Comments by "XSportSeeker" (@XSpImmaLion) on "How Corporate Consolidation is Killing Ski Towns" video.

  1. Parts of this video clearly explain to me, not an American citizen living in the US, the reason why these things happen - Americans have become too used to clear monopolistic schemes to understand that the root problem of cases like this one lies solely in it, and so they cease also understanding why and how important anti-trust legislation is. Through all the impossible, tragic, inevitable, unavoidable, etc comments in this video, what I hear is creating excuses to allow for such things to continue happening. There is no real inevitability there, there are only excuses created to excuse crass monopolistic late stage capitalism behavior that should never have been allowed in the first place. Let's analyze just a few things there and try to at least imagine solving a few problems at a time. Mind you, I'm not an expert, I don't know the case all that well, I'm making assumptions based on the video, and proper policies and ideas need far more than this to be developed... this is just an uninformed, potentially wrong and full of holes, speculative surface level analysis by a random Internet commenter. Ok, here we go. The first and most obvious problem identified at the video itself is a single corporation owning everything there. Not only the ski resort operations, but also real estate, lodging, restaurants, businesses, private transport, commerce, and a whole ton more things in the area. This should be extinguished via anti-trust. The company should be forced to dismantle and be broken down into separate different smaller independent companies each taking care of their own portions of the business. Why does this need to be done when there seems to be so many advantages to having an integrated system like that? Two reasons - to allow for small competition to have a fighting chance, and to stop underhanded methods such as using finance from one side of the company to prop up unfair competition in another. This is the central main issue the needs to be solved if these ski resort towns want to have a shot at making things better. Without dismantling the monopoly, what Vail truly has there is a complete ownership of the region, period. They are the kings, the authoritarian leaders of the entire place. And for corporations like that, the only thing that matters is profit and shareholder needs, no matter how much they pretend to care. This is not a matter of one CEO or president being "evil" or being a sociopath, which sometimes is the case and sometimes isn't. This is about a system that is sometimes invisible for those working in the inside that has all these side effects that they cannot control. That is the true problem of monopolies. People supporting it, working in it, profiting from it's operations, people who depend on it for their livelihoods, cannot understand why what these company do is bad in a given situation, because they are shielded from everything by the monopoly itself. It's the old "but I'm just supporting my family", or "at least they gave me a job" and other stuff you might have heard. Survivorship bias. It's not my fault if I'm working hard to sustain myself and my family, no matter if the results of the company as a whole is destroying an entire city/ environment/ economic area to sustain that. The problem with people working in the resort having to live outside of it because the town itself has become unaffordable. A few different approaches - public housing programs, regulation that limits percentage of real estate that goes towards AirBnb and whatnot schemes, regulation that enforces how long through the year houses needs to be occupied with penalties applied in fines, taxes and whatnot, which will then finance programs like public housing. I'm drawing a blank here, but there are all sorts of things that can be done to alleviate this. There are several nations around the world right now with very strong touristic destinations that are applying all sorts of measures for those places not to become touristic ghost towns. It needs to have governmental will to do it, but it can be done. Depending on size of resort/town and expected local population, there could also be government regulations that establishes by law that for a company to operate there and exploit the land for profit, they need to house a percentage of employees locally. They cannot be all coming from outside. The town also needs to have basic infrastructure, facilities and services locally, or else it's not to be considered a town anymore, and all sorts of other rules will have to come in place to stop it from becoming half and half. I think some will see this as an inevitability of the particular situation ski towns are in, but for me it's about allowing uncontrolled and unregulated late stage capitalism trends to take over. Hype tourism can certainly take over and change places until they become completely different and unrecognizable from it's idyllic origins, but when well managed and controlled, it can become something better - not just a place that a huge conglomerate will exploit dry. The problem for this case and so many others in the US is a lack of institutional intelligence, will, and ability to apply different regulations, laws and policies on companies before they start abusing their positions to destroy everything for profit. And I'm not saying this because I am anti-capitalism, against businesses making profit, against business prosperity. It's just that it needs to be done in a controlled fashion, and the priority needs to always be about the needs of the people living in the area affected, not what shareholders want, not how much more you can squeeze that cow. The particular problem of US and so many cases of corporate abuse that is killing a whole ton of things there, is that people have still not fully woken up to how exploited by corporations they have become. How much in control these corporations are because government either pretends they are not seeing it, or are in direct cahoots with them, with all the lobbying schemes. How unhealthy the relationship has become, and how many of benefits that US citizens have are crumbs and scraps given by huge corporations rather than something they get by right, by having a democratic government, by representative action and power.
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