Good post, but you're a fool if you don't think software is currently sold at profit maximizing prices. Publishers aren't just pulling these prices out of their asses, they study price elasticity and (who knew) have economics models that tell them what level maximizes profit. If people made more money selling games for less and with no DRM, in America of all places, they would. Sadly, they don't. But that's not a reason to fool yourself into thinking that the current scheme is bad for everyone, and if only the developers could see the light everyone might be better off. I guarantee the science is totally, totally against you.
I don't think consumers eat the costs of these schemes. I'm an economics student, and it seems that the costs of DRM implementation function much like a tax; i.e. they add a single additional cost to the price of the good the consumer is buying. That means that Tax Incidence comes into play. Long story short, for those that don't want to read the Wikipedia article, tax incidence is the idea that the tax is really distributed to those that respond the least to changes in the price of whatever good we're talking about. The underlying economics is more complicated, having to do with elasticities of supply and demand, but that's the bottom line.
Tax incidence is the reason every economist in the world came out against the Gas Tax Holiday; the elasticity of Gas supply is inelastic, so the Oil Companies were already eating the cost of the gas tax and removing it would only profit them.
But in the case of the TPM chips, if you really wanted to see who pays the cost for their implementation, you'd need to know how both producers and consumers of the boards they're on respond to the price hike they force. As long as some boards are available that don't have TPM and are thus cheaper, the manufacturers have to eat the costs of the DRM or else they wouldn't be able to sell any boards (few people pay more for nothing). So I wouldn't be surprised to see a fair amount of backroom dealing in the convincing of manufacturers to include the TPM chip, because not only does it do nothing for them, I suspect it actually hurts their bottom line.
Bzzt you apparently do not know what a free market is (although the person you replied to doesn't appear to know what an externality is - they are effects that markets do not take into account). Manipulated markets are by definition unfree. The problem isn't free markets, it's that free markets don't exist in reality, because you never have perfect competition, consumer awareness, or rule of law.
I'm amazed however, that there are still people who could see both Eastern and Western Germany, and still not be convinced that markets are a pretty solidly good idea. You really looked at the Westerners and saw slaves?
And by the way, I give to charity all the time; it doesn't appear that the free market system has prevented me from doing that, and lo I do not consider myself particularly taken advantage of.
We need to also start going after all those cops that kidnap kidnappers, or as they like to call it in their Orwellian doublespeak "put them in jail."
I'm intolerant of intolerant people, does that make me a hypocrite? If it does, I suppose I am also a hypocrite for supporting the jailing of kidnappers, the levying of fines against thieves, and wiping out other nations that try to wipe out us first. Look: it matters what you are intolerant of. Those that are intolerant of bigots do not stand on the same moral ground as the bigots themselves - only one of the two groups harms greater society - and your moral relativism is frankly ridiculous. Feel free, I suppose, to voice it however.
The ratings weren't too high if housing prices didn't fall nation wide. Any of you with experience in statistics know that if I have group of 10,000 mortgages with even a 10% default rate, it's overwhelmingly, overwhelmingly likely that at least 3000 of them will be good (consider that 3000 to be the upper AAA rated tranche of the SIV). Unless of course, that 10% default rate turns out to be totally bogus because housing prices fall across the country and people start to walk away from their mortgages en masse. That's how you get a AAA rated asset that turns out be trash. That's how you get a believable AAA, because people thought overall housing prices were reasonable. The math wasn't totally crazy.
Total Bullshit. The fall in housing prices has nothing to do with a contraction of the money supply, and we are not experiencing general deflation. We don't even include food and fuel when we calculate inflation for the very reason we're seeing right now - their price fluctuations often have little to do with the valuation of money. But a little research shows me that the CPI nevertheless increased.6% annualized last month, and it's been positive all year (I don't think it has ever been negative, at least not over the course of a year - the fed prevents that). Housing prices are falling because houses were overvalued (go look at the ratio of house values / rents on those houses - you will notice that they are relatively constant for a long time then shoot up... the housing bubble). I notice that housing was the entirety of your list of assets that were experiencing price drops. In any case, here's a link to a graph of the money supply: http://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/usfd/page6.pdf. You can see we are not seeing any type of collapse.
One of the few things the fed has near total control over is the money supply, and that allow them essentially to prevent deflation under any circumstances. Worry about something else.
Electricity production != electricity reaching end users. Sure we'd be producing a constant amount of power, but if we're losing the majority of it to the enormous transmission costs sending it across thousands of miles entails, we're not really solving a useful problem are we?
You're absolutely wrong about your discussion of supply and demand, which does not require a physical good (please don't make up fake economics rules). The good is a WoW account, and people will purchase more or fewer of them depending on how they cost. Depending on how much they cost, Blizzard will be willing to supply more or fewer or them. It is not free for Blizzard to provide accounts - all those accounts need to be run on servers, and have people looking after them, etc.
How much of Blizzard's pricing is due to the cost of supply is probably small, because they have a monopoly on WoW accounts and so follow a different set of profit maximizing rules than the so called "price takers" of a competitive market, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. And it certainly doesn't mean that services (particularly "access services" as you call them) live in some other universe where supply and demand don't exist. Yes, the same goes for satellite TV and cable, and certainly gym memberships (Do those exercise machines look like they're free to you? What about the building they're in? Can a gym really admit as many people as it wants for free?). Stick to talking WoW, and avoid econ until you know a little more about it.
They just needed to create a better justification for why I couldn't have my flashlight and my gun out at the same time. Maybe for you it seemed sensible enough and drew you in to the game, but for me it felt ridiculous and drew me out of the game.
When and why did we lose the technology to mount a light on a gun? That's a question they needed to do a better job answering.
But it is still a crop, and therefore competes with foods for the attention of farmers. Since farmers choose what to grow, and can grow non food goods (cotton anyone?) profitable grass growing moves farming away from stuff like wheat, corn, etc and raises their respective prices. So you still have the same problem that you have with corn --> fuel. Stay away from growing stuff for fuel, because land usage usage wise it does a ton of stuff you don't want to do.
Chinese producers can respond to distorted exchange rates simply by raising the prices they charge foreigners though. After all, if an American Consumer is willing to spend 20 dollars worth of yuan to buy a toaster, there isn't anything that stops a Chinese exporter from charging that consumer 20 dollars worth of yuan. It doesn't matter whether 20 dollars turns out to be 140 yuan or 165.6 yuan, because the transaction is governed by supply and demand. It's well known that there is an immediate benefit to exports from a depreciating currency, however I believe it's also well known that the phenomenon is temporary, because prices adjust to take into account the new exchange rate. So for a while Asia (particularly China) was subsidizing the US consumer, it's been decades since China enacted its policy to peg the yuan (crawling peg now) to the dollar, and the subsidization you're talking about has long since ended. I've heard prominent economists come down on both sides of this issue (mine and yours) but it seems fair to say that you are likely to be at the very least over stating the level of the subsidy, because you're ignoring the ability of the Chinese producer to adjust to the dollar price of the yuan.
Not bad, but are we really sure we've gotten to the very bottom when it comes to elementary particles? I mean, it's not like we haven't been wrong before when we've declared hitting the basement.
And also, how can the mass of an elementary particle change? The whole point of elementary particles is that they are homogeneous. So are you saying that the particles will accelerate? Because there's no other way for an elementary particle to absorb the mass. We don't have "plump" quarks or neutrons or something.
What does matter absorption do to the momentum of a black hole? I'd think instinctively it would work like an elastic collision, but on the other hand the whole exciting thing about black holes is that physics kind of breaks down beyond that event horizon. Do any physicists know whether fancy astronomy has answered this question, or are we still operating essentially on conjecture?
And to preempt any possible troll mods, I'm not offering this as a hinting doomsday problem with the LHC, I'm simply legitimately curious.
As how Hawking Radiation works (if it indeed even exists) is still entirely conjectural at this point, it's a little presumptuous to say you can use it to prove the safety of the thing that is designed to test for it. Sheesh.
I'm surprised you were modded troll, as I've periodically wondered the same thing myself. The cosmic ray defense of the LHC is pretty compelling, but on the other hand it's not like there aren't any differences between the interactions between the upper atmosphere and cosmic rays and what's going to go on in the collider. What is ultimately compelling to me is that the holes formed would be so small that even if they didn't evaporate, the sun will go out before they impact with enough matter and accumulate enough mass to do anything dangerous. Still, I'd like to hear a particle physicist address whether the differences in momentum of the results of LHC interactions vs upper atmosphere interactions is at all relevant. It would make the whole thing a little more rigorous and a little less hand waving "Well something we don't entirely understand doesn't appear to be killing and so we think this highly similar thing is probably fine."
Any Good Samaritan physicists care to give me a response?
Yet the obvious lesson of the past 30 years is that manufacturing can be hosted anywhere in the world too. That's why, like duh, there is significant manufacturing capacity in all sorts of places around the world that there didn't used to be. So would a return to greater steel production benefit us? Well, no. It would simply mean that instead of doing some high value work, like programming computers or posting to Slashdot, some group of people would have to do low value work like make steel. We wouldn't get any "security of industry" gains, because there is nothing stopping manufacturing production from moving around the world just like programming production.
Ironically though, IP production itself is actually a lot more resistant to globalization than you may think; it depends moreso than manufacturing on a highly educated, stable, free as in freedom society, and therefore actually can't be transported easily to developing countries (like steel can).
This is one of the reasons that, despite many projections, the divide between rich and poor nations has increased in the past 30 years. So don't worry about losing the wage premium you earn simply by being born in the "right" country so soon (to be fair, I worry too). We've got a long way to go.
PERJURY - When a person, having taken an oath before a competent tribunal, officer, or person, in any case in which a law of the U.S. authorizes an oath to be administered, that he will testify, declare, depose, or certify truly, or that any written testimony, declaration, deposition, or certificate by him subscribed, is true, willfully and contrary to such oath states or subscribes any material matter which he does not believe to be true; or in any declaration, certificate, verification, or statement under penalty of perjury, willfully subscribes as true any material matter which he does not believe to be true; 18 USC (emphases mine)
Bill's case aside, there is a widespread myth that perjury is any lying under oath, and this is simply not true. The lie has to be relevant and important to the case.
Actually, I think (hope) it was also a recognition of the fact that oppressive regimes breed extremism - it's not a coincidence that not a lot of terrorists come out of the Scandinavian countries, for instance. And while it's not like Bush made any gains there either, I think the idea itself - attacking the causes of a disease rather than the symptoms - has a lot of merit. Which is yet another reason why Iraq is such a tragedy.
Slashdot Mirror
You signed a contract idiot.
Good post, but you're a fool if you don't think software is currently sold at profit maximizing prices. Publishers aren't just pulling these prices out of their asses, they study price elasticity and (who knew) have economics models that tell them what level maximizes profit. If people made more money selling games for less and with no DRM, in America of all places, they would. Sadly, they don't. But that's not a reason to fool yourself into thinking that the current scheme is bad for everyone, and if only the developers could see the light everyone might be better off. I guarantee the science is totally, totally against you.
I don't think consumers eat the costs of these schemes. I'm an economics student, and it seems that the costs of DRM implementation function much like a tax; i.e. they add a single additional cost to the price of the good the consumer is buying. That means that Tax Incidence comes into play. Long story short, for those that don't want to read the Wikipedia article, tax incidence is the idea that the tax is really distributed to those that respond the least to changes in the price of whatever good we're talking about. The underlying economics is more complicated, having to do with elasticities of supply and demand, but that's the bottom line.
Tax incidence is the reason every economist in the world came out against the Gas Tax Holiday; the elasticity of Gas supply is inelastic, so the Oil Companies were already eating the cost of the gas tax and removing it would only profit them.
But in the case of the TPM chips, if you really wanted to see who pays the cost for their implementation, you'd need to know how both producers and consumers of the boards they're on respond to the price hike they force. As long as some boards are available that don't have TPM and are thus cheaper, the manufacturers have to eat the costs of the DRM or else they wouldn't be able to sell any boards (few people pay more for nothing). So I wouldn't be surprised to see a fair amount of backroom dealing in the convincing of manufacturers to include the TPM chip, because not only does it do nothing for them, I suspect it actually hurts their bottom line.
Except we discriminate again stupid people all the time. Why aren't slashdotters up in arms about that?
Bzzt you apparently do not know what a free market is (although the person you replied to doesn't appear to know what an externality is - they are effects that markets do not take into account). Manipulated markets are by definition unfree. The problem isn't free markets, it's that free markets don't exist in reality, because you never have perfect competition, consumer awareness, or rule of law.
I'm amazed however, that there are still people who could see both Eastern and Western Germany, and still not be convinced that markets are a pretty solidly good idea. You really looked at the Westerners and saw slaves?
And by the way, I give to charity all the time; it doesn't appear that the free market system has prevented me from doing that, and lo I do not consider myself particularly taken advantage of.
We need to also start going after all those cops that kidnap kidnappers, or as they like to call it in their Orwellian doublespeak "put them in jail."
I'm intolerant of intolerant people, does that make me a hypocrite? If it does, I suppose I am also a hypocrite for supporting the jailing of kidnappers, the levying of fines against thieves, and wiping out other nations that try to wipe out us first. Look: it matters what you are intolerant of. Those that are intolerant of bigots do not stand on the same moral ground as the bigots themselves - only one of the two groups harms greater society - and your moral relativism is frankly ridiculous. Feel free, I suppose, to voice it however.
The ratings weren't too high if housing prices didn't fall nation wide. Any of you with experience in statistics know that if I have group of 10,000 mortgages with even a 10% default rate, it's overwhelmingly, overwhelmingly likely that at least 3000 of them will be good (consider that 3000 to be the upper AAA rated tranche of the SIV). Unless of course, that 10% default rate turns out to be totally bogus because housing prices fall across the country and people start to walk away from their mortgages en masse. That's how you get a AAA rated asset that turns out be trash. That's how you get a believable AAA, because people thought overall housing prices were reasonable. The math wasn't totally crazy.
Total Bullshit. The fall in housing prices has nothing to do with a contraction of the money supply, and we are not experiencing general deflation. We don't even include food and fuel when we calculate inflation for the very reason we're seeing right now - their price fluctuations often have little to do with the valuation of money. But a little research shows me that the CPI nevertheless increased .6% annualized last month, and it's been positive all year (I don't think it has ever been negative, at least not over the course of a year - the fed prevents that). Housing prices are falling because houses were overvalued (go look at the ratio of house values / rents on those houses - you will notice that they are relatively constant for a long time then shoot up... the housing bubble). I notice that housing was the entirety of your list of assets that were experiencing price drops. In any case, here's a link to a graph of the money supply: http://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/usfd/page6.pdf. You can see we are not seeing any type of collapse.
One of the few things the fed has near total control over is the money supply, and that allow them essentially to prevent deflation under any circumstances. Worry about something else.
Electricity production != electricity reaching end users. Sure we'd be producing a constant amount of power, but if we're losing the majority of it to the enormous transmission costs sending it across thousands of miles entails, we're not really solving a useful problem are we?
You're absolutely wrong about your discussion of supply and demand, which does not require a physical good (please don't make up fake economics rules). The good is a WoW account, and people will purchase more or fewer of them depending on how they cost. Depending on how much they cost, Blizzard will be willing to supply more or fewer or them. It is not free for Blizzard to provide accounts - all those accounts need to be run on servers, and have people looking after them, etc.
How much of Blizzard's pricing is due to the cost of supply is probably small, because they have a monopoly on WoW accounts and so follow a different set of profit maximizing rules than the so called "price takers" of a competitive market, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. And it certainly doesn't mean that services (particularly "access services" as you call them) live in some other universe where supply and demand don't exist. Yes, the same goes for satellite TV and cable, and certainly gym memberships (Do those exercise machines look like they're free to you? What about the building they're in? Can a gym really admit as many people as it wants for free?). Stick to talking WoW, and avoid econ until you know a little more about it.
Here's an interesting map I saw recently with nations sized by their number of scientific publications:
http://www.worldmapper.org/display.php?selected=205
Can you spot the Middle East?
They just needed to create a better justification for why I couldn't have my flashlight and my gun out at the same time. Maybe for you it seemed sensible enough and drew you in to the game, but for me it felt ridiculous and drew me out of the game.
When and why did we lose the technology to mount a light on a gun? That's a question they needed to do a better job answering.
But it is still a crop, and therefore competes with foods for the attention of farmers. Since farmers choose what to grow, and can grow non food goods (cotton anyone?) profitable grass growing moves farming away from stuff like wheat, corn, etc and raises their respective prices. So you still have the same problem that you have with corn --> fuel. Stay away from growing stuff for fuel, because land usage usage wise it does a ton of stuff you don't want to do.
Capitalism is involved in this how?
Chinese producers can respond to distorted exchange rates simply by raising the prices they charge foreigners though. After all, if an American Consumer is willing to spend 20 dollars worth of yuan to buy a toaster, there isn't anything that stops a Chinese exporter from charging that consumer 20 dollars worth of yuan. It doesn't matter whether 20 dollars turns out to be 140 yuan or 165.6 yuan, because the transaction is governed by supply and demand. It's well known that there is an immediate benefit to exports from a depreciating currency, however I believe it's also well known that the phenomenon is temporary, because prices adjust to take into account the new exchange rate. So for a while Asia (particularly China) was subsidizing the US consumer, it's been decades since China enacted its policy to peg the yuan (crawling peg now) to the dollar, and the subsidization you're talking about has long since ended. I've heard prominent economists come down on both sides of this issue (mine and yours) but it seems fair to say that you are likely to be at the very least over stating the level of the subsidy, because you're ignoring the ability of the Chinese producer to adjust to the dollar price of the yuan.
Not bad, but are we really sure we've gotten to the very bottom when it comes to elementary particles? I mean, it's not like we haven't been wrong before when we've declared hitting the basement.
And also, how can the mass of an elementary particle change? The whole point of elementary particles is that they are homogeneous. So are you saying that the particles will accelerate? Because there's no other way for an elementary particle to absorb the mass. We don't have "plump" quarks or neutrons or something.
I've always thought TV was the solution to the Fermi Paradox.
What does matter absorption do to the momentum of a black hole? I'd think instinctively it would work like an elastic collision, but on the other hand the whole exciting thing about black holes is that physics kind of breaks down beyond that event horizon. Do any physicists know whether fancy astronomy has answered this question, or are we still operating essentially on conjecture?
And to preempt any possible troll mods, I'm not offering this as a hinting doomsday problem with the LHC, I'm simply legitimately curious.
Any thoughts?
As how Hawking Radiation works (if it indeed even exists) is still entirely conjectural at this point, it's a little presumptuous to say you can use it to prove the safety of the thing that is designed to test for it. Sheesh.
I'm surprised you were modded troll, as I've periodically wondered the same thing myself. The cosmic ray defense of the LHC is pretty compelling, but on the other hand it's not like there aren't any differences between the interactions between the upper atmosphere and cosmic rays and what's going to go on in the collider. What is ultimately compelling to me is that the holes formed would be so small that even if they didn't evaporate, the sun will go out before they impact with enough matter and accumulate enough mass to do anything dangerous. Still, I'd like to hear a particle physicist address whether the differences in momentum of the results of LHC interactions vs upper atmosphere interactions is at all relevant. It would make the whole thing a little more rigorous and a little less hand waving "Well something we don't entirely understand doesn't appear to be killing and so we think this highly similar thing is probably fine."
Any Good Samaritan physicists care to give me a response?
Her family would have been the one's to promote the story, not her. Seem more plausible now?
Does antimatter give off a different type of light? If not, how do we know the two types aren't simply segregated?
Yet the obvious lesson of the past 30 years is that manufacturing can be hosted anywhere in the world too. That's why, like duh, there is significant manufacturing capacity in all sorts of places around the world that there didn't used to be. So would a return to greater steel production benefit us? Well, no. It would simply mean that instead of doing some high value work, like programming computers or posting to Slashdot, some group of people would have to do low value work like make steel. We wouldn't get any "security of industry" gains, because there is nothing stopping manufacturing production from moving around the world just like programming production.
Ironically though, IP production itself is actually a lot more resistant to globalization than you may think; it depends moreso than manufacturing on a highly educated, stable, free as in freedom society, and therefore actually can't be transported easily to developing countries (like steel can).
This is one of the reasons that, despite many projections, the divide between rich and poor nations has increased in the past 30 years. So don't worry about losing the wage premium you earn simply by being born in the "right" country so soon (to be fair, I worry too). We've got a long way to go.
Here's another important definition you missed:
PERJURY - When a person, having taken an oath before a competent tribunal, officer, or person, in any case in which a law of the U.S. authorizes an oath to be administered, that he will testify, declare, depose, or certify truly, or that any written testimony, declaration, deposition, or certificate by him subscribed, is true, willfully and contrary to such oath states or subscribes any material matter which he does not believe to be true; or in any declaration, certificate, verification, or statement under penalty of perjury, willfully subscribes as true any material matter which he does not believe to be true; 18 USC (emphases mine)
Bill's case aside, there is a widespread myth that perjury is any lying under oath, and this is simply not true. The lie has to be relevant and important to the case.
Actually, I think (hope) it was also a recognition of the fact that oppressive regimes breed extremism - it's not a coincidence that not a lot of terrorists come out of the Scandinavian countries, for instance. And while it's not like Bush made any gains there either, I think the idea itself - attacking the causes of a disease rather than the symptoms - has a lot of merit. Which is yet another reason why Iraq is such a tragedy.