AT&T’s stock price hit a 29-year low on Friday and continued to sink today as investors fled telecom stocks on reports that cleanups of lead-covered telephone cables could cost the industry tens of billions of dollars.
Oh noes! Whatever are we gonna do? Fuck corporations of all kinds. Fuck their wealthy backers too.
I believe that stock prices have at best a tiny relationship to the corporation’s health, except in extreme cases.
It’s mostly a picture of wealthy and powerful elites manipulating equity prices for their own gain. Completely rigged by people whose only concern is control.
But hey, we should be happy. Use Your Illusion. If we are intentional, free, and authentic they cannot touch our souls.
Also, a majority of stocks are never traded, really. It’s just sitting there in ETF or other funds/depots without ever being looked at.
The short term price differences are solely based on valueless trades back and forth.
I think stock values are mostly driven by speculation with a minority on a company’s actual performance and real world worth.
Corporations are like governments, we need the services they provide to live a modern life. Both can do things that harm public welfare, and they do. If you find the solution to malevolent government, you’ll find the solution to malevolent capitalism. That solution eludes us and always will because of human nature. We will always compete for acquisition. You’d have to eliminate greed which is impossible.
The problem with a non-capitalistic system is it suffers a much worse fate because there’s a single point of control. In the ideal it could work better, but because of human nature it works a lot worse.
But yeah, corporations do a lot of evil greedy shit so fuck 'em.
You are conflating capitalism with corporations; they are not at all the same thing. The former is an economic system, whereas the latter is the legal creation of a fictional “person” for the express purpose of shielding private individuals from legal consequences.
Mind you, that is not always a bad thing. If someone decides to start a new business using a portion of their savings, it is arguably good to allow them to do so in such a way that if the business fails (and my understanding is that something like 90% of them do, so this is the overwhelmingly most likely outcome) then they lose only their investment and not their entire life savings or worse end up deeply in personal debt because otherwise we as a society would lose out on a lot of beneficial enterprises due to them being too risky. The problem comes in when this legal fiction acts as such a strong shield that it enables and encourages people to act in extremely harmful ways with virtual impunity because only the fictional person that is the corporation gets punished rather than the individuals who made the harmful decisions.
You know companies need to exist so you can have and do nearly everything you rely on in your life right? Unless you want the state to control all means of production, which I would not recommend, there is a lane where corporations do need to exist and you’re absolutely free to invest in their businesses (or not) just like everyone else.
ISPs and telecoms are natural monopolies. The state owning them would probably improve the options many people have access to. Also state owned does not have to mean it is owned by a federal or even state government. It can be owned by smaller units of organization. Furthermore there can be vendoring out of the parts that a private market is more competitive for (such as equipment).
Utilities, in particular, can and often should be owned by municipalities or states. For every example of an inefficiently-run state-owned enterprise, there’s a dozen boring, local, publicly-owned utilities that are run as well or better than private companies.
The clusterfucks tend to be at the national level where there’s no real oversight. A corrupt president might be able to treat a utility as a slush fund or jobs program and get away with it but a mayor or county executive just doesn’t have the juice to be flagrantly corrupt without someone investigating.
The losses were spurred by a Wall Street Journal investigation into lead-sheathed cables installed by phone companies across the US many decades ago.
The industry started phasing out lead in the 1950s, but the WSJ said it found evidence of more than 2,000 lead-covered cables and said there “are likely far more throughout the country.”
Fan-fucking-tastic. Y’all excited to bail out the telcos again?
The industry started phasing out lead in the 1950s, but the WSJ said it found evidence of more than 2,000 lead-covered cables and said there “are likely far more throughout the country.”
Fan-fucking-tastic. Y’all excited to bail out the telcos again?
But how can it be that there are still lead-covered cables everywhere? We already paid them billions of dollars in subsidies to rip out the plain old telephone cables in favor of fiber several times now. They would never just pocket those subsidies instead of actually modernizing the network! \s
Typically, the last mile is often not fiber. Telecoms are generally required to continue non-voip land line service. Its one of those regulations that, despite having good intentions, end up causing issues.
That’s not true anymore. https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-19-72A1.pdf
Telecoms are generally required to continue non-voip land line service.
Nah, I can personally confirm that that’s no longer correct. My house didn’t have analog telephone service but still had a phone line running to it, until one day a few years ago I went outside and noticed that AT&T had taken the wire clear off the pole and left it laying in my yard. They clearly have no intention of ever providing such service in my area again, even if somebody wanted it.
lol, also, lmao.
However will they afford this?
New Street Research estimated that remediation could cost the telecom industry $60 billion
At&T alone had 120 billion in revenue in 2022 which was a bad year for them but God forbid we penalize a corporation, they’re job CREATORS don’t you know?
Driving by one of their stores the other day and thought to myself, “Who the hell uses AT&T anymore?!”
They’ve had shit service since before T-Mobile existed. Literally let a noone come from nowhere just gobble up their market share.
It’s super location specific. I’ve been lots of places where no one except AT&T subscribers had coverage.
I’m so glad I live in a city that forces competition.
Same here. I was paying $130/month to Comcast for 1000/35 and no data cap ($30 bump from the normal $100/month) and AT&T finally rolled fiber out to our street. While I don’t like them as a company it’s not like Comcast is better and now I get synchronous gig with no data caps for $80/month.
I’ve been an AT&T customer for years, mostly out of necessity. They just offer the best all around service for my needs.I tried switching to T-Mo, but they have a lot of dead spots (especially along interstates) and has weaker signal strength in most buildings than AT&T. And I just refuse to use Verizon, but they’re in a similar situation.
That hasn’t been true for about 5 years. TMo bought and utilized a wide spectrum of wavelengths previously held for over the air television. If you haven’t tried them in the past few years, I’d give them another try. I went from AT&T to T-Mobile. I’m in the same never Verizon boat.
Believe it or not, wireless coverage isn’t the same everywhere.
VoiceStream Wireless PCS was established in 1994 as a subsidiary of Western Wireless Corporation. In 1999, VoiceStream ventured out under the umbrella of parent company Western Wireless. Then in 2001, Deutsche Telekom purchased VoiceStream before launching the T-Mobile brand on Sept. 4, 2002.
Hardly a no one
Guess this means my cell bill is going up another 20%.
Move to another network!
I’m about to actually. What are you suggest and why I need real unlimited data without slowdowns as I’m constantly on the move.
T-Mobile and Verizon both have true unlimited options. If you need true true unlimited, I’d suggest looking into a T-Mobile home internet router, needs wall power. I think you’re deprioritized after some arbitrary amount, but you can do terabytes a month.
TMHI has been pretty great for me for a little over a year now. Only one outage because of a big power outage.
Now that they have some more competition, AT&T is shown for the shitty company it was.
They are going to use this as an excuse to finally have to get out of providing (POTS) land line service. Expect them to spin off a subsidiary that owns all this old infrastructure, declare bankruptcy, and either get a bail out to repair the cable of they convince the regulators to let them kill off POTS for good.
Let the big three fall. Decentralize them and remove their overreaching control on the networks. All they do is sick money out of our pockets both directly and indirectly.
of course it did. I’m invested in it
RIP lil bub
This seems impossible, they’re charging me 10k/mo for 5 T1 circuits.
That can’t be real - there is no better option for <10mbps?
We don’t need the bandwidth. We need the physical PRI circuits for our legacy PBX. We will be migrated off by September for sure.
They’re gonna charge you whatever you’re willing to pay. They don’t run T1 anymore and are just squeezing the blood from the stone before they rip it down and toss it out.
We will be migrated off by September for sure. The price is more than tripled after the circuits were deregulated
Neat. Buying more T stonks now.
