The problem with your analogy is that being Jewish or Gay isn't inherently icky. Those states of being aren't inherently harmful to anyone and being Jewish or Gay implies a kind of free association among like minded adults to engage in those activities.
Is there any way you can justify the practice of pedophilia outside of simulated imagery? Even sharing such images seems as if it encourages and reinforces impulses which may encourage acting out those impulses, acts which do not involve the free association of like minded adults, since one party to pedophilia isn't an adult.
Perhaps you could have a very limited argument that mere possession of such imagery isn't a crime, I don't think you can argue that the larger society is wrong for public condemnation of collecting such imagery or socially ostracizing those who do so.
We hear plenty of arguments as to why "freedom of speech" doesn't protect people from the public social consequences of holding unpopular opinions.
It's also interesting to pose the simulated imagery question with a different subject matter. If a person collects simulated imagery of lynching black people, can you justify it by stating that racists are less likely to lynch people if they have a safe outlet for enjoying lynchings?
I think we're already at the place where we pursue political prosecutions. Tom Delay, Scooter Libby, Jim Wright (although not specifically prosecuted in court) and even Bill Clinton. And likely many more lower level sacrificial lambs whose prosecutions were merely proxies for bigger fish whose power base prevented prosecution.
And it's not that these people didn't commit crimes or weren't involved in some kind of ethically dubious behavior, but that by and large their principal crime was zealous political advocacy.
The criminal justice system, especially at the Federal level, no longer seems to be about crimes or justice, but a kind of Praetorian guard for whoever grasps the levers of power to pursue political agendas and vendettas against political enemies.
My only hope is that unlike Rome, our version of the Gracci brothers and our version of Gaius Marius manage to defeat the Senatorial and Equestrian classes while we can still claim to be a Republic and not a dynastic empire. (I'd settle for a Galactic empire, provided I can get a ride in the Millennium Falcon).
A quick example, the US forced Switzerland to automatically provide information on bank account but at the same is refusing to do the same.
Maybe they're not refusing, it's just that no Swiss citizens have decided that when depositing money in a highly secure private bank account, why screw around with the United States when you could just walk across the street. You know, to a Swiss bank...
I honestly think that Tivo was just popular enough with the right people at the right time to get cablecard working for themselves that it became "viable".
I've owned a Tivo since 2002 and I can remember how broken the cablecards were when they came out. There were practically entire forums devoted to all manner of voodoo on how to actually get a cablecard, get one that worked, etc.
It was like "if you live in Minneapolis and use Comcast, call Jenny on Tuesdays before 2 PM and Thursdays between 9 and 11 am at her direct number. You have to call from your dining room, but not the kitchen, and make sure she schedules Tom but not Lars and get an M stream card with a serial number ending in 4, 7 or 9 and reboot your Tivo exactly 4 minutes and 27 seconds before the installer gets there. Or none of it will work and you will have to start over."
You would think if cablecards were such a great solution there would be a slot in every TV for one and whole industry of DVR/STBs that used them that did things even Trump would say were amazing.
What surprises me sometimes is why cable companies haven't given up on all of it and haven't just given in to some IP based open standard, especially for cable internet subscribers. While I'm sure they make money in some way on STBs, they also seem to spend a lot to provide a whole customer disservice experience involving store fronts and warehouse lot worth of hardware making that money. An IP-enabled dongle that fit an HDMI port they didn't have to spec, buy, warehouse and support should make everyone happy and let them ditch a lot of labor and cost overhead.
Plus, if they went all IP they would have the entire spectrum available in RG-6 for data, since "watching" a channel would just enable a customer requesting a data stream when they needed it, not dedicating some hunk of frequency to a channel with low viewer numbers.
Australia was exactly what I have in mind. I have a 5 dollar Australian note that was given to me by a wife's coworker (he lost a joke bet and paid off in 5 "dollars" I can't spend).
The coloration is great and the material feels kind of like Tyvek. I use it as a bookmark since changing it would be a waste of time and money. Currency works well as a bookmark and I'm actually thinking of buying a batch of worthless/obsolete currency for this purpose. I only recently found a place that sells it in bulk.
You'd think that pre-Euro currency or other devalued or obsolete currencies with high levels of circulation would be kind of easy to find, but I could only find one place selling them. It's easier to find collectible rare currency than obsolete currency for some reason.
I think tops of buildings are somewhat hard to get into, and the power you might find up there is probably not tap-friendly 115v but some kind of high voltage 3 phase used with air handlers or other mechanical systems.
It'd be great if just being near a window was good enough, there are probably plenty of offices where you could stash the box near a window and get easy wall power.
I wonder if a better idea wouldn't be finding a tall tree and placing the box in it as if it was some kind of bird's nest, either a purpose built box built for larger birds or camouflage it from the ground as an actual raptor nest but have the transmitter in it with a solar panel.
I'm guessing power consumption for 20 watts of radio transmission would make most compact solar setups ineffective but perhaps if you had a decent location solar added to a couple of deep cycle marine batteries would give you a deep enough reserve to not have to change batteries more than once a week, especially if you didn't transmit in the day and limited to a few hours at night.
Wow, TFS makes it really hard to feel that what they're really afraid of is the public gaining access to information diverging from the establishment talking points and entertainment not supporting the current corporate entertainment products.
Maybe that was the intended conclusion I'm supposed to draw, but I can't say I wouldn't have drawn that conclusion anyway.
The funniest thing is "false advertising"? WTF? Do "officials" think current marking practices are a bastion of transparent and unvarnished truth, free from deliberate deception and manipulation?
I think the tipping point was when they killed the ability to open new windows. It made it much easier to build large music playlists because you could browse the library in one window and have the playlist open in another.
Once they killed that off, it got harder to navigate a library because they also got into stupid shit like showing you giant album cover icons and generally doing the same stupid shit Netflix has done to make browsing their library awful, too.
My guess is Apple looks at it as a horrifying legacy codebase that barely manages to do phone backups and restores and organize music libraries and sell shit from the store. I suspect they will ultimately try to kill it off and force you into iCloud backups and streaming/radio only music "ownership", with maybe some optional download for doing only phone backups and restores.
Even for that it kind of sucks. It's a huge PITA to move iTunes between computers and you can't do something sane like easily export into a single file an iPhone backup.
I think in its initial incarnations it had some hope. I remember when I first installed it it seemed pretty usable and so far even letting it manage my music library hasn't been horrible, its basically as good as I would have done manually managing files and folders.
I wish they would have allowed the ability to create multiple libraries for segregating music into different categories or for creating some kind of master library if you're collect-them-all interested in some band or other but don't necessarily want 80+ live shows by one band or Christmas music or all your classical music in your "normal" library.
I'm mostly content to use it for what still works, but it keeps getting incrementally, boiling-a-frog bad.
I think at this stage of the race Cruz would offer to perform abortions on live TV if it would get him the nomination.
As President, he seems the most likely to do whatever his Republican masters tell him to do with the exception of social issues, where he might be willing to fall on his sword.
The presidential election needs runoff elections, not primaries.
Runoff election 1 should allow anyone who can raise a million signatures to be on the ballot nationally. This would require enough time and organization to keep out the joke candidates and the true crackpots, but still allow for niche candidates or underdogs to get onto the ballot if they can demonstrate some legwork.
Runoff election 2 should be made up of the top 10 vote getters in runoff 1. That's enough to still give minor candidates exposure, but will all but assure crackpots don't make the cut.
Both runoff elections should be open and party-independent. You can label yourself by an actual party or none at all.
The top 4 candidates from runoff 2 should be on the final ballot in November and the winner decided by ranked choice voting. No party dependencies. If the top 4 end up being 3 Democrats and 1 Republican, so be it, the three Democrats are offering enough unique value to the electorate that they don't feel the need to dump all but one.
The existing system sucks because of the ridiculous state by state nature of ballots. I fine with devolved government, but devolving the method of electing a common president is lunacy, and it makes it extraordinarily hard for a third party to get much traction.
This results in third parties being dismissed as ineffective and forces independent minded candidates like Trump or Sanders to identify with a major party and be subject to rules and a party establishment that has other ideas. I get it, parties are private, but you face impossible odds if you're not a major party candidate, which gives ridiculous power to two parties to control who's even available as an option.
The process of selecting who ends up on the final ballot should be wide open. Democrats or Republicans or Libertarians or National Socialists can have whatever process they want for their own internal candidate choice, but it should not be a determinant for who is actually available to be voted for by the public.
My thought was that for a single user (ie, minus any of the group/shared functionality of Exchange or other groupware concepts) IMAP wouldn't have been a terrible way to interact with remote data storage.
You get the value of a single server process handling the info, clients not capable of parsing and rendering calendar and contacts could just ignore it (or at least not mangle the data) and if the format was standardized any client could read/cache/interpret it/present it to the user, providing you with an easy way to have the same kind of stored-on-the-server functionality you get for email for calendar data and contact info.
I wonder if their revenue models account for accidental purchases? Purchases that get made unintentionally because their system is deliberately designed to generate purchases extremely easily, even if the account holder wouldn't otherwise make them in a considered way.
It's hard not to think that both one-click and in-app purchases, especially for games oriented at children, are intentionally designed to generate revenue from purchases that the account holder would not make if they had more consideration.
I guess maybe 10% of it might be useful convenience, but the rest, especially in-app just seems to be opaque about real costs.
I wish I could take a job for $5 an hour and then show up and offer "in-employment upgrades" where I would charge other, unknown-until-purchased fees for doing actual tasks.
"Oh, you want me to show up at 8:30? I offer an AM arrival 5-day pack for $399 per week, otherwise it's $99 per day. And I offer a Stay until 5 PM 5-day pack for the same prices for the AM pack. You can buy the Combo All Day pack for $789 per week. I also offer this in annual subscriptions, $40,000 per year. Buy for five years and it's $195,000."
I think from the banks' perspective the corporate cash is a nuisance because corporations aren't depositing all $97 billion in cash they have into a passbook savings account. Corporations have all manner of management for balance sheet cash that can involve everything from literal deposits to T-bills to other highly liquid instruments that are the accounting equivalent of cash. None of it is held in one account or in any one instrument for long.
If Apple plops $5 billion of cash into an account because they need to wait 30 days to buy a raft of new 30 day T-bills with that cash, the bank can't say "Oh look! $5 billion in cash we can loan out at 5% while we pay Apple 2.5%" because they know Apple will come back in 29 days and pull out $5 billion. It's a liquidity problem for the bank to try to use that money, whereas the average over all other longer term accounts makes for easier liquidity calculations.
I think banks are actually being reasonable here with regard to short term large-scale cash deposits, I think the larger problem is corporate cash hoarding. But the people who should care, like shareholders, don't seem to or at least don't care enough to force management to do anything different. In theory they should be paying most of the cash out as dividends (less sane reserves or business investments), but they don't.
I know Apple has had strategies in the past of cornering the supply market on some components by essentially building a factory for the component and guaranteeing they are the only customer for the first 20 million items produced, which is an enormous investment. Maybe that's their argument for hoarding cash, is that their supply strategy requires them to commit $10 billion at time to maintain some kind of component edge so they are able to convince the board or shareholders that $90 billion is therefore a reasonable reserve amount.
My guess is they don't even bother -- the board is a management rubber stamp and the shareholders can go fuck themselves if they don't like it, and the shareholders only option is to dump their stock.
You could probably add to your definition the ability to enter into contracts to buy or sell goods and services without coercion. Monopoly systems ultimately end up seeming coercive because they are able to set arbitrary prices.
I think the problem with our present system is growing economic inequality which leads to power inequality which leads to further market corruption. The reactions to inequality seem to be a duality -- a Bernie Sanders style socialism or a Donald Trump populism, as the most powerful of the economically disenfranchised groups tilts towards one solution or the other.
I'm inclined to think that neither provides an optimal outcome and that the optimal outcome of reforming markets to re-establish a balance to markets is impossible with the remaining political candidates as they end up representing the establishment that benefits from continuing the status quo.
It's probably the best of the worst outcomes to elect an anti-establishment candidate now, while their programs are the least radical with the hope that they will force a compromise that consists mostly of reforms. Continuing with an establishment candidate and putting off any reforms just seems likely to make even more radical solutions seem appealing.
I'm willing to advocate for war, and for war fought cruelly, with scorched earth tactics when necessary to win.
But in my heart, I hate conflict and value understanding. At night I really do dream of a peaceful understanding among men and wonder how conflicts like Syria or places like Afghanistan can be made less broken. And sometimes I hope there will be a way.
But then I read this story and realize it's hopeless. If the world of fucking science fans can't manage to run their awards ceremony because of nitpicking and infighting, what fucking chance does the rest of the world have?
It's been argued by some economists that slow growth has caused these companies to hoard cash, both out of fear of uncertainty and because they cannot find investments they believe will provide enough return to be worth the risk of investing.
I think they also argue that this contributes somewhat to wealth inequality -- corporations are hoarding vast quantities of cash, effectively removing it from the economy. I think that I've read that even some banks have started charging negative interest to manage it because they themselves lack an effective means to park it.
The idea is that popular adoption of an easy open source solution didn't happen because of the division of all those items into multiple data types requiring multiple back end services to be installed.
If they all had been usable through a single server instance, maybe an open source alternative to Exchange circa 2000 would have blunted its momentum. I think despite the so-called complexity of an Exchange install, it offered a fairly easy to install, "single server" solution for mail/calendar/contacts that free open source alternatives couldn't match, especially 15 years ago when an equivalent server-side storage solution would have mattered.
Most of that now has been ceded to Exchange and more recently to web/cloud services now. Zimbra seems like an also-ran solution at this point, although I have no experience with it and have no idea how good it is or how useful its free product is.
Maybe this person does not know what Exchange is. I didn't, so I came here to learn.
I thought this was News For Nerds.
How can you not know what Exchange is? It is literally the most dominant on-premise groupware server and has been for at least a decade and more or less in its same format has been available since the 1990s.
I might expect you to not know what Groupwise or Lotus Notes were, but Exchange?
Quite literally a huge majority of the white collar world has decided that Outlook and Exchange is ideal for them, especially given the high quality support for them on popular smartphones.
I have at least 3 Exchange accounts from 3 mail systems open in Outlook at one time and I use them all extensively. I can't imagine the clusterfuck of having three programs to manage this same information.
IMHO, the real failure was for someone to extend the IMAP protocol to handle contacts and calendar items. Maybe the commands and primitives were already suited for this and we just needed some standard format for calendar and contact data types and they could have been saved as messages in folders flagged as containing that kind of data, and then at that point the processing logic is just up to the client to provide interfaces for it.
In other words, if you had a MUA that had calendaring and contact user interfaces, could you have just used IMAP to store that data in the mail store? Or is there some kludgey inefficiency to something like that where it would mean harsh IMAP queries to populate a month view of a calendar or an entire address book?
In my mind the "best tool for the job" mindset kind of made Exchange an easy choice, since Exchange functionality on Unix would have meant LDAP, IMAP, and maybe something else.
If somehow you could have gotten all of this done with a client and an IMAP server (at least for individuals without intra-user shared data) maybe a more open client model would have held on to some of the market because the back-end could have been a single system and not a mashup of a half-dozen different services.
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The problem with your analogy is that being Jewish or Gay isn't inherently icky. Those states of being aren't inherently harmful to anyone and being Jewish or Gay implies a kind of free association among like minded adults to engage in those activities.
Is there any way you can justify the practice of pedophilia outside of simulated imagery? Even sharing such images seems as if it encourages and reinforces impulses which may encourage acting out those impulses, acts which do not involve the free association of like minded adults, since one party to pedophilia isn't an adult.
Perhaps you could have a very limited argument that mere possession of such imagery isn't a crime, I don't think you can argue that the larger society is wrong for public condemnation of collecting such imagery or socially ostracizing those who do so.
We hear plenty of arguments as to why "freedom of speech" doesn't protect people from the public social consequences of holding unpopular opinions.
It's also interesting to pose the simulated imagery question with a different subject matter. If a person collects simulated imagery of lynching black people, can you justify it by stating that racists are less likely to lynch people if they have a safe outlet for enjoying lynchings?
I, for one, welcome our four next Presidents in one year.
I think we're already at the place where we pursue political prosecutions. Tom Delay, Scooter Libby, Jim Wright (although not specifically prosecuted in court) and even Bill Clinton. And likely many more lower level sacrificial lambs whose prosecutions were merely proxies for bigger fish whose power base prevented prosecution.
And it's not that these people didn't commit crimes or weren't involved in some kind of ethically dubious behavior, but that by and large their principal crime was zealous political advocacy.
The criminal justice system, especially at the Federal level, no longer seems to be about crimes or justice, but a kind of Praetorian guard for whoever grasps the levers of power to pursue political agendas and vendettas against political enemies.
My only hope is that unlike Rome, our version of the Gracci brothers and our version of Gaius Marius manage to defeat the Senatorial and Equestrian classes while we can still claim to be a Republic and not a dynastic empire. (I'd settle for a Galactic empire, provided I can get a ride in the Millennium Falcon).
A quick example, the US forced Switzerland to automatically provide information on bank account but at the same is refusing to do the same.
Maybe they're not refusing, it's just that no Swiss citizens have decided that when depositing money in a highly secure private bank account, why screw around with the United States when you could just walk across the street. You know, to a Swiss bank...
I honestly think that Tivo was just popular enough with the right people at the right time to get cablecard working for themselves that it became "viable".
I've owned a Tivo since 2002 and I can remember how broken the cablecards were when they came out. There were practically entire forums devoted to all manner of voodoo on how to actually get a cablecard, get one that worked, etc.
It was like "if you live in Minneapolis and use Comcast, call Jenny on Tuesdays before 2 PM and Thursdays between 9 and 11 am at her direct number. You have to call from your dining room, but not the kitchen, and make sure she schedules Tom but not Lars and get an M stream card with a serial number ending in 4, 7 or 9 and reboot your Tivo exactly 4 minutes and 27 seconds before the installer gets there. Or none of it will work and you will have to start over."
You would think if cablecards were such a great solution there would be a slot in every TV for one and whole industry of DVR/STBs that used them that did things even Trump would say were amazing.
What surprises me sometimes is why cable companies haven't given up on all of it and haven't just given in to some IP based open standard, especially for cable internet subscribers. While I'm sure they make money in some way on STBs, they also seem to spend a lot to provide a whole customer disservice experience involving store fronts and warehouse lot worth of hardware making that money. An IP-enabled dongle that fit an HDMI port they didn't have to spec, buy, warehouse and support should make everyone happy and let them ditch a lot of labor and cost overhead.
Plus, if they went all IP they would have the entire spectrum available in RG-6 for data, since "watching" a channel would just enable a customer requesting a data stream when they needed it, not dedicating some hunk of frequency to a channel with low viewer numbers.
Australia was exactly what I have in mind. I have a 5 dollar Australian note that was given to me by a wife's coworker (he lost a joke bet and paid off in 5 "dollars" I can't spend).
The coloration is great and the material feels kind of like Tyvek. I use it as a bookmark since changing it would be a waste of time and money. Currency works well as a bookmark and I'm actually thinking of buying a batch of worthless/obsolete currency for this purpose. I only recently found a place that sells it in bulk.
You'd think that pre-Euro currency or other devalued or obsolete currencies with high levels of circulation would be kind of easy to find, but I could only find one place selling them. It's easier to find collectible rare currency than obsolete currency for some reason.
I think tops of buildings are somewhat hard to get into, and the power you might find up there is probably not tap-friendly 115v but some kind of high voltage 3 phase used with air handlers or other mechanical systems.
It'd be great if just being near a window was good enough, there are probably plenty of offices where you could stash the box near a window and get easy wall power.
I wonder if a better idea wouldn't be finding a tall tree and placing the box in it as if it was some kind of bird's nest, either a purpose built box built for larger birds or camouflage it from the ground as an actual raptor nest but have the transmitter in it with a solar panel.
I'm guessing power consumption for 20 watts of radio transmission would make most compact solar setups ineffective but perhaps if you had a decent location solar added to a couple of deep cycle marine batteries would give you a deep enough reserve to not have to change batteries more than once a week, especially if you didn't transmit in the day and limited to a few hours at night.
If you want to play it safe, or if you don't have an iodine pill, the best thing to do when your local nuke reactor goes critical
I thought the best thing I could do was to slug a couple of shots of bourbon, grab a pistol and go settle some scores.
Wow, TFS makes it really hard to feel that what they're really afraid of is the public gaining access to information diverging from the establishment talking points and entertainment not supporting the current corporate entertainment products.
Maybe that was the intended conclusion I'm supposed to draw, but I can't say I wouldn't have drawn that conclusion anyway.
The funniest thing is "false advertising"? WTF? Do "officials" think current marking practices are a bastion of transparent and unvarnished truth, free from deliberate deception and manipulation?
I think the tipping point was when they killed the ability to open new windows. It made it much easier to build large music playlists because you could browse the library in one window and have the playlist open in another.
Once they killed that off, it got harder to navigate a library because they also got into stupid shit like showing you giant album cover icons and generally doing the same stupid shit Netflix has done to make browsing their library awful, too.
My guess is Apple looks at it as a horrifying legacy codebase that barely manages to do phone backups and restores and organize music libraries and sell shit from the store. I suspect they will ultimately try to kill it off and force you into iCloud backups and streaming/radio only music "ownership", with maybe some optional download for doing only phone backups and restores.
Even for that it kind of sucks. It's a huge PITA to move iTunes between computers and you can't do something sane like easily export into a single file an iPhone backup.
I think in its initial incarnations it had some hope. I remember when I first installed it it seemed pretty usable and so far even letting it manage my music library hasn't been horrible, its basically as good as I would have done manually managing files and folders.
I wish they would have allowed the ability to create multiple libraries for segregating music into different categories or for creating some kind of master library if you're collect-them-all interested in some band or other but don't necessarily want 80+ live shows by one band or Christmas music or all your classical music in your "normal" library.
I'm mostly content to use it for what still works, but it keeps getting incrementally, boiling-a-frog bad.
And that's exactly what they are doing -- charging negative interest rates for large-scale short term cash deposits. Discouragement pricing.
To me it sounds like "we just want to sell more chipsets".
The existing market for analog audio ICs is probably extremely saturated with mature products whose basic technology is long out of patent.
How can Intel make money competing against that when they could sell a proprietary chip for every damn thing with an audio jack?
I think at this stage of the race Cruz would offer to perform abortions on live TV if it would get him the nomination.
As President, he seems the most likely to do whatever his Republican masters tell him to do with the exception of social issues, where he might be willing to fall on his sword.
The presidential election needs runoff elections, not primaries.
Runoff election 1 should allow anyone who can raise a million signatures to be on the ballot nationally. This would require enough time and organization to keep out the joke candidates and the true crackpots, but still allow for niche candidates or underdogs to get onto the ballot if they can demonstrate some legwork.
Runoff election 2 should be made up of the top 10 vote getters in runoff 1. That's enough to still give minor candidates exposure, but will all but assure crackpots don't make the cut.
Both runoff elections should be open and party-independent. You can label yourself by an actual party or none at all.
The top 4 candidates from runoff 2 should be on the final ballot in November and the winner decided by ranked choice voting. No party dependencies. If the top 4 end up being 3 Democrats and 1 Republican, so be it, the three Democrats are offering enough unique value to the electorate that they don't feel the need to dump all but one.
The existing system sucks because of the ridiculous state by state nature of ballots. I fine with devolved government, but devolving the method of electing a common president is lunacy, and it makes it extraordinarily hard for a third party to get much traction.
This results in third parties being dismissed as ineffective and forces independent minded candidates like Trump or Sanders to identify with a major party and be subject to rules and a party establishment that has other ideas. I get it, parties are private, but you face impossible odds if you're not a major party candidate, which gives ridiculous power to two parties to control who's even available as an option.
The process of selecting who ends up on the final ballot should be wide open. Democrats or Republicans or Libertarians or National Socialists can have whatever process they want for their own internal candidate choice, but it should not be a determinant for who is actually available to be voted for by the public.
My thought was that for a single user (ie, minus any of the group/shared functionality of Exchange or other groupware concepts) IMAP wouldn't have been a terrible way to interact with remote data storage.
You get the value of a single server process handling the info, clients not capable of parsing and rendering calendar and contacts could just ignore it (or at least not mangle the data) and if the format was standardized any client could read/cache/interpret it/present it to the user, providing you with an easy way to have the same kind of stored-on-the-server functionality you get for email for calendar data and contact info.
I wonder if their revenue models account for accidental purchases? Purchases that get made unintentionally because their system is deliberately designed to generate purchases extremely easily, even if the account holder wouldn't otherwise make them in a considered way.
It's hard not to think that both one-click and in-app purchases, especially for games oriented at children, are intentionally designed to generate revenue from purchases that the account holder would not make if they had more consideration.
I guess maybe 10% of it might be useful convenience, but the rest, especially in-app just seems to be opaque about real costs.
I wish I could take a job for $5 an hour and then show up and offer "in-employment upgrades" where I would charge other, unknown-until-purchased fees for doing actual tasks.
"Oh, you want me to show up at 8:30? I offer an AM arrival 5-day pack for $399 per week, otherwise it's $99 per day. And I offer a Stay until 5 PM 5-day pack for the same prices for the AM pack. You can buy the Combo All Day pack for $789 per week. I also offer this in annual subscriptions, $40,000 per year. Buy for five years and it's $195,000."
I think from the banks' perspective the corporate cash is a nuisance because corporations aren't depositing all $97 billion in cash they have into a passbook savings account. Corporations have all manner of management for balance sheet cash that can involve everything from literal deposits to T-bills to other highly liquid instruments that are the accounting equivalent of cash. None of it is held in one account or in any one instrument for long.
If Apple plops $5 billion of cash into an account because they need to wait 30 days to buy a raft of new 30 day T-bills with that cash, the bank can't say "Oh look! $5 billion in cash we can loan out at 5% while we pay Apple 2.5%" because they know Apple will come back in 29 days and pull out $5 billion. It's a liquidity problem for the bank to try to use that money, whereas the average over all other longer term accounts makes for easier liquidity calculations.
I think banks are actually being reasonable here with regard to short term large-scale cash deposits, I think the larger problem is corporate cash hoarding. But the people who should care, like shareholders, don't seem to or at least don't care enough to force management to do anything different. In theory they should be paying most of the cash out as dividends (less sane reserves or business investments), but they don't.
I know Apple has had strategies in the past of cornering the supply market on some components by essentially building a factory for the component and guaranteeing they are the only customer for the first 20 million items produced, which is an enormous investment. Maybe that's their argument for hoarding cash, is that their supply strategy requires them to commit $10 billion at time to maintain some kind of component edge so they are able to convince the board or shareholders that $90 billion is therefore a reasonable reserve amount.
My guess is they don't even bother -- the board is a management rubber stamp and the shareholders can go fuck themselves if they don't like it, and the shareholders only option is to dump their stock.
You could probably add to your definition the ability to enter into contracts to buy or sell goods and services without coercion. Monopoly systems ultimately end up seeming coercive because they are able to set arbitrary prices.
I think the problem with our present system is growing economic inequality which leads to power inequality which leads to further market corruption. The reactions to inequality seem to be a duality -- a Bernie Sanders style socialism or a Donald Trump populism, as the most powerful of the economically disenfranchised groups tilts towards one solution or the other.
I'm inclined to think that neither provides an optimal outcome and that the optimal outcome of reforming markets to re-establish a balance to markets is impossible with the remaining political candidates as they end up representing the establishment that benefits from continuing the status quo.
It's probably the best of the worst outcomes to elect an anti-establishment candidate now, while their programs are the least radical with the hope that they will force a compromise that consists mostly of reforms. Continuing with an establishment candidate and putting off any reforms just seems likely to make even more radical solutions seem appealing.
I'm willing to advocate for war, and for war fought cruelly, with scorched earth tactics when necessary to win.
But in my heart, I hate conflict and value understanding. At night I really do dream of a peaceful understanding among men and wonder how conflicts like Syria or places like Afghanistan can be made less broken. And sometimes I hope there will be a way.
But then I read this story and realize it's hopeless. If the world of fucking science fans can't manage to run their awards ceremony because of nitpicking and infighting, what fucking chance does the rest of the world have?
We are doomed.
It's been argued by some economists that slow growth has caused these companies to hoard cash, both out of fear of uncertainty and because they cannot find investments they believe will provide enough return to be worth the risk of investing.
I think they also argue that this contributes somewhat to wealth inequality -- corporations are hoarding vast quantities of cash, effectively removing it from the economy. I think that I've read that even some banks have started charging negative interest to manage it because they themselves lack an effective means to park it.
See the film "Being There" for an explanation.
The idea is that popular adoption of an easy open source solution didn't happen because of the division of all those items into multiple data types requiring multiple back end services to be installed.
If they all had been usable through a single server instance, maybe an open source alternative to Exchange circa 2000 would have blunted its momentum. I think despite the so-called complexity of an Exchange install, it offered a fairly easy to install, "single server" solution for mail/calendar/contacts that free open source alternatives couldn't match, especially 15 years ago when an equivalent server-side storage solution would have mattered.
Most of that now has been ceded to Exchange and more recently to web/cloud services now. Zimbra seems like an also-ran solution at this point, although I have no experience with it and have no idea how good it is or how useful its free product is.
My typo, I mean 6M of water.
Maybe this person does not know what Exchange is. I didn't, so I came here to learn.
I thought this was News For Nerds.
How can you not know what Exchange is? It is literally the most dominant on-premise groupware server and has been for at least a decade and more or less in its same format has been available since the 1990s.
I might expect you to not know what Groupwise or Lotus Notes were, but Exchange?
Quite literally a huge majority of the white collar world has decided that Outlook and Exchange is ideal for them, especially given the high quality support for them on popular smartphones.
I have at least 3 Exchange accounts from 3 mail systems open in Outlook at one time and I use them all extensively. I can't imagine the clusterfuck of having three programs to manage this same information.
IMHO, the real failure was for someone to extend the IMAP protocol to handle contacts and calendar items. Maybe the commands and primitives were already suited for this and we just needed some standard format for calendar and contact data types and they could have been saved as messages in folders flagged as containing that kind of data, and then at that point the processing logic is just up to the client to provide interfaces for it.
In other words, if you had a MUA that had calendaring and contact user interfaces, could you have just used IMAP to store that data in the mail store? Or is there some kludgey inefficiency to something like that where it would mean harsh IMAP queries to populate a month view of a calendar or an entire address book?
In my mind the "best tool for the job" mindset kind of made Exchange an easy choice, since Exchange functionality on Unix would have meant LDAP, IMAP, and maybe something else.
If somehow you could have gotten all of this done with a client and an IMAP server (at least for individuals without intra-user shared data) maybe a more open client model would have held on to some of the market because the back-end could have been a single system and not a mashup of a half-dozen different services.