You have a good point here about Texas. As a state, TX and FL stand to lose the most from privatized space flight because of their large aerospace industries. Although Jeff Bezos does have Blue Origin based in TX, it probably won't bring nearly as many jobs as the Johnson space center.
NASA has done amazing things and should continue to do so. My hope is that delegating the easy stuff (low earth orbit) to the private sector will save enough money to fund next level stuff like the amazing James Webb telescope, more Mars missions, etc.
The paint analogy just doesn't hold water. You might be able to paint a house, but can you solve multi-dimensional nonlinear differential equations? I certainly can't. I'd have to hire someone to do so. The reason that private enterprise tends to be cheaper is because private sector workers are less unionized (7%) than public sector workers (36%). In this situation, you don't know how to paint your house. The question is whether you hire the unionized, bonded, insured worker or whether you hire the illegal alien.
Another failure of your metaphor is the issue of equipment. Suppose you don't have any brushes or ladder or cute little painter's cap. You have to buy those too.
And finally, let's talk about specialization. Suppose it takes me 2 hours to clean my house. If I make $100 an hour writing software, why the hell would I waste $200 cleaning my house when I can hire a maid for $50?
Having studied the long distance industry as a management consultant in the 90's, I've seen perhaps half a dozen graphs that chart the precipitous drop in the cost of long distance calls from the breakup of AT&T through 1996. It dropped from something like $1 per minute in 1984 to a $.05 per minute in 1996. Now it's wrapped into an all-you-can eat sort of plan so it's hard to compare. I believe in that case that privatization has worked, although re-consolidation presents a threat.
Another excellent example of privatization here in Los Angeles: Going to the Department of Motor Vehicles versus visiting a Triple A office. The DMV has enormous lines, and irritable, unfriendly workers. It's a nightmare. You can choose instead to get your car registered at a Triple A office in hollywood. It costs a little more, but it's fast, convenient, and the employees are super nice.
There are times where privatization is in appropriate (the Army, for instance) but there are times when it makes sense. Given that NASA is such a political football sometimes, I quite like the idea of privatizing it so that it isn't so much subject to the whims of politics. Also, I believe the competition will be more extensive than one or two providers. The one or two providers is the current situation: NASA outsources to Lockheed, Boeing, Russia, and possibly others for their parts and expertise. With the addition of Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, and SpaceX, things should get a lot more interesting.
I agree that SpaceX will be much cheaper than the shuttle -- especially when Blue Origin starts to offer competition, but this launch used the Dragon, not the Falcon, didn't it?. I have this vague recollection that Dragon is more capable than Falcon.
Good points all around. I suspect that Netflix will do just fine and continue to gain subscribers and revenue. I just took another look and didn't see anything I'm dying to watch, but a lot of movies would be good for killing time. I suppose that might be worth $8. As for the DVDs, I would much prefer to just pay $3 to watch something I really want to watch when I want to watch it. High plains drifter comes to mind. They have that on Amazon for $3: http://www.amazon.com/High-Plains-Drifter/dp/B000IDCJK8/ref=sr_1_1?s=instant-video&ie=UTF8&qid=1310753289&sr=1-1
Thanks for the informative post -- although that.02 per GB number is shocking. TW Cable charges me $51/mo for 10Mbps cable. I literally cannot switch because no one else offers anything above 1.5Mbps.
RE #1: Yes I suppose there are a couple of decent movies left. I recently watched Gangs of New York (meh) and I've seen that Stripes is available as well as a personal favorite: Zardoz. What's maddening is all of the garbage. Yes I know Zardoz is garbage but it's *my* kind of garbage.
RE #2: It's these sorts of failures that make me think Netflix is doomed.
RE #3: This is kind of interesting actually. Perhaps the 'garbage' Netflix is showing me is really the horror of the fact that my girlfriend and I share very little common ground movie-wise. This is, of course, the million-dollar recommendation engine, isn't it?
RE #4: Yes I've reported them but a form letter doesn't help me at all. They mail the new disk out the day they receive your old disk anyway. That I've lost about a week because I couldn't watch the movie is what sucks. They could at least consider sending two disks to make up for the lost cycle. I complained about the poor streaming on one particular movie and didn't get any response at all. I expect this is likely what happens when you have such rapid subscriber growth.
RE #5: Note that you're comparing burgers with burgers. Netflix could easily offer on-demand rentals if they wanted (and provided the studios would permit them). There's no technical reason preventing them from doing so. In fact, were they to do so then they could probably avoid such problems as Sony pulling their content due to a view cap because both Netflix and Sony would both get paid per viewing. I suspect this would also result in a much broader catalog of movies viewable on-line. In fact, if they could offer on-demand access to *good* movies via streaming and charge extra for it, they could probably squeeze the extra $6 out of me *quite* easily. That they choose not to--or that some fucked up business relationship prevents it--is what boggles my mind. I smell fail here.
This is probably true. I read something here on/. the other day about how federal stimulus money was spent to bring broadband connectivity to rural Idaho at a cost of about $350,000 per household which is about 7 times the income of the family in it and nearly twice the cost of the home. We are geographically dispersed and suffer from exceedingly poor judgement.
Yeah something is rotten about this. Why can't it just be as simple as: 1) Whatever you want, it's in there. 2) If you want to rent it, it has a price which you can take or leave 3) It doesn't matter whose network it's on.
I would obviously pay more for a decent movie. What I hate is how movies appear and disappear and the movies I really want to watch are nearly impossible to find online.
The problem is their streaming offering SUCKS for the most part. If you want a decent movie, you have to put it in your DVD queue. Can anyone explain whey they don't have on-demand video rentals?
The recent investor interest in Hulu suggests that profitability is imminent, if not already happening. Google's problem is that they have failed to make nice with the content studios. On the contrary, content providers were furious about YouTube and likely still are. Content providers are a pretty tightly-knit little group and have been loath to do business with Google. I wouldn't be surprised if they have put google on some kind of secret blacklist. Personally, I think the content providers are shooting themselves in the foot. Google has the bandwidth, the expertise, and the ability to funnel the entire world to their content and put ads in it or charge money for it.
Studios facing lost revenues somehow makes me happy. That they are forcing prices up to make up the shortfall doesn't necessarily seem like the right approach. I think cutting the fat out of their operations is probably smarter unless they want to end up like the music industry (which had it's greatest sales in 1999 before a 10-year decline started). Personally, I would start by scaling back investment in traditional distribution like DVDs and Bluray and start investing in things like Hulu. Hulu's about to sell for an enormous profit while Blockbuster just went bankrupt. The longer they take to provide legal alternatives to P2P piracy, the sooner they can expect massive revenue losses and the decimation of their industry.
As a side note, I would start investing less in Michael Bay and Martin Campbell and a lot more in Peter Jackson and the Coen brothers.
Mod parent up. This is definitely about the content providers wanting more money. The reason the Sony movies were removed is because they had hit a contractual cap and Netflix was unable to offer them anymore until a renegotiation followed. At the renegotiation, the content providers are all too aware of the soaring Netflix profits and stock price and are demanding more money. My actor friend in Hollywood (an armchair industry analyst) has been moaning for months about how the studios let Netflix get away with the content too cheaply.
I'll be canceling my account too for a variety of reasons: 1) The streaming selection has been awful lately. Like really awful. 2) The site redesign really sucks. You have to hover over a movie to see the rating. 3) The recommendations for me are ghastly. Maybe it's because my girlfriend has been watching too many movies. 4) I've received scratched DVDs and had streaming movies drop repeatedly (despite my 10Mbps connection). I have yet to receive any compensation or even an apology for these service failures. 5) No video rental on demand? WTF?? 6) Yes, the price increase.
I'll base the plot here on what I've seen in other movies like Independence Day and War of the Worlds (the Tom Cruise version).
Aliens attack earth to steal our water on account of its amazingly high specific heat capacity which they need for cooling their interstellar space drives. Despite the ability to travel interstellar space easily, the aliens somehow failed to read Sun Tzu's "the Art of War" and, assembling in a highly primitive phalanx formation reminiscent of the techniques of Ancient Romans, they are slaughtered wholesale by Global Hawks and F-22/F-35's manned by a people's army of inspiring ethnic diversity.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep I think you are right. There are numerous versions of the Falcon (1, 9, Heavy). I think an accurate cost comparison will be difficult.
You have a good point here about Texas. As a state, TX and FL stand to lose the most from privatized space flight because of their large aerospace industries. Although Jeff Bezos does have Blue Origin based in TX, it probably won't bring nearly as many jobs as the Johnson space center.
NASA has done amazing things and should continue to do so. My hope is that delegating the easy stuff (low earth orbit) to the private sector will save enough money to fund next level stuff like the amazing James Webb telescope, more Mars missions, etc.
The paint analogy just doesn't hold water. You might be able to paint a house, but can you solve multi-dimensional nonlinear differential equations? I certainly can't. I'd have to hire someone to do so. The reason that private enterprise tends to be cheaper is because private sector workers are less unionized (7%) than public sector workers (36%). In this situation, you don't know how to paint your house. The question is whether you hire the unionized, bonded, insured worker or whether you hire the illegal alien.
Another failure of your metaphor is the issue of equipment. Suppose you don't have any brushes or ladder or cute little painter's cap. You have to buy those too.
And finally, let's talk about specialization. Suppose it takes me 2 hours to clean my house. If I make $100 an hour writing software, why the hell would I waste $200 cleaning my house when I can hire a maid for $50?
Our gov't subsidizes telcoms? Sources please!
Having studied the long distance industry as a management consultant in the 90's, I've seen perhaps half a dozen graphs that chart the precipitous drop in the cost of long distance calls from the breakup of AT&T through 1996. It dropped from something like $1 per minute in 1984 to a $.05 per minute in 1996. Now it's wrapped into an all-you-can eat sort of plan so it's hard to compare. I believe in that case that privatization has worked, although re-consolidation presents a threat.
Another excellent example of privatization here in Los Angeles: Going to the Department of Motor Vehicles versus visiting a Triple A office. The DMV has enormous lines, and irritable, unfriendly workers. It's a nightmare. You can choose instead to get your car registered at a Triple A office in hollywood. It costs a little more, but it's fast, convenient, and the employees are super nice.
There are times where privatization is in appropriate (the Army, for instance) but there are times when it makes sense. Given that NASA is such a political football sometimes, I quite like the idea of privatizing it so that it isn't so much subject to the whims of politics. Also, I believe the competition will be more extensive than one or two providers. The one or two providers is the current situation: NASA outsources to Lockheed, Boeing, Russia, and possibly others for their parts and expertise. With the addition of Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, and SpaceX, things should get a lot more interesting.
I agree that SpaceX will be much cheaper than the shuttle -- especially when Blue Origin starts to offer competition, but this launch used the Dragon, not the Falcon, didn't it?. I have this vague recollection that Dragon is more capable than Falcon.
Wait...so DARPA bought KNOPPIX?
That there's some seeeeerious cash. Obviously, it's time to form us up a posse and find these mofos. Who's in boys (and girls)??!!
Good points all around. I suspect that Netflix will do just fine and continue to gain subscribers and revenue. I just took another look and didn't see anything I'm dying to watch, but a lot of movies would be good for killing time. I suppose that might be worth $8. As for the DVDs, I would much prefer to just pay $3 to watch something I really want to watch when I want to watch it. High plains drifter comes to mind. They have that on Amazon for $3:
http://www.amazon.com/High-Plains-Drifter/dp/B000IDCJK8/ref=sr_1_1?s=instant-video&ie=UTF8&qid=1310753289&sr=1-1
Mod parent up!
I meant the ability to pick a movie online, pay a fee online, and watch the movie online.
Thanks for the informative post -- although that .02 per GB number is shocking. TW Cable charges me $51/mo for 10Mbps cable. I literally cannot switch because no one else offers anything above 1.5Mbps.
RE #1: Yes I suppose there are a couple of decent movies left. I recently watched Gangs of New York (meh) and I've seen that Stripes is available as well as a personal favorite: Zardoz. What's maddening is all of the garbage. Yes I know Zardoz is garbage but it's *my* kind of garbage.
RE #2: It's these sorts of failures that make me think Netflix is doomed.
RE #3: This is kind of interesting actually. Perhaps the 'garbage' Netflix is showing me is really the horror of the fact that my girlfriend and I share very little common ground movie-wise. This is, of course, the million-dollar recommendation engine, isn't it?
RE #4: Yes I've reported them but a form letter doesn't help me at all. They mail the new disk out the day they receive your old disk anyway. That I've lost about a week because I couldn't watch the movie is what sucks. They could at least consider sending two disks to make up for the lost cycle. I complained about the poor streaming on one particular movie and didn't get any response at all. I expect this is likely what happens when you have such rapid subscriber growth.
RE #5: Note that you're comparing burgers with burgers. Netflix could easily offer on-demand rentals if they wanted (and provided the studios would permit them). There's no technical reason preventing them from doing so. In fact, were they to do so then they could probably avoid such problems as Sony pulling their content due to a view cap because both Netflix and Sony would both get paid per viewing. I suspect this would also result in a much broader catalog of movies viewable on-line. In fact, if they could offer on-demand access to *good* movies via streaming and charge extra for it, they could probably squeeze the extra $6 out of me *quite* easily. That they choose not to--or that some fucked up business relationship prevents it--is what boggles my mind. I smell fail here.
This is probably true. I read something here on /. the other day about how federal stimulus money was spent to bring broadband connectivity to rural Idaho at a cost of about $350,000 per household which is about 7 times the income of the family in it and nearly twice the cost of the home. We are geographically dispersed and suffer from exceedingly poor judgement.
Yeah something is rotten about this. Why can't it just be as simple as:
1) Whatever you want, it's in there.
2) If you want to rent it, it has a price which you can take or leave
3) It doesn't matter whose network it's on.
I would obviously pay more for a decent movie. What I hate is how movies appear and disappear and the movies I really want to watch are nearly impossible to find online.
In the United States, prices have not "decreased dramatically" for consumer broadband. In fact, they have remained largely stable with a mild increase.
http://www.techpolicyinstitute.org/news/show/23252.html
See figure 6 in the linked document which shows that the 25Mbps to 100Mbps plans have *increased* 25% from 2007 to 2009.
The problem is their streaming offering SUCKS for the most part. If you want a decent movie, you have to put it in your DVD queue. Can anyone explain whey they don't have on-demand video rentals?
The recent investor interest in Hulu suggests that profitability is imminent, if not already happening. Google's problem is that they have failed to make nice with the content studios. On the contrary, content providers were furious about YouTube and likely still are. Content providers are a pretty tightly-knit little group and have been loath to do business with Google. I wouldn't be surprised if they have put google on some kind of secret blacklist. Personally, I think the content providers are shooting themselves in the foot. Google has the bandwidth, the expertise, and the ability to funnel the entire world to their content and put ads in it or charge money for it.
Studios facing lost revenues somehow makes me happy. That they are forcing prices up to make up the shortfall doesn't necessarily seem like the right approach. I think cutting the fat out of their operations is probably smarter unless they want to end up like the music industry (which had it's greatest sales in 1999 before a 10-year decline started). Personally, I would start by scaling back investment in traditional distribution like DVDs and Bluray and start investing in things like Hulu. Hulu's about to sell for an enormous profit while Blockbuster just went bankrupt. The longer they take to provide legal alternatives to P2P piracy, the sooner they can expect massive revenue losses and the decimation of their industry.
As a side note, I would start investing less in Michael Bay and Martin Campbell and a lot more in Peter Jackson and the Coen brothers.
My cost of bandwidth has increased 20% in the past 3 years for the same goddamn connection. What fantasy world do you live in?
Mod parent up. This is definitely about the content providers wanting more money. The reason the Sony movies were removed is because they had hit a contractual cap and Netflix was unable to offer them anymore until a renegotiation followed. At the renegotiation, the content providers are all too aware of the soaring Netflix profits and stock price and are demanding more money. My actor friend in Hollywood (an armchair industry analyst) has been moaning for months about how the studios let Netflix get away with the content too cheaply.
I'll be canceling my account too for a variety of reasons:
1) The streaming selection has been awful lately. Like really awful.
2) The site redesign really sucks. You have to hover over a movie to see the rating.
3) The recommendations for me are ghastly. Maybe it's because my girlfriend has been watching too many movies.
4) I've received scratched DVDs and had streaming movies drop repeatedly (despite my 10Mbps connection). I have yet to receive any compensation or even an apology for these service failures.
5) No video rental on demand? WTF??
6) Yes, the price increase.
Mod parent up.
Eastern culture, my friend. Eastern culture. Or at least the Western culture translation of it.
I'll base the plot here on what I've seen in other movies like Independence Day and War of the Worlds (the Tom Cruise version).
Aliens attack earth to steal our water on account of its amazingly high specific heat capacity which they need for cooling their interstellar space drives. Despite the ability to travel interstellar space easily, the aliens somehow failed to read Sun Tzu's "the Art of War" and, assembling in a highly primitive phalanx formation reminiscent of the techniques of Ancient Romans, they are slaughtered wholesale by Global Hawks and F-22/F-35's manned by a people's army of inspiring ethnic diversity.
I was just joking, but I appreciate how sincere and informative your comment is!