I think it's pretty much indisputable that the FTC was making huge progress in consumer rights and antitrust work. What, specifically, are you talking about in your comment. It's easy to make comments like this based on general 'feelings' without saying anything at all.

I think maybe Lina Khan was, but not the whole Biden administration.

>They already can.

I'm not a railroad expert, but here's the exact quote from the article, which cites a consultancy:

>Going from coast to coast is a greater prize. Avoiding interchanges between networks would mean faster trains and fewer delays. According to Oliver Wyman, a consultancy, the share of intermodal goods in America that travel by rail on journeys longer than 1,500 miles increases from 39% to 65% when served by a direct line. Transcontinental railways would mean fewer lengthy stops in Chicago and may make shorter routes near the Mississippi river more profitable.

Maybe Oliver Wyman is on the payroll of UP/Norfolk and this isn't true, but I'd like to see something more reputable than a HN comment of 1-3 word refutations.

Disputed does not mean disproven.

There are reasonable people who think this merge would be good, and reasonable people who think it would be bad, and perhaps we can discuss pros and cons without acting like asses?

...and what? Did it pan out? Don't leave us hanging!

Given demographics of HN they probably is British and talking to Americans

I think that referred to Americans

Yeah even chuds like Josh Hawley and Matthew Gates were pushing for anti trust

Any hard line taken by Trump is just a cudgel to extract concessions or bribes. Break up Big Tech [unless they follow my orders].

Khan was from Biden. Purged like everyone else.

Trump was just shaking them down. He was never going to actually fight money.

My personal take is you are mistaking progress with a shake down in progress. Lina is operating within the highly restrictive framework the supreme court put in place on Rhenquist and under that it is extremely difficult to break up anyone. it is, however, possible to be enough of a pain for a company that they elect to pay you off in some manner (i.e. campaign contribution, cushy job upon leaving government, outright bribe,etc). Everybody knows an at&t style breakup isn't going to happen when that is what is really needed for most of these oligopolies and they are playing it in a rent seeking manner.

> Could you explain why you think any "startup" "needs an exit"?

Because it is, and always has been, profit over product (and people).

It’s very hard for companies to go public these days. There isn’t a willingness for institutions or people to invest in companies that haven’t made it yet. Think about how small companies like Microsoft or Google or Amazon were when they went public. Then think about giant private companies like Stripe or Figma. Now you have to be much larger and more mature, which takes a long time.

For employees it means waiting 15-20 years for a payday. How many people can take such a big risk, going half their career underpaid waiting for their options to become something? Companies are meanwhile forced to raise capital that isn’t from the public stock exchanges and that can also go on only for so long. Meanwhile you have these giant companies like Google or whatever who can just copy your great idea/business and throw money or people at it, eventually killing you before you get to exit. Look at how Microsoft abused their Office sales contracts to give away Teams to kill Slack. Eventually that forced Slack to sell to Salesforce.

I guess I view it as chicken and egg. If the huge mega corp companies were broken up or heavily regulated maybe smaller companies wouldn’t need mergers and acquisitions as much because they would be more stable in a fair competitive environment.

But I’m not an expert in any of this. I’ve just seen others talk about all this when lurking on this website.

If you thought Trump believed in anything beyond whatever is good for Trump right now you fell for the con.

OK, but why does that make it "outlandish", as opposed to just "really big"?

It's smaller than Pfizer buying Warner-Lambert in 1999. It's smaller (at least inflation adjusted) than Exxon-Mobil or Citicorp-Travelers. It's a lot smaller than AOL-Time Warner in 2000. It's smaller than Dow-duPont in 2015.

Why is it outlandish? Because it involves railroads?