We're not talking about iPods, we're talking about Apple IIe's. These are houses no one wants to buy, no one can sell, and no one will live in. They are a drain on the economy. When they were built, they had a purpose. Their purpose now outlived, it's time to let them go.
They are talking about razing EMPTY buildings. They aren't talking about moving people anywhere.
A minor quibble... TFA does state that they're planning to offer those still living in these largely abandoned areas relocation to "more affluent" parts of the city. They won't be forced to, however; they have the option to retain their current home, which will in a couple years be surrounded by plants instead of decaying stucco.
Well, these plans involve relocating people from the outer, largely abandoned areas of Flint, MI.... sounds a lot like suburbs.
Since the population of Flint is more than half African-American, they're probably not moving caucasians by and large... but some of them, anyway.
In any event, they're relocating people from dying areas into "more affluent" areas, where they will have neighbors instead of squatters. If they want to move, that is. Even if they don't, they're pulling out the abandoned buildings next door and letting nature take over. So you have the choice of living where you are, but in a rural setting instead of an urban wasteland... or relocating to a better area.
And the problem is...?
What solution would you prefer? that they uproot Valencia, California and move them to suburban Flint MI to fill in those abandoned houses? Ok, I admit that proposal appeals to me in certain ways too...
Take your kids out of nature, grass, trees, clean air... and pack them into a filthy concrete jungle full of extreme poverty and extreme wealth.
There's six and a half square miles of nature, grasses, and trees an easy walk from my house. I'm also three miles from downtown LA. (BTW, the walk includes a footbridge over a river populated by fish, ducks, geese, and coots. It's lovely.)
It's not either/or. There are urban areas people are happy to escape from when they manage it, and there's urban areas that are great places to be. It sounds like this project hopes to "prune" the really awful parts of certain cities, allowing people subsidized relocation to the vibrant areas. Sounds like a great idea.
The other downside is that the US Trade Deficit will get a whole lot bigger, since California's trade is at a huge surplus, and the rest of the country drags us down into the negative.
Me, I just want California to declare independence. If Oregon, Washington, and Hawaii want to come with us, ok by me, but it's not necessary.
There might be a problem with that new economy: it probably won't create enough jobs/wealth for hundreds of millions of people, like the industrial economy did. In the worst case the information economies won't be able to pay enough goods from the manufacturing economies.
Incidentally, your sig points to the root of the problem.
The problem is, the trade economy is built on the premise of a manufacturing economy. Unfortunately, our existing trade economy cannot efficiently allocate resources in an information economy.
Hunter-gatherers "worked" an average of 10-20 hours a week to maintain themselves. It was the introduction of agriculture that put us in the mode of working all the time; it also meant our population could burgeon out of control, and we could (several thousand years later) start building an industrial base. But the 40-hour-work-week is an artifact of a particular system that some societies have already outgrown. In places where health care isn't tied to "full-time" employment, there's already growing trends toward job-sharing, the four-thirds solution, and shorter work weeks.
Bottom line: we no longer need as much labor put in to meet our needs, so we need to stop withholding needed goods and services based on how much labor one puts in. There's enough for everyone. Let's be nice about it.
Anybody who doesn't realize it at this point should re-open Heidi and Alvin Toeffler's books, because they provided the roadmap years ago. The fact that is happening now is not a surprise to me at all.
I read The Third Wave in... 1993, I think, and it was already goosebump-inducing. The only thing that hadn't worked out the way it was predicted was recurrences of the 1970's oil crisis, but that seems to be coming around finally.
Really amazing stuff. Guy hit the nail on the head.
I wasn't. Los Angeles is usually held up as an example of an extremely un-dense, sprawling urban area. "27 suburbs in search of a city," as columnist Jack Smith put it.
Now, Manhattan has about 100k people per square mile. THAT'S dense.
Um... why are you squaring 34? One square mile is a square that is a mile on each side. 34 square miles is an area that, for example, is almost six miles on each side. There are 34 one-square-mile areas within Flint, MI, and 110,000 people spread between them. Hence, a bit over 3,000 people to each square mile.
Corporate? What's corporate about it? What companies do you think are participating in this? You think some company is going to spend money building something on the outskirts of Flint, MI?
110,000 people in 34 square miles is 3,235 people per square mile. Los Angeles? around 7,000 people per square mile.
They can significantly densify the population without impacting quality of life in a negative way. TFA discusses how the city is buying up houses in "more affluent areas" for people to relocate to... if they choose.
Right now, we let those low-income areas decay, with people inside them having no choices. This way, rather than unmanaged decay with people still inside, they're giving people the option of staying or going, and then removing the vacant buildings around the inhabited ones to contract the city's infrastructure to a manageable level. Anyone who has lived in a decaying urban area knows that vacant buildings are a hazard to people living around them for a variety of reasons.
The article mentions Baltimore, which makes sense. If you've ever visited some of the, shall we say, less popular portions of that city, you'll find block after block of boarded-up rowhouses.
But if they tear those down, where will Marlo Stanfield's crew hide the bodies?
Well, sure, the Kindle edition is less than "list price," but ALL Amazon's books are. If they themselves are selling the paper book for the same price, that doesn't seem quite cricket.
Most of those sites (if not all of them) probably state in the TOS that you are not to share your login information. So... they're asking people to violate their agreements, and won't hire people who refuse. For example, Facebook's Terms section 4 item 6 states "You will not share your password, let anyone else access your account, or do anything else that might jeopardize the security of your account."
Brilliant. If you want to bribe a city official, go to Bozeman, because they only hire people who violate policy.
The biggest reason they didn't mention for pricing the Kindle at cost rather than subsidizing and requiring a subscription is that you capture a lot more gift sales that way. I can't speak for the rest of the world, but I'm reluctant to ever buy someone a gift that requires a recurring fee (unless I'm going to pay that, too). And then there's the fact that I never would have bought myself a Kindle, because I just didn't think I had any desire to read books digitally. But I got one as a gift, and now I really adore it. I'm at least one customer (who has bought several books from the Kindle store) that they wouldn't have at all if they'd gone with a cell-phone-style pricing plan.
Digital content has no intrinsic cost to the publisher.
You're absolutely right. The book is just magically fully edited, formatted, and presented to the publisher from the author. Nope, no need to have the publisher involved at all........
I think he should have said "no intrinsic marginal cost."
That is just not true. Amazon guarantees that the Kindle price will always be less than the dead tree edition.
Hmmm... as much as I love my Kindle, I have to disagree here. Or at least, if they guarantee this, they need to take care of a coupleoftitles. I'm not going to count this one because the paperback's not out yet.
I couldn't find any with an actual released paperback that costs less than the Kindle edition, but found several where the price was the same.
My biggest complaint is that I have to turn off the Kindle for takeoff and landing.
Now that there are more phones (like the Blackberry) where you can turn the wireless off while leaving the phone power on, some airlines have revised the instruction. This means that you can often leave the Kindle on, so long as you turn off the wireless radio.
Kindle IS a library model, despite what they suggest in their advertising. You download the book to your Kindle but you can't sell it or lend it to a friend. They have access to the book to do anything they wish to it at any time. (As in the right-to-read-books-aloud fiasco recently).
They rent it to you for full paper-purchase price for as long as they choose to support the Kindle format.
Um...
(1) it's not full-price; Kindle books tend to be cheaper, especially when you compare to hardback prices. (2) the books will continue to work for as long as they're on your reader and your reader is functioning. If you keep the wireless connection off, there's no way at all that Amazon can change what you have available to you. (And your battery will last longer also, so you typically only turn on wireless when you need the connection for something.)
98% of books and 99.9% of magazines I never re-read. I'd prefer a library model, say $1 a day to read a book, then I could stop access and paying for it. The main exception would be course-texts.
If I was paying $1/day for my Kindle books, which I read for a few minutes here and there while waiting for the rest of my life to happen, I'd end up paying $10-15 per book. Currently I pay $5-10 (for Amazon books; books from Baen.com are free), and can look up what happened in the previous book when I'm reading a subsequent novel in the same series, for example.
Also, it's currently possible to back up the book files on your device to your home computer. They'd have to disable that feature if they wanted to implement a library model, where you only pay while you're using it.
Slashdot Mirror
We're not talking about iPods, we're talking about Apple IIe's. These are houses no one wants to buy, no one can sell, and no one will live in. They are a drain on the economy. When they were built, they had a purpose. Their purpose now outlived, it's time to let them go.
They are talking about razing EMPTY buildings. They aren't talking about moving people anywhere.
A minor quibble... TFA does state that they're planning to offer those still living in these largely abandoned areas relocation to "more affluent" parts of the city. They won't be forced to, however; they have the option to retain their current home, which will in a couple years be surrounded by plants instead of decaying stucco.
Well, these plans involve relocating people from the outer, largely abandoned areas of Flint, MI.... sounds a lot like suburbs.
Since the population of Flint is more than half African-American, they're probably not moving caucasians by and large... but some of them, anyway.
In any event, they're relocating people from dying areas into "more affluent" areas, where they will have neighbors instead of squatters. If they want to move, that is. Even if they don't, they're pulling out the abandoned buildings next door and letting nature take over. So you have the choice of living where you are, but in a rural setting instead of an urban wasteland... or relocating to a better area.
And the problem is...?
What solution would you prefer? that they uproot Valencia, California and move them to suburban Flint MI to fill in those abandoned houses? Ok, I admit that proposal appeals to me in certain ways too...
Take your kids out of nature, grass, trees, clean air... and pack them into a filthy concrete jungle full of extreme poverty and extreme wealth.
There's six and a half square miles of nature, grasses, and trees an easy walk from my house. I'm also three miles from downtown LA. (BTW, the walk includes a footbridge over a river populated by fish, ducks, geese, and coots. It's lovely.)
It's not either/or. There are urban areas people are happy to escape from when they manage it, and there's urban areas that are great places to be. It sounds like this project hopes to "prune" the really awful parts of certain cities, allowing people subsidized relocation to the vibrant areas. Sounds like a great idea.
Damn. My kingdom for a mod point. +1 ITA.
The other downside is that the US Trade Deficit will get a whole lot bigger, since California's trade is at a huge surplus, and the rest of the country drags us down into the negative.
Me, I just want California to declare independence. If Oregon, Washington, and Hawaii want to come with us, ok by me, but it's not necessary.
+1 Relevant Song Lyrics!
There might be a problem with that new economy: it probably won't create enough jobs/wealth for hundreds of millions of people, like the industrial economy did. In the worst case the information economies won't be able to pay enough goods from the manufacturing economies.
Incidentally, your sig points to the root of the problem.
The problem is, the trade economy is built on the premise of a manufacturing economy. Unfortunately, our existing trade economy cannot efficiently allocate resources in an information economy.
Hunter-gatherers "worked" an average of 10-20 hours a week to maintain themselves. It was the introduction of agriculture that put us in the mode of working all the time; it also meant our population could burgeon out of control, and we could (several thousand years later) start building an industrial base. But the 40-hour-work-week is an artifact of a particular system that some societies have already outgrown. In places where health care isn't tied to "full-time" employment, there's already growing trends toward job-sharing, the four-thirds solution, and shorter work weeks.
Bottom line: we no longer need as much labor put in to meet our needs, so we need to stop withholding needed goods and services based on how much labor one puts in. There's enough for everyone. Let's be nice about it.
Anybody who doesn't realize it at this point should re-open Heidi and Alvin Toeffler's books, because they provided the roadmap years ago. The fact that is happening now is not a surprise to me at all.
I read The Third Wave in... 1993, I think, and it was already goosebump-inducing. The only thing that hadn't worked out the way it was predicted was recurrences of the 1970's oil crisis, but that seems to be coming around finally.
Really amazing stuff. Guy hit the nail on the head.
I wasn't. Los Angeles is usually held up as an example of an extremely un-dense, sprawling urban area. "27 suburbs in search of a city," as columnist Jack Smith put it.
Now, Manhattan has about 100k people per square mile. THAT'S dense.
Um... why are you squaring 34? One square mile is a square that is a mile on each side. 34 square miles is an area that, for example, is almost six miles on each side. There are 34 one-square-mile areas within Flint, MI, and 110,000 people spread between them. Hence, a bit over 3,000 people to each square mile.
If Flint, MI was 34 MILES SQUARE, you'd be right.
Corporate? What's corporate about it? What companies do you think are participating in this? You think some company is going to spend money building something on the outskirts of Flint, MI?
110,000 people in 34 square miles is 3,235 people per square mile. Los Angeles? around 7,000 people per square mile.
They can significantly densify the population without impacting quality of life in a negative way. TFA discusses how the city is buying up houses in "more affluent areas" for people to relocate to... if they choose.
Right now, we let those low-income areas decay, with people inside them having no choices. This way, rather than unmanaged decay with people still inside, they're giving people the option of staying or going, and then removing the vacant buildings around the inhabited ones to contract the city's infrastructure to a manageable level. Anyone who has lived in a decaying urban area knows that vacant buildings are a hazard to people living around them for a variety of reasons.
The article mentions Baltimore, which makes sense. If you've ever visited some of the, shall we say, less popular portions of that city, you'll find block after block of boarded-up rowhouses.
But if they tear those down, where will Marlo Stanfield's crew hide the bodies?
Does it require going to Montana? Because if so, I'm right out.
Maybe I can just email them all my passwords from here...
Well, sure, the Kindle edition is less than "list price," but ALL Amazon's books are. If they themselves are selling the paper book for the same price, that doesn't seem quite cricket.
Most of those sites (if not all of them) probably state in the TOS that you are not to share your login information. So... they're asking people to violate their agreements, and won't hire people who refuse. For example, Facebook's Terms section 4 item 6 states "You will not share your password, let anyone else access your account, or do anything else that might jeopardize the security of your account."
Brilliant. If you want to bribe a city official, go to Bozeman, because they only hire people who violate policy.
The biggest reason they didn't mention for pricing the Kindle at cost rather than subsidizing and requiring a subscription is that you capture a lot more gift sales that way. I can't speak for the rest of the world, but I'm reluctant to ever buy someone a gift that requires a recurring fee (unless I'm going to pay that, too). And then there's the fact that I never would have bought myself a Kindle, because I just didn't think I had any desire to read books digitally. But I got one as a gift, and now I really adore it. I'm at least one customer (who has bought several books from the Kindle store) that they wouldn't have at all if they'd gone with a cell-phone-style pricing plan.
Digital content has no intrinsic cost to the publisher.
You're absolutely right. The book is just magically fully edited, formatted, and presented to the publisher from the author. Nope, no need to have the publisher involved at all........
I think he should have said "no intrinsic marginal cost."
That is just not true. Amazon guarantees that the Kindle price will always be less than the dead tree edition.
Hmmm... as much as I love my Kindle, I have to disagree here. Or at least, if they guarantee this, they need to take care of a couple of titles. I'm not going to count this one because the paperback's not out yet.
I couldn't find any with an actual released paperback that costs less than the Kindle edition, but found several where the price was the same.
Bezos said 'that he sees Kindle-the-device and Kindle-the-book-format as two separate business models
What's next? Kindle the Lunchbox? Kindle the Flamethrower?
Dammit, if they come out with those, I'll have to get a new Kindle! Or possibly even two!
My biggest complaint is that I have to turn off the Kindle for takeoff and landing.
Now that there are more phones (like the Blackberry) where you can turn the wireless off while leaving the phone power on, some airlines have revised the instruction. This means that you can often leave the Kindle on, so long as you turn off the wireless radio.
Kindle IS a library model, despite what they suggest in their advertising. You download the book to your Kindle but you can't sell it or lend it to a friend. They have access to the book to do anything they wish to it at any time. (As in the right-to-read-books-aloud fiasco recently).
They rent it to you for full paper-purchase price for as long as they choose to support the Kindle format.
Um...
(1) it's not full-price; Kindle books tend to be cheaper, especially when you compare to hardback prices.
(2) the books will continue to work for as long as they're on your reader and your reader is functioning. If you keep the wireless connection off, there's no way at all that Amazon can change what you have available to you. (And your battery will last longer also, so you typically only turn on wireless when you need the connection for something.)
98% of books and 99.9% of magazines I never re-read. I'd prefer a library model, say $1 a day to read a book, then I could stop access and paying for it. The main exception would be course-texts.
If I was paying $1/day for my Kindle books, which I read for a few minutes here and there while waiting for the rest of my life to happen, I'd end up paying $10-15 per book. Currently I pay $5-10 (for Amazon books; books from Baen.com are free), and can look up what happened in the previous book when I'm reading a subsequent novel in the same series, for example.
Also, it's currently possible to back up the book files on your device to your home computer. They'd have to disable that feature if they wanted to implement a library model, where you only pay while you're using it.
Assuming there are enough people that care about it to bother breaking it.
E-books are a non-starter for me, DRM or not, so I'm not going to bother trying to break it.
e-books didn't sound very interesting to me. I wouldn't have bought myself a Kindle in a looooong time. My mom gave it to me for $WINTER_HOLIDAY.
Now, I'm a Kindle fanatic. The device makes good use of the advantages to e-books, and mitigates the disadvantages admirably. I 3 my Kindle.