People always want more police and that's in large part because of the endless focus of the news on petty crime stories
Burglarizing my car or my home or other theft crimes may be "petty" in some legal sense but they aren't petty from a lifestyle perspective. I made a lot of sacrifices of time and energy to get the job to make the money to buy the stuff, and if someone comes around and steals it because there's no police presence and the police do nothing but give you a case number for insurance it's basically a complete insult and a repudiation of the social contract.
So yes, I want more police, but I want more police protecting me and my property. I don't want them beating the shit out of minorities in their own neighborhoods, I don't want them chasing around drug users and I don't want them engaging in mass spying.
If they won't look out for my interests, then they should get out of the way and let me deal with the people breaking into my house.
I work with a lot of people younger than me (like 10-20 years younger) and there are cultures that get created in an office which can be hard to relate to for older people. It's kind of a generation gap thing.
I think it's possible for older workers to kind of wind up the odd man out socially -- not because they're bad workers, lazy, unskilled, bitter, etc, but because they don't share the same generational influences and life-stage interests. And this itself can lead to performance integration problems if the company is weakly led and managed and workflow is really organic and not process driven.
What I've found interesting is watching it change over time, as about half the younger group have started having kids and living a lifestyle more similar to mine. The subgroup with kids actually starts interacting less with the childless guys.
Eventually you get tired of it. Yet another programming language, when you've used 20, and played with 20 more? It gets tiresome, and really, I haven't seen anything really innovative for ages, it's all just young folk reinventing old ideas.
I'm 50 and have done IT all my life. I think up to a point, learning anything new is generally useful even if you never use the specific technology because you're absorbing new concepts. I think of some of the stuff I learned that was never really applied in any structured way and what I got out of it wasn't the details but the larger picture it exposed me to.
That being said, I think most of IT is a finite space with a lot of repetition. Once you've been exposed to enough to see the general picture, you start to see IT learning not as a conceptual exercise -- you already *know* the concepts -- but as a detail exercise, what highly specific details of this particular piece of technology need to operate well? The latter is a lot less interesting, IMHO, and a byproduct of experience and rote memorization, which can be really tedious, especially if it requires "certification".
After a couple of iterations of this without any actual use where I worked, I turned it around on my employer: "What new skills can I invest in that will benefit the business?" This has been great because it forces management to actually manage and chart a business course and less inclined to ask for things that aren't valuable to the business. It's kind of a put up or shut up kind of situation. But it works both ways, if they ask for something and actually invest in it (training/time/resources) you have to actually deliver on it. Yet at the same time, they've stopped suggesting worthless "educational" endeavors because I always make sure they're discussed in the context of value to the business.
The payback is really a synergistic (sorry, I had to use that word) situation, though. If they do decide it's important to the business and invest in it, they get something valuable AND you become more valuable to the business.
I'm guessing car ownership in Denmark is also lower than most other countries and that most people with cars own smaller and cheaper models (for all kinds of reasons, including the tax on new vehicles, fuel efficiency, etc).
So expensive new cars are probably seen as a status symbol and it's easy to get behind a tax on what amount to toys for rich people.
I'd be curious to know what loopholes there are in the law, such as buying a used car in Germany or elsewhere and bringing it into Denmark or importing cars as "parts" and then applying some simple repair to them to make them usable again.
My sense is that maybe part of the problem is that the perceived value of the function when performed via automation declines.
In the case of planning a meeting, if all you have to do is use the "suggest a time" function in Outlook and send invites it appears to be a not very valuable function unless you compare it to the 1 hour of human labor required to make calls, check calendars and manually determine a common time all attendees are available.
For some outputs like email, they may actually be individually less valuable, especially when compared to a memo typed on letterhead which has been spell checked, corrected for grammar, and validated for its content (in terms of policy, etc, and now being an official communication, possibly even setting policy). Emails in comparison are slapdash, impulsive and it may take a string of them to achieve the content value that an original typed correspondence had.
When it comes time to pay for maintenance on the automated system, the amount you pay for the maintenance appears too high because you now value the functionality far less because it seems so much less valuable.
I think they also suffer from what I call "efficiency savings hoarding".
If you have a process that requires 10 labor inputs to achieve and you buy a machine that reduces it to 5 labor inputs, your ongoing savings isn't really 5 labor inputs. You have to spend some of that labor savings in keeping the machine maintained and operational and investing in its replacement when it reaches end of life.
When I started working for a company in 1993, they had some 40 secretarial positions whose workload was about half spent doing correspondence and scheduling meetings. In 2001, thanks to widely deployed email/calendaring system they had cut about 30 of those positions because internal meetings could be automatically planned via email and the bulk of internal correspondence shifted from paper memos to email.
Yet when it came time to expand/replace the email system due to growth it was seen as a "cost". I actually got the project approved by arguing that the cost of the replacement was actually being paid for by the savings realized from fewer administrative staff -- they still had ample savings (the project was less than 1 administrative FTE). But the efficiency gain from the project wasn't free on an ongoing basis.
Too many business gain efficiencies and savings from automation, but assume these are permanent gains whose maintenance incurs no costs.
I have an existing client with a large, internally developed kind of ERP system that supports a couple of thousand remote workers. The system is aging out (software versions, resources, performance issues all identified by their own internal developer) and of course the owner is balking at investing in it without realizing that the "free money" from reduced in-office staff needed to process faxes, etc, needs to be applied to maintaining the system to keep achieving the savings.
Collecting garbage in many places is already extremely automated. You have a driver who almost never gets out of a truck who uses hydraulics to grab, raise and dump the can into the back of the truck. As automation increases these kinds of jobs into something more like "monitoring" than "doing", they become less demanding and more likely to find people willing to do them.
I also call into question your definition of "socially redeeming" production. Why is decorative arts "unproductive" but working in a factory making sugary cereal or filling out TPS reports "useful production"? I think there's a strong argument to be made that a lot our so-called productive economy doesn't actually produce what people want, and that instead we stimulate artificial demand for marginal or useless products. A lot of "productive output" is merely the administration in service of the business of empty consumerism.
If UBI were to re-orient human society towards more leisure time, I would expect than an economic shift would occur in production towards goods and services in support of leisure activities. In a world where people have more time for water sports, why is it worse for the economy if it shifts from making office furniture to making water sports equipment?
It's still culturally at the center of a global empire, even though the actual empire is long gone.
I also think London has a transcendent quality about it, being in Europe, but not of Europe, that has an appeal above and beyond any specific trade bloc or treaty. Especially for Americans and other English centric groups.
All the hard-core liberal mayors are into this alternative Federal policy stuff, where the Feds do (or don't do) X and the mayors and city councils decide to do contrary policy Y. I think the whole sanctuary city movement started a lot of it and Trump's election has certainly accelerated it.
Some of the time it's sensible, regional policy making the Feds shouldn't have been doing anyway or that cities or states should be doing.
But an awful lot of it seems like empty grandstanding on areas like diplomacy, foreign relations (including immigration) and economic policies that are just way out of scale, especially for a municipal government. I remember in the 1980s when cities would declare themselves a nuclear free zone, as if deciding to be a nuclear power was a municipal public safety question or maybe that they had local autonomy from the military.
It's mostly preposterous and the economic stuff especially seems like it is toothless if you can cross into a suburb and avoid the requirements. California and maybe Texas have the unique combinations of geography and size to dictate some of these things and make it work, Minneapolis, not so much.
I want streets without holes, garbage pickup, potable water and public safety. Master those, and maybe I'll be receptive to more grandiose policy ambitions. But usually the more grandiose the policy, the more likely they're failing at the basic tasks.
The FBI will release a statement indicating that "evidence suggests" a DDoS attack but with no actionable evidence indicating who was behind it or what the motives were and that no further investigation is possible.
Really, nothing will change except that these Senators will be have talking points for a press conference or their next speech to voters about their affirmative stance on network neutrality.
I think it's about the licensing revenue for MS. A dockable phone that becomes a PC means that some non-trivial number of people who buy phones would stop buying PCs with Windows, costing MS a Windows license sale and shrinking the installed base.
The problem is, if they don't do it someone else will, and they may not even get the phone sale let alone another desktop license.
I think they would gain a lot of traction with that kind of dock your phone-get a computer idea, the problem is their finance people hate it because a big chunk of people would decide they don't need a desktop or laptop anymore and all those windows (and some office) licenses would disappear.
Microsoft is really in an existential trap where the actual innovation they could provide that would be valuable would apparently cost them money.
Personally, I don't think that many people would abandon their desktops or laptops really, but I'm sure there are numbers out there that MS scared of doing it.
Maybe the hotel figures if someone is going direct, they're not an aggressive shopper and will be more likely to pay whatever they ask.
If they have to give a discount, best to give the discount to the middle man earning a commission. It's a percentage of the booking anyway, so the less you charge, the less commission you pay.
At that point as well, it's better to let the room at a discount than it is to leave it empty. At least on site there's a chance you will get money out of them in the restaurant or from added services.
Really, the whole printer industry is in a prisoners' dilemma where they have to keep the printer prices down in order to sell printers and then they make it up on consumables.
They dug their own grave. They assumed they could chip/DRM toner/ink cartridges, give away the imaging device way below cost and then make land-rush profits with annuity-like cash flows with overpriced cartridges they controlled.
The industry should have just played chicken with the first manufacturer to do this, realizing that the market would punish this model in the long run, just as it is now going to punish all of them, with refills and remans sucking the profit out of the entire enterprise.
I shed no tears for the imaging industry -- they got greedy and thought they could give away a valuable component only to be paid back in spades on the consumables. Now they will all face the crunch of realigning their pricing model.
So why is it a problem, especially on phablets like the iPhone Plus line or larger Galaxies? These devices originally were much smaller in the earlier incarnations and had headphone jacks. Not thinner, but definitely smaller vertically and horizontally.
I'm struggling to understand what the huge engineering challenge is if they've had these jacks all along and the phones were overall lower internal volume.
What functionality are we losing by having a headphone jack? I'm still failing to see this as the colossal engineering limitation that has cost functionality that isn't being driven largely by cosmetic design concepts.
You're assuming there isn't a good reason. Most consumers assume that device designers can just stick anything they want into a device, any place they like, but that's not remotely true. The headphone jack has been causing problems with the placement of components, especially antennas, for years now because the thing is enormous, cutting deep into the device, and has to be on the edge and at one end. The USB port is a similar problem, it's less than half as deep and it serves many purposes -- including audio.
Engineering is often about design constraints or goals that make integrating the necessary components for the desired functionality complicated.
In this case, I'd wager the jack isn't the problem in and of itself, it's the design constraint of an artificially imposed cosmetic requirement that the device be thinner than the last model.
My question is why is the thinness of the device more important than the functionality of the headphone jack? I don't know anybody who says "my phone is too thick, make it thinner" -- in fact, a huge number of people purposefully make their phones thicker by adding cases to them, whether for protection or to make it ergonomically more useful.
I'm sure the headphone jack is a design problem if you demand the phone be shrunk to some small dimensions, but it seems like an artificially imposed design criteria.
I am not an economist and most of my "education" in economics consists of news magazines and the EconTalk podcast.
But whenever I talk to someone online or in person who has an economics background, we often get around to the topic of whether economics has a zero-sum component to it and nearly all of them say it does not.
I can always think of lots of examples in the short run where it is zero sum -- a firm has a finite revenue in a given period, thus profit is a finite value, and how that profit is distributed is zero sum -- if more is paid to the CEO, that means less is available to be paid to everyone else.
This seems like another example of zero sum outcomes -- a finite amount of capital is allocated for labor costs, and more spent in the US means less spent on Indian outsourcing firms.
You're on the right track, except I disagree with the flat tax concept.
I'd prefer to see a progressive tax structure that increased taxes as earned income increased so that the relative value of even small amounts of work wasn't drastically eroded by taxes.
I think in a UBI system you need to preserve a positive, reward-based incentive for working. I think it's too easy to underestimate the worker's non-monetary working costs -- time, effort, and so on. If taxes escalate too quickly, the return on effort will be seen as too little and will discourage workforce participation, or at least workforce participation in above-board taxable income.
I also think a progressive system with a lower taxation threshold ends up having the side effect of improving working conditions for low-paid work as it removes the coercive power of poverty that largely allows employers to treat low-paid workers poorly. My guess is that this is also something that would improve even higher paid middle class workers who would ordinarily be "taxed out" of UBI benefits; even with a total loss of earned income they would have UBI to fall back on and survive extended job searches.
A higher tax threshold might even change the entire nature of work, by creating what we were promised nearly a century ago -- more leisure time through enabling UBI + part time work as sufficient for a "comfortable" type of middle class lifestyle, which in turn could provide a broader level of workforce participation.
EconTalk is a great podcast, even if you disagree with most of what Roberts and his guests have to say. Although I would argue that Roberts is intelligent enough and reasonable enough that only a doctrinaire ideologue could disagree with a significant majority of what gets said.
My problem with private charity vs. government welfare is that private charity seems more prone to the moral hazard of putting its agenda ahead of its charity -- converting recipients to its faith, restricting its charity to organizational members or or other similar organizational goals. Charity becomes a kind of service delivered for the price of loyalty or ideological alignment.
As for the politics of division, I think we're just seeing side effects of an increasing population combined with an increasingly centralized power structure. There's space, physically and politically for divergent views. My guess is that on of the design goals of the United States as a federation was to limit the problems of divergent views by giving individual states enough political power that divergence could be diluted among the many states.
With the long term growth in Federal power and the decline in individual State power, there is less room for divergent views to translate into actual political outcomes. When combined with a concurrent growth in population and ideological diversity, the overall outcome is conflict that has no outlet.
Now you're getting to the heart of rational choice theory, that people are making a willing choice to sacrifice their privacy and attention for the services they get.
I don't think that some kind of privacy legislation that sucked some of the profit out of computing services would price people out of the Internet. Before the era of "free" Internet services, people paid for operating systems that didn't have telemetry, got email accounts without content-scanning with their $35/month ISP account and got nearly the same social/information value from USENET, FAQs, and the more rudimentary services available then.
I think in a lot of ways, people are paying far more for Internet access now than they did 20 years ago. Where before you shouldered the burden of a PC, you still largely do that now. The hardware is cheaper overall, but people have more devices and probably pay more for a laptop/desktop + broadband and smartphone + data service, not to mention tablets, streaming services, etc.
Removing the "free" out of telemetry-laden products and services might make them more expensive, but it wouldn't cut anyone off. I think it would have the side benefit of the services needing to be responsive to users -- less perpetual beta and arbitrary end of life of services and the general manipulation of the service for the provider's benefit.
The larger problem of rational choice theory is also that you start to ask why people can't make a lot of rational economic trade-offs. Why can't an 18 year old choose to sell themselves into indentured servitude for 5 years in exchange for college tuition? Why can't I buy my way out of the military draft if there's some guy willing to go fight in my place if I pay him? It excludes the notion that these choices may actually be economically coercive at some level and not free choices.
Storage access is mediated on so many levels that even vendors have a hard time identifying whether even relatively simple performance problems are the result of an application, the application subsystem (databases), the operating system, the network system, the storage system, the storage fabric or the computer system.
I don't see how it would ever be possible to exploit this, especially when the flash vendors are aware of it and the closest software levels of the hardware are deliberately written in ways to inhibit it.
In a lot of ways, this almost begs for a kind of public health type of response.
In years past, most people would have willfully chosen poisonous product X for its low cost and rejected more expensive non-poisonous product Y. Or they would have rejected tax increases for improved sanitation or water filtration for the same reasons. Or they chose the patent medicine with an opioid versus the one with just sugar.
I don't know that we ever really made the masses more intelligent than they are now about these issues, on the whole. Everybody "knows" that some common medicine with opioids in it is risky, but I'd bet that even with this knowledge if you put tincture of laudanum in a cough and cold remedy it would become a best seller because it made people feel better.*
The best you could do was try to sway the more intelligent members about the risks and hope that would be enough to influence law makers to change the rules in ways that prohibited the bad ingredients, fixed the sewage system or removed the addictive drugs.
The larger problem here is constructing a public health type of argument that intelligent, non-technical people will understand and accept, in the hopes that these key influencers will be able to pass laws that force uniform standards for privacy or data collection. You'll never change the masses individual preference for free/cheap, you have to change the law to eliminate Microsoft, Apple or Google's ability to use this preference to exploit people for their own gain.
(* There's a whole other side argument to be made as to whether this really would lead to widespread addiction among the population as a whole, or whether we're really just preventing an acute crisis among a small subset of the population. One of the risks of public health is over reach and excess risk aversion, imposing restrictions and costs to eliminate increasingly smaller threats.)
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People always want more police and that's in large part because of the endless focus of the news on petty crime stories
Burglarizing my car or my home or other theft crimes may be "petty" in some legal sense but they aren't petty from a lifestyle perspective. I made a lot of sacrifices of time and energy to get the job to make the money to buy the stuff, and if someone comes around and steals it because there's no police presence and the police do nothing but give you a case number for insurance it's basically a complete insult and a repudiation of the social contract.
So yes, I want more police, but I want more police protecting me and my property. I don't want them beating the shit out of minorities in their own neighborhoods, I don't want them chasing around drug users and I don't want them engaging in mass spying.
If they won't look out for my interests, then they should get out of the way and let me deal with the people breaking into my house.
I work with a lot of people younger than me (like 10-20 years younger) and there are cultures that get created in an office which can be hard to relate to for older people. It's kind of a generation gap thing.
I think it's possible for older workers to kind of wind up the odd man out socially -- not because they're bad workers, lazy, unskilled, bitter, etc, but because they don't share the same generational influences and life-stage interests. And this itself can lead to performance integration problems if the company is weakly led and managed and workflow is really organic and not process driven.
What I've found interesting is watching it change over time, as about half the younger group have started having kids and living a lifestyle more similar to mine. The subgroup with kids actually starts interacting less with the childless guys.
Eventually you get tired of it. Yet another programming language, when you've used 20, and played with 20 more? It gets tiresome, and really, I haven't seen anything really innovative for ages, it's all just young folk reinventing old ideas.
I'm 50 and have done IT all my life. I think up to a point, learning anything new is generally useful even if you never use the specific technology because you're absorbing new concepts. I think of some of the stuff I learned that was never really applied in any structured way and what I got out of it wasn't the details but the larger picture it exposed me to.
That being said, I think most of IT is a finite space with a lot of repetition. Once you've been exposed to enough to see the general picture, you start to see IT learning not as a conceptual exercise -- you already *know* the concepts -- but as a detail exercise, what highly specific details of this particular piece of technology need to operate well? The latter is a lot less interesting, IMHO, and a byproduct of experience and rote memorization, which can be really tedious, especially if it requires "certification".
After a couple of iterations of this without any actual use where I worked, I turned it around on my employer: "What new skills can I invest in that will benefit the business?" This has been great because it forces management to actually manage and chart a business course and less inclined to ask for things that aren't valuable to the business. It's kind of a put up or shut up kind of situation. But it works both ways, if they ask for something and actually invest in it (training/time/resources) you have to actually deliver on it. Yet at the same time, they've stopped suggesting worthless "educational" endeavors because I always make sure they're discussed in the context of value to the business.
The payback is really a synergistic (sorry, I had to use that word) situation, though. If they do decide it's important to the business and invest in it, they get something valuable AND you become more valuable to the business.
I'm guessing car ownership in Denmark is also lower than most other countries and that most people with cars own smaller and cheaper models (for all kinds of reasons, including the tax on new vehicles, fuel efficiency, etc).
So expensive new cars are probably seen as a status symbol and it's easy to get behind a tax on what amount to toys for rich people.
I'd be curious to know what loopholes there are in the law, such as buying a used car in Germany or elsewhere and bringing it into Denmark or importing cars as "parts" and then applying some simple repair to them to make them usable again.
My sense is that maybe part of the problem is that the perceived value of the function when performed via automation declines.
In the case of planning a meeting, if all you have to do is use the "suggest a time" function in Outlook and send invites it appears to be a not very valuable function unless you compare it to the 1 hour of human labor required to make calls, check calendars and manually determine a common time all attendees are available.
For some outputs like email, they may actually be individually less valuable, especially when compared to a memo typed on letterhead which has been spell checked, corrected for grammar, and validated for its content (in terms of policy, etc, and now being an official communication, possibly even setting policy). Emails in comparison are slapdash, impulsive and it may take a string of them to achieve the content value that an original typed correspondence had.
When it comes time to pay for maintenance on the automated system, the amount you pay for the maintenance appears too high because you now value the functionality far less because it seems so much less valuable.
I think they also suffer from what I call "efficiency savings hoarding".
If you have a process that requires 10 labor inputs to achieve and you buy a machine that reduces it to 5 labor inputs, your ongoing savings isn't really 5 labor inputs. You have to spend some of that labor savings in keeping the machine maintained and operational and investing in its replacement when it reaches end of life.
When I started working for a company in 1993, they had some 40 secretarial positions whose workload was about half spent doing correspondence and scheduling meetings. In 2001, thanks to widely deployed email/calendaring system they had cut about 30 of those positions because internal meetings could be automatically planned via email and the bulk of internal correspondence shifted from paper memos to email.
Yet when it came time to expand/replace the email system due to growth it was seen as a "cost". I actually got the project approved by arguing that the cost of the replacement was actually being paid for by the savings realized from fewer administrative staff -- they still had ample savings (the project was less than 1 administrative FTE). But the efficiency gain from the project wasn't free on an ongoing basis.
Too many business gain efficiencies and savings from automation, but assume these are permanent gains whose maintenance incurs no costs.
I have an existing client with a large, internally developed kind of ERP system that supports a couple of thousand remote workers. The system is aging out (software versions, resources, performance issues all identified by their own internal developer) and of course the owner is balking at investing in it without realizing that the "free money" from reduced in-office staff needed to process faxes, etc, needs to be applied to maintaining the system to keep achieving the savings.
Collecting garbage in many places is already extremely automated. You have a driver who almost never gets out of a truck who uses hydraulics to grab, raise and dump the can into the back of the truck. As automation increases these kinds of jobs into something more like "monitoring" than "doing", they become less demanding and more likely to find people willing to do them.
I also call into question your definition of "socially redeeming" production. Why is decorative arts "unproductive" but working in a factory making sugary cereal or filling out TPS reports "useful production"? I think there's a strong argument to be made that a lot our so-called productive economy doesn't actually produce what people want, and that instead we stimulate artificial demand for marginal or useless products. A lot of "productive output" is merely the administration in service of the business of empty consumerism.
If UBI were to re-orient human society towards more leisure time, I would expect than an economic shift would occur in production towards goods and services in support of leisure activities. In a world where people have more time for water sports, why is it worse for the economy if it shifts from making office furniture to making water sports equipment?
It's still culturally at the center of a global empire, even though the actual empire is long gone.
I also think London has a transcendent quality about it, being in Europe, but not of Europe, that has an appeal above and beyond any specific trade bloc or treaty. Especially for Americans and other English centric groups.
All the hard-core liberal mayors are into this alternative Federal policy stuff, where the Feds do (or don't do) X and the mayors and city councils decide to do contrary policy Y. I think the whole sanctuary city movement started a lot of it and Trump's election has certainly accelerated it.
Some of the time it's sensible, regional policy making the Feds shouldn't have been doing anyway or that cities or states should be doing.
But an awful lot of it seems like empty grandstanding on areas like diplomacy, foreign relations (including immigration) and economic policies that are just way out of scale, especially for a municipal government. I remember in the 1980s when cities would declare themselves a nuclear free zone, as if deciding to be a nuclear power was a municipal public safety question or maybe that they had local autonomy from the military.
It's mostly preposterous and the economic stuff especially seems like it is toothless if you can cross into a suburb and avoid the requirements. California and maybe Texas have the unique combinations of geography and size to dictate some of these things and make it work, Minneapolis, not so much.
I want streets without holes, garbage pickup, potable water and public safety. Master those, and maybe I'll be receptive to more grandiose policy ambitions. But usually the more grandiose the policy, the more likely they're failing at the basic tasks.
When you're willing to start a nuclear war, you'll agree to pretty much any hair-brained scheme.
The FBI will release a statement indicating that "evidence suggests" a DDoS attack but with no actionable evidence indicating who was behind it or what the motives were and that no further investigation is possible.
Really, nothing will change except that these Senators will be have talking points for a press conference or their next speech to voters about their affirmative stance on network neutrality.
I'd rather have corporate guys say this kind of thing than to bullshit me with other lies or bullshit.
I think it's about the licensing revenue for MS. A dockable phone that becomes a PC means that some non-trivial number of people who buy phones would stop buying PCs with Windows, costing MS a Windows license sale and shrinking the installed base.
The problem is, if they don't do it someone else will, and they may not even get the phone sale let alone another desktop license.
Without the system, you're 100% sure to go belly-up.
I think they would gain a lot of traction with that kind of dock your phone-get a computer idea, the problem is their finance people hate it because a big chunk of people would decide they don't need a desktop or laptop anymore and all those windows (and some office) licenses would disappear.
Microsoft is really in an existential trap where the actual innovation they could provide that would be valuable would apparently cost them money.
Personally, I don't think that many people would abandon their desktops or laptops really, but I'm sure there are numbers out there that MS scared of doing it.
Maybe the hotel figures if someone is going direct, they're not an aggressive shopper and will be more likely to pay whatever they ask.
If they have to give a discount, best to give the discount to the middle man earning a commission. It's a percentage of the booking anyway, so the less you charge, the less commission you pay.
At that point as well, it's better to let the room at a discount than it is to leave it empty. At least on site there's a chance you will get money out of them in the restaurant or from added services.
Really, the whole printer industry is in a prisoners' dilemma where they have to keep the printer prices down in order to sell printers and then they make it up on consumables.
They dug their own grave. They assumed they could chip/DRM toner/ink cartridges, give away the imaging device way below cost and then make land-rush profits with annuity-like cash flows with overpriced cartridges they controlled.
The industry should have just played chicken with the first manufacturer to do this, realizing that the market would punish this model in the long run, just as it is now going to punish all of them, with refills and remans sucking the profit out of the entire enterprise.
I shed no tears for the imaging industry -- they got greedy and thought they could give away a valuable component only to be paid back in spades on the consumables. Now they will all face the crunch of realigning their pricing model.
So why is it a problem, especially on phablets like the iPhone Plus line or larger Galaxies? These devices originally were much smaller in the earlier incarnations and had headphone jacks. Not thinner, but definitely smaller vertically and horizontally.
I'm struggling to understand what the huge engineering challenge is if they've had these jacks all along and the phones were overall lower internal volume.
What functionality are we losing by having a headphone jack? I'm still failing to see this as the colossal engineering limitation that has cost functionality that isn't being driven largely by cosmetic design concepts.
You're assuming there isn't a good reason. Most consumers assume that device designers can just stick anything they want into a device, any place they like, but that's not remotely true. The headphone jack has been causing problems with the placement of components, especially antennas, for years now because the thing is enormous, cutting deep into the device, and has to be on the edge and at one end. The USB port is a similar problem, it's less than half as deep and it serves many purposes -- including audio.
Engineering is often about design constraints or goals that make integrating the necessary components for the desired functionality complicated.
In this case, I'd wager the jack isn't the problem in and of itself, it's the design constraint of an artificially imposed cosmetic requirement that the device be thinner than the last model.
My question is why is the thinness of the device more important than the functionality of the headphone jack? I don't know anybody who says "my phone is too thick, make it thinner" -- in fact, a huge number of people purposefully make their phones thicker by adding cases to them, whether for protection or to make it ergonomically more useful.
I'm sure the headphone jack is a design problem if you demand the phone be shrunk to some small dimensions, but it seems like an artificially imposed design criteria.
I am not an economist and most of my "education" in economics consists of news magazines and the EconTalk podcast.
But whenever I talk to someone online or in person who has an economics background, we often get around to the topic of whether economics has a zero-sum component to it and nearly all of them say it does not.
I can always think of lots of examples in the short run where it is zero sum -- a firm has a finite revenue in a given period, thus profit is a finite value, and how that profit is distributed is zero sum -- if more is paid to the CEO, that means less is available to be paid to everyone else.
This seems like another example of zero sum outcomes -- a finite amount of capital is allocated for labor costs, and more spent in the US means less spent on Indian outsourcing firms.
You're on the right track, except I disagree with the flat tax concept.
I'd prefer to see a progressive tax structure that increased taxes as earned income increased so that the relative value of even small amounts of work wasn't drastically eroded by taxes.
I think in a UBI system you need to preserve a positive, reward-based incentive for working. I think it's too easy to underestimate the worker's non-monetary working costs -- time, effort, and so on. If taxes escalate too quickly, the return on effort will be seen as too little and will discourage workforce participation, or at least workforce participation in above-board taxable income.
I also think a progressive system with a lower taxation threshold ends up having the side effect of improving working conditions for low-paid work as it removes the coercive power of poverty that largely allows employers to treat low-paid workers poorly. My guess is that this is also something that would improve even higher paid middle class workers who would ordinarily be "taxed out" of UBI benefits; even with a total loss of earned income they would have UBI to fall back on and survive extended job searches.
A higher tax threshold might even change the entire nature of work, by creating what we were promised nearly a century ago -- more leisure time through enabling UBI + part time work as sufficient for a "comfortable" type of middle class lifestyle, which in turn could provide a broader level of workforce participation.
EconTalk is a great podcast, even if you disagree with most of what Roberts and his guests have to say. Although I would argue that Roberts is intelligent enough and reasonable enough that only a doctrinaire ideologue could disagree with a significant majority of what gets said.
My problem with private charity vs. government welfare is that private charity seems more prone to the moral hazard of putting its agenda ahead of its charity -- converting recipients to its faith, restricting its charity to organizational members or or other similar organizational goals. Charity becomes a kind of service delivered for the price of loyalty or ideological alignment.
As for the politics of division, I think we're just seeing side effects of an increasing population combined with an increasingly centralized power structure. There's space, physically and politically for divergent views. My guess is that on of the design goals of the United States as a federation was to limit the problems of divergent views by giving individual states enough political power that divergence could be diluted among the many states.
With the long term growth in Federal power and the decline in individual State power, there is less room for divergent views to translate into actual political outcomes. When combined with a concurrent growth in population and ideological diversity, the overall outcome is conflict that has no outlet.
Now you're getting to the heart of rational choice theory, that people are making a willing choice to sacrifice their privacy and attention for the services they get.
I don't think that some kind of privacy legislation that sucked some of the profit out of computing services would price people out of the Internet. Before the era of "free" Internet services, people paid for operating systems that didn't have telemetry, got email accounts without content-scanning with their $35/month ISP account and got nearly the same social/information value from USENET, FAQs, and the more rudimentary services available then.
I think in a lot of ways, people are paying far more for Internet access now than they did 20 years ago. Where before you shouldered the burden of a PC, you still largely do that now. The hardware is cheaper overall, but people have more devices and probably pay more for a laptop/desktop + broadband and smartphone + data service, not to mention tablets, streaming services, etc.
Removing the "free" out of telemetry-laden products and services might make them more expensive, but it wouldn't cut anyone off. I think it would have the side benefit of the services needing to be responsive to users -- less perpetual beta and arbitrary end of life of services and the general manipulation of the service for the provider's benefit.
The larger problem of rational choice theory is also that you start to ask why people can't make a lot of rational economic trade-offs. Why can't an 18 year old choose to sell themselves into indentured servitude for 5 years in exchange for college tuition? Why can't I buy my way out of the military draft if there's some guy willing to go fight in my place if I pay him? It excludes the notion that these choices may actually be economically coercive at some level and not free choices.
Storage access is mediated on so many levels that even vendors have a hard time identifying whether even relatively simple performance problems are the result of an application, the application subsystem (databases), the operating system, the network system, the storage system, the storage fabric or the computer system.
I don't see how it would ever be possible to exploit this, especially when the flash vendors are aware of it and the closest software levels of the hardware are deliberately written in ways to inhibit it.
In a lot of ways, this almost begs for a kind of public health type of response.
In years past, most people would have willfully chosen poisonous product X for its low cost and rejected more expensive non-poisonous product Y. Or they would have rejected tax increases for improved sanitation or water filtration for the same reasons. Or they chose the patent medicine with an opioid versus the one with just sugar.
I don't know that we ever really made the masses more intelligent than they are now about these issues, on the whole. Everybody "knows" that some common medicine with opioids in it is risky, but I'd bet that even with this knowledge if you put tincture of laudanum in a cough and cold remedy it would become a best seller because it made people feel better.*
The best you could do was try to sway the more intelligent members about the risks and hope that would be enough to influence law makers to change the rules in ways that prohibited the bad ingredients, fixed the sewage system or removed the addictive drugs.
The larger problem here is constructing a public health type of argument that intelligent, non-technical people will understand and accept, in the hopes that these key influencers will be able to pass laws that force uniform standards for privacy or data collection. You'll never change the masses individual preference for free/cheap, you have to change the law to eliminate Microsoft, Apple or Google's ability to use this preference to exploit people for their own gain.
(* There's a whole other side argument to be made as to whether this really would lead to widespread addiction among the population as a whole, or whether we're really just preventing an acute crisis among a small subset of the population. One of the risks of public health is over reach and excess risk aversion, imposing restrictions and costs to eliminate increasingly smaller threats.)