You're a company with $100 million in annual revenue for whom a Fortune 50 retailer represents some significant percentage of your total product distribution and sales.
They pull some dubious move and you sue them.
They easily determine the Chinese manufacturer of your product, obtain said product with their private label on them and drop your product.
Now you're a $75 million company.
That $50k or whatever in deductions from a past year audit you just saved suddenly isn't a very good stance, outside of its moral value.
From what I could tell, the products they repped were not like major name brands owned by other Fortune 50 (or even 100, or maybe even 500) companies, so it was the epitome of unequal bargaining power.
It really was a case of either being able to dispute it effectively with documentation, eat the costs, or complain and lose a major chunk of your retail distribution.
If it had been a vendor of equal weight to the retailer, then it gets a lot harder for the retailer.
I had a client who insisted he needed to keep every email forever. I thought he was full of shit until he explained to me why.
He works as a vendor rep, helping them sell shit to a well-known Fortune 50 retailer.
As it turns out, this Fortune 50 company periodically audits years old (like sometimes 5+ years) invoices and receiving information and arbitrarily decides "we just realized that shipment you sent us in 2009 was short, but we paid the invoice in full. So we're going to subtract the overpayment -- plus interest -- from the current amount we owe you."
Part of this guy's job was the ability to get the shipping/receiving info as it happens, and the old email lets him present info that basically says "you said it was a complete shipment in 2009, so no deductions".
What I found kind of amazing was that somehow this retroactive auditing is considered acceptable. My guess is vendors are just expected to eat it or not get their product on the shelves.
In a world where lying to the government is a crime and where you can fill bound volumes with laws on "conspiracy to.." crimes, I'm not so certain that "talking about doing illegal things" is necessarily as clean, easy and legal as you might think.
While I agree it *shouldn't* be illegal to talk about doing illegal things, decades of legislation aimed at organized crime, drug dealing, terrorism and likely now, the newish focus on "self-radicalized" individuals leads me to believe the authority structure is now focused more than ever on what would have been disregarded as idle chatter.
Dirt poor, repressive government takes steps to reject technology, choosing staying dirt poor and repressive as best options for improving status of nation and people.
The real benefit in manned space travel has little to do with where you go or what you do while you're there.
It's the enormous engineering development and all the secondary uses for the things you develop trying to get there and/or stay there. It's science and engineering with a *purpose* versus the kind of haphazard, profit/monopoly motivated science and engineering we have now.
The other side benefit is creating a demand for a lot of smart people and paying them good wages but without the money-grubbing MBA layer of corporate America. You won't get rich, but you won't get nickled and dimed and then laid off at 50, either. It's like a WPA program for educated people.
There's also a socially unifying aspect to it. Space travel transcends Earthly bullshit and allows society to focus on something other than the usual squabbles.
I'm pretty sure that modem provisioning is much of it, but I have to believe that there's some configuration at the neighborhood fiber uplink point, too.
If it was all just done in modem firmware, I'd suspect *someone* would have cracked open a modem and figured out how to update the firmware in the modem to negotiate maximum speeds, sort of like the hacked ROMs you used to be able to get for the old set-top boxes that would just unscramble all channels automatically.
My guess is that it's not actually firmware (as in modem executable code) but the provisioning configuration in the modem and the fiber uplink node which all have to agree in order for it to work.
I'm just waiting for the NAACP to get involved here, since right-wing white energy companies are showing up in poor, disenfranchised, elderly rural African American communities and bullying the locals, belittling their ignorance and furthering what really amounts to corporate imperialism.
Further, their ignorance is really not something for the white power structure to mock, since their ignorance is of course a byproduct of the bigoted and prejudicial segregated educational system the white power structure forces minorities into.
I'm pretty sure the Afrikaners treated the Bantus better than these energy companies are treating these local people.
The advertisers and their media buying arms are far smarter than just paying rates based on bulk cable subscriber numbers.
I worked in advertising for 13 years and rating and demographic analytics are extremely deep for TV. The agency I worked for had a pretty successful business unit selling media campaigns to reach regional and even national audiences based solely on coordinating local broadcast and cable spots and doing it all to reach specific demographic and ratings targets.
Even magazines have to count giveaway copies differently than paid subscriptions.
Comcast should sell off their Internet service business to municipalities to operate as municipal networks and focus on being a network neutral content provider business.
Ultimately their dual-use cable network will be an albatross around their network, unable to provide competitive bandwidth and television channels on the same wire without significant and costly upgrades. They're already starting to feel some competitive pressure from other providers willing to string fiber (here in Minneapolis a local ISP has a good chunk of SW Minneapolis strung with fiber and Century Link has strung fiber, too).
On top of it, their content business as offered is shrinking, too, because they're stuck in carriage agreements that require bundling so many channels that the product cost is too high, especially relative to Netflix, Amazon, HBONOW, etc.
Unloading their cable plant networks now allows them to be sold while they're still considered highly valuable -- wait too long, and it's like selling Baby Bell analog copper networks.
They could also spin off their network management to be contract operators of the municipal networks they've just sold.
This seems like the kind of thing that would benefit some SMBs I've worked with.
I've worked with several that have awkwardly architected homegrown applications or very low-quality vertical market applications that they're highly dependent on. The net result is applications which don't translate well to cloud-hosted scenarios for various reasons, or at least not at cost levels that make any sense.
Colocation would work, but datacenters' relentless focus on being super duper redundant makes them too expensive, so the clients are stuck hosting their own systems on premise, often in facilities not much better than the proverbial mop closet.
Low cost colocation facilities that might not fit some kind of top-tier datacenter definition may not be a great choice for others, but I can see these kinds of clients going for them. It would be a reliability improvement over what they do now and probably at a cost they would afford.
I'm curious about the psychology of how that works.
I would bet more than a few men she's worked with have spent at least some time thinking "I wonder what she looks like naked" or "I wonder what she's like to have sex with".
Does she think about that? Does it undermine her confidence -- "these guys aren't taking me seriously, they're thinking about what I'm like bent over a couch".
Or increase it somehow, knowing that maybe its something she can use against them -- "these morons are so preoccupied with my sexuality, I can get what I want"?
And how does it affect her relationship with her husband? IIRC, he's no slouch, but he's also not at her level of CEO-ness. Does their relationship have kind of a clinical neutrality to it, or is there some kind of top/bottom aspect to it?
Strangely, none of these questions come to mind when I think about Meg Whitman.
Weren't a lot of the B-52 losses in Viet Nam due to dumb planning more than anything else? IIRC, the attrition rate was really high on the first couple of nights of Linebacker II because they flew the planes in predictable formations. After they handed over mission planning to theater commanders, the strategy was revised to have them fly in at random altitudes and from different directions and losses were cut dramatically. And within days after that, the NVA were out of SAMs and the USAF was running out of targets because they had so obliterated everything.
B-52 carpet bombing is an awe-inspiring application of destruction, but we don't really seem to use it very much anymore.
It would be interesting what carpet bombing an ISIS stronghold would do to ISIS morale and sense of invulnerability.
There are thousands of unsolved murders every year, and many more people that go missing.
I hear that "thousands of unsolved murders" but how many are there really? I believe there are a fair amount of murders that go unsolved, but aren't most of these like gang killings or something? The kind of deal where some guy is found shot dead in a shitty part of town -- the cops don't know who the trigger is, but through gang intelligence they have a pretty decent idea what group killed him and often a fair guess (they can't prove in court) who the trigger probably was.
Actual disappearances that are non-gang related make big news, especially kids (who wouldn't seem likely to be contract killing targets). Very rarely do non-criminals established people in a community "just disappear" and its a total mystery where they went. Maybe drifters, runaways, prostitutes, but I'm guessing anyone that wants those people dead is a serial killer or hasn't the wherewithal to pay someone in Btc for their murder.
And when basic upstanding people do get killed or just disappear, it takes the cops like 3 seconds to figure out that Mr. Mustard killed Mrs. Plum in the Library with a Candlestick over the inheritance or some other obvious dispute.
About the only time I ever hear about contract killings is when people get arrested trying to hire somebody to commit murder on their behalf. It never works, they always seem to get caught. As they say, good help is hard to find.
Have there been any actual killings attributed to a murder for hire website? It sounds like a scam.
I have a self-winding Tag I got for my 40th birthday. What I like about is never having to worry about replacing a battery. But on the other hand, I have a Seiko solar chronograph that doesn't need a battery replacement, either, or at least likely not in my lifetime.
Not sure it will be an heirloom, but when I was at a Tag dealer to get the bracelet replaced I noticed that none of the displayed Tags had my movement -- day and date chronograph, so maybe it will be marginally more valuable due to a less common movement (or maybe it was discontinued because its a flawed movement..).
The problem (at least with concerts) is they'd be better off being profit-maximizing capitalists.
Sure, they say they want to keep tickets affordable for fans, but they end up with an inflexible pricing model that keeps fans from being able to buy tickets because resellers flood ticketing systems with bots and then resell the tickets for prices high enough to make their own profit.
If they used another pricing model, artists would be able to deter the arbitrage on face price versus market price, making more profit for the artist and mostly eliminating the profit from resellers by making the tickets unprofitable to resell in bulk.
I had a serious accident that cost me half of my left ring finger and required fusing the distal joint on my middle finger. I was prescribed 40 mg oxycodone per day but after about two weeks it was just too much -- I was listless and in a fog, so I just dialed back the dosage to the point where the pain was manageable and I was much less foggy. I ended up on a daily dose of about 5 mg for three months and when they were gone, I never felt the need to take more.
I don't know how typical my experience is, but I honestly expected that when the meds ran out I would feel some kind of withdrawal symptoms and/or some compulsion to keep taking them, but I mostly just forgot about them. My best guess is that the half life of oxycodone is short enough and the once a day dosage I was taking was low enough that I probably couldn't have developed an additction because I wasn't taking enough or with enough frequency to develop a physical addiction.
I think I've also read that the psychoactive tolerance to opiates builds much faster than the angelsic response -- escalating dosages is a problem because people get less high and believe the pain relief is less, too, so they take higher dosages because they don't believe they're getting the right response. In fact, the analgesic response is still good, they just don't think so because they've gotten tolerant to the psychoactive response.
I would think that the "opate problem" would be a lot less if we'd develop sound strategies on how to take them and educate patients versus just sending them away with pills. Personally I think that given how many people take opiates, the problems are way smaller than the hype would suggest (and more than a few people have a stake in the hype).
I think the standard economics argument has always been that tickets are priced too low. People are clearly able and willing to pay much more than the face value for tickets.
I would think that a reverse auction could implemented with a demand-driven pricing curve, starting out expensive and then dropping the price automatically as demand dropped.
The question is -- why hasn't this been widely implemented already? Given that there are actual businesses that exist solely to resell tickets and that the venues/teams/artists don't collect any of that money, you would think somebody would have implemented this already.
Although I have read the expected conspiracy theories that the artists/venues/teams actually collude with third party resellers by withholding tickets from general purchase to drive up demand and then slowly sell them to brokers to capitalize on demand. Not sure how true this is, but it wouldn't surprise me if concert tickets sometimes worked this way.
VMware did some kind of pricing change a few years ago (which I think they may have later modified) when they figured out that people were beating the system by loading up multicore machines with maxed out memory and cutting their licensing costs.
My guess this is a similar gambit by Microsoft. Use whatever statistics they can get on server sales, plus their own sales information and work out an equation that allows them to maximize revenue.
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You're a company with $100 million in annual revenue for whom a Fortune 50 retailer represents some significant percentage of your total product distribution and sales.
They pull some dubious move and you sue them.
They easily determine the Chinese manufacturer of your product, obtain said product with their private label on them and drop your product.
Now you're a $75 million company.
That $50k or whatever in deductions from a past year audit you just saved suddenly isn't a very good stance, outside of its moral value.
I hired a couple of ex-Mossad freelancers and suddenly that company quit calling anyone.
I think that was the risk.
From what I could tell, the products they repped were not like major name brands owned by other Fortune 50 (or even 100, or maybe even 500) companies, so it was the epitome of unequal bargaining power.
It really was a case of either being able to dispute it effectively with documentation, eat the costs, or complain and lose a major chunk of your retail distribution.
If it had been a vendor of equal weight to the retailer, then it gets a lot harder for the retailer.
I had a client who insisted he needed to keep every email forever. I thought he was full of shit until he explained to me why.
He works as a vendor rep, helping them sell shit to a well-known Fortune 50 retailer.
As it turns out, this Fortune 50 company periodically audits years old (like sometimes 5+ years) invoices and receiving information and arbitrarily decides "we just realized that shipment you sent us in 2009 was short, but we paid the invoice in full. So we're going to subtract the overpayment -- plus interest -- from the current amount we owe you."
Part of this guy's job was the ability to get the shipping/receiving info as it happens, and the old email lets him present info that basically says "you said it was a complete shipment in 2009, so no deductions".
What I found kind of amazing was that somehow this retroactive auditing is considered acceptable. My guess is vendors are just expected to eat it or not get their product on the shelves.
In a world where lying to the government is a crime and where you can fill bound volumes with laws on "conspiracy to.." crimes, I'm not so certain that "talking about doing illegal things" is necessarily as clean, easy and legal as you might think.
While I agree it *shouldn't* be illegal to talk about doing illegal things, decades of legislation aimed at organized crime, drug dealing, terrorism and likely now, the newish focus on "self-radicalized" individuals leads me to believe the authority structure is now focused more than ever on what would have been disregarded as idle chatter.
Dirt poor, repressive government takes steps to reject technology, choosing staying dirt poor and repressive as best options for improving status of nation and people.
The real benefit in manned space travel has little to do with where you go or what you do while you're there.
It's the enormous engineering development and all the secondary uses for the things you develop trying to get there and/or stay there. It's science and engineering with a *purpose* versus the kind of haphazard, profit/monopoly motivated science and engineering we have now.
The other side benefit is creating a demand for a lot of smart people and paying them good wages but without the money-grubbing MBA layer of corporate America. You won't get rich, but you won't get nickled and dimed and then laid off at 50, either. It's like a WPA program for educated people.
There's also a socially unifying aspect to it. Space travel transcends Earthly bullshit and allows society to focus on something other than the usual squabbles.
I'm pretty sure that modem provisioning is much of it, but I have to believe that there's some configuration at the neighborhood fiber uplink point, too.
If it was all just done in modem firmware, I'd suspect *someone* would have cracked open a modem and figured out how to update the firmware in the modem to negotiate maximum speeds, sort of like the hacked ROMs you used to be able to get for the old set-top boxes that would just unscramble all channels automatically.
My guess is that it's not actually firmware (as in modem executable code) but the provisioning configuration in the modem and the fiber uplink node which all have to agree in order for it to work.
Is the evidence good enough for anyone to sue for damages?
I'm just waiting for the NAACP to get involved here, since right-wing white energy companies are showing up in poor, disenfranchised, elderly rural African American communities and bullying the locals, belittling their ignorance and furthering what really amounts to corporate imperialism.
Further, their ignorance is really not something for the white power structure to mock, since their ignorance is of course a byproduct of the bigoted and prejudicial segregated educational system the white power structure forces minorities into.
I'm pretty sure the Afrikaners treated the Bantus better than these energy companies are treating these local people.
To complete the picture, can you tell us which MVNO you use for $2.99 unlimited talk, text and data on your smartphone?
But it's not just about studying Mars or any other planet for just scientific reasons. That's myopic.
Space travel is an end unto itself.
Why is the loss of life in going into space always seen as such a big, scary risk with ruinous repercussions?
You want safe? Stay home and play in the back yard.
Pretty much any human exploration endeavor worth a damn risks life and limb -- exploring the poles, sailing to "the new world", etc.
Limiting space travel because somebody might die? That's lame.
The advertisers and their media buying arms are far smarter than just paying rates based on bulk cable subscriber numbers.
I worked in advertising for 13 years and rating and demographic analytics are extremely deep for TV. The agency I worked for had a pretty successful business unit selling media campaigns to reach regional and even national audiences based solely on coordinating local broadcast and cable spots and doing it all to reach specific demographic and ratings targets.
Even magazines have to count giveaway copies differently than paid subscriptions.
Comcast should sell off their Internet service business to municipalities to operate as municipal networks and focus on being a network neutral content provider business.
Ultimately their dual-use cable network will be an albatross around their network, unable to provide competitive bandwidth and television channels on the same wire without significant and costly upgrades. They're already starting to feel some competitive pressure from other providers willing to string fiber (here in Minneapolis a local ISP has a good chunk of SW Minneapolis strung with fiber and Century Link has strung fiber, too).
On top of it, their content business as offered is shrinking, too, because they're stuck in carriage agreements that require bundling so many channels that the product cost is too high, especially relative to Netflix, Amazon, HBONOW, etc.
Unloading their cable plant networks now allows them to be sold while they're still considered highly valuable -- wait too long, and it's like selling Baby Bell analog copper networks.
They could also spin off their network management to be contract operators of the municipal networks they've just sold.
This seems like the kind of thing that would benefit some SMBs I've worked with.
I've worked with several that have awkwardly architected homegrown applications or very low-quality vertical market applications that they're highly dependent on. The net result is applications which don't translate well to cloud-hosted scenarios for various reasons, or at least not at cost levels that make any sense.
Colocation would work, but datacenters' relentless focus on being super duper redundant makes them too expensive, so the clients are stuck hosting their own systems on premise, often in facilities not much better than the proverbial mop closet.
Low cost colocation facilities that might not fit some kind of top-tier datacenter definition may not be a great choice for others, but I can see these kinds of clients going for them. It would be a reliability improvement over what they do now and probably at a cost they would afford.
I think she is quite attractive.
I'm curious about the psychology of how that works.
I would bet more than a few men she's worked with have spent at least some time thinking "I wonder what she looks like naked" or "I wonder what she's like to have sex with".
Does she think about that? Does it undermine her confidence -- "these guys aren't taking me seriously, they're thinking about what I'm like bent over a couch".
Or increase it somehow, knowing that maybe its something she can use against them -- "these morons are so preoccupied with my sexuality, I can get what I want"?
And how does it affect her relationship with her husband? IIRC, he's no slouch, but he's also not at her level of CEO-ness. Does their relationship have kind of a clinical neutrality to it, or is there some kind of top/bottom aspect to it?
Strangely, none of these questions come to mind when I think about Meg Whitman.
Weren't a lot of the B-52 losses in Viet Nam due to dumb planning more than anything else? IIRC, the attrition rate was really high on the first couple of nights of Linebacker II because they flew the planes in predictable formations. After they handed over mission planning to theater commanders, the strategy was revised to have them fly in at random altitudes and from different directions and losses were cut dramatically. And within days after that, the NVA were out of SAMs and the USAF was running out of targets because they had so obliterated everything.
B-52 carpet bombing is an awe-inspiring application of destruction, but we don't really seem to use it very much anymore.
It would be interesting what carpet bombing an ISIS stronghold would do to ISIS morale and sense of invulnerability.
There are thousands of unsolved murders every year, and many more people that go missing.
I hear that "thousands of unsolved murders" but how many are there really? I believe there are a fair amount of murders that go unsolved, but aren't most of these like gang killings or something? The kind of deal where some guy is found shot dead in a shitty part of town -- the cops don't know who the trigger is, but through gang intelligence they have a pretty decent idea what group killed him and often a fair guess (they can't prove in court) who the trigger probably was.
Actual disappearances that are non-gang related make big news, especially kids (who wouldn't seem likely to be contract killing targets). Very rarely do non-criminals established people in a community "just disappear" and its a total mystery where they went. Maybe drifters, runaways, prostitutes, but I'm guessing anyone that wants those people dead is a serial killer or hasn't the wherewithal to pay someone in Btc for their murder.
And when basic upstanding people do get killed or just disappear, it takes the cops like 3 seconds to figure out that Mr. Mustard killed Mrs. Plum in the Library with a Candlestick over the inheritance or some other obvious dispute.
About the only time I ever hear about contract killings is when people get arrested trying to hire somebody to commit murder on their behalf. It never works, they always seem to get caught. As they say, good help is hard to find.
Have there been any actual killings attributed to a murder for hire website? It sounds like a scam.
I have a self-winding Tag I got for my 40th birthday. What I like about is never having to worry about replacing a battery. But on the other hand, I have a Seiko solar chronograph that doesn't need a battery replacement, either, or at least likely not in my lifetime.
Not sure it will be an heirloom, but when I was at a Tag dealer to get the bracelet replaced I noticed that none of the displayed Tags had my movement -- day and date chronograph, so maybe it will be marginally more valuable due to a less common movement (or maybe it was discontinued because its a flawed movement..).
The problem (at least with concerts) is they'd be better off being profit-maximizing capitalists.
Sure, they say they want to keep tickets affordable for fans, but they end up with an inflexible pricing model that keeps fans from being able to buy tickets because resellers flood ticketing systems with bots and then resell the tickets for prices high enough to make their own profit.
If they used another pricing model, artists would be able to deter the arbitrage on face price versus market price, making more profit for the artist and mostly eliminating the profit from resellers by making the tickets unprofitable to resell in bulk.
I had a serious accident that cost me half of my left ring finger and required fusing the distal joint on my middle finger. I was prescribed 40 mg oxycodone per day but after about two weeks it was just too much -- I was listless and in a fog, so I just dialed back the dosage to the point where the pain was manageable and I was much less foggy. I ended up on a daily dose of about 5 mg for three months and when they were gone, I never felt the need to take more.
I don't know how typical my experience is, but I honestly expected that when the meds ran out I would feel some kind of withdrawal symptoms and/or some compulsion to keep taking them, but I mostly just forgot about them. My best guess is that the half life of oxycodone is short enough and the once a day dosage I was taking was low enough that I probably couldn't have developed an additction because I wasn't taking enough or with enough frequency to develop a physical addiction.
I think I've also read that the psychoactive tolerance to opiates builds much faster than the angelsic response -- escalating dosages is a problem because people get less high and believe the pain relief is less, too, so they take higher dosages because they don't believe they're getting the right response. In fact, the analgesic response is still good, they just don't think so because they've gotten tolerant to the psychoactive response.
I would think that the "opate problem" would be a lot less if we'd develop sound strategies on how to take them and educate patients versus just sending them away with pills. Personally I think that given how many people take opiates, the problems are way smaller than the hype would suggest (and more than a few people have a stake in the hype).
I think the standard economics argument has always been that tickets are priced too low. People are clearly able and willing to pay much more than the face value for tickets.
I would think that a reverse auction could implemented with a demand-driven pricing curve, starting out expensive and then dropping the price automatically as demand dropped.
The question is -- why hasn't this been widely implemented already? Given that there are actual businesses that exist solely to resell tickets and that the venues/teams/artists don't collect any of that money, you would think somebody would have implemented this already.
Although I have read the expected conspiracy theories that the artists/venues/teams actually collude with third party resellers by withholding tickets from general purchase to drive up demand and then slowly sell them to brokers to capitalize on demand. Not sure how true this is, but it wouldn't surprise me if concert tickets sometimes worked this way.
VMware did some kind of pricing change a few years ago (which I think they may have later modified) when they figured out that people were beating the system by loading up multicore machines with maxed out memory and cutting their licensing costs.
My guess this is a similar gambit by Microsoft. Use whatever statistics they can get on server sales, plus their own sales information and work out an equation that allows them to maximize revenue.