There literally is NO WAY to obtain a price match and EVERYONE involved knows this.
But everyone doesn't know this. There are lots of people who think the 60" Samsung TV being sold by BestBuy is the same 60" Samsung TV being sold by Walmart, and if their favorite store claims to match prices, then there's no reason to go check other prices.
I remember a jewelry chain in San Diego that had a "chapter 7 liquidation" sale running for the entire five years I lived there. There's a carpet store around the corner from me now whose "SALE" signs have been in the window long enough to bleach red to orange.
The shit is always on sale. It has to be: consumers refuse to pay full price.
Did he seriously think he could get away with selling fake bomb detectors?
Considering that, outside of certain specific geographical regions, the actual incidence of bombs is vanishingly small: yes, I expect he did seriously think he could get away with selling fake bomb detectors. Same as you can get away with selling cootie detectors, unicorn detectors, or homeopathic medicine.
His mistake was trying to expand into a market where bombs actually do exist. And not skipping town immediately after. That's really the most important part of a good scam: recognizing when the gig is blown and vanishing before the police show up.
I came here to see how many people would be flipping their shit over the idea. I watched the video, and to my disappointment discovered that Trump didn't suggest anything about said Moslim Database
The reporter was trying to get him to state opposition to a national database of religious affiliation, and he wouldn't. Nor has his camp done anything to clarify the exchange. If he does oppose religious cataloging, or has a more nuanced position, he's clearly happy for the xenophobes among his supporters to believe his administration would have a "system" for everyone who's ever visited a mosque. It's like when he says of Rand Paul, "I never attacked him on looks, and believe me, there is plenty of subject matter there." Technically, he has still not said anything negative about Paul's appearance, but we all get the message.
By any measure a 'fair trial' would certainly give him life in prison or the death penalty for treason
Curiously, parts of the US justice system retain the discretion for sentences to fit the severity of the crime. The high-profile cases of espionage (not treason), Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen, secretly delivered information to the Soviet Union, not quite a declared enemy of the time. The US government did not know about these disclosures and could not counter them. They directly resulted in the deaths of US agents. That's about the worst way to do information disclosure, and those dudes are both still alive, though neither is ever likely to see the outside of prison walls.
Pollard, who secretly disclosed information to Israel, one of the closest allies the US has, shocked the public back in the 80s by the unprecedented severity of his sentence: a single life term (from which he was paroled yesterday). A Senate Intelligence staffer claims that passing information to an ally, without intent to harm America normally carries a sentence of 2-4 years.
So, the question is: why are the universities imposing a paralegal system when we have an adequately functional one? Disciplinary committees are NOT intended to deal with criminal activities, particularly activities that they don't have the capacity to assess.
Colleges are unique environments: many of them consider themselves to be essentially reality-with-training-wheels. Places where students can experience their independence with relatively low consequences for mistakes. Their disciplinary systems are set up around righting wrongs where everyone is willing to give the perpetrator another chance. As you say, they are explicitly not for dealing with criminal behavior.
In cases of sexual assault, it is the victim's prerogative whether to pursue criminal proceedings or 'collegeal' discipline. Considering that we are often talking about sexual encounters involving alcohol or drugs, involving people without much experience communicating or much understanding of their own social boundaries, these cases seem like they could often be reconciled without the criminal justice system.
The data escrow TFA describes seems like it would be a useful system for helping to understand whether a particular incident is an honest misunderstanding of intention or part of a predatory pattern.
"real sex" that they wanted no part of, either before, during or after
What? If they fuckin' fucked and then regretted it later, so fucking what? That's the way this shit goes, bitch. Now suck it down or I'll make you suck mine down.
You seem to be a non-native speaker of English, so let me explain one of our idiomatic phrases. "Before, during or after" is an emphatic way of saying "at any time." So, the proper interpretation of "sex that they wanted no part of, either before, during or after," is "sex that they wanted no part of, period" or "sex that they wanted no part of, ever."
The way question is defined, both giving and receiving oral sex constitutes penetration.
To be fair, sex does generally involve two parties, both of whom are generally said to have "had sex" afterwards. If only one of those parties was willing, then the other has had non-consensual sex. It shouldn't matter whether the unwilling partner is the one with saliva all over their genitals or the one with the taste of genitalia in their mouth: an unwilling participant is unwilling.
The numbers won't add up if there are individuals who were victim of more than one subcategory.
There's no police here: this is about confidential, university investigations
So the criminal behavior of RAPE is swept under the rug?
No. Regardless of what happens within the university, the victim is always free to press criminal charges. History indicates that they often prefer not to, even in cases of violent rape, at least in part because the criminal justice system has been even more biased against women than the university disciplinary system.
University disciplinary actions are intended for less egregious bad behavior, and the whole discussion here seems to be missing that point. Intramural discipline is for correcting poor behavior within the community. It's a halfway step between being grounded by their parents and being sent to prison.
Or false accusations are sufficient to run someone off campus under a cloud of suspicion?
There's still a process and still a hearing. The accusations are evaluated by (supposedly) impartial, rational people, so no: false accusations are not sufficient to run someone off campus.
That means that the average rapist has raped 5 times. I *hope* that is waaaay to high.
It's not. The vast majority of men don't do non-consensual sex, meaning that non-consensual sex is practiced by a small minority of men.
One argument is that they don't even know. That our dating language and culture are so strongly based on conquest, that (some) men may have trouble distinguishing between pretend resistance as sexual play and real resistance to unwanted contact. If the victim is afraid, embarrassed, or discouraged from making an accusation, then the perpetrator is taught that all those "No!" "Stop!" "Get out!" cries were just play.
It's clear there are people exaggerating the claims or severity of sexual violence, but it's also clear that many women have participated in "real sex" that they wanted no part of, either before, during or after. That latter number is hard to pin down, but does consistently seem to be somewhere in the 10-20% range. We have to stop that.
That's the only problem I have with it, as long as police/judges treat the earlier reports with enough suspicion I don't have a problem with it.
There's no police here: this is about confidential, university investigations. One hopes that those investigators would actually contact those prior accusers as part of the investigation, but there are no formal rules of evidence for such panels, as there are for criminal investigations.
Of course, the penalties they can impose are also much less severe. There's no jail time. There's no public disclosure. The worst that can happen is expulsion, and the university will not report the reason for expulsion - beyond academic or conduct. Nor will the university disclose any records at all without the student's (ie, the sanctioned) approval.
Notice how "evidence" and "courts" aren't words used anywhere in this.
That's because universities are not the criminal justice system. If a victim wants to file criminal charges, that's a completely separate process, independent of whatever the university does. The university data may be subpoenaed, and an online database is almost certainly not protected by patient-counselor privilege, but the court would need to validate that data for trial.
This is about university disciplinary hearings, which have the historical perception of bias against the woman. ie "she was asking for it," "she only changed her mind afterward," or "keep this quiet because it would hurt the university." There's perception, at least on the part of women, that this bias is facilitated by most of the faculty being men, thus identifying with the alleged perpetrator, and by the secretive nature of the hearings, thus making it hard to find patterns of repeated behavior. Those university-internal investigations are serious, even if not criminal, and a disciplinary panel that accepts a bunch of blog posts without following up to verify is dangerously incompetent. University disciplinary findings are protected student information, beyond the outcome, so other schools or potential employers won't know whether the expulsion is for sexual assault or for pissing in the dean's lunchbox.
Sure, people could conspire to use this tool to make false accusations, but conspirators so set on disrupting a boy's life don't need a tool. This is not "Click a button to expel Johnny Boogerhead." This is a way to collect names of people who might corroborate an open accuser's claims.
Yea, people who have time to dick around and read Twitter are not the kind of people who are willing to blow themselves up unless it's due to shear boredom.
Bored, idealistic, rich kids have been part of most major revolutions or asymmetric conflicts. "Useful idiots" maybe. Philosophers. Basically, kids angry with the world, looking for ways to improve the plight of some oppressed group. People who can be convinced of a noble sacrifice, however misguided.
I doubt very much that suicide bombers are sitting in their hovels, just waiting for someone to suggest the vest and the 72 virgins. They're cultivated over years. Slowly. Twitter and social media are extremely efficient tools to make first contact with many, many people.
If I'm stuck behind one and it's going well below the speed limit, I'm going to HATE it and everyone that owns one.
This "car" is a fancy golf cart. There are lots of little communities (at least in my area) built around golf carts - keeps cars off the streets, lets kids drive themselves to soccer practice, etc. Every once in a while, one of those golf carts will leak out onto one of the real roads surrounding the community. They annoy everyone stuck behind them, but they're usually only going a block or so and they'll often drive in a bike lane, if available.
Google would do well to have its self-driving golf carts follow similar etiquette.
or they'll illustrate all the conflicts the law has with itself and reality.
That's exactly why these 'impeding traffic' laws are written. In most cases, it's perfectly legal to drive 10 mph below the speed limit, even though "everyone" will drive 10 mph faster than the limit. So here you've got this self-driving car, going at bicycle speed on a busy road with everyone else trying to go 45. They can't put the self-driving car in the bicycle lane, so traffic backs up. Add in some gawking by drivers passing by, and the car sounds like a major hazard, even if it's behaving entirely by the letter.
Do you ticket the 10,000 people going 45 or the one going 25?
The problem is that very few banks will lend you money when you say "I want to manufacture 10,000 of these, and *if* I can sell them, I can pay you back."
Even fewer banks will lend you money when you say "I want to manufacture 10,000 of these, and *if* I can, I can pay you back." Selling stuff at a profit, where you know the production cost, is the easy part.
Banks absolutely do not want to lose their capital. If they think there's a 2% chance of not getting paid, then you're not getting your loan. Venture capital, they know they face 80-90% failure rate, but they hope that the projects that fail to fail do so extravagantly. Kickstarter/IndieGoGo are for projects so speculative that they can't even attract venture capital. There's no way they're getting a loan, regardless of whether they can demonstrate an orderbook or not.
Kickstarter is also good for artist-support projects, where someone needs front-money for recording or production costs, but that's a different animal entirely.
My mother-in-law takes a fairly new med for her leukemia -- it's about $10,000 for 14 days and has been very effective. That drug would have never made it to market if "big pharma" didn't expect to turn a profit (including cover OTHER research projects).
$5000 of that cost goes to marketing and sales commissions. R&D spending is generally 10-20% sales spending examples I mean, R&D is expensive. Those costs are definitely big numbers; it's just that they're small in comparison to other parts of pharmaceutical spending.
I have the ultimate solution, taken from the likes of OSS, lets make all of our textbooks setup with Creative Commons License
That will prevent authors from making perfectly legitimate profits from their writings.
Only a small minority of textbook authors ever see meaningful cash from them. Most textbooks get written because a book is a CV line towards tenure. If a prof isn't really happy with the textbooks on offer, he may just write his own. I've used plenty of 'books' like that in specialty courses - basically a bunch of powerpoints expanded into narrative. Sometimes distributed as free pdfs by the prof for a few years; eventually formalized when the Springer rep comes around hawking their latest offering. "Oh, you have your own reference? Have you ever considered distributing it more widely?"
There's people making money off textbooks, but it's not the authors. It is an ideal area for "open source" or creative commons distribution systems. It just takes someone or some group to take the initiative, write the appropriate text, and hype it a bit. Until then, nobody ever got fired for adopting Halliday & Resnick, even though David Halliday died 5 years ago.
I don't think of it as much a young vs old per say. But Baby Boomer logic vs. Gen XY logic.
That's because you're too young. The older guys remember when they were the 'agile' crowd. When Woz and Packard, working literally in their garages, outmaneuvered IBM by working in small groups of passionate people with rapid communication. What kids today call "startup culture" or "waterfall" or whatever the current buzzword is.
The naivety is adorable. The impatience, that you'd rather have the language and the data structures magically do stuff for you than take the time to understand the data organization yourself or manage interactions with the database, is the same impatience that stimulated the earlier generation to build their own computers rather than wait for time on the mainframe. Or to re-implement *nix rather than wait for existing implementations. For the older guys, who've been micromanaging code for so long it's second nature, it'll take longer to learn the latest framework (that will probably only be 'fashionable' for 3-5 years) and to build enough trust in its unseen developers and development process than it will just to implement.
When you don't know anything, using a new tool with a comfort grip and laser range finder is easier than using the old tool. If you've already internalized some skills, then the laser range finder and neon colors are a distraction.
You got by 30+ years doing the job you liked, but they also failed to think ahead and hoped to ride out the lifespan of the technology with the lifespan of their careers.
The "old" system offered people retirement and pension after 20 years, meaning many people could "retire" around age 40 with a modest pension. Not quite enough to live on, but definitely enough to support a dramatic change of career. And you could retire from your second career around age 60.
Turns out, a lot of people get bored, frustrated, or otherwise useless at their job in their 40s. Call it the mid-life crisis, if you like. Failure to adapt, if you like. It can be pretty useful to both the employee and the employer to have people change careers at that point, but it's pretty intimidating to do that if all you've got is a 401k that you're not allowed to touch until you're 59
But if the interest rate is under 1%, and you can get 3-5% return by saving/investing the money instead of spending it to buy the car upfront, why wouldn't you take the loan?
If you're asking whether you should put the cash cost of your car purchase in a money market account and use that account to pay the loan over time, then yes, that's a reasonable plan.
That's not the decision most people face, though. Most people face the decision of buying a crappy car with the cash they have on hand or buying a nicer car using that cash as partial payment, and future income for the balance. In that case, you're buying more than you can afford; the "super low discount rate" is an advertising ploy to make you think you're getting a deal, when they've really just used it to upsell you.
It isn't necessarily market death to pay better for workers than your competitors.
No, that's supposed to be how you get better workers. The part that's supposed to be market death is when you pay your software developers and managers the same as you pay the janitor. The white collar workers are supposed to get all offended that their work is no more valued than the obviously inferior blue collar workers and abandon the company in a huff.
if chevy sells a car to a dealer for $16000 and the dealer after haggling and whatnot sell the car to me for $17600 then the dealer made their 10% profit. Cut out the dealer and buy from the manufacturer and they will just sell me the car direct for $17600. It is foolish to think anything else would happen.
The dealership sold you a car for $17,600, but they sold the same car (in red) to your neighbor for $16,900 and to my brother-in-law for $18,200. The dealership can spend three hours haggling to figure out just exactly how much each customer is willing to pay. In fact, they have to, because haggling is their entire profit margin.
Direct manufacturer sales will make plenty of profit without haggling. They're likely to be more interested that each customer feels fairly treated during the purchase, and a couple hundred dollars one way or the other just doesn't matter. If a customer thinks Joe's Chevy cheated them, they'll go to John's Chevy for the next purchase. If they think Chevy cheated, they'll be going to Ford.
Point is: if you take out a middleman tax, the seller gets more money, the buyer pays less money, and everyone's happy except the middleman. Sales taxes are still paid locally, property taxes are still paid locally, staff are still hired locally, so most of the 'local' money is going to stay local.
I know most people here hate the "Disney extension" of the copyright term, but what is the "community" losing, besides the ability to get Warner Bros. and Disney plush toys for practically free?
"Mickey Mouse" plush toys would still be covered by trademark. The community loses the ability to make up their own Mickey Mouse stories. To answer what would happen if Mickey met Kermit in a dark alley? Or if Mickey and Jerry teamed up against Tom the cat? The community loses the ability to make a Mickey Mouse costume for your favorite Destiny character.
Sherlock Holmes, pre-1923, is in the public domain, and look how many adaptations that's spawned. Or (less well known) Allan Quatermain, the original Indiana Jones.
Problem is, people will read: I can shoot down a drone now,
No, people will read: I can shoot video cameras to protect my privacy. A drone that wanders near my property. The neighbor's security camera. The dash cam on the car behind them.
people are sick of the politically correct narrative and it is their way of rebelling.
So join the conversation. Explain to the thin-skinned whiners how to distinguish between malicious threats and mock teasing. You might even learn something in the process about about why your sis-in-law seems like such "a real cunt who can't admit she's wrong" while you're so willing to accept that your teasing could have been legitimately misinterpreted.
The problem on the internet seems to be that a minority of the "sick of PC narrative" people express their opinions with bomb threats. Seriously? That doesn't do anyone any good. There's extremists on both sides. The rest of us should keep them as pariahs: demonstrations of how not to behave.
Slashdot Mirror
There literally is NO WAY to obtain a price match and EVERYONE involved knows this.
But everyone doesn't know this. There are lots of people who think the 60" Samsung TV being sold by BestBuy is the same 60" Samsung TV being sold by Walmart, and if their favorite store claims to match prices, then there's no reason to go check other prices.
I remember a jewelry chain in San Diego that had a "chapter 7 liquidation" sale running for the entire five years I lived there. There's a carpet store around the corner from me now whose "SALE" signs have been in the window long enough to bleach red to orange.
The shit is always on sale. It has to be: consumers refuse to pay full price.
Did he seriously think he could get away with selling fake bomb detectors?
Considering that, outside of certain specific geographical regions, the actual incidence of bombs is vanishingly small: yes, I expect he did seriously think he could get away with selling fake bomb detectors. Same as you can get away with selling cootie detectors, unicorn detectors, or homeopathic medicine.
His mistake was trying to expand into a market where bombs actually do exist. And not skipping town immediately after. That's really the most important part of a good scam: recognizing when the gig is blown and vanishing before the police show up.
I came here to see how many people would be flipping their shit over the idea. I watched the video, and to my disappointment discovered that Trump didn't suggest anything about said Moslim Database
The reporter was trying to get him to state opposition to a national database of religious affiliation, and he wouldn't. Nor has his camp done anything to clarify the exchange. If he does oppose religious cataloging, or has a more nuanced position, he's clearly happy for the xenophobes among his supporters to believe his administration would have a "system" for everyone who's ever visited a mosque. It's like when he says of Rand Paul, "I never attacked him on looks, and believe me, there is plenty of subject matter there." Technically, he has still not said anything negative about Paul's appearance, but we all get the message.
By any measure a 'fair trial' would certainly give him life in prison or the death penalty for treason
Curiously, parts of the US justice system retain the discretion for sentences to fit the severity of the crime. The high-profile cases of espionage (not treason), Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen, secretly delivered information to the Soviet Union, not quite a declared enemy of the time. The US government did not know about these disclosures and could not counter them. They directly resulted in the deaths of US agents. That's about the worst way to do information disclosure, and those dudes are both still alive, though neither is ever likely to see the outside of prison walls.
Pollard, who secretly disclosed information to Israel, one of the closest allies the US has, shocked the public back in the 80s by the unprecedented severity of his sentence: a single life term (from which he was paroled yesterday). A Senate Intelligence staffer claims that passing information to an ally, without intent to harm America normally carries a sentence of 2-4 years.
So, the question is: why are the universities imposing a paralegal system when we have an adequately functional one? Disciplinary committees are NOT intended to deal with criminal activities, particularly activities that they don't have the capacity to assess.
Colleges are unique environments: many of them consider themselves to be essentially reality-with-training-wheels. Places where students can experience their independence with relatively low consequences for mistakes. Their disciplinary systems are set up around righting wrongs where everyone is willing to give the perpetrator another chance. As you say, they are explicitly not for dealing with criminal behavior.
In cases of sexual assault, it is the victim's prerogative whether to pursue criminal proceedings or 'collegeal' discipline. Considering that we are often talking about sexual encounters involving alcohol or drugs, involving people without much experience communicating or much understanding of their own social boundaries, these cases seem like they could often be reconciled without the criminal justice system.
The data escrow TFA describes seems like it would be a useful system for helping to understand whether a particular incident is an honest misunderstanding of intention or part of a predatory pattern.
"real sex" that they wanted no part of, either before, during or after
What? If they fuckin' fucked and then regretted it later, so fucking what? That's the way this shit goes, bitch. Now suck it down or I'll make you suck mine down.
You seem to be a non-native speaker of English, so let me explain one of our idiomatic phrases. "Before, during or after" is an emphatic way of saying "at any time." So, the proper interpretation of "sex that they wanted no part of, either before, during or after," is "sex that they wanted no part of, period" or "sex that they wanted no part of, ever."
The way question is defined, both giving and receiving oral sex constitutes penetration.
To be fair, sex does generally involve two parties, both of whom are generally said to have "had sex" afterwards. If only one of those parties was willing, then the other has had non-consensual sex. It shouldn't matter whether the unwilling partner is the one with saliva all over their genitals or the one with the taste of genitalia in their mouth: an unwilling participant is unwilling.
The numbers won't add up if there are individuals who were victim of more than one subcategory.
There's no police here: this is about confidential, university investigations
So the criminal behavior of RAPE is swept under the rug?
No. Regardless of what happens within the university, the victim is always free to press criminal charges. History indicates that they often prefer not to, even in cases of violent rape, at least in part because the criminal justice system has been even more biased against women than the university disciplinary system.
University disciplinary actions are intended for less egregious bad behavior, and the whole discussion here seems to be missing that point. Intramural discipline is for correcting poor behavior within the community. It's a halfway step between being grounded by their parents and being sent to prison.
Or false accusations are sufficient to run someone off campus under a cloud of suspicion?
There's still a process and still a hearing. The accusations are evaluated by (supposedly) impartial, rational people, so no: false accusations are not sufficient to run someone off campus.
That means that the average rapist has raped 5 times. I *hope* that is waaaay to high.
It's not. The vast majority of men don't do non-consensual sex, meaning that non-consensual sex is practiced by a small minority of men.
One argument is that they don't even know. That our dating language and culture are so strongly based on conquest, that (some) men may have trouble distinguishing between pretend resistance as sexual play and real resistance to unwanted contact. If the victim is afraid, embarrassed, or discouraged from making an accusation, then the perpetrator is taught that all those "No!" "Stop!" "Get out!" cries were just play.
It's clear there are people exaggerating the claims or severity of sexual violence, but it's also clear that many women have participated in "real sex" that they wanted no part of, either before, during or after. That latter number is hard to pin down, but does consistently seem to be somewhere in the 10-20% range. We have to stop that.
That's the only problem I have with it, as long as police/judges treat the earlier reports with enough suspicion I don't have a problem with it.
There's no police here: this is about confidential, university investigations. One hopes that those investigators would actually contact those prior accusers as part of the investigation, but there are no formal rules of evidence for such panels, as there are for criminal investigations.
Of course, the penalties they can impose are also much less severe. There's no jail time. There's no public disclosure. The worst that can happen is expulsion, and the university will not report the reason for expulsion - beyond academic or conduct. Nor will the university disclose any records at all without the student's (ie, the sanctioned) approval.
Notice how "evidence" and "courts" aren't words used anywhere in this.
That's because universities are not the criminal justice system. If a victim wants to file criminal charges, that's a completely separate process, independent of whatever the university does. The university data may be subpoenaed, and an online database is almost certainly not protected by patient-counselor privilege, but the court would need to validate that data for trial.
This is about university disciplinary hearings, which have the historical perception of bias against the woman. ie "she was asking for it," "she only changed her mind afterward," or "keep this quiet because it would hurt the university." There's perception, at least on the part of women, that this bias is facilitated by most of the faculty being men, thus identifying with the alleged perpetrator, and by the secretive nature of the hearings, thus making it hard to find patterns of repeated behavior. Those university-internal investigations are serious, even if not criminal, and a disciplinary panel that accepts a bunch of blog posts without following up to verify is dangerously incompetent. University disciplinary findings are protected student information, beyond the outcome, so other schools or potential employers won't know whether the expulsion is for sexual assault or for pissing in the dean's lunchbox.
Sure, people could conspire to use this tool to make false accusations, but conspirators so set on disrupting a boy's life don't need a tool. This is not "Click a button to expel Johnny Boogerhead." This is a way to collect names of people who might corroborate an open accuser's claims.
Yea, people who have time to dick around and read Twitter are not the kind of people who are willing to blow themselves up unless it's due to shear boredom.
Bored, idealistic, rich kids have been part of most major revolutions or asymmetric conflicts. "Useful idiots" maybe. Philosophers. Basically, kids angry with the world, looking for ways to improve the plight of some oppressed group. People who can be convinced of a noble sacrifice, however misguided.
I doubt very much that suicide bombers are sitting in their hovels, just waiting for someone to suggest the vest and the 72 virgins. They're cultivated over years. Slowly. Twitter and social media are extremely efficient tools to make first contact with many, many people.
If I'm stuck behind one and it's going well below the speed limit, I'm going to HATE it and everyone that owns one.
This "car" is a fancy golf cart. There are lots of little communities (at least in my area) built around golf carts - keeps cars off the streets, lets kids drive themselves to soccer practice, etc. Every once in a while, one of those golf carts will leak out onto one of the real roads surrounding the community. They annoy everyone stuck behind them, but they're usually only going a block or so and they'll often drive in a bike lane, if available.
Google would do well to have its self-driving golf carts follow similar etiquette.
or they'll illustrate all the conflicts the law has with itself and reality.
That's exactly why these 'impeding traffic' laws are written. In most cases, it's perfectly legal to drive 10 mph below the speed limit, even though "everyone" will drive 10 mph faster than the limit. So here you've got this self-driving car, going at bicycle speed on a busy road with everyone else trying to go 45. They can't put the self-driving car in the bicycle lane, so traffic backs up. Add in some gawking by drivers passing by, and the car sounds like a major hazard, even if it's behaving entirely by the letter.
Do you ticket the 10,000 people going 45 or the one going 25?
The problem is that very few banks will lend you money when you say "I want to manufacture 10,000 of these, and *if* I can sell them, I can pay you back."
Even fewer banks will lend you money when you say "I want to manufacture 10,000 of these, and *if* I can, I can pay you back." Selling stuff at a profit, where you know the production cost, is the easy part.
Banks absolutely do not want to lose their capital. If they think there's a 2% chance of not getting paid, then you're not getting your loan. Venture capital, they know they face 80-90% failure rate, but they hope that the projects that fail to fail do so extravagantly. Kickstarter/IndieGoGo are for projects so speculative that they can't even attract venture capital. There's no way they're getting a loan, regardless of whether they can demonstrate an orderbook or not.
Kickstarter is also good for artist-support projects, where someone needs front-money for recording or production costs, but that's a different animal entirely.
My mother-in-law takes a fairly new med for her leukemia -- it's about $10,000 for 14 days and has been very effective. That drug would have never made it to market if "big pharma" didn't expect to turn a profit (including cover OTHER research projects).
$5000 of that cost goes to marketing and sales commissions. R&D spending is generally 10-20% sales spending examples I mean, R&D is expensive. Those costs are definitely big numbers; it's just that they're small in comparison to other parts of pharmaceutical spending.
I have the ultimate solution, taken from the likes of OSS, lets make all of our textbooks setup with Creative Commons License
That will prevent authors from making perfectly legitimate profits from their writings.
Only a small minority of textbook authors ever see meaningful cash from them. Most textbooks get written because a book is a CV line towards tenure. If a prof isn't really happy with the textbooks on offer, he may just write his own. I've used plenty of 'books' like that in specialty courses - basically a bunch of powerpoints expanded into narrative. Sometimes distributed as free pdfs by the prof for a few years; eventually formalized when the Springer rep comes around hawking their latest offering. "Oh, you have your own reference? Have you ever considered distributing it more widely?"
There's people making money off textbooks, but it's not the authors. It is an ideal area for "open source" or creative commons distribution systems. It just takes someone or some group to take the initiative, write the appropriate text, and hype it a bit. Until then, nobody ever got fired for adopting Halliday & Resnick, even though David Halliday died 5 years ago.
I don't think of it as much a young vs old per say. But Baby Boomer logic vs. Gen XY logic.
That's because you're too young. The older guys remember when they were the 'agile' crowd. When Woz and Packard, working literally in their garages, outmaneuvered IBM by working in small groups of passionate people with rapid communication. What kids today call "startup culture" or "waterfall" or whatever the current buzzword is.
The naivety is adorable. The impatience, that you'd rather have the language and the data structures magically do stuff for you than take the time to understand the data organization yourself or manage interactions with the database, is the same impatience that stimulated the earlier generation to build their own computers rather than wait for time on the mainframe. Or to re-implement *nix rather than wait for existing implementations. For the older guys, who've been micromanaging code for so long it's second nature, it'll take longer to learn the latest framework (that will probably only be 'fashionable' for 3-5 years) and to build enough trust in its unseen developers and development process than it will just to implement.
When you don't know anything, using a new tool with a comfort grip and laser range finder is easier than using the old tool. If you've already internalized some skills, then the laser range finder and neon colors are a distraction.
You got by 30+ years doing the job you liked, but they also failed to think ahead and hoped to ride out the lifespan of the technology with the lifespan of their careers.
The "old" system offered people retirement and pension after 20 years, meaning many people could "retire" around age 40 with a modest pension. Not quite enough to live on, but definitely enough to support a dramatic change of career. And you could retire from your second career around age 60.
Turns out, a lot of people get bored, frustrated, or otherwise useless at their job in their 40s. Call it the mid-life crisis, if you like. Failure to adapt, if you like. It can be pretty useful to both the employee and the employer to have people change careers at that point, but it's pretty intimidating to do that if all you've got is a 401k that you're not allowed to touch until you're 59
But if the interest rate is under 1%, and you can get 3-5% return by saving/investing the money instead of spending it to buy the car upfront, why wouldn't you take the loan?
If you're asking whether you should put the cash cost of your car purchase in a money market account and use that account to pay the loan over time, then yes, that's a reasonable plan.
That's not the decision most people face, though. Most people face the decision of buying a crappy car with the cash they have on hand or buying a nicer car using that cash as partial payment, and future income for the balance. In that case, you're buying more than you can afford; the "super low discount rate" is an advertising ploy to make you think you're getting a deal, when they've really just used it to upsell you.
It isn't necessarily market death to pay better for workers than your competitors.
No, that's supposed to be how you get better workers. The part that's supposed to be market death is when you pay your software developers and managers the same as you pay the janitor. The white collar workers are supposed to get all offended that their work is no more valued than the obviously inferior blue collar workers and abandon the company in a huff.
if chevy sells a car to a dealer for $16000 and the dealer after haggling and whatnot sell the car to me for $17600 then the dealer made their 10% profit. Cut out the dealer and buy from the manufacturer and they will just sell me the car direct for $17600. It is foolish to think anything else would happen.
The dealership sold you a car for $17,600, but they sold the same car (in red) to your neighbor for $16,900 and to my brother-in-law for $18,200. The dealership can spend three hours haggling to figure out just exactly how much each customer is willing to pay. In fact, they have to, because haggling is their entire profit margin.
Direct manufacturer sales will make plenty of profit without haggling. They're likely to be more interested that each customer feels fairly treated during the purchase, and a couple hundred dollars one way or the other just doesn't matter. If a customer thinks Joe's Chevy cheated them, they'll go to John's Chevy for the next purchase. If they think Chevy cheated, they'll be going to Ford.
Point is: if you take out a middleman tax, the seller gets more money, the buyer pays less money, and everyone's happy except the middleman. Sales taxes are still paid locally, property taxes are still paid locally, staff are still hired locally, so most of the 'local' money is going to stay local.
I know most people here hate the "Disney extension" of the copyright term, but what is the "community" losing, besides the ability to get Warner Bros. and Disney plush toys for practically free?
"Mickey Mouse" plush toys would still be covered by trademark. The community loses the ability to make up their own Mickey Mouse stories. To answer what would happen if Mickey met Kermit in a dark alley? Or if Mickey and Jerry teamed up against Tom the cat? The community loses the ability to make a Mickey Mouse costume for your favorite Destiny character.
Sherlock Holmes, pre-1923, is in the public domain, and look how many adaptations that's spawned. Or (less well known) Allan Quatermain, the original Indiana Jones.
Problem is, people will read: I can shoot down a drone now,
No, people will read: I can shoot video cameras to protect my privacy. A drone that wanders near my property. The neighbor's security camera. The dash cam on the car behind them.
people are sick of the politically correct narrative and it is their way of rebelling.
So join the conversation. Explain to the thin-skinned whiners how to distinguish between malicious threats and mock teasing. You might even learn something in the process about about why your sis-in-law seems like such "a real cunt who can't admit she's wrong" while you're so willing to accept that your teasing could have been legitimately misinterpreted.
The problem on the internet seems to be that a minority of the "sick of PC narrative" people express their opinions with bomb threats. Seriously? That doesn't do anyone any good. There's extremists on both sides. The rest of us should keep them as pariahs: demonstrations of how not to behave.