I am an AEA member (the stage actor's union) which means I can join SAG if I want. But my point is the same for both unions.
We do not need more collective bargaining. Both SAG and AEA spend a truckload on things like lobbying for health care. You should have seen our newsletters when congress was debating it -- first it was 'call your congressman and support this bill!' And then when it seemed like the 'Cadillac' plans would be taxed, it was 'call your congressman and fight this bill!'
As a professional actor you do not have a choice when it comes to joining the unions. If you just act on the side then there are plenty of non-union stage jobs at dinner theaters and that sort of thing, and some professional tours every now and then (though the unions have pretty much successfully unionized these). When I got my first professional stage job, I forked over about 1/5 of what I was going to make over the 4 months of the tour for the $1400 initiation fee (and then paid a couple percentage points out of my pay check each week). You can't choose not to do it.
Having said that, the acting unions, like most unions, perform a number of great functions. Before they existed, you couldn't make a respectable living as an actor -- now you can but it's just very hard (which is probably always going to be the case). There are lots of really helpful people who do things like go over all the time sheets because your stage manager didn't keep track of the hours you spent driving / assembling the show / acting the show, and you get a check in the mail 3 months after the fact because your union is looking out for you. They also help you with taxes and do a lot of fairly simple 'here's how the business works' type programs for new actors.
But like most unions, they never ever give anything up that they've won in past negotiations. Before, the producers controlled the business; now the unions do, though of course they wouldn't put it that way. What's happened is that there's now a huge divide between the very small (99 or fewer) seat theaters and the 'professional' ones where they have to do everything according to union rules -- that means actor's union, the electricians' union, the stagehands' union... because the unions stick together and if you get one on board, then you get 'em all. It's very, very difficult to make money running a theater, and as a consequence most bigger theaters won't produce anything unless it's a big hit show. So lots of fad musicals and less original drama. To some extent that's how the business would be anyway, union or not, but it's exacerbated by how expensive running an AEA theater is.
Compared to groups like the SEIU, the entertainment unions are pretty tame, and as I hope I've made clear, I'm grateful for what my union has done for me -- but if I could, I'd tear them all apart and start from scratch, because we have the same big, bloated, self-serving unions just grabbing for the biggest piece of pie they can (an actual headline from Equity News last year: 'How AEA Will Get a Piece of the Stimulus Pie,' as if actors needed federal stimulus money!) in the same fashion that big business used to do it before the unions. No union leader stops and asks 'just because I CAN do this or demand that, should I?'
I thought Stewart did a fantastic job of introducing the rally and that his video segment lambasting 'insanity' was perfect in that it went after nuts on both sides. Although I'm a conservative, I really do enjoy Stewart because he tends to get to the raw truth of most matters pretty quickly, no matter what his politics or his viewers'.
Although I've never gone to a political rally, my concern here is that both of these rallies will end up drawing Stewart's primary demographic, who will view it as a counter-Beck and counter-Palin rally, even though that's not at all how Stewart described them, and so the conversation will end up just applying the label of 'insane' or 'irrational' to anyone they don't like -- just as some threads here are saying about the Tea Party. I don't think most regular left-wing folk (in the '80 percenters' category Stewart talked about) are irrational or insane in the slightest, but these days, if you don't support government-run health care and you want smaller government or low taxes, I find myself being treated like the insane person when talking to liberals, even though I'm not even a Republican, and socially quite liberal (anti-religion, pro gay marriage, pro choice). I don't turn that around, either -- I hardly think it's irrational or insane to want a bigger government role in your day to day life or in something as broken as health insurance is in this country. I don't agree with the common liberal solutions to these problems, But I'm Pretty Sure They're Not Hitler.
So how is this rally going to help restore sanity to political conversation? That's a serious question. It's great publicity for Stewart and Colbert (and I'm happy to give it to them)... but will it result in anything more than patting ourselves on the back?
Yes, parent is correct. It is very difficult to protect employees with laws for this kind of thing, at least not without also protecting employees who are simply inept, have a rotten attitude, or are just plain old lazy. If a company decides you've done something that's perfectly legal but contrary to their policy, then in many states you can indeed be fired. Personally, as a business owner in an at-will state, I would say that any business who fires somebody over something like this without even a cursory investigation doesn't deserve a good employee, and if I were the employee, I'd go to the local news outlet with a story about how 'identity theft can cost you YOUR JOB' and not exactly tear apart my previous employee, but indicate that they just didn't care to dedicate the resources to uncover what went on.
In fact, while this doesn't happen in my line of work (thankfully), what you'll see in states with these legal protections is that, when your company decides they want to fire you for any reason at all, they just start the very long paper trail of documenting your 'poor performance and attitude' and xyz other legal requirements to fire you, so that when you do finally lose your job, you're a) completely unprepared and b) now have a paper trail of BS performance reviews and poor references. You might say 'well that's a dishonest company,' and indeed you'd be correct, but that's what happens when the government doesn't let two private parties resolve their differences through a more natural means: resentment builds up and the work environment tanks. I'd sooner work in an at-will state than one where I'm 'protected.'
Honestly, most of the stuff that can be automated has been. Even in an old single-engine plane, a lot of the old calculations pilots had to do (mostly for wind corrections, and even then they had a pretty easy-to-use device to do it) are all done by the GPS/Navcom. That single device has cut out a lot of stuff that pilots used to have to do, but there's still a great deal left and I doubt most of it would make good candidates for automation.
Things like communicating with ATC are a good example. There's already tech that matches your plane with the radar blip (your transponder) and also sends your altitude (mode C transponder) and now even your course, airspeed, lat/lon, and whatever else you might want to send (mode S), but air traffic control is such a juggling act that you just have to be listening in case you need to slot in to an airport pattern differently, or change your spot once you're in, or pull a 360 because the guy in front of you is slow...mostly not stuff commercial flights do very often but the human/ATC relationship is not going to be one a computer can replace any time soon.
The other thing is just the sheer number of instruments. It's easy for a computer to monitor them but it's the comprehension of several factors that make a good pilot. A classic example told to new pilots is carb heat. If you have icing going on, you need to turn on the carb heat. Duh, right? Not so much. Carb heat reduced engine power even further, so you take a double hit until it's actually done its job and melted the ice. Some new pilots will see 2100 RPMs where they're expecting 2500, panic, and just turn for home rather than doing the right thing.
Of course, newer planes don't have carburetors, but the number of instruments and thingies in the cockpit generally goes up as you get into a commercial jet, even with all the tech. Glass cockpits are amazing things and they make learning to be a pilot a lot easier than it used to be... but the way our aviation infrastructure is now (mostly having to do with how the FAA and ATC work), you can't drop in too many more computers.
Finally, safety is a huge concern for pilots and change is a very slow process -- and a lot of the time it's not good change, like the recent raise to 1500 hours before you can fly for an airline which was a direct result of the Buffalo crash on Colgan air. Classic case of political overreaction. Should something have been done? Sure. Was this the right thing? No way. So it's unlikely that anyone is going to want to spend the money to really bring ATC into the 21st century or redo the fundamentals of aviation (which really are impressive, by the way, even if they're not always super-ultra-techie).
Back to the original post: airlines do need to make some money and it's very hard to do that because they're in a tremendously regulated sector with a large amount of competition. This won't help too much but it might help a little and there are circumstances where it would be fine. Even without an instrument rating or a commercial rating, I could reduce a jetliner pilot's load a bit by sitting next to him, so I'm sure a flight crew member (aka stewardess) wouldn't mind a pay bump to learn some of that stuff as well.
Disclaimer: IANACP (I Am Not a Commercial Pilot) but IAAP (I Am A Pilot)
There are probably some flights, in some aircraft, where you could train a flight crew member to do enough to relieve the captain of enough tasks so that (s)he can concentrate on landing the plane. In some cases it isn't that any one part of getting an aircraft from A to B is difficult so much as it's the sheer number of tasks at hand -- between monitoring a zillion instruments and talking to approach, then the tower, then the ground -- that you just need a second person there. Even in a small plane, there are times when having a co-pilot just handle the radio makes things a lot easier.
The actual mechanics of flying an airplane are not especially difficult, but knowing how to handle bad or emergency conditions while keeping cool is. It's easy to get overwhelmed just by the quantity of things you have to keep track of. It's plausible that, on shorter, commuter flights, a computer could do enough of those things so that one person can reasonably fly a plane.
The problem is that, while most pilots are pretty safety-conscious, there is such a huge supply of them that there will always be people willing to fly for these companies under less than ideal conditions. Particularly with the minimum number of hours (in the US, anyway) jumping to 1500 (from something like 200-250, which was indeed too low), you're going to see a lot of young guys with a lot of debt from flight school (where commercial loans are on the order of 12-18% interest) who will take any job just to pay the bills. They just don't get paid very well these days, and airline margins are tiny as it is.
I was just talking about that subject this morning, as it happens. The argument against fighting disease in Africa basically says that, when you spend hundreds of millions fighting diseases and starvation that kill children in Africa in countries without well-developed, democratic societies, what you get in 20-30 years is a large population of healthy young adults who are still in a country without a developed society, without even a semi-modern economy, and without much modern healthcare outside of what other countries donate. In other words, you have a population that is vastly larger than what the country can economically support, and you don't have jobs for them, so you get a lot of militant young guys whose pasttimes are either making lots of babies or causing problems.
Now, that's a gross oversimplification of the problem, and I'm actually not sold on it as a reason to say 'bah, let disease kill millions!' as that's a pretty cold stance to take. You'll sometimes hear opponents of this kind of charity point out that disease is Nature's way of controlling population, but you could justify quite a few scary things with that reasoning.
I do think that the 'feel good about yourself by donating to starving children' drive of the last 60-70 years is shortsighted in this respect, but of course it's much easier to feed even large numbers of starving people than it is to set up a modern government and economy in some of these African countries, assuming even that you have the right to try and do so (which is a big assumption).
In other words, not unlike Mr. Gates himself, the 'disease and starvation in Africa' subject is a complex one that has a lot more going on than the sound bytes you usually hear. I haven't reached a conclusion on Africa because most of the conversation about it goes like this:
Feels Good Guy: I just gave $1,000 to charity and saved the lives of 100 kids in Africa! Skeptical Guy: What about their education? Their future health care? Do they have a chance at being self-sufficient later or will they simply need even more external support as they get older? Feels Good Guy: Racist!
Anyway, that's what's (potentially) wrong with it. I tried to paint a pretty neutral picture because I really do want to hear more actual conversation on the subject rather than the knee-jerk stuff that's out there.
Umm, we are. Every time you buy a computer from a large vendor, it WILL have windows preinstalled. Sure, you could assemble your own or buy from a small, independent retailer that does this for you, but economies of scale will ensure that even with the "microsoft tax", the large vendor will be cheaper.
In other words, 'every time you MAKE THE DECISION to buy a computer with windows preinstalled, you're forced to buy windows.'
Yes. And I have a choice to buy elsewhere or build my own. As it happens, that's exactly what I do. Even the big manufacturers offer alternatives to Windows these days, though it's not really a big money-maker for them (not that you care about such trivial realities). My business buys some MS products that my business uses (like SQL Server and Windows Server) and very cheaply at that. Nobody forced us to do this and we could switch to an open-source alternative if we wanted to (and we have a few reasons why we might one day, but not yet). Nobody mugged us and nobody broke into our shop and forced us to do this.
MS is an easy target for people who like to sit around and yell about how you should stick it to the man while doing nothing productive to actually support open-source software themselves. MS is also a very legitimate target for people who DO actively support OSS for some, though not all of the reasons that you mentioned. It's a very large and complex company with a very large and complex history which is composed of a whole lot more than 'has been convicted of monopolistic practices.' Intel has been convicted of monopolistic practices, too. You want to get rid of them? Punish them both, sure, but destroy them? To what end?
Companies that large and that significant have tens of thousands of people who make decisions that affect everybody. Some of them are terrible and some of them are crooked and come right from the top. We can and do punish those people and the company as well, though not always perfectly. How many products does MS make? You want to get rid of every single one of them because they got convicted of bundling browsers and Windows pre-installation schemes? How many businesses and consumers that depend on MS (out of their choice!) would be screwed out of a livelihood because you wanted to be the Monopoly Avenger and Stick It to the Man? You know how cheap computers are these days, even with the MS tax? What problem exactly are you trying to solve?
Your argument and your 'personal note' are nothing more than juvenile anti-business rhetoric. MS is a huge and often blundering company that has made a lot of mis-steps, but they do a lot of things right as well.
Wow. What an angry, narrow-minded post. 'Insightful' indeed.
I have no more love for Microsoft than the next guy, but you act like we're all being forced to buy MS products and that every cent they've earned was all but stolen from our pockets, and that, if it weren't stolen from our pockets, we'd be giving all that money to charity ourselves. Yeah, right.
Gates believes that recognition will drive more people to charity than anonymity. As an un-involved businessman who gives a small piece of his small profit to charity every year, I share your preference for anonymous donations, because the cause (whatever it may be) is certainly more important than the donor. This isn't what Gates is arguing. He's saying that whatever harm comes from the recognition factor, at the end of the day, you'll have an order of magnitude more money coming in from people who want that recognition such that, if the cause is so important, funding it an extra order of magnitude is much more important than our anonymity principle. That's a tough case to argue, because vanity is definitely a big piece of philanthropy, and as much as I think stamping people's names on university buildings or theater/classroom seats is dumb, I'd rather have a theater or a classroom with some stranger's name on everything than not have it.
Gates' charity is not 'all about recognition,' either. He honestly believes that recognition is an important piece of the cycle; you're free to disagree, but as I imagine that neither you nor I have achievements that even come close to what his charity accomplishes in a single year, I think it's very easy for us to throw stones and paint him as a jerk.
As it happens, I actually don't completely support a big piece of what his charity does -- focusing on disease in Africa -- but it's foolish and simply wrong to suggest that Gates is just a successful crook rather than an accomplished individual who is free to spend the fruits of his labor as he pleases.
The difference is that conservatives are being hypocrites when they support this stuff while liberals are being consistent with a general liberal philosophy that 'government knows best.' Obviously there are a lot of liberal ideologies out there and a lot of conservative ones as well, but the generalized conservative viewpoint of 'government should stay out of our lives' doesn't translate well to stuff like this, and when conservatives try to do it, they typically get in trouble when shoe-horning something like that into an otherwise conservative platform. You see conservatives try and justify this stuff all the time, but it's typically the same populist arguments that liberals use, e.g. 'declining moral values of society,' and that kind of thing. It's no less hypocritical when conservatives try to block more emotionally-charged issues like abortion. The late George Carlin quotes Reagan's 'government should be off our back' and then makes a crack about 'but they can be in a woman's uterus' in pointing out this inconsistency.
I wouldn't say that conservatives do it 'most likely more' as far as free speech goes, as the big nanny states are the ones that get away with this the most today -- look no further than Australia. The US is probably more 'to the right' on free speech issues than a lot of the 'civilized world' in that you see stuff like this struck down again and again.
Oh, absolutely - I'm not recommending the Mustang to anyone just yet, but if you look at the 2011 Mustang GT versus the 2010, it's ALMOST a whole different car.
It's still a Mustang, though. In that class I'd probably look at Infiniti or the new Hyundai sports car, but the Mustang went from 'no way' to 'hey, look at that.'
The rear axle isn't so bad if so long as you're under 30 and don't need all your body parts.
How does that make sense? The conspiracy required for the type of scheme you're describing would mean that the Japanese, American, Korean, and European automakers would all have to be colluding to keep this stuff out of their vehicles. It's also why imports have been routing American cars for so many years -- they've had a lot more of this kind of stuff than American cars. Though one possible reason for that is that they have more money to throw around, since it costs a lot more to design and build a car in the US, thanks to the UAW.
This may finally be changing thanks to Ford, whose new Focus and Mustang are both noteworthy accomplishments in terms of features, performance, and safety, but I don't buy the argument that 'the government should've been in the car business all along and a Reagan/Republican/Auto company conspiracy is the only reason they weren't.'
There have been (and still are) a lot of government-run car companies over the years. You won't see many of the cars they produce today because they're typically totalitarian and/or socialist regimes that make them, and they're usually rubbish. The auto industry in the US (and in most of the industrialized world) is very heavily regulated, with a couple thousand dollars added to the cost of most cars to pay for all the stuff we're requiring the auto companies to do over the next few years. That's not a bad trade-off for a lot of people.
I bought my first real car in 2002, sold it in 2004 to move to NYC, and just bought a new car a couple months ago after leaving the city. It's amazing how much has changed just in that time. Up until very recently, I would never have thought of buying an American car (I never have) but hopefully that will change, though I suspect it'll be Ford and not GM driving that change.
Doesn't cost me anything (extra) to send an email from my PDA, though I don't have an SMS plan and so that does cost me something.
Exactly who is it who ought to decide what should be free and what shouldn't?
I love when smartphone packages are singled out as evidence of free market villainy, since they're something to which you are apparently entitled. I guess it didn't cost the phone companies anything to build those cell towers, to navigate the byzantine bureaucracies to get permission to build the towers, and to pay for the software and hardware engineering and design for SMS interfaces? Or is that the 'literally nothing' you're talking about?
I'll grant that there are some problems with a boilerplate free market solution where phone companies are concerned (both wired and wireless) since the airwaves are considered to belong to everybody and someone has to be responsible for doling them out. The usual free market answer of 'more competition' only helps a little bit -- there are definitely cheaper alternatives than AT&T, remember; it's just that we all like our nice iPhones and are complaining about the provider to whom we knowingly married ourselves for so long as they have the exclusive rights to the iPhone.
I'm an AT&T iPhone customer and I jailbreak my phone so that I can use PDANet. The minute I can switch my iPhone to a provider who won't charge me to tether, I'm gone. In the meantime, the convenience of having a single device to house my portable movie and music collection as well as handle all my contacts, email, and phone calls is worth the nuisance of jailbreaking, particularly when AT&T ignores most everyone who tethers in this manner. It was my decision to buy the phone, my decision to sign up with AT&T, and my decision not to use SMS. I don't see how government can regulate a better scenario here without also damaging the kind of innovation you need for us to have iPhones in the first place.
I've heard the 'big states set standards for textbooks' line for years.
Is it -that- much more expensive for a smaller state to find a different textbook publisher? Is the selection of textbooks so very small, and the marginal cost for a smaller order so very large, that there's absolutely no free market solution to this problem?
The whole point of having states manage their own education is that California shouldn't care what Texas does or doesn't want to teach. Having a big inter-state brawl over what should be taught is exactly what the system is supposed to avoid.
There has got to be an opportunity for smaller publishers here.
A few people were talking about trying to find 'equivalent' PCs and mentioning things like the Dell Precision Mobile Workstation, which isn't really at all the same (they're huge). This is the nearest 'wannabe Macbook' that I found (and ordered):
It's definitely aimed squarely at the MBP, and while the build quality is not as good as Apple's, I have to admit that it's come a very long way since the last time I looked in on HP's notebooks. They're also doing better with service options - they offer in-home service now just like Dell does (used to be mail-in).
They routinely have $200, $300, or even (until quite recently) $450 off coupons, so I wouldn't advise buying one at full price. This is what I ended up with:
5.15 lbs @ 1.1" thick (more with the slice battery attached) i5-540 CPU @ up to 3.06 GHz 4 GB DDR3-1066 RAM 320 GB Intel G2 SSD (2x 160 GB) ATI 5830 GPU w/1GB VRAM 15.6" 1920x1080 BrightView Glossy display (matte available for $25 less) Wireless-N + Bluetooth 6-cell Li-Ion battery + 9-cell 'thin-fit Slice' battery
Total: $1,849.99, after a $450 off coupon. Even without that, though, an equivalent-spec'd MBP is over $2,700, and that's with a significantly worse GPU. But that buys you the Apple logo and better historical reliability - HP is improving but Apple is certainly pretty awesome in that respect.
So we all know that the Spaniards were probably the most brutal of all the Europeans tromping around the New World. That's understatement, too -- they made the English, French, and Dutch put together look like friendly, singing Disney animals. But that was 300+ years ago.
Can you please explain why, six+ generations later, this means that those of Spanish descent deserve to be overthrown as a pre-requisite for progress? Because it sounds like you're about to make a 'they weren't there first' argument.
There are still plenty of people in the US who drive stick. You can't rent a car with a manual transmission very easily but you can still buy one very easily (I've never owned anything else).
Texas is 39th, with 94 cents in Federal spending for every dollar they pay in taxes.
I've been living in New York since 1998, which is 42nd and has 79 cents on the dollar returned to us.
Oh noes! Market freedom! They must be evil!
You pay the same Federal taxes if you live in Texas as you do if you live in New York or New Jersey. You just pay fewer State taxes (particularly in NY, with one of the highest Sales tax rates and one of the highest income tax rates).
Even if you were right, wouldn't it be nice if some businesses could survive without the Federal teat? I have zero Federal contracts and don't want any, so 'government services' don't really affect me beyond the basics, most of which the State provides.
Well, a bit off-topic, but yes, I agree, which is why my business is relocating from NYC, where we pay:
- one of the highest state + city income tax rates in the nation - 4% unincorporated business tax - Metropolitan Commuter transportation mobility tax (something they invented this year to fund the MTA)
To Austin, TX, where we'll pay:
- No state income tax (corporate or personal) - No UBT - No spend-happy gov't - 80% national avg cost of living rather than NYC (don't even want to know what percentage that is)
I'm not a tea party guy or anything but whenever I talk about this stuff, people look at me like I'm crazy. More money for my business means I can have more employees and charge my clients less. Everybody always assumes that the first thing we do when taxes are lower is pocket the difference. Yeah, right.
It's extremely difficult to tax non-sale services, for the reasons I mentioned. Very few states even try. Reason being that it's not a 'sale' if you have a professional perform a service for you, which is usually what custom software is.
Sales tax doesn't usually apply to custom software, where 'custom software' means you can't just buy it on a shelf or download it. My company sells custom software that runs youth sports leagues.
We pay income tax on all our revenue, of course, but we don't have to collect sales tax so long as it's a 'service' -- meaning no 'click here to download our software.' So custom software is not currently taxed in most states.
Washington state also doesn't have an income tax at all.
Depending on your current state and existing tax burden, I could see paying a fair tax for something like this, but not ten percent. Custom software is already pretty expensive (possibly one of the reasons it's not currently taxed) and because it doesn't have fixed price, it's tough to track for tax purposes -- I could say 'well, our software costs a hundred bucks, but my consulting fees to set it up and maintain it for you are $10,000 a year' since that's a professional fee/service. Sort of how attorneys work - you're paying for their expertise, not really for a 'product.'
Like many things with modern politics, it's simply a matter of degree.
Does the market exist with unique attributes making it a perfect storm of easily abused, vital to the public good, and immune to normal market solutions (i.e. competition)? Sure. There are absolutely areas of the economy where laissez-faire capitalism doesn't work - the problem is that we've given the govenrments of the world near carte-blanche with respect to identifying and policing these. Make a few political enemies? Better hope you're not suddenly 'anti-competitive!'
Your flour scenario is a perfect example. You've grossly exaggerated what is nonetheless a very real problem in need of solving but you've applied it to a case that would be very easily solved by the market. It didn't seem to occur to you that the scenario you described is not only perfectly normal, but desirable - bad behaviors in any normal market won't last long because of competition. Buying something at $x and re-selling it at $y isn't anti-competitive.
The threshold for what is anti-competitive and the markets to which that threshold should be applied is a question that deserves a lot of scrutiny and consideration -- and it hasn't got much of either, because just about everyone is confident that Big Brother is going to take care of it all for them, with very little mind to the fact that government is just as inherently corrupt as business, only without the constraints and self-correcting measures the market has.
No serious capitalist pretends that people aren't (on the whole) greedy bastards who will do anything they feel they can get away with if it gains them money or power. But the serious capitalist believes that the market will restrain most (but not all) bad behavior for the same reason that I don't rip people off when I'm running my small business, even though it would be quite easy to get away with it -- when the consumer has choices, some combination of quality, price, and reputation had better make them settle on me and not my competitor, or else I go out of business and become a wage drone. Probably for the competition.
My line of work (hosted application development) is almost completely unregulated and I certainly hope it stays that way. My fiancee is in medicine and you couldn't pay me enough to put up with what doctors have to deal with these days.
I also don't support ticket scalping. I never buy from scalpers because I think they're mostly sleazy, even if they are a natural market phenomenon. I don't like Ticketmaster either, and will try to buy tickets from some of Ticketmaster's smaller competition whenever I can. My point is that I understand ticket scalping and I know that the government can't do much about it -- and in cases where the government tries, they end up hurting the legit people as well.
You can't regulate away human nature. You can and should try to make it transparent whenever possible, but for so long as we have luxuries like concerts available (and they are luxuries) then there will be people willing to pay a premium for access and there will be a market to serve them. Empowering a busybody bureaucrat to try and pretend that's not the case is hardly ever the answer.
>> , and so some people like you can't appreciate their evil up front.
Good thing we have you around to protect us from ourselves!
This is mickey mouse Econ 101 stuff. The only way your scenario ends in 'people starve' is if there is only one supplier of flour (i.e. flour is controlled by a monopoly). Even libertarians (many of us, anyway) agree that monopolies have to be treated a little differently, at least in cases where the nebulous 'public good' is involved -- typically infrastructure or telecom where you have private companies gaining access to both public and private land and need some oversight.
This is certainly not the case with your flour example, though let's give you a pass on the analogy since someone else can make more-or-less identical flour, which is tough to do with a Springsteen concert.
There are a variety of methods for ticket sellers to combat scalping, and a variety of reasons (which vary by state and country) which often restrict a vendor from selling the same product at two different prices based on the buyer. For example, ticketmaster can charge me $100 for an orchestra seat and $60 for a balcony seat, but (AFIAK) they can't charge me $100 for an orchestra seat but then make my buddy pay $140 for another orchestra seat at the same time; they can raise all their prices or have 'early bird discounts' but those things affect all transactions. They can only sub-divide on a limited scale, e.g. 'American express discount' or other things which apply to fairly large groups but not individuals. So you have a certain degree of rigidity that is being forced on the market, since there are clearly some people who would pay $200 for an orchestra seat, but pricing all their orchestra seats at $200 would never fly -- so they sell them to scalpers who can turn around and sell them at whatever price they want through a variety of outlets. Those prices can change every day (we'd never put up with Ticketmaster doing that) because there are effectively multiple small markets as opposed to a single larger one.
As for whether or not all this should be legal, the practical reality is that it's very tough to eradicate when you have a static, tiered market that actually wants to behave like a funnel. You'd pretty much have to mandate that tickets be linked to the actual person attending at the time of purchase, which means no resales, no gifts, no last-minute 'oh crap i can't go who wants to buy my ticket?' A simple, free-market solution would be to give somebody a 'lock-in' ticket price in which they could voluntarily tie the ticket to themselves (non-transferable) and get a lower price - that would cut into the scalping market quite a lot. I'd guess that it isn't legal to do as the ability to re-sell something that you've bought is usually quite well protected, but that's a question for the law and not a free market criticism.
It seems like there are a zillion comments relating to health insurance dogma or 'Go to Canada' or 'go to the UK.' I won't get into how health care SHOULD work (beyond one point that I consider to be quite simple) but will try to answer your question, since I'm in the same boat.
I am in business for myself as a software guy. One day soon we might have an employee or two, but even then our situation won't change too much.
There is really only one thing you can do: go to eHealthinsurance.com, plug in your info and your zip code, and hope your zip code is a good one. Right now I have the misfortune of living in New York State. If I lived in PA, DE, or CT then my insurance would cost anywhere between 1/4 and 1/2 of what I pay now (north of $300 and I'm healthy and young), but New York has one of the most highly regulated insurance markets in the country, either up there with or right behind California. New Jersey is also terrible.
Depending on your income and your situation, there can be benefits to living in a heavily regulated insurance market, but for the most part, if you run a small business or otherwise are a contractor rather than an employee, you're out of luck when it comes to affordable insurance if you are in a state like NY that is very hostile to the insurance industry.
New York screws you two ways because not only are all your choices expensive, but there aren't many choices to begin wtih. What I really wanted was a health savings plan where I could put X amount away (ideally pre-tax, but whatever) and spend it on routine care, and then have insurance for catastrophic stuff. I don't mind paying out of pocket for small things because small things are going to be less than (or, at worst, as much as) my $300 monthly premium anyway - I've had my policy now for three years and have probably made one or two claims on it for a couple hundred bucks worth of stuff, but I've been lucky and haven't needed anything worse. There are plenty of states out there that allow or even encourage this. But in heavily regulated NY and CA, the insurance market needs my buy-in not to balance out my own claims down the line, but because politicians insist on things like demanding that insurers keep on unemployed/COBRA customers are reduced premiums or even no premiums for a set amount of time, and so I end up paying inflated rates.
So if you're lucky, you're in a state that does a better job than NY or CA or NJ in terms of looking out for you (since it's not like total deregulation is really ideal either) but isn't driving out the insurance companies and therefore limiting competition.
WSJ had a good piece about this a few weeks back (subscription required):
My two cents about the health care debate going on in other comments is just this: if I could buy insurance from any state, almost all my problems with health care would go away. I encourage you to go to eHealthinsurance and just plug in different zip codes for your neighboring states. Try Connecticut (a pretty good state for health insurance, relatively speaking) and then New York. Then PA or DE. Or Texas. The discrepancies are amazing.
We have 100Mbps here in New York City (via Cablevision) - at least the parts of us lucky to have cablevision rather than Time Warner. It's $100/mo and they offer 5 static IPs as well for a bit more.
I didn't say he was a self-made man. I said he knows what it is to work very hard.
I've known trust-fund babies my entire life and they are usually completely irresponsible with no idea of what a dollar means. That's not true of Steve. I'm perfectly willing to condemn someone who is an idiot when it comes to money, and that is certainly quite true of most people who inherit a lot of money -- that is probably one of the reasons that Steve's kids aren't going to inherit much (or anything - I didn't ask for details when it was explained to me). I'm not willing to condemn someone solely because he inherited a lot of money, particularly when anyone who does inherit a large sum of money gives most of it to the Great Wealth Redistribution System in the Sky anyway.
I'll take a hard-working person who comes from money and has to overcome prejudices from ignorant populists like you any day of the way over... well, an ignorant populist. The kernel of truth in what you're saying is certainly a very valid, and very old observation -- that most people who 'come from money' end up as irresponsible idiots. Maybe we ought to think well of the people who are able to overcome that rather than just judging people solely because they've been successful -- which, whatever Forbes himself may have inherited, he certainly is. Plenty of people inherit millions. Most of them will never do half as much with their lives as Forbes has.
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I am an AEA member (the stage actor's union) which means I can join SAG if I want. But my point is the same for both unions.
We do not need more collective bargaining. Both SAG and AEA spend a truckload on things like lobbying for health care. You should have seen our newsletters when congress was debating it -- first it was 'call your congressman and support this bill!' And then when it seemed like the 'Cadillac' plans would be taxed, it was 'call your congressman and fight this bill!'
As a professional actor you do not have a choice when it comes to joining the unions. If you just act on the side then there are plenty of non-union stage jobs at dinner theaters and that sort of thing, and some professional tours every now and then (though the unions have pretty much successfully unionized these). When I got my first professional stage job, I forked over about 1/5 of what I was going to make over the 4 months of the tour for the $1400 initiation fee (and then paid a couple percentage points out of my pay check each week). You can't choose not to do it.
Having said that, the acting unions, like most unions, perform a number of great functions. Before they existed, you couldn't make a respectable living as an actor -- now you can but it's just very hard (which is probably always going to be the case). There are lots of really helpful people who do things like go over all the time sheets because your stage manager didn't keep track of the hours you spent driving / assembling the show / acting the show, and you get a check in the mail 3 months after the fact because your union is looking out for you. They also help you with taxes and do a lot of fairly simple 'here's how the business works' type programs for new actors.
But like most unions, they never ever give anything up that they've won in past negotiations. Before, the producers controlled the business; now the unions do, though of course they wouldn't put it that way. What's happened is that there's now a huge divide between the very small (99 or fewer) seat theaters and the 'professional' ones where they have to do everything according to union rules -- that means actor's union, the electricians' union, the stagehands' union ... because the unions stick together and if you get one on board, then you get 'em all. It's very, very difficult to make money running a theater, and as a consequence most bigger theaters won't produce anything unless it's a big hit show. So lots of fad musicals and less original drama. To some extent that's how the business would be anyway, union or not, but it's exacerbated by how expensive running an AEA theater is.
Compared to groups like the SEIU, the entertainment unions are pretty tame, and as I hope I've made clear, I'm grateful for what my union has done for me -- but if I could, I'd tear them all apart and start from scratch, because we have the same big, bloated, self-serving unions just grabbing for the biggest piece of pie they can (an actual headline from Equity News last year: 'How AEA Will Get a Piece of the Stimulus Pie,' as if actors needed federal stimulus money!) in the same fashion that big business used to do it before the unions. No union leader stops and asks 'just because I CAN do this or demand that, should I?'
It's all just a matter of degrees.
I thought Stewart did a fantastic job of introducing the rally and that his video segment lambasting 'insanity' was perfect in that it went after nuts on both sides. Although I'm a conservative, I really do enjoy Stewart because he tends to get to the raw truth of most matters pretty quickly, no matter what his politics or his viewers'.
Although I've never gone to a political rally, my concern here is that both of these rallies will end up drawing Stewart's primary demographic, who will view it as a counter-Beck and counter-Palin rally, even though that's not at all how Stewart described them, and so the conversation will end up just applying the label of 'insane' or 'irrational' to anyone they don't like -- just as some threads here are saying about the Tea Party. I don't think most regular left-wing folk (in the '80 percenters' category Stewart talked about) are irrational or insane in the slightest, but these days, if you don't support government-run health care and you want smaller government or low taxes, I find myself being treated like the insane person when talking to liberals, even though I'm not even a Republican, and socially quite liberal (anti-religion, pro gay marriage, pro choice). I don't turn that around, either -- I hardly think it's irrational or insane to want a bigger government role in your day to day life or in something as broken as health insurance is in this country. I don't agree with the common liberal solutions to these problems, But I'm Pretty Sure They're Not Hitler.
So how is this rally going to help restore sanity to political conversation? That's a serious question. It's great publicity for Stewart and Colbert (and I'm happy to give it to them) ... but will it result in anything more than patting ourselves on the back?
Yes, parent is correct. It is very difficult to protect employees with laws for this kind of thing, at least not without also protecting employees who are simply inept, have a rotten attitude, or are just plain old lazy. If a company decides you've done something that's perfectly legal but contrary to their policy, then in many states you can indeed be fired. Personally, as a business owner in an at-will state, I would say that any business who fires somebody over something like this without even a cursory investigation doesn't deserve a good employee, and if I were the employee, I'd go to the local news outlet with a story about how 'identity theft can cost you YOUR JOB' and not exactly tear apart my previous employee, but indicate that they just didn't care to dedicate the resources to uncover what went on.
In fact, while this doesn't happen in my line of work (thankfully), what you'll see in states with these legal protections is that, when your company decides they want to fire you for any reason at all, they just start the very long paper trail of documenting your 'poor performance and attitude' and xyz other legal requirements to fire you, so that when you do finally lose your job, you're a) completely unprepared and b) now have a paper trail of BS performance reviews and poor references. You might say 'well that's a dishonest company,' and indeed you'd be correct, but that's what happens when the government doesn't let two private parties resolve their differences through a more natural means: resentment builds up and the work environment tanks. I'd sooner work in an at-will state than one where I'm 'protected.'
Honestly, most of the stuff that can be automated has been. Even in an old single-engine plane, a lot of the old calculations pilots had to do (mostly for wind corrections, and even then they had a pretty easy-to-use device to do it) are all done by the GPS/Navcom. That single device has cut out a lot of stuff that pilots used to have to do, but there's still a great deal left and I doubt most of it would make good candidates for automation.
Things like communicating with ATC are a good example. There's already tech that matches your plane with the radar blip (your transponder) and also sends your altitude (mode C transponder) and now even your course, airspeed, lat/lon, and whatever else you might want to send (mode S), but air traffic control is such a juggling act that you just have to be listening in case you need to slot in to an airport pattern differently, or change your spot once you're in, or pull a 360 because the guy in front of you is slow...mostly not stuff commercial flights do very often but the human/ATC relationship is not going to be one a computer can replace any time soon.
The other thing is just the sheer number of instruments. It's easy for a computer to monitor them but it's the comprehension of several factors that make a good pilot. A classic example told to new pilots is carb heat. If you have icing going on, you need to turn on the carb heat. Duh, right? Not so much. Carb heat reduced engine power even further, so you take a double hit until it's actually done its job and melted the ice. Some new pilots will see 2100 RPMs where they're expecting 2500, panic, and just turn for home rather than doing the right thing.
Of course, newer planes don't have carburetors, but the number of instruments and thingies in the cockpit generally goes up as you get into a commercial jet, even with all the tech. Glass cockpits are amazing things and they make learning to be a pilot a lot easier than it used to be ... but the way our aviation infrastructure is now (mostly having to do with how the FAA and ATC work), you can't drop in too many more computers.
Finally, safety is a huge concern for pilots and change is a very slow process -- and a lot of the time it's not good change, like the recent raise to 1500 hours before you can fly for an airline which was a direct result of the Buffalo crash on Colgan air. Classic case of political overreaction. Should something have been done? Sure. Was this the right thing? No way. So it's unlikely that anyone is going to want to spend the money to really bring ATC into the 21st century or redo the fundamentals of aviation (which really are impressive, by the way, even if they're not always super-ultra-techie).
Back to the original post: airlines do need to make some money and it's very hard to do that because they're in a tremendously regulated sector with a large amount of competition. This won't help too much but it might help a little and there are circumstances where it would be fine. Even without an instrument rating or a commercial rating, I could reduce a jetliner pilot's load a bit by sitting next to him, so I'm sure a flight crew member (aka stewardess) wouldn't mind a pay bump to learn some of that stuff as well.
Disclaimer: IANACP (I Am Not a Commercial Pilot) but IAAP (I Am A Pilot)
There are probably some flights, in some aircraft, where you could train a flight crew member to do enough to relieve the captain of enough tasks so that (s)he can concentrate on landing the plane. In some cases it isn't that any one part of getting an aircraft from A to B is difficult so much as it's the sheer number of tasks at hand -- between monitoring a zillion instruments and talking to approach, then the tower, then the ground -- that you just need a second person there. Even in a small plane, there are times when having a co-pilot just handle the radio makes things a lot easier.
The actual mechanics of flying an airplane are not especially difficult, but knowing how to handle bad or emergency conditions while keeping cool is. It's easy to get overwhelmed just by the quantity of things you have to keep track of. It's plausible that, on shorter, commuter flights, a computer could do enough of those things so that one person can reasonably fly a plane.
The problem is that, while most pilots are pretty safety-conscious, there is such a huge supply of them that there will always be people willing to fly for these companies under less than ideal conditions. Particularly with the minimum number of hours (in the US, anyway) jumping to 1500 (from something like 200-250, which was indeed too low), you're going to see a lot of young guys with a lot of debt from flight school (where commercial loans are on the order of 12-18% interest) who will take any job just to pay the bills. They just don't get paid very well these days, and airline margins are tiny as it is.
I was just talking about that subject this morning, as it happens. The argument against fighting disease in Africa basically says that, when you spend hundreds of millions fighting diseases and starvation that kill children in Africa in countries without well-developed, democratic societies, what you get in 20-30 years is a large population of healthy young adults who are still in a country without a developed society, without even a semi-modern economy, and without much modern healthcare outside of what other countries donate. In other words, you have a population that is vastly larger than what the country can economically support, and you don't have jobs for them, so you get a lot of militant young guys whose pasttimes are either making lots of babies or causing problems.
Now, that's a gross oversimplification of the problem, and I'm actually not sold on it as a reason to say 'bah, let disease kill millions!' as that's a pretty cold stance to take. You'll sometimes hear opponents of this kind of charity point out that disease is Nature's way of controlling population, but you could justify quite a few scary things with that reasoning.
I do think that the 'feel good about yourself by donating to starving children' drive of the last 60-70 years is shortsighted in this respect, but of course it's much easier to feed even large numbers of starving people than it is to set up a modern government and economy in some of these African countries, assuming even that you have the right to try and do so (which is a big assumption).
In other words, not unlike Mr. Gates himself, the 'disease and starvation in Africa' subject is a complex one that has a lot more going on than the sound bytes you usually hear. I haven't reached a conclusion on Africa because most of the conversation about it goes like this:
Feels Good Guy: I just gave $1,000 to charity and saved the lives of 100 kids in Africa!
Skeptical Guy: What about their education? Their future health care? Do they have a chance at being self-sufficient later or will they simply need even more external support as they get older?
Feels Good Guy: Racist!
Anyway, that's what's (potentially) wrong with it. I tried to paint a pretty neutral picture because I really do want to hear more actual conversation on the subject rather than the knee-jerk stuff that's out there.
Ha, a personal note from an AC. Fantastic.
Umm, we are. Every time you buy a computer from a large vendor, it WILL have windows preinstalled. Sure, you could assemble your own or buy from a small, independent retailer that does this for you, but economies of scale will ensure that even with the "microsoft tax", the large vendor will be cheaper.
In other words, 'every time you MAKE THE DECISION to buy a computer with windows preinstalled, you're forced to buy windows.'
Yes. And I have a choice to buy elsewhere or build my own. As it happens, that's exactly what I do. Even the big manufacturers offer alternatives to Windows these days, though it's not really a big money-maker for them (not that you care about such trivial realities). My business buys some MS products that my business uses (like SQL Server and Windows Server) and very cheaply at that. Nobody forced us to do this and we could switch to an open-source alternative if we wanted to (and we have a few reasons why we might one day, but not yet). Nobody mugged us and nobody broke into our shop and forced us to do this.
MS is an easy target for people who like to sit around and yell about how you should stick it to the man while doing nothing productive to actually support open-source software themselves. MS is also a very legitimate target for people who DO actively support OSS for some, though not all of the reasons that you mentioned. It's a very large and complex company with a very large and complex history which is composed of a whole lot more than 'has been convicted of monopolistic practices.' Intel has been convicted of monopolistic practices, too. You want to get rid of them? Punish them both, sure, but destroy them? To what end?
Companies that large and that significant have tens of thousands of people who make decisions that affect everybody. Some of them are terrible and some of them are crooked and come right from the top. We can and do punish those people and the company as well, though not always perfectly. How many products does MS make? You want to get rid of every single one of them because they got convicted of bundling browsers and Windows pre-installation schemes? How many businesses and consumers that depend on MS (out of their choice!) would be screwed out of a livelihood because you wanted to be the Monopoly Avenger and Stick It to the Man? You know how cheap computers are these days, even with the MS tax? What problem exactly are you trying to solve?
Your argument and your 'personal note' are nothing more than juvenile anti-business rhetoric. MS is a huge and often blundering company that has made a lot of mis-steps, but they do a lot of things right as well.
Wow. What an angry, narrow-minded post. 'Insightful' indeed.
I have no more love for Microsoft than the next guy, but you act like we're all being forced to buy MS products and that every cent they've earned was all but stolen from our pockets, and that, if it weren't stolen from our pockets, we'd be giving all that money to charity ourselves. Yeah, right.
Gates believes that recognition will drive more people to charity than anonymity. As an un-involved businessman who gives a small piece of his small profit to charity every year, I share your preference for anonymous donations, because the cause (whatever it may be) is certainly more important than the donor. This isn't what Gates is arguing. He's saying that whatever harm comes from the recognition factor, at the end of the day, you'll have an order of magnitude more money coming in from people who want that recognition such that, if the cause is so important, funding it an extra order of magnitude is much more important than our anonymity principle. That's a tough case to argue, because vanity is definitely a big piece of philanthropy, and as much as I think stamping people's names on university buildings or theater/classroom seats is dumb, I'd rather have a theater or a classroom with some stranger's name on everything than not have it.
Gates' charity is not 'all about recognition,' either. He honestly believes that recognition is an important piece of the cycle; you're free to disagree, but as I imagine that neither you nor I have achievements that even come close to what his charity accomplishes in a single year, I think it's very easy for us to throw stones and paint him as a jerk.
As it happens, I actually don't completely support a big piece of what his charity does -- focusing on disease in Africa -- but it's foolish and simply wrong to suggest that Gates is just a successful crook rather than an accomplished individual who is free to spend the fruits of his labor as he pleases.
The difference is that conservatives are being hypocrites when they support this stuff while liberals are being consistent with a general liberal philosophy that 'government knows best.' Obviously there are a lot of liberal ideologies out there and a lot of conservative ones as well, but the generalized conservative viewpoint of 'government should stay out of our lives' doesn't translate well to stuff like this, and when conservatives try to do it, they typically get in trouble when shoe-horning something like that into an otherwise conservative platform. You see conservatives try and justify this stuff all the time, but it's typically the same populist arguments that liberals use, e.g. 'declining moral values of society,' and that kind of thing. It's no less hypocritical when conservatives try to block more emotionally-charged issues like abortion. The late George Carlin quotes Reagan's 'government should be off our back' and then makes a crack about 'but they can be in a woman's uterus' in pointing out this inconsistency.
I wouldn't say that conservatives do it 'most likely more' as far as free speech goes, as the big nanny states are the ones that get away with this the most today -- look no further than Australia. The US is probably more 'to the right' on free speech issues than a lot of the 'civilized world' in that you see stuff like this struck down again and again.
Oh, absolutely - I'm not recommending the Mustang to anyone just yet, but if you look at the 2011 Mustang GT versus the 2010, it's ALMOST a whole different car.
It's still a Mustang, though. In that class I'd probably look at Infiniti or the new Hyundai sports car, but the Mustang went from 'no way' to 'hey, look at that.'
The rear axle isn't so bad if so long as you're under 30 and don't need all your body parts.
How does that make sense? The conspiracy required for the type of scheme you're describing would mean that the Japanese, American, Korean, and European automakers would all have to be colluding to keep this stuff out of their vehicles. It's also why imports have been routing American cars for so many years -- they've had a lot more of this kind of stuff than American cars. Though one possible reason for that is that they have more money to throw around, since it costs a lot more to design and build a car in the US, thanks to the UAW.
This may finally be changing thanks to Ford, whose new Focus and Mustang are both noteworthy accomplishments in terms of features, performance, and safety, but I don't buy the argument that 'the government should've been in the car business all along and a Reagan/Republican/Auto company conspiracy is the only reason they weren't.'
There have been (and still are) a lot of government-run car companies over the years. You won't see many of the cars they produce today because they're typically totalitarian and/or socialist regimes that make them, and they're usually rubbish. The auto industry in the US (and in most of the industrialized world) is very heavily regulated, with a couple thousand dollars added to the cost of most cars to pay for all the stuff we're requiring the auto companies to do over the next few years. That's not a bad trade-off for a lot of people.
I bought my first real car in 2002, sold it in 2004 to move to NYC, and just bought a new car a couple months ago after leaving the city. It's amazing how much has changed just in that time. Up until very recently, I would never have thought of buying an American car (I never have) but hopefully that will change, though I suspect it'll be Ford and not GM driving that change.
Uh, you can stop using text messaging.
Doesn't cost me anything (extra) to send an email from my PDA, though I don't have an SMS plan and so that does cost me something.
Exactly who is it who ought to decide what should be free and what shouldn't?
I love when smartphone packages are singled out as evidence of free market villainy, since they're something to which you are apparently entitled. I guess it didn't cost the phone companies anything to build those cell towers, to navigate the byzantine bureaucracies to get permission to build the towers, and to pay for the software and hardware engineering and design for SMS interfaces? Or is that the 'literally nothing' you're talking about?
I'll grant that there are some problems with a boilerplate free market solution where phone companies are concerned (both wired and wireless) since the airwaves are considered to belong to everybody and someone has to be responsible for doling them out. The usual free market answer of 'more competition' only helps a little bit -- there are definitely cheaper alternatives than AT&T, remember; it's just that we all like our nice iPhones and are complaining about the provider to whom we knowingly married ourselves for so long as they have the exclusive rights to the iPhone.
I'm an AT&T iPhone customer and I jailbreak my phone so that I can use PDANet. The minute I can switch my iPhone to a provider who won't charge me to tether, I'm gone. In the meantime, the convenience of having a single device to house my portable movie and music collection as well as handle all my contacts, email, and phone calls is worth the nuisance of jailbreaking, particularly when AT&T ignores most everyone who tethers in this manner. It was my decision to buy the phone, my decision to sign up with AT&T, and my decision not to use SMS. I don't see how government can regulate a better scenario here without also damaging the kind of innovation you need for us to have iPhones in the first place.
I've heard the 'big states set standards for textbooks' line for years.
Is it -that- much more expensive for a smaller state to find a different textbook publisher? Is the selection of textbooks so very small, and the marginal cost for a smaller order so very large, that there's absolutely no free market solution to this problem?
The whole point of having states manage their own education is that California shouldn't care what Texas does or doesn't want to teach. Having a big inter-state brawl over what should be taught is exactly what the system is supposed to avoid.
There has got to be an opportunity for smaller publishers here.
A few people were talking about trying to find 'equivalent' PCs and mentioning things like the Dell Precision Mobile Workstation, which isn't really at all the same (they're huge). This is the nearest 'wannabe Macbook' that I found (and ordered):
HP Envy 15
It's definitely aimed squarely at the MBP, and while the build quality is not as good as Apple's, I have to admit that it's come a very long way since the last time I looked in on HP's notebooks. They're also doing better with service options - they offer in-home service now just like Dell does (used to be mail-in).
They routinely have $200, $300, or even (until quite recently) $450 off coupons, so I wouldn't advise buying one at full price. This is what I ended up with:
5.15 lbs @ 1.1" thick (more with the slice battery attached)
i5-540 CPU @ up to 3.06 GHz
4 GB DDR3-1066 RAM
320 GB Intel G2 SSD (2x 160 GB)
ATI 5830 GPU w/1GB VRAM
15.6" 1920x1080 BrightView Glossy display (matte available for $25 less)
Wireless-N + Bluetooth
6-cell Li-Ion battery + 9-cell 'thin-fit Slice' battery
Total: $1,849.99, after a $450 off coupon. Even without that, though, an equivalent-spec'd MBP is over $2,700, and that's with a significantly worse GPU. But that buys you the Apple logo and better historical reliability - HP is improving but Apple is certainly pretty awesome in that respect.
For me, though, they're not $900 more awesome.
So we all know that the Spaniards were probably the most brutal of all the Europeans tromping around the New World. That's understatement, too -- they made the English, French, and Dutch put together look like friendly, singing Disney animals. But that was 300+ years ago.
Can you please explain why, six+ generations later, this means that those of Spanish descent deserve to be overthrown as a pre-requisite for progress? Because it sounds like you're about to make a 'they weren't there first' argument.
There are still plenty of people in the US who drive stick. You can't rent a car with a manual transmission very easily but you can still buy one very easily (I've never owned anything else).
Bullshit:
http://www.taxfoundation.org/taxdata/show/22685.html
Texas is 39th, with 94 cents in Federal spending for every dollar they pay in taxes.
I've been living in New York since 1998, which is 42nd and has 79 cents on the dollar returned to us.
Oh noes! Market freedom! They must be evil!
You pay the same Federal taxes if you live in Texas as you do if you live in New York or New Jersey. You just pay fewer State taxes (particularly in NY, with one of the highest Sales tax rates and one of the highest income tax rates).
Even if you were right, wouldn't it be nice if some businesses could survive without the Federal teat? I have zero Federal contracts and don't want any, so 'government services' don't really affect me beyond the basics, most of which the State provides.
Well, a bit off-topic, but yes, I agree, which is why my business is relocating from NYC, where we pay:
- one of the highest state + city income tax rates in the nation
- 4% unincorporated business tax
- Metropolitan Commuter transportation mobility tax (something they invented this year to fund the MTA)
To Austin, TX, where we'll pay:
- No state income tax (corporate or personal)
- No UBT
- No spend-happy gov't
- 80% national avg cost of living rather than NYC (don't even want to know what percentage that is)
I'm not a tea party guy or anything but whenever I talk about this stuff, people look at me like I'm crazy. More money for my business means I can have more employees and charge my clients less. Everybody always assumes that the first thing we do when taxes are lower is pocket the difference. Yeah, right.
It's extremely difficult to tax non-sale services, for the reasons I mentioned. Very few states even try. Reason being that it's not a 'sale' if you have a professional perform a service for you, which is usually what custom software is.
What you're talking about is closer to a VAT.
Sales tax doesn't usually apply to custom software, where 'custom software' means you can't just buy it on a shelf or download it. My company sells custom software that runs youth sports leagues.
We pay income tax on all our revenue, of course, but we don't have to collect sales tax so long as it's a 'service' -- meaning no 'click here to download our software.' So custom software is not currently taxed in most states.
Washington state also doesn't have an income tax at all.
Depending on your current state and existing tax burden, I could see paying a fair tax for something like this, but not ten percent. Custom software is already pretty expensive (possibly one of the reasons it's not currently taxed) and because it doesn't have fixed price, it's tough to track for tax purposes -- I could say 'well, our software costs a hundred bucks, but my consulting fees to set it up and maintain it for you are $10,000 a year' since that's a professional fee/service. Sort of how attorneys work - you're paying for their expertise, not really for a 'product.'
Like many things with modern politics, it's simply a matter of degree.
Does the market exist with unique attributes making it a perfect storm of easily abused, vital to the public good, and immune to normal market solutions (i.e. competition)? Sure. There are absolutely areas of the economy where laissez-faire capitalism doesn't work - the problem is that we've given the govenrments of the world near carte-blanche with respect to identifying and policing these. Make a few political enemies? Better hope you're not suddenly 'anti-competitive!'
Your flour scenario is a perfect example. You've grossly exaggerated what is nonetheless a very real problem in need of solving but you've applied it to a case that would be very easily solved by the market. It didn't seem to occur to you that the scenario you described is not only perfectly normal, but desirable - bad behaviors in any normal market won't last long because of competition. Buying something at $x and re-selling it at $y isn't anti-competitive.
The threshold for what is anti-competitive and the markets to which that threshold should be applied is a question that deserves a lot of scrutiny and consideration -- and it hasn't got much of either, because just about everyone is confident that Big Brother is going to take care of it all for them, with very little mind to the fact that government is just as inherently corrupt as business, only without the constraints and self-correcting measures the market has.
No serious capitalist pretends that people aren't (on the whole) greedy bastards who will do anything they feel they can get away with if it gains them money or power. But the serious capitalist believes that the market will restrain most (but not all) bad behavior for the same reason that I don't rip people off when I'm running my small business, even though it would be quite easy to get away with it -- when the consumer has choices, some combination of quality, price, and reputation had better make them settle on me and not my competitor, or else I go out of business and become a wage drone. Probably for the competition.
My line of work (hosted application development) is almost completely unregulated and I certainly hope it stays that way. My fiancee is in medicine and you couldn't pay me enough to put up with what doctors have to deal with these days.
I also don't support ticket scalping. I never buy from scalpers because I think they're mostly sleazy, even if they are a natural market phenomenon. I don't like Ticketmaster either, and will try to buy tickets from some of Ticketmaster's smaller competition whenever I can. My point is that I understand ticket scalping and I know that the government can't do much about it -- and in cases where the government tries, they end up hurting the legit people as well.
You can't regulate away human nature. You can and should try to make it transparent whenever possible, but for so long as we have luxuries like concerts available (and they are luxuries) then there will be people willing to pay a premium for access and there will be a market to serve them. Empowering a busybody bureaucrat to try and pretend that's not the case is hardly ever the answer.
>> understand the illegality yet?
No.
>> , and so some people like you can't appreciate their evil up front.
Good thing we have you around to protect us from ourselves!
This is mickey mouse Econ 101 stuff. The only way your scenario ends in 'people starve' is if there is only one supplier of flour (i.e. flour is controlled by a monopoly). Even libertarians (many of us, anyway) agree that monopolies have to be treated a little differently, at least in cases where the nebulous 'public good' is involved -- typically infrastructure or telecom where you have private companies gaining access to both public and private land and need some oversight.
This is certainly not the case with your flour example, though let's give you a pass on the analogy since someone else can make more-or-less identical flour, which is tough to do with a Springsteen concert.
There are a variety of methods for ticket sellers to combat scalping, and a variety of reasons (which vary by state and country) which often restrict a vendor from selling the same product at two different prices based on the buyer. For example, ticketmaster can charge me $100 for an orchestra seat and $60 for a balcony seat, but (AFIAK) they can't charge me $100 for an orchestra seat but then make my buddy pay $140 for another orchestra seat at the same time; they can raise all their prices or have 'early bird discounts' but those things affect all transactions. They can only sub-divide on a limited scale, e.g. 'American express discount' or other things which apply to fairly large groups but not individuals. So you have a certain degree of rigidity that is being forced on the market, since there are clearly some people who would pay $200 for an orchestra seat, but pricing all their orchestra seats at $200 would never fly -- so they sell them to scalpers who can turn around and sell them at whatever price they want through a variety of outlets. Those prices can change every day (we'd never put up with Ticketmaster doing that) because there are effectively multiple small markets as opposed to a single larger one.
As for whether or not all this should be legal, the practical reality is that it's very tough to eradicate when you have a static, tiered market that actually wants to behave like a funnel. You'd pretty much have to mandate that tickets be linked to the actual person attending at the time of purchase, which means no resales, no gifts, no last-minute 'oh crap i can't go who wants to buy my ticket?' A simple, free-market solution would be to give somebody a 'lock-in' ticket price in which they could voluntarily tie the ticket to themselves (non-transferable) and get a lower price - that would cut into the scalping market quite a lot. I'd guess that it isn't legal to do as the ability to re-sell something that you've bought is usually quite well protected, but that's a question for the law and not a free market criticism.
It seems like there are a zillion comments relating to health insurance dogma or 'Go to Canada' or 'go to the UK.' I won't get into how health care SHOULD work (beyond one point that I consider to be quite simple) but will try to answer your question, since I'm in the same boat.
I am in business for myself as a software guy. One day soon we might have an employee or two, but even then our situation won't change too much.
There is really only one thing you can do: go to eHealthinsurance.com, plug in your info and your zip code, and hope your zip code is a good one. Right now I have the misfortune of living in New York State. If I lived in PA, DE, or CT then my insurance would cost anywhere between 1/4 and 1/2 of what I pay now (north of $300 and I'm healthy and young), but New York has one of the most highly regulated insurance markets in the country, either up there with or right behind California. New Jersey is also terrible.
Depending on your income and your situation, there can be benefits to living in a heavily regulated insurance market, but for the most part, if you run a small business or otherwise are a contractor rather than an employee, you're out of luck when it comes to affordable insurance if you are in a state like NY that is very hostile to the insurance industry.
New York screws you two ways because not only are all your choices expensive, but there aren't many choices to begin wtih. What I really wanted was a health savings plan where I could put X amount away (ideally pre-tax, but whatever) and spend it on routine care, and then have insurance for catastrophic stuff. I don't mind paying out of pocket for small things because small things are going to be less than (or, at worst, as much as) my $300 monthly premium anyway - I've had my policy now for three years and have probably made one or two claims on it for a couple hundred bucks worth of stuff, but I've been lucky and haven't needed anything worse. There are plenty of states out there that allow or even encourage this. But in heavily regulated NY and CA, the insurance market needs my buy-in not to balance out my own claims down the line, but because politicians insist on things like demanding that insurers keep on unemployed/COBRA customers are reduced premiums or even no premiums for a set amount of time, and so I end up paying inflated rates.
So if you're lucky, you're in a state that does a better job than NY or CA or NJ in terms of looking out for you (since it's not like total deregulation is really ideal either) but isn't driving out the insurance companies and therefore limiting competition.
WSJ had a good piece about this a few weeks back (subscription required):
Wall Street Journal Wellpoint CEO interview
My two cents about the health care debate going on in other comments is just this: if I could buy insurance from any state, almost all my problems with health care would go away. I encourage you to go to eHealthinsurance and just plug in different zip codes for your neighboring states. Try Connecticut (a pretty good state for health insurance, relatively speaking) and then New York. Then PA or DE. Or Texas. The discrepancies are amazing.
We have 100Mbps here in New York City (via Cablevision) - at least the parts of us lucky to have cablevision rather than Time Warner. It's $100/mo and they offer 5 static IPs as well for a bit more.
I didn't say he was a self-made man. I said he knows what it is to work very hard.
I've known trust-fund babies my entire life and they are usually completely irresponsible with no idea of what a dollar means. That's not true of Steve. I'm perfectly willing to condemn someone who is an idiot when it comes to money, and that is certainly quite true of most people who inherit a lot of money -- that is probably one of the reasons that Steve's kids aren't going to inherit much (or anything - I didn't ask for details when it was explained to me). I'm not willing to condemn someone solely because he inherited a lot of money, particularly when anyone who does inherit a large sum of money gives most of it to the Great Wealth Redistribution System in the Sky anyway.
I'll take a hard-working person who comes from money and has to overcome prejudices from ignorant populists like you any day of the way over ... well, an ignorant populist. The kernel of truth in what you're saying is certainly a very valid, and very old observation -- that most people who 'come from money' end up as irresponsible idiots. Maybe we ought to think well of the people who are able to overcome that rather than just judging people solely because they've been successful -- which, whatever Forbes himself may have inherited, he certainly is. Plenty of people inherit millions. Most of them will never do half as much with their lives as Forbes has.