- Multinationals -

It's up to us

In Reply to: Who would make your computers, cd-players etc? posted by Frances Keating on June 05, 1996 at 00:10:23:

It seems that people are so used to multinationals that they feel they
cannot get by without them.

> If all multinationals were abolished, who would make your computers?,

I might... I do not advertise or do it regularly any more but before I
went to uni, I ran a small business from home building comptuers for
people. They were both cheaper, much better, and had better technical
support than the multinationals might provide. Many more people do the
same, and If you want a new computer, contact one of them.

> and how would you connect to the Internet wihtout modems?

Many of the best modems (and computer components) are made by
medium sized non-multinational companies. OK, processors, RAM
and hard drives tend to be made by large companies but these
companies should be gently discouraged from McDonald's style
advertising when they try it ....

Many non-multinational ISPs (in Australia at least),
esepcially the small ones, provide $20-50 per month flat
rate access, while large companies try to get people
to pay $5-$10 PER HOUR in addition to this!

> you wear on your feet?

Shoes... I didn't realise you had to be a multinational
company to make shoes...

and what would you eat when you wanted a fast
> meal?

Take away food (of varying quality, but there are
fast food places which are small, non franchised,
and run by their owners. If you research your local
area, hopefully you'll find one of reasonable quality)

Even better: plan, cook healthy food, live longer

and what would you play on your cd player?

Do you need a large company to burn CDs?

> you get another cd player from when that goes wrong?

There is a place for large companies to make items
such as microprocessors, CD players, consumer electornics,
cars and other things which *cannot* be made by smaller
companies. It is up to us to run web sites like this and
keep them responsible (or give up on things and live in
the trees, but I prefer the former option).

> We all know what the problems are, but what are the solutions?

I don't know for sure but I have some ideas:

1) If a local small company has a product which competes with
a multinational, choose the former

2) If two multinationals compete, and one is less
responsible than the other, choose the more
responsible one (i.e. cars, etc)

3) If you have any information to help with (2),
post it somewhere like this?

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