They dropped their tivo quite a few years ago, but when they still had it, it was connected to their phone line because that just worked. The tivo didn't have wifi so they'd have had to spend more money to hook it to the network and there was nothing to be gained from doing that.
I merely said that if you look at cars the ones you can buy new now typically cost about the same (adjusted for inflation) as they have done for decades. Now people are choosing to move to larger, heavier vehicles which has certainly increased the typical price paid.
A 1985 Toyota Corolla started at $7,133 (which is about $17,038.47 after inflation) and one today would start at $18,700. A slight increase, but you'd be getting a car that's faster, more efficient, safer and with a lot more features.
I'd argue that they mostly have. You can get a reliable new car for around the $20k mark. Land has certainly gone up a lot, but i think the actual cost of building a safe well insulated home has been pretty stable.
Obviously against a background of controlled inflation they've continued to rise in absolute dollars/euros but that's true of everything.
I think we're about to see a hasty retreat in the average smartphone price.
My girlfriend recently picked up a Nokia 6.1 - it's fast enough, it's got a good enough camera, a good enough screen, enough memory and it's a pretty good looking phone. It's $250. Certainly there are people who'll have some need for the top-of-the-line, but for the vast majority of people that's a perfectly good phone.
I really think that's the direction things will trend. The "entry level" phones will steadily advance and the "flagship" ones will argue about screen notches and stuff like that. I can't see myself buying another flagship one, and I'm sure i'm not alone.
Large web apps are often at near saturation. If someone hasn't signed up for facebook or gmail already then it's very unlikely that any kind of redesign or feature addition will change that calculus for them. However it does risk alienating existing users and in turn reducing the revenue stream.
Contrast that with non-subscription desktop software, you make nothing off satisfied users, you instead only make money off people who want the latest version and that forces a certain level of innovation. There's also little chance of pissing off your satisfied users, since they can usually skip the upgrade if the software is currently meeting their needs.
In their defense, Getty made it clear that they didn't have a property release.
They offer an additional service where they'll do the research for you to answer whether or not a property release is needed in a particular case and they even further will, for an additional fee, assume responsibility if they are wrong.
I'm assuming whomever chose that image didn't realize it was the Las Vegas version of the statue and it never occurred to them to even consider the rights issue. However most photos that come up when you search for "Statue of Liberty" are of the NY version, so the argument that they chose that one because it was more aesthetically pleasing does carry some weight (even if it wasn't deliberate).
If you weren't paying attention and thought you were buying an image of the original statue of liberty then you'd reasonably assume that it wasn't copyrighted because it's been built too long ago. However the photograph was clearly marked as being taken in Las Vegas and as being a photo of a replica.
From what I can tell, the photographer did their job and Getty did their job. Could they have handheld the USPS through the intricacies of federal copyright law better? Sure. Did they have a responsibility to? Probably not.
Fun fact - you need a property release to use a photo of the Eiffel Tower at night, but not during the day (the lights are copyrighted).
Yes, but it's also insignificant considering the projected needs of energy storage over the next few decades. If Tesla becomes the provider of choice in a market that could be worth tens of billions annually in a few years time then that's a pretty large revenue stream.
I think that while cars are a traditional market, energy storage is definitely not and it's hardly surprising that it'd be priced more like a startup.
They've deployed over a GWh of energy storage, and it sounds like they've got a single deal in the works with california that will be bigger than everything they've done so far (and i find it hard to believe that's the only big deal they are lining up). That's a huge space, and if they continue to beat the industry for the amount of cobalt in their batteries then they'll be really competitive in a fast growing space.
It's frustrating that so much of the gig economy is based around closed ecosystems. If you could coordinate uber, lyft, doordash, amazon, task rabbit and whatever else into a single platform where systems could try and find the best synergy for each employee then you could probably improve earnings, efficiency and pollution quite a bit.
Plus i expect you'd need something like $3-4M in revenue to support that.
Not a horrible rate of return if the work is stable, but you seem like you'd be totally dependent on Amazon to keep the packages and growth coming and you'd really suffer if they slowed down a little.
Still I don't think it's reasonable to say that the pollution caused in mongolia in refining neodymium is a function of "green energy". It's much more a function of the Chinese lacking sensible environmental regulations. If we wanted to start a useful trade war we could put tariffs on stuff that's made in ways that are needlessly damaging to the environment.
I'm sure some states support online filing, but i know my company still fills out a paper form and mails a check. You'd think states could work together and streamline this process since they'd likely get more compliance if you didn't need to establish ~45 different relationships, but it seems to not be the case. In any event it's easy for amazon to add a couple of CPAs to deal with the burden of filing all that, much harder for a small retailer.
If states can mandate collection then it seems self-evident that cities and special tax districts can too. In colorado your ZIP code alone doesn't answer which tax jurisdiction(s) you are in and for some of the special tax regions it's nearly impossible to find out if an address is in them or not. Here's the actual definition of where denver's transit tax applies
Counties of Denver, Boulder, and Jefferson. Generally, Broomfield County (except certain areas immediately adjacent to I-25 and Highway 7 interchange), Adams County (west of Box Elder Creek), Arapahoe County (south of I-70, generally west of Picadilly Rd. to Jewell, then west of Gun Club Rd. to Quincy, then generally west of Monaghan Rd., including Arapahoe Park and Aurora Reservoir), and Douglas County (northern portion consisting of the City of Lone Tree, the Town of Parker, the Acres Green area and most of Highlands Ranch), the area within the boundaries of the Town of Castle Rock does not have RTD sales/use tax, parts of Weld County that have been annexed by the city of Longmont and the town of Erie since 1994
How do you resolve something like that? It'll obviously create a market for a secondary service that exists to figure out the applicable combination of tax rates, which again will be disproportionately costly for small businesses.
Perhaps not as cheaply as the Chinese process, but my understanding of what MolyCorp are doing suggests that you can indeed refine Neodymium without dumping sulfuric acid into rivers.
This isn't so much an issue with Neodymium but with the fact that we tend to buy materials from wherever they are cheapest and without a second thought for the externalized costs that went into producing them.
Radioactivity certainly is an issue if it winds up in wastewater, but if the radioactive elements can be isolated then I can't really see the issue with dumping them in the same environment. The processing is solvent based and it's not like we've "made more" radioactivity than was in the natural environment to start with..
It's one thing to have your business registered in your home state, you'll already have a corporate presence a tax id number and whatever else you'd need. Usually remitting sales tax is one extra form that you send in monthly or quarterly depending on the sales volume.
However you now need to do this in fifty states. Some states let you do that for free, but lots of states have charges just for being able to remits sales tax, others further require that your business be registered with the secretary of state (and also charge for that too). If you are a small (or even medium-sized) business, this will result in filing dozens if not hundreds of extra government forms every year. Plus you run into the fact that different states have different rules about what's even taxable.
That's a huge burden for a small internet retailer, but an insignificant one for a large internet retailer.
It'd be nice to have some kind of harmonized form that all states could agree to use and make this process less cumbersome, or perhaps go down the EU path and make businesses exempt if they do less than $100k of sales to any state would make it a bit more manageable.
Netflix is entrenched and large enough that ISPs have to negotiate with them. If anything the loss of Net Neutrality will be a win for them as it'll create a further barrier for entry for new competitors in their space.
Losing NN will hurt the people that might try to unthrone netflix or google, it won't hurt netflix or google.
Well i think once you have one fiber ISP then everyone is forced to come up to speed. I believe i have 4 gigabit options (since I believe my zip has both comcast and centurylink fiber service) and I can get municipal fiber and also gigabit cable.
But if there's no real competition then the existing ISPs don't seem to care.
I'm certainly simplifying economic theory some, and I can see why it's not often cost effective to sell a factory second or reconditioned item. Also recognize the arguments for why fashion houses don't want seconds on the market at all.
However I think the EU is well within their purview if they want to regulate that. They are working towards setting up binding rules on food waste that will (I presume) create a legal requirement that supermarkets don't throw salable food in the trash and presumably motivate customers to buy it. I get that very notion offends some people's sensibilities, but the EU is very much in the business of telling you what you can and can't do with something you own.
The EU can absolutely set up a tax structure that makes it unattractive to for businesses to throw stuff that has residual value into the trash. Then that simply tilts the whole economic structure in favor of reuse.
> And YOU expect the retailer (or someone) to sell the product for less than the first time. After adding on a bunch of costs. What "savings" do you imagine exist that would justify a lower selling price?
The sales price of any item is determined by what the market will bear and not the cost to make it. In reality it costs our factory more to produce a factory second (because of the extra QC, repackaging and maintaining a separate sales channel, yet we sell them for less than our first quality items because the value of the item has nothing to do with the cost.
> Now I know you are... well, if something is defective from the seller then it is OBVIOUS that the seller should not only refund the purchase price but pay for getting it back.
I perhaps worded that wrongly. My point was that Amazon encourages consumers to use the defective label to get free return shipping. In reality I think they should probably offer free returns for any reason. Then "I didn't like the color" wouldn't be an "item not as described".
> You've fabricated the corner, because the fact that the product was SOLD means it cannot be sold as new again, defective or not.
Is that true? I'm pretty sure if i return a shirt to the store with the tags on it then it'll go right out and be sold as new in most situations.
Our washing machine was an open box that we got from a regular retailer. I'm pretty sure it had been used before, but was effectively new, warrantied and a bit cheaper than it would have been.
Was it tested? I have no idea. But i'll bet a manufacturer service center could run a self diagnostic on it and have a pretty good idea if it's working or not. Same for smartphones - they are small and light, they could go back to samsung, be inspected, factory reset and tested before going out to consumers who are happy to take the savings.
Now I don't doubt that paying someone to hook up a washing machine, run it through a test cycle, the drain it and repackage it for sale costs a significant amount of money and that it's more cost effective to drop it in a landfill. However I think the EU's point is that this is unnecessarily wasteful and that we (as a global society) would be better off if that stuff did get reconditioned for sale.
In a somewhat unrelated note, I do believe that Amazon make this worse by offering free returns for anything that's defective. This creates an incentive for the customer to say a phone is defective because "the battery life isn't as long as advertised". Then they have painted themselves into a corner where the consumers fabricated defect means they can't resell that product as new.
Slashdot Mirror
They dropped their tivo quite a few years ago, but when they still had it, it was connected to their phone line because that just worked. The tivo didn't have wifi so they'd have had to spend more money to hook it to the network and there was nothing to be gained from doing that.
I never said we were making progress.
I merely said that if you look at cars the ones you can buy new now typically cost about the same (adjusted for inflation) as they have done for decades. Now people are choosing to move to larger, heavier vehicles which has certainly increased the typical price paid.
A 1985 Toyota Corolla started at $7,133 (which is about $17,038.47 after inflation) and one today would start at $18,700. A slight increase, but you'd be getting a car that's faster, more efficient, safer and with a lot more features.
My comment isn't to suggest that there aren't shit phones out there.
If i wanted a non-smartphone i'd totally go for the Nokia 3310. It's around $50 and seems to get solid reviews.
I'd argue that they mostly have. You can get a reliable new car for around the $20k mark. Land has certainly gone up a lot, but i think the actual cost of building a safe well insulated home has been pretty stable.
Obviously against a background of controlled inflation they've continued to rise in absolute dollars/euros but that's true of everything.
I think we're about to see a hasty retreat in the average smartphone price.
My girlfriend recently picked up a Nokia 6.1 - it's fast enough, it's got a good enough camera, a good enough screen, enough memory and it's a pretty good looking phone. It's $250. Certainly there are people who'll have some need for the top-of-the-line, but for the vast majority of people that's a perfectly good phone.
I really think that's the direction things will trend. The "entry level" phones will steadily advance and the "flagship" ones will argue about screen notches and stuff like that. I can't see myself buying another flagship one, and I'm sure i'm not alone.
Large web apps are often at near saturation. If someone hasn't signed up for facebook or gmail already then it's very unlikely that any kind of redesign or feature addition will change that calculus for them. However it does risk alienating existing users and in turn reducing the revenue stream.
Contrast that with non-subscription desktop software, you make nothing off satisfied users, you instead only make money off people who want the latest version and that forces a certain level of innovation. There's also little chance of pissing off your satisfied users, since they can usually skip the upgrade if the software is currently meeting their needs.
From what I understand it's fair game at all times
https://helpx.adobe.com/stock/...
Plus the renovation to the light is mostly just to the type of bulb. The Eiffel towers light display is a bit more involved
In their defense, Getty made it clear that they didn't have a property release.
They offer an additional service where they'll do the research for you to answer whether or not a property release is needed in a particular case and they even further will, for an additional fee, assume responsibility if they are wrong.
I'm assuming whomever chose that image didn't realize it was the Las Vegas version of the statue and it never occurred to them to even consider the rights issue. However most photos that come up when you search for "Statue of Liberty" are of the NY version, so the argument that they chose that one because it was more aesthetically pleasing does carry some weight (even if it wasn't deliberate).
The photographer & getty sold the image with the caveat of "No release, but release may not be required" - here's their popup of what that means:
https://www.gettyimages.com/as...
If you weren't paying attention and thought you were buying an image of the original statue of liberty then you'd reasonably assume that it wasn't copyrighted because it's been built too long ago. However the photograph was clearly marked as being taken in Las Vegas and as being a photo of a replica.
From what I can tell, the photographer did their job and Getty did their job. Could they have handheld the USPS through the intricacies of federal copyright law better? Sure. Did they have a responsibility to? Probably not.
Fun fact - you need a property release to use a photo of the Eiffel Tower at night, but not during the day (the lights are copyrighted).
Yes, but it's also insignificant considering the projected needs of energy storage over the next few decades. If Tesla becomes the provider of choice in a market that could be worth tens of billions annually in a few years time then that's a pretty large revenue stream.
I think that while cars are a traditional market, energy storage is definitely not and it's hardly surprising that it'd be priced more like a startup.
They've deployed over a GWh of energy storage, and it sounds like they've got a single deal in the works with california that will be bigger than everything they've done so far (and i find it hard to believe that's the only big deal they are lining up). That's a huge space, and if they continue to beat the industry for the amount of cobalt in their batteries then they'll be really competitive in a fast growing space.
Oh yeah, i totally understand why they aren't doing it.
Still there's some hope that europe might force something like that on them.
It's frustrating that so much of the gig economy is based around closed ecosystems. If you could coordinate uber, lyft, doordash, amazon, task rabbit and whatever else into a single platform where systems could try and find the best synergy for each employee then you could probably improve earnings, efficiency and pollution quite a bit.
It's no different from a subway franchise in that regard. Or really a fedex franchise.
Plus i expect you'd need something like $3-4M in revenue to support that.
Not a horrible rate of return if the work is stable, but you seem like you'd be totally dependent on Amazon to keep the packages and growth coming and you'd really suffer if they slowed down a little.
Thanks - didn't know that.
Still I don't think it's reasonable to say that the pollution caused in mongolia in refining neodymium is a function of "green energy". It's much more a function of the Chinese lacking sensible environmental regulations. If we wanted to start a useful trade war we could put tariffs on stuff that's made in ways that are needlessly damaging to the environment.
The main issue is that it's not all tech.
I'm sure some states support online filing, but i know my company still fills out a paper form and mails a check. You'd think states could work together and streamline this process since they'd likely get more compliance if you didn't need to establish ~45 different relationships, but it seems to not be the case. In any event it's easy for amazon to add a couple of CPAs to deal with the burden of filing all that, much harder for a small retailer.
If states can mandate collection then it seems self-evident that cities and special tax districts can too. In colorado your ZIP code alone doesn't answer which tax jurisdiction(s) you are in and for some of the special tax regions it's nearly impossible to find out if an address is in them or not. Here's the actual definition of where denver's transit tax applies
Counties of Denver, Boulder, and Jefferson. Generally, Broomfield County (except certain
areas immediately adjacent to I-25 and Highway 7 interchange), Adams County (west of Box
Elder Creek), Arapahoe County (south of I-70, generally west of Picadilly Rd. to Jewell, then
west of Gun Club Rd. to Quincy, then generally west of Monaghan Rd., including Arapahoe
Park and Aurora Reservoir), and Douglas County (northern portion consisting of the City of
Lone Tree, the Town of Parker, the Acres Green area and most of Highlands Ranch), the area
within the boundaries of the Town of Castle Rock does not have RTD sales/use tax, parts of
Weld County that have been annexed by the city of Longmont and the town of Erie since 1994
How do you resolve something like that? It'll obviously create a market for a secondary service that exists to figure out the applicable combination of tax rates, which again will be disproportionately costly for small businesses.
Perhaps not as cheaply as the Chinese process, but my understanding of what MolyCorp are doing suggests that you can indeed refine Neodymium without dumping sulfuric acid into rivers.
https://cen.acs.org/articles/9...
This isn't so much an issue with Neodymium but with the fact that we tend to buy materials from wherever they are cheapest and without a second thought for the externalized costs that went into producing them.
Radioactivity certainly is an issue if it winds up in wastewater, but if the radioactive elements can be isolated then I can't really see the issue with dumping them in the same environment. The processing is solvent based and it's not like we've "made more" radioactivity than was in the natural environment to start with..
And every new natural gas or coal plant
You are missing the point though.
It's one thing to have your business registered in your home state, you'll already have a corporate presence a tax id number and whatever else you'd need. Usually remitting sales tax is one extra form that you send in monthly or quarterly depending on the sales volume.
However you now need to do this in fifty states. Some states let you do that for free, but lots of states have charges just for being able to remits sales tax, others further require that your business be registered with the secretary of state (and also charge for that too). If you are a small (or even medium-sized) business, this will result in filing dozens if not hundreds of extra government forms every year. Plus you run into the fact that different states have different rules about what's even taxable.
That's a huge burden for a small internet retailer, but an insignificant one for a large internet retailer.
It'd be nice to have some kind of harmonized form that all states could agree to use and make this process less cumbersome, or perhaps go down the EU path and make businesses exempt if they do less than $100k of sales to any state would make it a bit more manageable.
Netflix is entrenched and large enough that ISPs have to negotiate with them. If anything the loss of Net Neutrality will be a win for them as it'll create a further barrier for entry for new competitors in their space.
Losing NN will hurt the people that might try to unthrone netflix or google, it won't hurt netflix or google.
Well i think once you have one fiber ISP then everyone is forced to come up to speed. I believe i have 4 gigabit options (since I believe my zip has both comcast and centurylink fiber service) and I can get municipal fiber and also gigabit cable.
But if there's no real competition then the existing ISPs don't seem to care.
I'm certainly simplifying economic theory some, and I can see why it's not often cost effective to sell a factory second or reconditioned item. Also recognize the arguments for why fashion houses don't want seconds on the market at all.
However I think the EU is well within their purview if they want to regulate that. They are working towards setting up binding rules on food waste that will (I presume) create a legal requirement that supermarkets don't throw salable food in the trash and presumably motivate customers to buy it. I get that very notion offends some people's sensibilities, but the EU is very much in the business of telling you what you can and can't do with something you own.
The EU can absolutely set up a tax structure that makes it unattractive to for businesses to throw stuff that has residual value into the trash. Then that simply tilts the whole economic structure in favor of reuse.
> And YOU expect the retailer (or someone) to sell the product for less than the first time. After adding on a bunch of costs. What "savings" do you imagine exist that would justify a lower selling price?
The sales price of any item is determined by what the market will bear and not the cost to make it. In reality it costs our factory more to produce a factory second (because of the extra QC, repackaging and maintaining a separate sales channel, yet we sell them for less than our first quality items because the value of the item has nothing to do with the cost.
> Now I know you are ... well, if something is defective from the seller then it is OBVIOUS that the seller should not only refund the purchase price but pay for getting it back.
I perhaps worded that wrongly. My point was that Amazon encourages consumers to use the defective label to get free return shipping. In reality I think they should probably offer free returns for any reason. Then "I didn't like the color" wouldn't be an "item not as described".
> You've fabricated the corner, because the fact that the product was SOLD means it cannot be sold as new again, defective or not.
Is that true? I'm pretty sure if i return a shirt to the store with the tags on it then it'll go right out and be sold as new in most situations.
Our washing machine was an open box that we got from a regular retailer. I'm pretty sure it had been used before, but was effectively new, warrantied and a bit cheaper than it would have been.
Was it tested? I have no idea. But i'll bet a manufacturer service center could run a self diagnostic on it and have a pretty good idea if it's working or not. Same for smartphones - they are small and light, they could go back to samsung, be inspected, factory reset and tested before going out to consumers who are happy to take the savings.
Now I don't doubt that paying someone to hook up a washing machine, run it through a test cycle, the drain it and repackage it for sale costs a significant amount of money and that it's more cost effective to drop it in a landfill. However I think the EU's point is that this is unnecessarily wasteful and that we (as a global society) would be better off if that stuff did get reconditioned for sale.
In a somewhat unrelated note, I do believe that Amazon make this worse by offering free returns for anything that's defective. This creates an incentive for the customer to say a phone is defective because "the battery life isn't as long as advertised". Then they have painted themselves into a corner where the consumers fabricated defect means they can't resell that product as new.