Steam has stopped selling a variety of games over the years, but they don't take them away from those who already bought them. OTOH, I have several games I like that I can't play due to the non-Steam DRM on them somehow going bad. GOG is always preferable, when they actually have a game, for just that reason.
Not really. You don't found a pharma startup unless you've got a promising candidate already.
Pharma startups spend millions to test millions of candidates. When they find one that looks useful, they do each testing round to prove it out. For the publicly traded ones, you can see the stock price move 10x each time they pass one of those gates. Once they get FDA approval, or sometimes one gate before that, they get bought.
"Basic discovery" is very far removed from product. It's the first link in a very long chain. Of course, you need that first link, or you have nothing, but it's not the universities trying millions of minor variations on an idea, risking millions of dollars on the hope it leads somewhere.
In the long run, we just up the number of people we train to be medicine researchers as and when needed.
Sure, a central planning committee can form a Five Year Plan for the number of pharma researchers needed, and we can just tell people what degree they're going to get and force them to work in the field. I can see no flaw in this plan. It will totally motivate people better than pharma startup culture, and the mere monetary rewards for success.
Most drug discovery is done by academic, publicly funded researchers, who get paid fairly poorly considering their education, and the hazards of the field.
Maybe last century? Modern pharma research happens in pharma startups, which get bought by big companies if they succeed. It's very similar to the tech startup model. The big companies invent little, they just brand, but their money fuels the startup industry where the actual discovery happens.
Sure, the big companies make the profits from consumer sales, but the pharma startups make their profits from selling the company (plus the VCs and angels, just like tech startups). You need profits flowing through that pipe to fund the actual research.
We just need to figure out what to do about drugs with low sales volume - the per-pill costs have to be high, to fund the fixed cost of expensive research, and history shows government subsidies just mean higher prices. Maybe a shorter monopoly period? I'm fine with the rich paying whatever high price for a handful of years before a drug goes mainstream.
Corporate taxes are just passed on to the consumer. If he can get away with increasing prices by 4x, he can get away with keeping the same profits after taxes at an even higher price.
Corporate taxes are a feel-good measure that don't accomplish much (beyond incentivizing companies like Apple not to spend their profits in the US).
OTOH, if the government hadn't granted him a monopoly in the first place, he wouldn't be harming anyone by his desire for profit. Maybe that's where you should direct your ire.
The British Empire did a solid job of protecting the rights of citizens. Subjects, not so much. Be wary of any governmental body that acts as if you were a subject, not a citizen.
News companies came too late to the web ads game, and are very far behind the curve. Online advertising is very high tech these days, and there's little money to be made in untargeted ads. I do think there's room for local news running local ads on the web, as "local" is still a valuable form of targeted advertising.
Facebook and Google are great at selling ads, but seemingly have no interest in hiring reporters, despite a lot of people getting their news there. That's ot a sustainable situation, but it's had to guess how it will play out.
There certainly seem to be a lot of online personalities who comment on the news, an make a living from ads or crowdfunding. You'd think reporters could do the same.
The establishment and the populists are on opposite sides, you know? The megacorps and other big money donors never mat an immigrant they didn't like - anything to increase labor supply and bring down wages - and free global trade benefits the largest players,
"Ice age" is an odd term - if there is ice year-round at the poles, it's an ice age. We're in the Quaternary Ice Age, as far as we know, have been for a couple hundred million years. Had the historical pattern continued, glaciation would have returned 10,000 years ago. It's not obvious why it didn't beyond "the sun" (since the 100k yr glaciation cycle is a solar cycle). Perhaps the Quaternary Ice Age actually ended then.
In any case, the failure to return to glaciers 10k yrs ago allowed human civilization to arise, so it's not entirely a coincidence we find ourselves in an anomaly.
If human CO2 emission is piling on top of a transition from ice age to "warm Earth" it will be extra exciting, and the ice caps will melt regardless of what we do.
The EU law doesn't seem to make allowance for fair use, which is a lot of content on YouTube. But more fundamentally, memes and other remixing of copyrighted work for non-commercial use should be seen as fair use, for the same reason parody is fair use.
Subscription fees don't even cover the cost of ink for newspapers. Newspapers are paid for by advertisers, just like social media. Subscription fees exist to give credibility to publishers' claims about subscriber count.
We spend about the same on Medicaid as we do on Medicare (excluding prescription drug benefit), but health care for the elderly is much more expensive, and Medicare covers almost all US elderly.
I don't think it's very contentious that people tend to move to "disability" when unemployment runs out, and they don't have other means of support. Heck, some people legitimately become disabled due to the psychological stresses of not living up to their need to carry their own weight - there's some research connecting that to the oxy epidemic.
I was surprised the cost is as high as that, but when you look at the labor participation rate, it does answer the original question - there's enough money there to support several percent of the population.
Something/someone must be supporting these people.
Medicaid. Disability has become "extended unemployment" in America. That's why we're spending almost $600 billion on it, about the same as the defense budget and double what we spend on "welfare".
You appear to claim that building, testing, and distributing for Google Chrome, Safari, Edge, and Firefox is no less costly than building, testing, and distributing a native application in Windows, macOS, X11/Linux, iOS, and Android editions.
I was talking about the pre-Chome days of poor standards adherence.
Sure, if you're a one-man crew, those licensing costs suck. But if you're an actual software shop, the cut the stores take dominates, and that's the argument to make these days. It's only getting easier to develop native applications cross-platform, and cross platform dev costs keep shinking (it's very close to "just use Xamarin" for non-games). Cross-platform testing costs will always remain, though, regardless of approach.
Obviously, for games the cheap approach is Unity if you're small, and Lumberyard if you're big, and the tech problems for going cross platform are small compared to the problems of marketing and user expectation being do different between platforms.
Web developers developed for "five different platforms" for most of the web's history, you know. Cross-platform testing is always a bigger cost than development, and you have to do that regardless. One way or another, you end up using libraries or a framework that abstracts away platform differences.
It would be nice if Xamarin would extend its tools to Mac and Ubuntu, though. They do a good job with Windows/Android/iThing.
Tesla has solved the biggest problems most companies have: people really want to buy its products, and he can sell them at a profit. That's a great place for any company to be.
Tesla really struggled to ramp up production to meet demand, mostly due to arrogance. They didn't start by hiring the best and brightest from other car companies that were good at automated manufacturing, but instead had a Silly Valley startup mentality of "we're smarter, so it's better if we invent everything from scratch" (of course, successful startups rarely think that way). Didn't work out so well.
But now they're making cars at a respectable rate, and demand is still quite high. No reason not to flip to cashflow positive in a few quarters.
So, the company will be making money, but the stock has "bigger than Ford" priced in already, which is a very different question.
My problem is that buying a house in any major western city has become a giant leveraged speculative investment
I agree. That's why I rented until I had saved enough to pay cash for a house. Not a leveraged speculative investment now. If house prices double because of some BS, I'll sell and move somewhere cheap. If they fall, I still have the same house to live in, can't be underwater (even literally: FFS people, check flood maps before you buy a house).
1). This has never happened. In places where rents are increasing, the developers build high-end apartments and condos.
It happens every time the property market crashes. AT the height of the early-2000s condo bubble, there were 400000 unoccupied condos in FL, priced stupidly high. The the bubble popped, and you could get one for a song.
Slashdot Mirror
STEAM is next!
Steam has stopped selling a variety of games over the years, but they don't take them away from those who already bought them. OTOH, I have several games I like that I can't play due to the non-Steam DRM on them somehow going bad. GOG is always preferable, when they actually have a game, for just that reason.
Not really. You don't found a pharma startup unless you've got a promising candidate already.
Pharma startups spend millions to test millions of candidates. When they find one that looks useful, they do each testing round to prove it out. For the publicly traded ones, you can see the stock price move 10x each time they pass one of those gates. Once they get FDA approval, or sometimes one gate before that, they get bought.
"Basic discovery" is very far removed from product. It's the first link in a very long chain. Of course, you need that first link, or you have nothing, but it's not the universities trying millions of minor variations on an idea, risking millions of dollars on the hope it leads somewhere.
In the long run, we just up the number of people we train to be medicine researchers as and when needed.
Sure, a central planning committee can form a Five Year Plan for the number of pharma researchers needed, and we can just tell people what degree they're going to get and force them to work in the field. I can see no flaw in this plan. It will totally motivate people better than pharma startup culture, and the mere monetary rewards for success.
Most drug discovery is done by academic, publicly funded researchers, who get paid fairly poorly considering their education, and the hazards of the field.
Maybe last century? Modern pharma research happens in pharma startups, which get bought by big companies if they succeed. It's very similar to the tech startup model. The big companies invent little, they just brand, but their money fuels the startup industry where the actual discovery happens.
Sure, the big companies make the profits from consumer sales, but the pharma startups make their profits from selling the company (plus the VCs and angels, just like tech startups). You need profits flowing through that pipe to fund the actual research.
We just need to figure out what to do about drugs with low sales volume - the per-pill costs have to be high, to fund the fixed cost of expensive research, and history shows government subsidies just mean higher prices. Maybe a shorter monopoly period? I'm fine with the rich paying whatever high price for a handful of years before a drug goes mainstream.
Corporate taxes are just passed on to the consumer. If he can get away with increasing prices by 4x, he can get away with keeping the same profits after taxes at an even higher price.
Corporate taxes are a feel-good measure that don't accomplish much (beyond incentivizing companies like Apple not to spend their profits in the US).
OTOH, if the government hadn't granted him a monopoly in the first place, he wouldn't be harming anyone by his desire for profit. Maybe that's where you should direct your ire.
The British Empire did a solid job of protecting the rights of citizens. Subjects, not so much. Be wary of any governmental body that acts as if you were a subject, not a citizen.
News companies came too late to the web ads game, and are very far behind the curve. Online advertising is very high tech these days, and there's little money to be made in untargeted ads. I do think there's room for local news running local ads on the web, as "local" is still a valuable form of targeted advertising.
Facebook and Google are great at selling ads, but seemingly have no interest in hiring reporters, despite a lot of people getting their news there. That's ot a sustainable situation, but it's had to guess how it will play out.
There certainly seem to be a lot of online personalities who comment on the news, an make a living from ads or crowdfunding. You'd think reporters could do the same.
The establishment and the populists are on opposite sides, you know? The megacorps and other big money donors never mat an immigrant they didn't like - anything to increase labor supply and bring down wages - and free global trade benefits the largest players,
*millions of years, not hundreds of millions
"Ice age" is an odd term - if there is ice year-round at the poles, it's an ice age. We're in the Quaternary Ice Age, as far as we know, have been for a couple hundred million years. Had the historical pattern continued, glaciation would have returned 10,000 years ago. It's not obvious why it didn't beyond "the sun" (since the 100k yr glaciation cycle is a solar cycle). Perhaps the Quaternary Ice Age actually ended then.
In any case, the failure to return to glaciers 10k yrs ago allowed human civilization to arise, so it's not entirely a coincidence we find ourselves in an anomaly.
If human CO2 emission is piling on top of a transition from ice age to "warm Earth" it will be extra exciting, and the ice caps will melt regardless of what we do.
The EU law doesn't seem to make allowance for fair use, which is a lot of content on YouTube. But more fundamentally, memes and other remixing of copyrighted work for non-commercial use should be seen as fair use, for the same reason parody is fair use.
Subscription fees don't even cover the cost of ink for newspapers. Newspapers are paid for by advertisers, just like social media. Subscription fees exist to give credibility to publishers' claims about subscriber count.
We spend about the same on Medicaid as we do on Medicare (excluding prescription drug benefit), but health care for the elderly is much more expensive, and Medicare covers almost all US elderly.
I don't think it's very contentious that people tend to move to "disability" when unemployment runs out, and they don't have other means of support. Heck, some people legitimately become disabled due to the psychological stresses of not living up to their need to carry their own weight - there's some research connecting that to the oxy epidemic.
I was surprised the cost is as high as that, but when you look at the labor participation rate, it does answer the original question - there's enough money there to support several percent of the population.
It's almost as if there might be a better place for Apple to build a factory, if they want US workers.
Wow, you win "biggest lie of the thread" with that whopper. $600B on disability per year?
Citation provided, bitch. 2018 Medicaid numbers are $575 B, plus administrative costs.
Far more than 1 million unemployed in the US - closer to 20 million if you add in people who are working part time but want full time work.
Something/someone must be supporting these people.
Medicaid. Disability has become "extended unemployment" in America. That's why we're spending almost $600 billion on it, about the same as the defense budget and double what we spend on "welfare".
A million workers? WTF? It doesn't take a week's worth of labor to assemble an iPhone. It doesn't take a tenth of that.
You appear to claim that building, testing, and distributing for Google Chrome, Safari, Edge, and Firefox is no less costly than building, testing, and distributing a native application in Windows, macOS, X11/Linux, iOS, and Android editions.
I was talking about the pre-Chome days of poor standards adherence.
Sure, if you're a one-man crew, those licensing costs suck. But if you're an actual software shop, the cut the stores take dominates, and that's the argument to make these days. It's only getting easier to develop native applications cross-platform, and cross platform dev costs keep shinking (it's very close to "just use Xamarin" for non-games). Cross-platform testing costs will always remain, though, regardless of approach.
Obviously, for games the cheap approach is Unity if you're small, and Lumberyard if you're big, and the tech problems for going cross platform are small compared to the problems of marketing and user expectation being do different between platforms.
Web developers developed for "five different platforms" for most of the web's history, you know. Cross-platform testing is always a bigger cost than development, and you have to do that regardless. One way or another, you end up using libraries or a framework that abstracts away platform differences.
It would be nice if Xamarin would extend its tools to Mac and Ubuntu, though. They do a good job with Windows/Android/iThing.
Tesla has solved the biggest problems most companies have: people really want to buy its products, and he can sell them at a profit. That's a great place for any company to be.
Tesla really struggled to ramp up production to meet demand, mostly due to arrogance. They didn't start by hiring the best and brightest from other car companies that were good at automated manufacturing, but instead had a Silly Valley startup mentality of "we're smarter, so it's better if we invent everything from scratch" (of course, successful startups rarely think that way). Didn't work out so well.
But now they're making cars at a respectable rate, and demand is still quite high. No reason not to flip to cashflow positive in a few quarters.
So, the company will be making money, but the stock has "bigger than Ford" priced in already, which is a very different question.
Truer words were never spoken.
closely packed cars can move at 75 mph and the capacity of the network is correspondingly increased
Ah, so daily Cali traffic.
This requires dedicated lanes, or eventually removing human driven cars from the road network.
Not so much. I mean, your way lacks the daily collision, but it's hardly a requirement.
My problem is that buying a house in any major western city has become a giant leveraged speculative investment
I agree. That's why I rented until I had saved enough to pay cash for a house. Not a leveraged speculative investment now. If house prices double because of some BS, I'll sell and move somewhere cheap. If they fall, I still have the same house to live in, can't be underwater (even literally: FFS people, check flood maps before you buy a house).
1). This has never happened. In places where rents are increasing, the developers build high-end apartments and condos.
It happens every time the property market crashes. AT the height of the early-2000s condo bubble, there were 400000 unoccupied condos in FL, priced stupidly high. The the bubble popped, and you could get one for a song.