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Doubts Multiply About the "Long Tail"
fruey sends in a New Scientist analysis of the many second thoughts about the Long Tail theory. It summarizes four studies that show, in different markets, that the tail is both flatter and thinner than originally supposed, and that blockbusters are not going away in those markets — they are getting bigger. It's theorized that widely used collaborative filtering software is magnifying the winners' share of the various pies, and peer influence is a large contributor to consumer behavior.
Just how do you quantify "doubts"? LOL
One person had a doubt, then a second, therefore it multiplied by a factor of two.
I stopped buying CDs when the music companies started sueing their own customers.
:-)
So I'm not even part of the fat root
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never cease to amaze me! Now give yourselves a pat on - no, a long tug on the tail.
Looks like he got his long tail, but I don't know why anyone would expect Harry Potter to sell less simply because someone could chose to get some out-of-print book or the like. Fill Barnes and Noble with shitty fantasy that will never sell and HP will still break records. The Internet can't change that.
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What is the long tail? The summary, and TFA (I skimmed it so maybe I missed this) seem to indicate that the long tail theory means the more obscure stuff will be more popular. I thought it simply meant that you could make money off the obscure stuff when your distribution costs went to zero (because of the Internet). Am I missing something, or does the article interpret the idea of the long tail incorrectly?
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A summary that told me so much, yet so little.
"Long Tail theory" No idea. Apparently I missed an article somewhere.
"flatter and thinner" I gotto admit, tails in an evolutionary sense popped to mind here for some reason. Though the mention of markets made that an obvious red herring.
"blockbusters are not going away" Aha, movies!
"widely used collaborative filtering software is magnifying the winners' share of the various pies" Say what?
I had no idea what long tail theory is. I originally thought this summary was a joke, like one of those automatically generated jargon papers.
Of course they want to sell you new media. Old media has the unfortunate quality of being old. Should copyright extension insanity ever end, old content is closer to becoming free content.
If they can induce you to fill your time with new, "premium" content by splashing adverts at you and skewing selection algorithms on Amazon and the like, they will prefer to every time. New stuff commands a higher price. New stuff has higher margins. New stuff keeps the media industry running, and they have clout.
Old stuff is, like, yesterdays stuff. Even if it's better.
It's pretty silly to expect that everyone is going to change their behavior immediately due to increased availability of a larger variety of goods. When cable came along and people were given a larger amount of choice of television programming viewing habits didn't change overnight, they changed over decades.
People are creatures of habit. It'd be more interesting to see if the variety of goods people buy varies with age. If so, expect that "long tail" to eventually appear as the population turns over.
AccountKiller
OTOH, it is clear that the way to make a lot of money as a retailer is to have the popular options at a low price, a la Wal Mart. As the article suggests, though, have a few niche items can make money, if you can get people to pay for therm.
Here is what I think. Stocking an item, even a virtual item, incurs a cost. So if one stocks a million different items, and only one thousand different items moves a week, then there are costs not being covered on an even yearly basis. One way to make this work it mark up items a lot, as in the used book store, wher a book can be bought for a dime and sold for a dollar.
To me the long tail means either selling in a high markup niche market, or having the ability to control costs so you can sell less of more different things and actually draw a profit. In either case, the long tail in going to be chanllenged in times that force are going to force some fiscal responsibility, and people are going to focus on necessities and cheap luxuries.
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The original(for me) Long tail article. You can also check out longtail.com.
Or, you know...just search with Google for "The Long Tail".
Could it be that because of the bad economy those things on the farther ends of the tails which were more cheap and more available before aren't so anymore?
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The thing about the long tail theory is that, on the flat end of the curve, you have very small overall returns, and a lot of other people making products with the same low capital and similar returns. so, basically, you have a lot of sucky stuff, then, a few things that are actually pretty good. You can see this with windows shareware as much as you can with web sites or anything else. A lot of stuff sucks, and only a small amount of it is actually good.
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It's not even about new vs old. It's about the specific item that "they" want you to buy. It's much more profitable to invest in and sell one big blockbuster than it is to invest in and sell several moderately popular items. In short, they want us back playing their game.
I for one have often browsed the shelves of airport bookstores and have walked out disgusted every time because I can't find anything worth reading. I've even passed up classics because they only stock the most poorly done translations. I don't shop at record stores anymore because almost no one carries good metal. I don't shop at hobby shops much anymore because in the few I can find, none carry any supplies for resin models (let alone carrying the models themselves).
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
Long tail theory is that selling large numbers of unique items at low levels is profitable. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Tail
from the comments, the "long tail theory" is misunderstood by most slashdotters (at least, the few who are showing up today, most of whom, it seems, are in my "freaks" list judging from the comment moderations).
TFA was incredibly bring and unnecessarily wordy, as if the author had little to say and vast tracts of text to say it in.
Wikipedia refers to:
Obviously it's not referring to a boat or telecommunbications traffic. What it does refer to is a statistical curve on a graph. Take IQ. If your IQ is 100, you are on the top of the bell curve, the median. If your IQ is over 150 you are close to the extreme end of the "long tail".
The theory is that if you have warehousing costs, it isn't profitable to stock items that don't sell well. On the other hand, if your warehousing costs are zero, any sale is profitable.
The article (what I read of the boring thing) didn't say much of anything except "stuff one person will buy won't outsell stuff millions of people will buy"
In short, DUH. hardly profound.
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are you going to sit at your computer and listen to every sample iTunes has to offer and pick out the ones you like best, or are you just going to buy what your friends recommend?
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
The markets studied in this work are notorious for being driven by short term fads. Online downloads are by predominantly ephemeral pop music, and a study of 14,000 teenagers? These are the people most influenced by peers and the 'so last week' attitude, They haven't had the time to explore and broaden their outlook.
Try getting a more diverse sample and I think that the long tail will look a lot fatter. People in their 30's and up have had time to develop far more diversified tastes and will have much more eclectic buying habits.
Pick a cohort of 14,000 boomers and you will see something very different.
There's a certain segment of the population that enjoys finding obscure stuff. I'm not sure of the size, but I'd guess it's about the same size as the introverted segment of the population, around 25%, as the two behaviors are somewhat correlated. (i.e. folks who actively stray from the herd socially are more likely to express interest in consumables that are different from the herd's preferences) So, given that assumption, the drivers of a long tail market, "funky stuff seekers," could be overpowered by the general population.
On top of that, it's my guess that researchers in this area, as researchers in most areas, tend to be "funky stuff seekers" themselves. (I mean, it's their job to search and speculate on the edge of their field of study.) So, right off the bat, there's a bit of inherent bias in interpreting the effect of their cohort on the market. In other words, they're following the non-herd herd. :)
Doubts geometrically increase about the "long tail" :)
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That is absolutely perfect. This perfectly defines it.
Many long-tail proponents argue that the two meanings you discuss are related: when distribution/stocking costs for obscure works go to zero, it can be profitable to stock/sell them, and therefore they will actually be stocked/sold by online retailers. Since this makes the works much more readily available than previously, their sales will (collectively) go up.
The hypothesis is that the reason the top N works account for such a large market share traditionally is at least in part the practical problems with stocking more than a certain amount of stuff at your local retailer. Therefore, the hypothesis goes, obscure works will collectively account for a larger percentage of sales once the shelf-space constraint goes away and people can buy what they would "naturally" prefer.
The present article seems to be arguing that, even though obscure works are now easier to get, they're actually still not really being bought much. The article seems to be arguing that the constraining factor is now a sort of virtual shelf space of mind-share/visibility/recommendations, so the obscure works don't get noticed even though they are now easy to find and buy if you knew about them.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Not exactly.
It is the hypothesis that ALL of the non-Harry Potter books COLLECTIVELY will sell as much or more than the Harry Potter books themselves.
Even that is wrong. It isn't a single book or a single series. It's the percentages. It is the hypothesis that the 80% of lesser selling titles will equal or exceed the sales of the top 20%. Or 90% / 10%. Or wherever you want to make the cut.
In theory, it is easy to demonstrate. Suppose there are 2 blockbusters released in a category ... and the average person buy 10 items in that category. So, 20% of the sales would go to the blockbusters ... but 80% would go to the "long tail".
The problem is that the average person does NOT operate that way. They might by the latest Harry Potter book ... and no other book that year. The same with music. The same with movies.
fruey sends in a New Scientist analysis that questions the Long Tail theory. The theory, first described in Wired, describes how retailers with low stocking and distribution costs can profit by selling a large number of unique products to very small niche markets. But the four studies summarized in the article examine different markets and conclude that this business model may be harder to exploit than originally expected. In fact, the importance of blockbuster products which are sold to an enormous number of buyers may be growing rather than shrinking. One possible reason is that recommendation services, like those provided my Amazon and Netflix, may concentrate interest on a few items and take market share away from the niche items.
/...
The article was generally ok, but clearly not completely understanding of what the "Long Tail" means. Of course, from what I've read (including the book itself) the interpretations and applications of the theory are rather fluid anyway.
The biggest issue I have with the article is that it seemed to be conveying that the "Long Tail" meant an end to blockbusters. It doesn't mean that at all. It just means that there's enough business in the "Long Tail" to make it profitable to sell items that weren't blockbusters given the low cost structures of Internet retailing. Amazon and iTunes both make hundreds of thousands of dollars monthly on items that only sell 2 or 3 copies. With traditional retailers, space is a limited commodity and must be devoted to items that will sell in enough volume to justify carrying them.
Now, IANAPhd, and the article quotes quite a few that seem to disagree with the idea of the "Long Tail", but it seems the evidence they discuss is rather weak. Yes, people are influenced by others in their choices. Much of this comes from the vast history of humanity and our tendency to form social groups. The Internet has yet to truly begin to change humanity in the ways that it will. The key thing with respect to the article is the definition of what our peer groups are. Despite the global nature of the Internet, most of our peer influence is local. As more and more people around the world connect and begin to actually talk to others outside their current peer groups, those peer groups will expand and change. That is going to be a key driver in generating the diversity that the "Long Tail" predicts.
The "Long Tail" is only beginning because humanity's experience with the Internet and the interconnectedness that it brings is only beginning. Just because it hasn't completely happened doesn't mean that it's not happening.
The habit (of wanting what everybody else wants) is not waning as selection and availability increase. The habit is reinforced by the increasing channels by which we can see what everybody else wants and adjust our own wants to that.
The Internet, while logistically making the long tail feasible, is socially making blockbusters bigger.
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The Long, Fat Tail is not the bestseller. Nowhere does its author claim that the tail is fat, and by calling it less fat than some ambiguous amount of fatness makes for a rather boring argument. Highlighted in TFA:
"Of the 13 million tracks available, 0.4% of them account for over three-quarters of downloads"
The real story of The Long Tail:
"Of the 13 million tracks available, 0.4% of them account for 80% of the market, and others (the long tail) account for about 20% of the market - a market that did not previously exist."
Googling for the "long tail" in German may have unforeseen consequences.
Particularly if you do it at work.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
... also known (in a simplified form) as "Zipf's Law". The most popular word occurs twice as often as the second popular, three times the third popular, four times the fourth etc.pp.
If you look at the 10% most popular words in a table, you will notice that the absolute share of the upper 10% increases, if you count longer and longer texts with more and more individual words.
With 10 different words you get, that the first 10% make up ~34% of all words.
With 100 different words you get already ~56,5% share for the first 10% of words.
With 1000 words we have 69,2% share for the first 10%, with 10000 we come to ~76,5% share.
So what i sread from the summary is that Four scientist anaysis studies of long tails show that in different stores that tails are flatter and thinner than originally supposed. And blockbusters (only one I know of is the firewor) are not going away in those markets either, they will be bigger though (so much for safe and sane). Then they change the subject and talk about some filtering software that magnifies winner's share of their pies (probably employing the adage about "your eyes being bigger than your stomach"), then again peer influence is a large contributor to consuming (I'll say, aunt Ethel always tell me to have another slice of pie when I win.)
Hmm, I know, maybe it's some sort of "tail pie" they are talking about, no mention what sort of varmint the tail is from, probably rat, they always look stalky and thick.
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Anderson gives several examples of companies actually making money in the long tail, including Netflix, which rents out a heck of a lot of movies that are not available at Blockbuster.
I, for one, think the biggest thing that holds this back is the one mentioned in TFA - there are too many choices to be able to make a rational selection, so you buy the thing that "everyone" is recommending.
The internet does not increase taste. It may increase choice, but the tastes of people remain the same. If you appeal to the lowest common denominator you flood the market.
Case in point, warez sites. Troll them for 30 minutes and you'll be hard pressed to NOT find a flood of the same 10 movies, CDs, books etc. Even when stealing the product people do not go for the avant-garde or the art house, they go for the same 10 things that are hot.. NOW. Yes, you can find the other obscure stuff, but you have to dig long and hard for it. And in the end, it's the same very small circle of people that do that. The masses want what they want. It's called MASS APPEAL for a reason.
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is available online free courtesy of Univ of Virginia:
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How does that figure into the tail?
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The usual formulation of the long tail thesis is that sales volume for items follows a zipf distribution. I didn't see anything in the article to contradict that.
The article holds up the continued existence of blockbusters, like Harry Potter, and evidence against the long tail. However, there must be blockbusters in a zipf distribution--otherwise it isn't zipf.
Every retailer truncates their own tail at the point where sales volume becomes too small (relative to fixed costs) to be profitable. Anderson's original observation wasn't that the internet was going to make the long tail longer or fatter (that wouldn't be zipf, either). Rather, it was that brick-and-mortar retailers and on-line retailers have different cost structures, and that as a result, the truncation point was going to be a lot further out for on-line retailers than for brick-and-mortar retailers.
"Word of mouth" spreads faster on line and so something popular can snowball bigger faster and faster in the internet age. The fat part of the tail.
But the net also allows people with unique tastes to find unique objects to satisfy them. That is the long thin tail.
I personally hate shopping at the modern American mall where I get to pick which of 6 different retailers I buy the same product from. Who thinks that is about choice?
Think Deeply.
The long tail is alive and well. I think some people seem to have gotten the crazy idea that implementing it meant that you'd have an automatic win. In reality, most of the basic rules of business still apply. You still have to deliver a quality product at a fair price, you still have to provide good service and a friendly buying experience ... in short, you can't be a piece of crap e-commerce company and still expect that the world will beat a path to your door simply because you offer a huge selection. Amazon got it right. iTunes got it right. The basic premise of Long Tail still holds water: if you can connect a near-infinite number of buyers with a near-infinite number of selections, then you don't have to be the market leader selling the big blockbuster hits in order to turn a profit. But you can't suck either; Long Tail doesn't change that.
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The assumption here is that the total overhead costs of popular vs non-popular items can really be reduced to zero by the retailer.
Perhaps to Amazon or to any other virtual retailer, the overhead costs can and do become nearly zero per item, and identical between products (that is, itemwise, it's the same effort for Amazon to sell a Harry Potter as anything else). The implicit assumption seems to be that Amazon's point-of-view vis-a-vis 'costs' is what will draw the-long-tail.
But this is not the end of the supply chain. All costs related to shipping or lead times are passed on to any potential consumer. Rare items may now be available, but that does not mean their total cost of aquisition is lower than very popular books. An obscure title will still be more difficult to ship or print, and may be second hand. That rare items can be had, is now a possibility - that rare items can be had at the same total cost and convenience to the consumer, is not. That the rare items are, in the end, still more costly and less convenient will dissuade any consumer away from their consumption, despite that Amazon can process the transaction with equal facility.
To that end, the warehousing costs are really just transformed into shipping, quality, and convenience costs, all of which are transferred to the end user. Thus, for non-virtual items anyway, I wouldn't expect as strong a long-tail effect as predicted. As for virtual products like music sales.... Who can list of more than 10,000 songs anyway???
Perhaps what the Long Tail Theory postulates is that people will somehow stop having a herd mentality once their experiences can be tailored on a whim. However, given that man is a social animal, I don't know whether (or how much) this change will occur.
Personal observation has been that people simply don't have the time these days to dig deeper. Pardon my acting a bit ignorant, but just as many people do not examine their own actions and lives, so too do they not examine many of the things they consume. People are not wired to "dig deeper" for more things they like, they are wired to extract pleasure from entertainment right now. Even people I know who are into obscure things do not seem to dig deeper (like bad movies, for instance).
It takes an intrusive event in someone's life to open them up to new ideas, and people don't like change, even when it obviously makes sense in scientific black and white. I see it in finance every day (when you say "Sir, if you do X you can save yourself thousands of dollars a year in taxes (or whatever)" and Mr. Sir simply won't do it. It's infuriating!) and it seems to occur in hobbies and interests as well. It's something I've been witnessing in myself and others for a long time.
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The Long tail is snake oil; wishful thinking encapsulated in a sound bite. Mr Anderson has certainly demonstrated how to profit from the "Long Tail", however the business model is really restricted to just himself.
Music is a tough business since music taste is built by repetition. Certainly though Pandora has expanded the range of music I listened and introduced me to groups that I would like but didn't know about. Classic long tail.
But Pandora doesn't sell music. iTunes conversely I don't buy from anymore after annoyance with their DRM. It looks like Pandora/Amazon cross links are starting to work better and then we'll see about the long tail.
And that just illustrates the problem with thought experiments to "prove" anything. If you can make up the numbers or handwave in anecdotes and "common sense" in as "data", you can prove any bloody thing imaginable.
E.g., Aristotle "proved" that women have (as in, are born with) less teeth than men.
And that, in a nutshell, is why experimental validation is needed.
And I wish more people exercised some healthy scepticism when some bullshitter tries to sell the next snake oil. Because whether it's the Long Tail, or Web 2.0 (the original one, not the "lots of javascript and new tech" thing it's been hijacked into), the Dot-Con bubble rationalization, or whatever other bullshit of the century, that's been the recipe: handwave through some anecdotes, "common sense" and made up numbers instead of any hard data.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Anyone wanting to get a better understanding of this needs to read around a bit more.
"... inequality can arise in systems where users are free to make choices among a large set of options, even in the absence of central control or manipulation. Inequality is not a priori evidence of manipulation, in other words; it can also be a side effect of large systems governed by popular choice. ... the debate on media concentration can now be sharpened to a single question: if inequality is a fact of life, even in diverse and free systems, what should our reaction be? "
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
Your observations match mine.
The thing I find most. . , curious, (I almost said 'maddening') is that I find the same forces live strong inside me. When presented by an obviously superior idea, my first instinct is to look around to see who else is using and benefiting from it. If nobody, then fear and doubt set in and it takes a shit-load of internal chutzpah herding to bring myself to jump. Then, even after it works and life gets that much better, I find I still actually have to sell the idea to others, not so that they'll adopt it themselves, (that's their business, not mine), but rather simply so that I'll not have to suffer ridicule and social exclusion. --Though, the sell job can be achieved quite easily if you know the tricks; herd mentality is automatic, and so the same stupid tricks apply to every cow and they nearly always work. If you have the patience and if you care enough to bother trying. Sometimes it's just easier to ignore people and let them laugh while your water-car burns no gas. (I don't have a water-car, but you see the point).
It's actually very relaxing and fun when my tastes and rationale happens to land on a blockbuster bit of popularity. It's very nice when you can run with the herd and not feel like you're selling yourself short or that you're being a hypocrite. This doesn't happen very often, though, since most consumer-grade popularity is horseshit. I find I grind my teeth at most of the popular crap on the market and it takes a lot of will power to not be actively infuriated with humanity most of the time. The other side, however, is to adopt a condescending, "Awww, look at the silly, charming little hobbits," kind of attitude, which is just as bad because while there is no anger, there is no respect either. It's a tough razor to walk, respecting people and the learning process of life and not judging anybody.
The nice thing, though, is that the 'Long Tail' is actually quite well populated. It's sort of a herd which you can't run with exactly, but which you can really love and respect and have intelligent conversations within. Often, sharing or 'cross-pollinating' your favorite media and ideas is really rewarding. People living in the tail discover and share all kinds of great stuff, and none of it is Harry Potter.
-FL
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HINT: isn't that just codeword for a female vibrator? Obviously the author had been shopping for those hard to get items...
I worked for Warner Music Group a number of years ago and it was common knowledge that a *very* small % of the catalog was responsible for most of the profit (I no longer recall the numbers). The fact that the long tail doesn't apply to the music industry hardly seems like news to me.
Evolution: love it or leave it
I remember years ago when porn customers were happy enough to see a video of good looking people having sex. Now I have the impression that entire companies are surviving off the money of "long tail" customers who want to see shemales fuck midgets inside of a walk-in freezer.
And as we all know, where porn goes everyone else follows.
"... They found that of the 13 million tracks available, 52,000 - just 0.4 per cent - accounted for 80 per cent of downloads. The overall pattern of demand showed nothing like the shift towards a long, fat tail postulated by Anderson. In fact, it showed the reverse: it followed what is known as a log-normal curve, characterised by a sharp spike of best-selling blockbusters that rapidly tailed off into nothing. There was an added irony to Page's findings. If an average album holds 12 tracks, 52,000 songs equate to about 4300 CDs - according to Anderson's Long Tail book, about the number of titles stocked by Wal-Mart, the largest bricks-and-mortar retailer in the US."
Did you follow the mistake he made? He assumed that each 12 downloads corresponded to ONE album instead of being from 12 different album, which is not how online music sales work.
So throwing away this garbage estimate, %80 of online music sales don't represent the same number of cds as wallmart stocks they represtent up to 12 TIMES as many cds as Wallmart stocks (but probably they more like 4 or 5 times).
Possibly what friends suggest, but actually it's more likely to be something that I've heard and liked. Increasingly, this is whatever has been online for free (demos), on internet radio, or possibly available through podcasts, etc.
Will you listen to all the samples on iTunes? Probably not. But a lot of online services offer
"people who like X also listen to Y" type information, and these days that may lead away from the big boys and to some less well-known, but still well-followed band.
Usually slashdot editors do a *decent* job. Sure sometimes they do a sub-par just, but who doesn't.
This article on the other hand has a terrible summary. If a reader (such as me) is not familiar with what "long-tail" means, it is impossible to find out without following links to other pages.
At first glance I thought the article was talking about evolution, but that didn't make much sense. Then blockbusters were brought up and I got even more confused. Finally I decided to follow the link to the original article to find out what the heck they were talking about.
A summary should give a reader a basic idea of the article, and this time they failed miserably.
Like I said, you can do better.
They don't operate that way YET. But remember we are in the 'early days' of the web. When me and my wife looks for a new film to rent, we go by the recommendations associated with movies we've enjoyed at sites like amazon. We often end up renting movies that we have never,ever vaguely heard of anywhere, and often really like them.
This is only possible because of Amazon's huge stock list, and computerised recommendation systems.
If my 60 year old mother rents a movie, she walks into a B&M store and picks something from their limited stock. Also, if she is going to buy my a Christmas present, it will be from a B&M store, as she doesn't use the web.
The web is slowly getting to become the dominant means of content delivery, but right now a lot of people rely on newspaper, TV and the old blockbuster-focused channels. Eventually, these channels will die out, and the people who aren't net-savvy will die.
The long tail makes a huge amount of sense, the book is just predicting what will be happening over time, not a phenomena that has totally taken over from the old system already.
give it time.
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I'm amazed by how skeptical /.ers turn out to be about such an obviously valid concept.
What a lot of commentators who dismiss the long tail seem to forget is that it takes time to create a culture where a massive amount of the populations moves online for their discovery and purchasing habits AND for entrepreneurs to catch on and apply such a contemporary concepts to their products. If you want to sell within the long tail you have to adapt your store or website to be able to cope with trends, you have to be pro-active. Change, especially for such habitual behavior that are taken for granted, takes its time, expressed in years.
The dismissing of the long tail here is reminding me of the people who said planes would never become commercially viable back in 1905. It's simply very short-sighted. You can't come to any conclusion based on so little contemporary data because it doesn't take the adaptation cycle into account.
There's a whole world that starts from the point where your nose ends, to those dismissing new ideas and concepts at face value: try and take notice of it.
I wonder to what exten that works?
Specifically, I think that there are two kinds of blockbusters: "Best of the Rest" and "SUPERIOR". It's kind of like comparing Harry Potter to Twilight. No insult to Twilight, it did a great job making it, but frankly ten years from now, Twilight might be one of those 'hard trivia' questions, while everyone over the age of 20 will STILL remember the basic plot of Harry Potter.
I bet that that the 'SUPERIOR' stuff would have made it to block buster status in all of the randomly selected groups. It is only if we don't have something clealry superior and worthy of being the best seller do we get blockbusters that vary acroos groups.
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I'm glad to know that an indy gamer can make a living and it gives me hope to try with something worth the sale.
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I am sorry gentlemen(women), but we have replaced the if or what with one catch term: evidence based (medicine), it is only the end game that matters whether or not you understand the process or not. All healthy debates are healthily settled by a nice experiment.
Does anyone know the joke about difference between philosophy and mathematics departments: only one needs erasers.
Instead of debating whether the tail exists, please someone offer some credible evidence either way.