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  1. #176
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  2. #177
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  3. #178
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    [url]

  4. #179
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  5. #180
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    Metro Atlanta home values have risen across the board from 2012 to 2022. But the AJC’s analysis found they climbed more sharply in places where investors bought more houses. In the 30 ZIP codes with the most investor-owned properties, home values appreciated at nearly twice the annual rate as the 30 ZIP codes where investors own the least.

    Experts say the effect on homeownership has been dramatic.

    A landmark study from Georgia Tech found that the rise in investor activity caused a 1.4 percentage point drop in homeownership rates in metro Atlanta from 2007 to 2016. That translates to 16,500 fewer households owning homes than would be expected, were it not for the influx of Wall Street cash.
    African Americans like Lowman have been hit the hardest. Investor purchases explain a 4.2 percentage point drop in Black homeownership during that period, the research found.

    Large investor purchases have accelerated since then. During one 12-month stretch beginning in July 2021, investors bought one out of every three homes for sale in metro Atlanta.
    Research suggests that the largest owners behave like monopolies that set the price of rent, rather than responding to the market. In otherwise similar neighborhoods, large landlords raise rents faster where they own a larger share of houses, a 2022 study by University of Texas at Dallas researchers found.

    “That’s not supposed to happen,” said Raymond, the Georgia Tech professor. “And given how concentrated they are in Atlanta specifically, that’s scary.”
    https://www.ajc.com/american-dream/i...ouses-atlanta/

  6. #181
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    Prices rise like a rocket and fall like a feather.


  7. #182
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    For-profit health care is a ING RACKET by the Capitalist oligarchy

    Health care cronyism is fueling

    hospital consolidation and rising medical costs

    Ninety percent of metropolitan statistical areas are considered highly concentrated by an rust standards.

    With this kind of
    monopoly power, hospital systems gain bargaining leverage over payors.

    They can raise
    prices without increases in quality.

    The increased
    cost to private insurers
    is passed on to patients via higher premiums.

    Half of U.S. health care expenditures go toward hospitals and clinics, and those numbers are rising.


    https://thehill.com/opinion/healthca...medical-costs/

    The Capitalist health care racket is unstoppable, because the political/judicial class is corrupted,
    compromised by $Bs from the Capitalists.

    There is no solution, no countervailing power to resist Capitalist domination, driving USA into inevitable one-party fascism.

  8. #183
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  9. #184
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  10. #185
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    Amazon and Google both face FTC an rust lawsuits.

    Any day now, the FTC is expected to drop "The Big One" on Amazon, an an rust lawsuit that appears inevitable after the company's so-called "last rites" meeting with FTC officials last week. Through its inquiry, the FTC has taken notice of how Amazon treats sellers on its platform, specifically scrutinizing how Amazon punishes sellers that don't use Amazon's logistics services.


    With so much heat coming from the FTC, it seems like bad timing for Amazon to decide to start charging an extra fee to sellers who bypass Amazon's logistics services and instead ship products themselves. But that’s precisely the step that Amazon has taken, Bloomberg reported.
    https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...-ftc-scrutiny/

  11. #186
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    Only sellers who [don't] use Amazon's Seller Fulfilled Prime service will have to pay the fee. So most of Amazon's two million sellers won't be affected. But for thousands of sellers who prefer to ship their own products, starting in October, they will have to pay Amazon "a two percent fee on each sale," according to internal do ents reviewed by Bloomberg.

    It may seem like a small fee, but it’s likely enough to pressure some sellers into using Amazon's logistics services who previously had avoided the high costs associated with those services. One furniture seller told Bloomberg that the new fee would cost $1 million over a year of sales.

    In February, Search Engine Land reported that higher fulfillment fees and mandatory advertising expenses had increased Amazon's share of sellers' revenue to 50 percent. Using Amazon's fulfillment at that point costs sellers 20 to 35 percent of their revenue.

    This new fee seems like the latest way Amazon has put the squeeze on sellers who were avoiding paying that larger percent of revenue by doing their own fulfillment. Bloomberg spoke to several sellers who, speaking anonymously for fear of retaliation, confirmed that they were interpreting the latest fee as "an attempt to pressure them into using Amazon’s logistics services rather than fulfilling orders themselves."

  12. #187
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    (They) were not going to allow "us" to gain that windfall that came with upheaval & rearrangement of the deck chairs during "Minnesota Floyd," followed by COVID.
    No- in'-way. (They) waited a bit so we'd marvel at said windfall then lowered the in' boom. Now we're basically where we were, just a bit to more than a bit light.

  13. #188
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  14. #189
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    somewhat beside the point, but Google's search engine is well nigh unusable, largely because of the ads.

    In merger control, it is assumed from the outset that mergers result in cost savings. As many economists have recognized, most recently Nancy Rose & Jonathan Sallat, the merging parties are already credited for “efficiencies” (cost savings) in the “standard efficiency credit” which undergirds the merger safe harbor in low and moderate concentrated markets. After all, absent any cost savings, why allow any merger that even weakly increases concentration? A concentration screen that allows some mergers and not others must be assuming that all mergers come with some socially beneficial cost savings. But do they? As we show in the working paper, there is no empirical research to suggest that mergers that increase concentration actually lower costs and pass on the benefits to consumers. As one district court commented, “The Court is not aware of any case, and Defendants have cited none, where the merging parties have successfully rebutted the government’s prima facie case on the strength of the efficiencies.” We have been unable to locate any study of merger efficiencies showing cost savings that are passed on as lower prices to consumers. Indeed, most studies show that mergers result in higher prices, lower economic performance, and less research and development.
    https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspe...r-efficiencies

  15. #190
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    private equity for the most part extracts rather than creates value, with predictable results




  16. #191
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    ghoulish


  17. #192
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  18. #193
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    "dead to rights" is probably hyperbole, an rust cases aren't easy to win.


  19. #194
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    get 'em, Lina




  20. #195
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    FTC an rust lawsuit against Amazon just dropped.

    Most people think of Amazon as a retailer who sells to retail customers. But retail end users — you and me — aren’t really the customer. We are the product. And Amazon doesn’t really sell to us; it’s a middleman who sells access to us. The actual customers of Amazon are third-party businesses that rely on Amazon’s infrastructure to get their wares to the public.




    In 2022, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said this explicitly, “small and medium sized” sellers use Amazon not because of the “eCommerce software” Amazon provides but “because they get access to a few hundred million customers.” There are extremely high switching costs to move from one online superstore to another, so this is a business with significant barriers to entry.

    Indeed, this barrier to entry is baked into the very structure of Amazon Prime and its free shipping, which was created, Jeff Bezos said, “to draw a moat around our best customers.” Here’s how the FTC complaint describes the allure of Prime, which is a bundle of services customers would prefer to order separately.

    “This current restrictive structure of Prime reflects a deliberate strategy by Amazon to artificially increase barriers to entry and compe ion. As one former Amazon executive explained in recalling Amazon's motivation for adding non-shipping services to Prime, ‘[a]ny compe or might launch a Prime shipping clone, or they could potentially build a new Netflix-type service, but it was unlikely that any one of them would be able to do both.’”

    Amazon’s strategy is to use Prime to build, extend, and fortify barriers to entry. One result of Prime is that Amazon now has an overwhelming monopoly share of online shoppers. And online shoppers aren’t the customer, but the product that Amazon brokers to third-party sellers, who must either pay Amazon what it demands or lose access to the market. As one seller put it, "We have nowhere else to go and Amazon knows it."
    https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/t...up-amazon-over

  21. #196
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    Once it achieved monopoly power, Amazon squeezed on price through fees to third-party sellers. As a third-party seller, you pay fees for listing on Amazon; for using Amazon’s warehouse services, known as Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA); and for advertising services. If you don’t pay, you don’t get put in a place on the site where consumers click. "Advertised products on Amazon,” reads the complaint, “are 46 times more likely to be clicked on when compared with products that are not advertised." And these fees have all increased steadily over the years.

    At this point, the price Amazon charges these third party sellers has grown to nearly 50% of its revenue. It is this money, estimated at $123 billion in total last year, that pays for “free” shipping, as well as its video service, its music service, Twitch, and everything else that comes bundled with Prime. These third-party sellers in turn raise their prices to consumers, aka you and me, and then send that money back to Amazon in the form of fees. It’s basically money laundering.

    This dynamic increasingly ruins the consumer experience. Amazon is now so full of pay-to-play ads that consumers are complaining they can’t find organic results, but are instead directed to higher priced items.

  22. #197
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    You ain't had many, if any, but this, this is your finest hour, Winester.

    Winester

  23. #198
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    *twirls das ly moustache*


  24. #199
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    "information about how we screwed farmers and shoppers is a proprietary trade secret!"


  25. #200
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    Ballad Health agreed to heightened regulation as a condition of its regional monopoly, then threatened to take away ambulance service when Carter County locals complained about them closing the County's only ICU.

    https://tennesseelookout.com/2023/10...unity-protest/






    An East Tennessee county commission will vote later this month on a resolution asking Tennessee lawmakers to break up or better regulate Ballad Health, a hospital chain that operates in the region as a state-sanctioned hospital monopoly.

    But amid discussions of the resolution, Carter County Commissioner Nick Holder warned that if the resolution is approved at the commission’s Oct. 23 meeting, Ballad could punish the county by pulling private funding for an ambulance it said it would pay for after the company closed the county’s only Intensive Care Unit (ICU).

    Holder said Ballad made the ambulance funding threat after a previous meeting in the summer in which community members and some commissioners expressed frustrations over the hospital’s transparency and process for closing the ICU at the Sycamore Shoals Hospital in Elizabethton, a town of 14,000 located at the heart of Carter County in the northeastern corner of Tennessee.

    “They were almost willing to take an ambulance from this county because of one meeting that made them mad,” Holder said during the commission’s health and welfare committee meeting held on Oct. 3.

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