It wouldn't surprise me if the regulations were somehow structured to hinder the introduction of a marijuana equivalent of Budweiser, some kind of acceptable but middling quality product that could be sold cheaply in mass quantities.
I'd guess that there's probably not any active collusion on prices, but some kind of pricing structure that more or less represents production costs and producers and consumers accept as a price floor.
Black market prices also play a role -- you can charge a legal retail price that's probably even some marginal value above black market prices because you're adding the value of freedom from criminal liability and predictable quality, so in some ways the black market price helps set the legal market price even if the legal market price could be lower.
I would kind of expect more like cultural collusion, though, where producers see themselves establishing a "connoisseur" market like wine and focus more on varieties and quality than pushing prices lower, much like the craft brewing phenomenon.
I had orthopedic surgery last winter and I was paying like $13 for forty 5 mg oxycodone pills. It's hard to see that price getting too much lower regardless of who counts them.
Think about it -- generic oxycodone is made where? India? There's probably zero intellectual property licensing involved, labor costs are low and regulation probably at the minimum required to import it. It's geographically close to the raw materials. High health care costs in the US mean that marketing for a generic, common medicine are also near zero as pharmacy wholesalers and insurance companies probably are always scouring the market for ever-cheaper suppliers. And you're not imposing punitive taxation on it like cigarettes or liquor, either.
My guess is that the opioid supply chain (farm-to-table, if you will) probably has a bunch of places where it's just not elastic enough to meet the economies of scale required to push the price lower than that, especially if you factor in some kind of increase in demand in some kind of hypothetical retail sales environment. And once you assume some kind of looser retail sales environment you have to factor in costs for marketing, etc, which will contribute to the price, too.
And that kind of a retail environment seems pretty unlikely, probably the closest you would come is some kind of highly regulated environment where the overhead costs of regulation plus punitive taxation would keep the costs higher even if greater production was brought online.
Aspirin still costs money, even in generic store brands.
My understanding is that total synthesis of opiates is possible but remains complicated and low yield, so you still need to obtain raw opium for it to be cost effective to produce opiate derivitives like morphine. Factor in a global supply chain, FDA-certified production and the price you pay at the pharmacy for generic oxycodone is probably priced accurately.
If it was available retail I would probably expect raw material excise taxes and consumption taxes to double the current pharmacy pricing.
In theory pot should be cheap like most agricultural commodities if produced at industrial scale but AFAIK in Colorado it remains curiously expensive. Not sure if this is due to taxes, the legal-but-not-federally legal status that results in all kinds of extra transaction costs for businesses involved in its production and sale or due to the demand and associated costs with producing many varities of a premium product through "artisinal" production methods.
The problem, of course, is that they phased out incandescents by law, meaning we're stuck buying whatever else there is to buy, which means manufacturers can get away with crap because there's nothing else to buy. Hopefully market forces will still kick in and manufacturers will still have an incentive to make a more durable product at a lower price.
I'm not sure I'd pay anything more for a guarantee. Pay enough surcharge and you could have bought one or maybe even more replacements and future bulbs are also likely to be better quality and lower cost. If they have a long lifespan (say 10 years), there's some chance you may want to replace them anyway (better color temperature, lower power, maybe some new feature, eg remote control) but you'll have a lot of sunk costs into them.
CFLs are kind of like this for me. I have a lot of CFLs now that still work but are kind of poor compared to new LEDs. They were relatively expensive new and its kind of wasteful to toss them when they still work and are much lower powered than incandescents.
Why not skip the ships and just have massive barrages of guided missles? They could approach from all angles, split MIRV style and fly random patterns closer to impact. If they could coordinate their behavior it'd be like trying to stop a swarm of bees.
Well, give Ashcroft some credit. He pushed back while sick in the hospital against Bush White House cronies and refused to sign off on domestic spying when they wanted him to.
I think a lot of people who have over the years tried to use more energy efficient bulbs found that their actual lifespan was all over the map. I'm sure this has led to a lot of people being turned off and going back to incandescents.
When they decided to phase out incandescents they should have made bulb makers date stamp the bulb with a "good until" date AND mandate that any bulb burned out before this date is eligible for a free, over-the-counter replacement.
This would have greatly improved consumer confidence and forced manufacturers to be either more realistic about lifespans or not skimp on components.
What I've found odd about CFLs is that they seem to fail strangely with no discernable pattern. I've gotten some to last in extreme places (outdoors, through subzero winters) and had several fail in places you think they wouldn't, indoor lamps with good ventilation.
I've bought about a half-dozen of the Costco bulbs and so far no problems. You're right, they are bright, almost too bright!
The ones I've used the most have been replacements for the typical 65 watt recessed can lights. I have a mix of Philips Halogena 45 watt (reduced power halogen, "same" output as a 65 watt), normal incandescent and CFL. The Costco LEDs are by far brighter than any of the others, in some cases they seem almost too bright.
They all seem to have decent dimming performance, too, although I mostly use a dimmer on my bedside light. Not super linear in dimming, but acceptable for the most part.
I wonder if it moved a lot of cars from "able to repo and sell again to someone else" to "remotely shut down and then reported stolen and torched in a shitty neighborhood."
I'm surprised these things haven't been hacked. My impression is that low income communities are often better than average at car repairs out of pure necessity and I would think a whole shadow industry would spring up, either outright disabling the devices or hacking them to the point where the "controller" couldn't tell that it wasn't working correctly (ie, installed and gathering data but unable to stop the car).
Even though I'd bet that the devices themselves are essentially bought outright by the people taking on these loans (and assumed to be obsolete or just unwanted once the loan had been satisfied), there seems to be a limit as to how complex they could be or how complex their installation could be, especially considering how complex modern cars are these days. It's almost impossible to replace your damn stereo on a lot of modern cars due to its integration.
I also wonder how many could be beat, even if it was only short term, by parking in underground or lower-level parking ramps where there is no cellular or GPS signal. I'm guessing they may auto-disable if they lose GPS or comms for some period of time.
This has been the reported outcome where I live and has been our experience, too.
I found the pre-sort recycling experience exasperating because it meant either a huge collection of crap in the kitchen (paper sacks for cans, plastic, newspapers, glass) if we sorted as we went or a tedious and kind of gross sort operation on the day we hauled it out to the curb.
What it boiled down to was just not bothering with any of it most of the time, with the exception of newsprint which was too bulky to put in the trash. Now we recycle so much that the bin outside is usually close to overflowing on pickup day and the only slightly smaller garbage bin often is only a third to half full. My wife thinks they should pickup recycling every week (trash is weekly, recycling every other week).
The pre-sort advocates claim, though, that not pre-sorting results in a lower yield of usable recycling, but how much I don't know. I'm curious if the single-sort volume and participation is so much better that the yield numbers don't matter.
I'm also curious how much actually gets recycled. A client who works for a company that runs an older garbage-to-fuel processing plant claims that recycling of non-aluminum is kind of a sham, that much of it ends up in landfills anyway because of low demand.
I think one of the best tools would be leveraging some of the rule of law against them.
Maybe make patents tougher to get or have much less protection for companies whose principal business isn't in the US. Maybe make lobbying the government more difficult or in some cases, illegal, so that they aren't able to use the State Department as a proxy for problems they have with other governments. It's great to walk into a meeting with some corrupt government official with a deputy from State at your side, less so when it's a deputy from the Cayman Islands.
I'm surprised they haven't banned garbage disposals. Pretty much all our food waste with the exception of meat bones goes into the disposal.
Here in Minneapolis we used to have pre-sort recycling where you had to separate out all the recyclables by type. In the past year they went to single sort and participation soared. I'm kind of curious if anyone's studied the impact of flawed but high participation rate recycling versus more perfect but low participation rate recycling.
I think there's some disturbing parallels to the zombie/ebola outbreak scenario.
The movie "Contagion", while kind of lame, sort of came close to delivering it. 28 Days Later wasn't bad, either, but a little too zombie-like to be "realistic."
It's not hard to imagine a real pandemic where there's a disease with a very high mortality rate, a long incubation period before debilitating symptoms occur but a very short period before obvious but benign symptoms occur that make the infected easy to identify.
I could see a situation like that being a lot like a zombie outbreak -- the infected know they are infected and likely to die but have several weeks without symptoms that make them unable to cause havoc. At some point those infected would probably start to react/strike back at the uninfected as the uninfected pulled back and stopped wanting to have anything to do with them.
I've bought new releases because I always wanted a faster phone, my wife gets my year old model (making the annual upgrade marginally more justifiable) and "because I work in IT" (hey, my wife buys it..)
But this time around money is a little tighter and the only feature I really cared about was phablet-sized screen, and wouldn't you know it, Apple delivered.
I do think the smartphone as a concept is kind of running out of meaningful upgrades of any type. CPUs are plenty fast, screens are crazy high resolution and LTE speeds can often beat random wifi connections.
Someone is going to have to bite the bullet and start making dockable smartphones that can drive laptops/desktops or something really a bigger leap.
It's usually not worth it on small purchases, but with bigger ticket purchases I will often ask for a cash discount. Sometimes they counter for less than 3% and then I just lay down a credit card and say "No, thanks, I'll take the credit card points". Some are smart enough to give me the 3%, but I'm more than happy to have them eat the 3% and take the points.
There is something to be said for delays. It allows the internals to get that much better, allowing more horsepower to handle the larger screens as well as giving the human factor part of the interface time to figure out what works and doesn't.
They haven't released numbers yet, but the press reports seem to indicate that the 6 Plus demand is outstripping supply yet the chorus of people who think that even the 6 is too big let alone the 6 plus is as loud as ever. I think this is an interesting dichotomy.
I think the 6 Plus is fine -- I find more screen better than less screen, even if the increased size limits one-handed usage. I don't think there's an "ideal" size for any phone unless you toss in some usage requirements, like one-handed use or pocket storage complaints. I know some people who would use a full-size iPad as a phone if they could because none of the one-handed use or pocket issues apply to them. I think it's just a matter of personal preference.
I do think it's interesting that Tim Cook's Apple is responding to market demand instead of imposing a Jobsian design fascism. I also think that for a decent chunk of people, the 6 Plus is meant to take over some of the things they'd use a tablet for. I'm mostly happy with my iPad 3 (even with iOS8), but I think with a 6 Plus I'll reach for it less and put off upgrading it until it runs out of iOS updates.
And I think a lot of people who want both but can't swing it financially will find a 6 Plus a reasonable universal device. This is what surprised me about the 6 Plus release as I'm pretty sure it will eat into iPad Mini sales and even some full-size iPad sales.
What would be nice and I don't know if we'll ever get there for lots of reasons (technological and sales/marketing) would be a watch-sized device becoming the root device with the phone or tablet being the kind of screen/user interface, tethered to the phone for network access. That way you could pick your "phone" based on size preference, or none at all if all you wanted was bluetooth audio and phone calling.
Of course we won't arrest you for drunk driving or domestic assault Mr. FBI, just like you won't arrest us for violating civil rights or using this highfalutin' cell phone spy gizmo.
Won't someone require a verification of ID tags against actual equipment serial numbers in a case like this, at least for some statistically significant portion of the equipment list?
Otherwise, you're just inventorying ID tags which could be stuck to anything. Now if they could manage to integrate the tag into the system somehow, although you'd have to define what the system was, otherwise you kind of get into a Theseus paradox situation.
Which makes me wonder how many empty computer cases have been "inventoried" even though there was functionally no computer inside.
I like the multigenerational family setup, although it could have some annoyances (will I really have to listen to my dad's ideas on how I am supposed to mow the fucking lawn forever?).
The biggest problem is that employers don't want to give you time to manage the lives of your children, let alone elderly parents.
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No, that was not the insurance co-pay, that was the cash price. Most pharmacies I've ever used charge the cash price if it is lower than the co-pay.
It wouldn't surprise me if the regulations were somehow structured to hinder the introduction of a marijuana equivalent of Budweiser, some kind of acceptable but middling quality product that could be sold cheaply in mass quantities.
I'd guess that there's probably not any active collusion on prices, but some kind of pricing structure that more or less represents production costs and producers and consumers accept as a price floor.
Black market prices also play a role -- you can charge a legal retail price that's probably even some marginal value above black market prices because you're adding the value of freedom from criminal liability and predictable quality, so in some ways the black market price helps set the legal market price even if the legal market price could be lower.
I would kind of expect more like cultural collusion, though, where producers see themselves establishing a "connoisseur" market like wine and focus more on varieties and quality than pushing prices lower, much like the craft brewing phenomenon.
I had orthopedic surgery last winter and I was paying like $13 for forty 5 mg oxycodone pills. It's hard to see that price getting too much lower regardless of who counts them.
Think about it -- generic oxycodone is made where? India? There's probably zero intellectual property licensing involved, labor costs are low and regulation probably at the minimum required to import it. It's geographically close to the raw materials. High health care costs in the US mean that marketing for a generic, common medicine are also near zero as pharmacy wholesalers and insurance companies probably are always scouring the market for ever-cheaper suppliers. And you're not imposing punitive taxation on it like cigarettes or liquor, either.
My guess is that the opioid supply chain (farm-to-table, if you will) probably has a bunch of places where it's just not elastic enough to meet the economies of scale required to push the price lower than that, especially if you factor in some kind of increase in demand in some kind of hypothetical retail sales environment. And once you assume some kind of looser retail sales environment you have to factor in costs for marketing, etc, which will contribute to the price, too.
And that kind of a retail environment seems pretty unlikely, probably the closest you would come is some kind of highly regulated environment where the overhead costs of regulation plus punitive taxation would keep the costs higher even if greater production was brought online.
Aspirin still costs money, even in generic store brands.
My understanding is that total synthesis of opiates is possible but remains complicated and low yield, so you still need to obtain raw opium for it to be cost effective to produce opiate derivitives like morphine. Factor in a global supply chain, FDA-certified production and the price you pay at the pharmacy for generic oxycodone is probably priced accurately.
If it was available retail I would probably expect raw material excise taxes and consumption taxes to double the current pharmacy pricing.
In theory pot should be cheap like most agricultural commodities if produced at industrial scale but AFAIK in Colorado it remains curiously expensive. Not sure if this is due to taxes, the legal-but-not-federally legal status that results in all kinds of extra transaction costs for businesses involved in its production and sale or due to the demand and associated costs with producing many varities of a premium product through "artisinal" production methods.
The problem, of course, is that they phased out incandescents by law, meaning we're stuck buying whatever else there is to buy, which means manufacturers can get away with crap because there's nothing else to buy. Hopefully market forces will still kick in and manufacturers will still have an incentive to make a more durable product at a lower price.
I'm not sure I'd pay anything more for a guarantee. Pay enough surcharge and you could have bought one or maybe even more replacements and future bulbs are also likely to be better quality and lower cost. If they have a long lifespan (say 10 years), there's some chance you may want to replace them anyway (better color temperature, lower power, maybe some new feature, eg remote control) but you'll have a lot of sunk costs into them.
CFLs are kind of like this for me. I have a lot of CFLs now that still work but are kind of poor compared to new LEDs. They were relatively expensive new and its kind of wasteful to toss them when they still work and are much lower powered than incandescents.
Why not skip the ships and just have massive barrages of guided missles? They could approach from all angles, split MIRV style and fly random patterns closer to impact. If they could coordinate their behavior it'd be like trying to stop a swarm of bees.
Well, give Ashcroft some credit. He pushed back while sick in the hospital against Bush White House cronies and refused to sign off on domestic spying when they wanted him to.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
I think a lot of people who have over the years tried to use more energy efficient bulbs found that their actual lifespan was all over the map. I'm sure this has led to a lot of people being turned off and going back to incandescents.
When they decided to phase out incandescents they should have made bulb makers date stamp the bulb with a "good until" date AND mandate that any bulb burned out before this date is eligible for a free, over-the-counter replacement.
This would have greatly improved consumer confidence and forced manufacturers to be either more realistic about lifespans or not skimp on components.
What I've found odd about CFLs is that they seem to fail strangely with no discernable pattern. I've gotten some to last in extreme places (outdoors, through subzero winters) and had several fail in places you think they wouldn't, indoor lamps with good ventilation.
I've bought about a half-dozen of the Costco bulbs and so far no problems. You're right, they are bright, almost too bright!
The ones I've used the most have been replacements for the typical 65 watt recessed can lights. I have a mix of Philips Halogena 45 watt (reduced power halogen, "same" output as a 65 watt), normal incandescent and CFL. The Costco LEDs are by far brighter than any of the others, in some cases they seem almost too bright.
They all seem to have decent dimming performance, too, although I mostly use a dimmer on my bedside light. Not super linear in dimming, but acceptable for the most part.
The Forest Service probably has their own SWAT team and they're looking for some action.
I wonder if it moved a lot of cars from "able to repo and sell again to someone else" to "remotely shut down and then reported stolen and torched in a shitty neighborhood."
I'm surprised these things haven't been hacked. My impression is that low income communities are often better than average at car repairs out of pure necessity and I would think a whole shadow industry would spring up, either outright disabling the devices or hacking them to the point where the "controller" couldn't tell that it wasn't working correctly (ie, installed and gathering data but unable to stop the car).
Even though I'd bet that the devices themselves are essentially bought outright by the people taking on these loans (and assumed to be obsolete or just unwanted once the loan had been satisfied), there seems to be a limit as to how complex they could be or how complex their installation could be, especially considering how complex modern cars are these days. It's almost impossible to replace your damn stereo on a lot of modern cars due to its integration.
I also wonder how many could be beat, even if it was only short term, by parking in underground or lower-level parking ramps where there is no cellular or GPS signal. I'm guessing they may auto-disable if they lose GPS or comms for some period of time.
This has been the reported outcome where I live and has been our experience, too.
I found the pre-sort recycling experience exasperating because it meant either a huge collection of crap in the kitchen (paper sacks for cans, plastic, newspapers, glass) if we sorted as we went or a tedious and kind of gross sort operation on the day we hauled it out to the curb.
What it boiled down to was just not bothering with any of it most of the time, with the exception of newsprint which was too bulky to put in the trash. Now we recycle so much that the bin outside is usually close to overflowing on pickup day and the only slightly smaller garbage bin often is only a third to half full. My wife thinks they should pickup recycling every week (trash is weekly, recycling every other week).
The pre-sort advocates claim, though, that not pre-sorting results in a lower yield of usable recycling, but how much I don't know. I'm curious if the single-sort volume and participation is so much better that the yield numbers don't matter.
I'm also curious how much actually gets recycled. A client who works for a company that runs an older garbage-to-fuel processing plant claims that recycling of non-aluminum is kind of a sham, that much of it ends up in landfills anyway because of low demand.
I think one of the best tools would be leveraging some of the rule of law against them.
Maybe make patents tougher to get or have much less protection for companies whose principal business isn't in the US. Maybe make lobbying the government more difficult or in some cases, illegal, so that they aren't able to use the State Department as a proxy for problems they have with other governments. It's great to walk into a meeting with some corrupt government official with a deputy from State at your side, less so when it's a deputy from the Cayman Islands.
I'm surprised they haven't banned garbage disposals. Pretty much all our food waste with the exception of meat bones goes into the disposal.
Here in Minneapolis we used to have pre-sort recycling where you had to separate out all the recyclables by type. In the past year they went to single sort and participation soared. I'm kind of curious if anyone's studied the impact of flawed but high participation rate recycling versus more perfect but low participation rate recycling.
I think there's some disturbing parallels to the zombie/ebola outbreak scenario.
The movie "Contagion", while kind of lame, sort of came close to delivering it. 28 Days Later wasn't bad, either, but a little too zombie-like to be "realistic."
It's not hard to imagine a real pandemic where there's a disease with a very high mortality rate, a long incubation period before debilitating symptoms occur but a very short period before obvious but benign symptoms occur that make the infected easy to identify.
I could see a situation like that being a lot like a zombie outbreak -- the infected know they are infected and likely to die but have several weeks without symptoms that make them unable to cause havoc. At some point those infected would probably start to react/strike back at the uninfected as the uninfected pulled back and stopped wanting to have anything to do with them.
I've bought new releases because I always wanted a faster phone, my wife gets my year old model (making the annual upgrade marginally more justifiable) and "because I work in IT" (hey, my wife buys it..)
But this time around money is a little tighter and the only feature I really cared about was phablet-sized screen, and wouldn't you know it, Apple delivered.
I do think the smartphone as a concept is kind of running out of meaningful upgrades of any type. CPUs are plenty fast, screens are crazy high resolution and LTE speeds can often beat random wifi connections.
Someone is going to have to bite the bullet and start making dockable smartphones that can drive laptops/desktops or something really a bigger leap.
Usually in the novels the surrounding areas/states/countries block the roads and shoot anyone trying to escape a contaminated area.
I wonder if these kinds of deaths are included in the model.
It's usually not worth it on small purchases, but with bigger ticket purchases I will often ask for a cash discount. Sometimes they counter for less than 3% and then I just lay down a credit card and say "No, thanks, I'll take the credit card points". Some are smart enough to give me the 3%, but I'm more than happy to have them eat the 3% and take the points.
There is something to be said for delays. It allows the internals to get that much better, allowing more horsepower to handle the larger screens as well as giving the human factor part of the interface time to figure out what works and doesn't.
They haven't released numbers yet, but the press reports seem to indicate that the 6 Plus demand is outstripping supply yet the chorus of people who think that even the 6 is too big let alone the 6 plus is as loud as ever. I think this is an interesting dichotomy.
I think the 6 Plus is fine -- I find more screen better than less screen, even if the increased size limits one-handed usage. I don't think there's an "ideal" size for any phone unless you toss in some usage requirements, like one-handed use or pocket storage complaints. I know some people who would use a full-size iPad as a phone if they could because none of the one-handed use or pocket issues apply to them. I think it's just a matter of personal preference.
I do think it's interesting that Tim Cook's Apple is responding to market demand instead of imposing a Jobsian design fascism. I also think that for a decent chunk of people, the 6 Plus is meant to take over some of the things they'd use a tablet for. I'm mostly happy with my iPad 3 (even with iOS8), but I think with a 6 Plus I'll reach for it less and put off upgrading it until it runs out of iOS updates.
And I think a lot of people who want both but can't swing it financially will find a 6 Plus a reasonable universal device. This is what surprised me about the 6 Plus release as I'm pretty sure it will eat into iPad Mini sales and even some full-size iPad sales.
What would be nice and I don't know if we'll ever get there for lots of reasons (technological and sales/marketing) would be a watch-sized device becoming the root device with the phone or tablet being the kind of screen/user interface, tethered to the phone for network access. That way you could pick your "phone" based on size preference, or none at all if all you wanted was bluetooth audio and phone calling.
Of course we won't arrest you for drunk driving or domestic assault Mr. FBI, just like you won't arrest us for violating civil rights or using this highfalutin' cell phone spy gizmo.
Won't someone require a verification of ID tags against actual equipment serial numbers in a case like this, at least for some statistically significant portion of the equipment list?
Otherwise, you're just inventorying ID tags which could be stuck to anything. Now if they could manage to integrate the tag into the system somehow, although you'd have to define what the system was, otherwise you kind of get into a Theseus paradox situation.
Which makes me wonder how many empty computer cases have been "inventoried" even though there was functionally no computer inside.
I like the multigenerational family setup, although it could have some annoyances (will I really have to listen to my dad's ideas on how I am supposed to mow the fucking lawn forever?).
The biggest problem is that employers don't want to give you time to manage the lives of your children, let alone elderly parents.
Well, the sky is just a little less dense than the ocean so you need to work on your buoyancy.