@1943397
"As long as you have a desirable product, your customer service is a secondary thing."
"The potential buyout offer for Time Warner Cable serves as a reminder that the stock is up 39 percent this year through Dec. 13 and has surged 450 percent over the past five years. This is why companies don’t really care if you hate them."
Well you're right about that, they probably don't care if you hate them when you're not a customer or potential customer. Or if you have a minority opinion in the customer base and the other customers want something else. Can't please everyone. That said, if you use their products it means you still find it preferable overall to buy those than not and you think they're worth whatever it is that they're charging for it.
As for the stock price increase, it was trading at 131$ a share in 2013 December.
December 2008 - 59$
That's 220%, not 450%, plus the article seems to ignore the decline periods. When it first appeared on the stock market in Jan 2007 it was trading at 127$ and was in MAJOR decline until March 2009 when it dropped to 25$.
I am not impressed. The price of the share can go down just as easily as it goes up based on supply and demand which is ultimately based on how well investors think the company will perform in the future, but there's always a risk that whatever estimates you make will be WAY off.
If you think it's that easy to make money, feel free to find a reliable broker, open an online trading account and start investing.
https://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=TWC+Interactive#{%22range%22:%22max%22,%22allowChartStacking%22:true}
"it turns out they just don’t have much incentive to care."
This is bullshit. Try applying for a customer support position, they go through a process of vetting to pick the best people for the job, that shit costs them money. And those that don't perform well and get too much negative feedback from customers (maybe they're rude, maybe they're incompetent, maybe they're slow at fixing shit) are fired and replaced.
So where exactly do you calculate stock return from? If you had bought TWC in Jan 2007 and held them for almost 7 years you'd be right back where you started on that investment.
"And, with a few random exceptions, the 1% can trace their wealth back to centuries of exploitation by their ancestors."
Uh, no they can't and let me tell you why:
When Europeans came to the new world they found a largely untapped landmass. They pretty much had to build a new country almost from scratch. They certainly didn't treat Native American right, but at the same time it's stupid to claim that a handful of tribes with no infrastructure besides primitive huts and tents had a legitimate claim of property over vast areas of untapped and unused landmass (let alone an entire continent, not even close, you're telling me that if 50 people set up some tents 100 miles away from a gold mine, they now own that mine even though they've never been there? I mean you can argue that they own the tents and the land beneath the tents and whatever else they've tapped into in the vicinity, not much else).
How about slavery? I'm sure some people got rich from it and yes it is grossly immoral and if you did it today you'd be locked up for life preferably, but it's not going to make you THAT rich, at the end of the day it's just low skill labor. That alone doesn't build an advanced civilization with skyscrapers, smartphones and automobiles. You need science, you need the technology and you need to have a stable form of government that allows people to free enough to develop those things and keep them from being killed. If you had made a fortune from slavery 160 or more years ago when slavery was legal, almost all of it would be withered away by now due to inflation if you just kept it under your pillow and didn't invest in anything. If you had built a mansion 160 years ago from slave running, today it would be unfit to live in without maintenance and rehabilitation.
In all fairness, every slaver should have been put on trial for crimes against humanity (rights precede government, so I don't particularly care if you engaged in slavery when it was legal, the government doesn't dictate rights) or at the very least should have had his entire wealth confiscated after a civil trial (wrongful imprisonment) brought forth by freed blacks and it should have been done then and there and the government who was complicit should have paid for the lawyers.
Since it wasn't done, it's too late to change now. There is a reason why people have a statute of limitations. Dwelling on a very distant past just isn't productive and most of the records are probably lost now.
"They have the luck of birth. Hard work and achievements have little to do with it. Luck and religion have much to do with it."
It may be the case that someone has luck, but that doesn't mean he's oppressing or "exploiting" anyone or that you're entitled to share in that luck.
Religion isn't entirely arbitrary either. A religion can have a good work ethic for example.
I'm afraid you've been taught half-truths and outright lies but this is what the left does. It takes something awful that that America or the west did, pretends that nobody else did it and then amplifies it 20 times to demonize the west. There is no purpose to that other than to demoralize a culture and make young people hate their own country.
