If you have people buying insurance across state lines, you have a single national market.
You may have local regulators, which may be a plus, but it won't change the economics of the insurance industry, which will still massively favor consolidation.
And we don't have that now?
Is there some kind of misunderstanding that I'm defending the status quo?
If so, I'll make it clear: I'm not. I think the current state of affairs sucks. What I'm trying to say is that unless you change those specific problems I mention, it doesn't matter what else you change. Next to the inherent lack of consumer power and choice in any free market insurance system, issues like state boundaries are irrelevant.
Ever hear of courts and lawsuits?
Yes. Not only did I mention them in my last post and explain why they're problematic venues for redress at best, I'm happy to elaborate further. For example, one insurer that I dropped because they were essentially committing fraud -- MEGA Life and Health, often selling under NASE or AAS, don't bite if you're ever offered -- has been slapped with two class action lawsuits in the last 10 years and tens of millions in regulatory fines. They're still selling and profitable. No apparent widespread damage to reputation. Just a part of the cost of doing business.
Punishments that involve revocation of charter and associated losses for owners/shareholders might have enough teeth to present real disincentives for misbehavior, and I find that idea intriguing. But it'd still have the problem that pursuing any form of redress in court has right now, and I don't think even with a backer of the stature of Thomas Jefferson that we're going to see political will for that right now. Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans would consider the consumer protection worthwhile when weighed against the downsides for investors.
Without competition you wouldn't have such a powerful computer that you're using. Competition brought it to you. Why is it so hard to believe competition can't do the same with health care and insurance?
Because competition only works for consumers when it's paired with consumer choice, and as I've explained, consumer choice doesn't exist in a free insurance market.
Because it doesn't fit into the socialist ideology?
At least up until now, I've assumed you're discussing the topic in good faith, and haven't made any particular assumptions about your motivations or politics. I'd appreciate the same courtesy. I don't believe I've espoused anything that can properly be called socialism, and if this needs clarifying, I'll state for the record that in the abstract, I think markets are generally the best means of providing most goods and services. And on a personal level, I've enjoyed participating not only as a consumer but as a worker, an investor, and even an entrepreneur in a market economy. I don't, however, believe that markets are magic. They're tools, like any other social institution, and like any tool, no matter how flexible, they have limits and require certain conditions to work effectively. And for a number of services (and even a few goods) where it's difficult to set up incentives correctly, they don't work very well at all. Whatever that set of beliefs is, I'm pretty certain it's not socialism.
Not if all health care providers, hospitals and doctors, refuse to accept certain insurance policies. Do you really think insurance companies are more powerful than hospitals and doctors?
Not unless they're really big. That's my point: most insurance companies are actually less powerful than providers -- unless they get to the point where they have a significant share of the market. And the bigger you get, the bigger your advantage is in negotiating prices with providers. That's why a single national insurance market will do exactly what state markets have done: boil down to 2-3 players.
But let's say for a moment that you get a national market with, I don't know, two dozen players. Competition, right? So, you pick one that seems pretty good, premiums are reasonable for the deductible, the benefits seem right for what you're looking for. And you pay into their pool for, say, three or four years, occasional doctor visit for your standard basic bacterial or viral infection, maybe trip to the opthamologist, periodic standard test. And *then*, one day, something big hits. Bad auto accident? Cancer? MS? Doesn't matter, but it requires a lot of care. Not just in one instance, over months. Maybe years. Maybe the rest of your life. And all of the sudden, you are suddenly a very different prospect than you were to the insurance company the day before. From here on out, you're a liability that has to be managed in some way. Higher premiums? Maybe. Or maybe the insurance company isn't very cooperative: every claim gets challenged, some they may relent on, but some they find an excuse and won't budge. Others they point to "usual and customary" charges for, paying far less of the claim than you expected. Either way, at best, they're a more expensive bargain than they used to be, and at worst, they're not only failing you as a service, they're an active obstruction. What are you going to do?
In a free market, here's what you'll do: nothing. Absolutely nothing.
Leave and go somewhere else? You have weeks to months to years of medical services ahead of you. What kind of rational profit-driven actor in a free market is going to take you on?
Use the law for redress? Perhaps if you can afford to employ a better team of lawyers than the team of lawyers the insurance company employs as part of the cost of doing business, and assuming there are laws favorable to your case (particularly when the same insurance companies employ lobbyists as part of the cost of doing business). And assuming you can hire and direct this team of lawyers while you're dealing with your health challenges.
Are you going to challenge their reputation? This is going to sound familiar, but as part of the cost of doing business, they have marketing and PR efforts that *start* in six figures. You have whatever you can garner via complaining to your social circle, posting on the internet, and maybe, if you're lucky, getting the attention of someone working at a sizable media outlet.
This is the other real reason there's no competition in a free health insurance market: there's a huge information and power asymmetry between insurers and customers, and there's no real incentive for insurers to compete on service, *especially* for the business of the most expensive customers. Not the kind of problem any amount of deregulation can solve -- even ignoring the market-favors-size problem I've mentioned above.
OS X vs Ubuntu have not only entirely different target audiences but are entirely different experiences.
I don't know about entirely: I'm certainly in the audience for both and find them both to have well-thought out desktop experiences on top of unixy goodness.
OS X wins out for me largely because of support for a number of commercial apps that I find valuable, but I like Ubuntu quite a bit, and in a world where it had those useful apps, I might well choose it over Apple's stuff.
Is didglennbeckrapeandmurderayounggirlin1991.com taken?
I'm not saying it is or isn't taken, I'm just saying that a lot of Americans are interested in this question, and somebody needs to ask it.
Oh, I know, some of you are saying "Hey, why not just use nslookup?" Did you know that's part of the "BIND" -- now there's a scary name if there ever was one -- package from Berkeley? Have you ever thought about what the "N" and the "S" stand for? Did you that there's a magazine called "New Socialist" -- and they're now online?
Don't you think this is all pretty interesting?
Oh, and whether or not didglennbeckrapeandmurderayounggirlin1991.com is taken.... gb1990.com is. In fact, they're carrying -- and I know this is a little spooky -- the same content that was at didglennbeckrapeandmurderayounggirlin1990.com. Now that's a pretty interesting fact right there, isn't it? I'm not saying what's there is or isn't "true", but I hope Mr. Beck comes clean about these charges, because if he's innocent, we need him without this cloud over his head.
That's easy to deal with. Wasn't there talk about hearings and an investigation when Microsoft sought to buy Yahoo!? Didn't the FTC investigate Google's buyout of Doubleclick?
The FTC really only got in the game at that point because those are markets that have essentially already boiled down to 2-3 players. Although the difference between search and ad-networks and insurance is that there's a lot more consumer choice -- not number of choices, but freedom to switch at any time. This is the big reason why insurance isn't and doesn't need to be competitive: there's really little consumer pressure.
Someone in a post above wrote about how a hospital in, AZ I think, started refusing the coverage from one insurance company because of what it wasw doing. That forced the company to change it's policy or behavior.
This is actually an example of why it's a *major* advantage to be huge if you're an insurance company. Until you get to a certain size, providers like that hospital you're mentioning actually have more power in negotiating terms than you do, and the only way to get more leverage is to increase your customer base, and the easiest way to do that in a market that doesn't have a lot of consumer choice is to merge.
Also many insurance companies are corporations and the charter which grants them limited liability can be revoked. If businesses are allowed to get away with anything it's because people allow it to not because it can't be punished.
Allow people to go across state lines to buy insurance. Right now each state can say who can and can not sell insurance in that state, I can not go across a state line and buy insurance in another state which may have lower insurance premiums. In other words there is no competition.
This isn't the reason there's no competition. There *might* be a brief increase in competition if you were to remove individual state's rights to regulate and create a national market, but it's pretty likely what would happen before too long would be the same thing that's happened in telecom, broadcast, newspapers, and a bunch of other industries: we'll consolidate nationally to 2-3 players. If anything, it'll happen faster: profitability as an insurance company depends strongly on what you can negotiate with providers, and when it comes to that, bigger is better.
Programming a computer is as hard for most musicians as playing guitar is for you. There's nothing special about it.
I also think computer programming is hard, but that might be because I've only been doing it for 25 years.:)
I'm being a little tongue-in-cheek here: my experience is that the longer I spend on refining any skill, the more I find that *mastery* seems elusive, the greater capacity I have to appreciate the difference between my own skills and people who are farther along the road, and the depth of the investment really required to get there.
It doesn't hurt a musician a bit to spread his music around
I completely agree with you that it's often to their advantage -- in fact, I think I noted in my original comment in this thread.
But I think this is really different from the arguments that music is cheap to create and therefore shouldn't be seen as being as valuable as $10-$12 for an album or $1/song. Because this:
f I hear a great song I'm going to look for another one. Two great songs? Time to buy the album.
only creates a winning economic proposition for the artist if at the time someone decides to buy, they're willing to pay more than peanuts.
You may make money making art, but you can't make art by trying to make money.
I also agree with this as a general philosophy -- not just for art, for anything. You can't do your best work if all you've got in mind is the bottom line, whether it's code, medicine, law, or art.
The flip side is that in order to get to a level of mastery, you have to spend a *lot* of time. If your life is already set up such that you don't have to sell your time to take care of yourself, that gives you a fantastic platform to pursue whatever you like with artistry and craftsmanship in mind rather than rewards. Most people aren't that lucky, and that's the root of the day job, but every hour you work there is time you're not spending refining your skills and sweating over your next creation. People who can figure out a way to get paid for working on their art can spend more time becoming better at it and making better work.
And if they didnt sign the exclusive deal with Apple, what do you think that growth would have been?
Given the common wisdom that the iPhone isn't actually useful -- it's basically a shiny fashion accessory, right? -- one ought to be skeptical that the deal with Apple has anything to do with increased data usage.
The Academic fantasizes about the Technocrat that will eventually lead us all into utopia by prescribing us "plebes" the perfect formula to live our lives
For example, the Chicago or Austrian Schools of Economics.
See, difference between taxes and equity venture-funded capitalism, is...
You can safely spare me the obvious points. I'm keenly aware of the underlying differences in the fundraising mechanisms, in how competition operates within both worlds, in the different investment vehicles, and in where the yields go. Just pointing out one similarity (among a number) that appears to be non-obvious.
Of course, seeing your signature, its obvious that you dislike competition and pray at the alter of big, all powerful government.
You're quite wrong. The only thing you should conclude from my sig is that the consternation among movement conservatives over TFD is one of the pieces of evidence that the conventional wisdom they're underdogs in broadcast media is false.
Not only do I have a considerable amount of theoretical respect for private enterprise and markets as mediating social institutions, I like participating: I've spent the better part of my career working startups and hanging out my own shingle.
But I definitely take exception at unsubtle analyses and digs at other social institutions, including those apparent in the GP. The fact is that academic institutions have to compete for funds, that individuals who participate in it have to compete with each other for project and research funding as well, that there are real incentives even beyond this competition to produce good and useful work, and that these institutions yield dividends to the communities that sponsor them. And that the real business world is full of people who aren't concerned about whether they're using other people's money effectively.
Does that mean that private enterprise sucks and academia is better? Hardly (leaving aside the fact that the question presents a false dichotomy). No single tool, however versatile, is the right one for *every* job.
Perhaps you should move to Europe. They love big unaccountable government.
I expect it would be pleasant. Many if not most European states arguably have economic freedom and prosperity that equal or rival ours, interesting cultural heritages, function as representative democracies (what was that about unaccountability?), and have their own opportunities for entrepreneurs who can find the right space. But I enjoy it here in the US as well, and care about it too much to leave it to people who don't seem to have more than a single idea about what makes a successful and prosperous society.
As opposed to the cost of training anyone to program, or do anything else? There's nothing special about musicians;
There's nothing unique about having a specialization, but by definition, there's something special about musicians: they have a specialization.
I've been playing guitar since about 1966
Maybe because I've only been playing for 14 years it still seems hard to me.
I have a lot of very talented friends who have recorded CDs and whose performances are the highest quality, but they're not rich either. 19 out of 20 artists signed by the major labels don't sell diddly squat, yet they had to get the same training and cost the same as the occasional winner.
In other words, even for most people who develop this specialization, it's still a losing economic proposition.
Sounds like de-valuing it further isn't likely to make things any better.
I used to write music at school. I even have a GCSE qualification in music. Writing music is easy.
Was it easy before you invested the time in studying it?
Writing music is quick too. Someone at the top of their game could knock together a decent tune in a day. Another day to add some words. Another day for some polish.
Perhaps I'm just not on top of the game, but my experience is that writing something compelling and then creating a good performance of it often takes longer.
I do. The cost of everything about making a record album have dropped dramatically in the last few decades, while the price of CDs has remained what it was.
In real terms, I'm not sure that's the case. CDs were around $12-$20 in the late 1980s. They're the same cost now, but a late 1980s dollar had more purchasing power.
In 1975 it cost a musician $200 to record one demo, for a demo the price now is essentially free. Studio costs have dropped to the point that any band that can afford musical instrumants can afford to record.
The cost of production technology has definitely dropped dramatically, but it's not really the issue I'm referring to. It's the cost in human labor to refine the skills necessary to compose something compelling and produce a high quality performance.
wouldn't even be so much of a problem if the music industry (these publishers) charged a reasonable price for a CD
I don't think that $12-$15 (or a buck or two per track) is really an unfair price for even a half-decent CD, really (and I don't think many people pay $30). It may be vanishingly cheap to transmit bits or print them into plastic and foil discs, but it's a lot of work to create music. Paying for it is one good way to make sure the people who make it can keep doing it. Not that it's not good for artists to sometimes sell lower or even give music away, and not that I don't agree there's a lot of crap out there that isn't worth paying for. Just that the most common prices don't seem unreasonable to me given the work involved in making music.
The labels and publishers, on the other hand... increasingly irrelevant middlemen and control freaks who add a lot of overhead and a questionable amount of value.
How's this for an idea. A band signs with a college instead of a record label. The college pays the band, everyone at the college gets their music for free.
Awesome. And the band gets an education from the college, instead of the record industry!
Though to be fair, I'm sure the record industry is a very educational experience...
Fannie Mae, the nation's biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people
Income level doesn't have much to do with the risk level of a given loan. Someone making $30k might be a fantastic candidate for a $100,000 30 year mortgage. Someone making $100k might be a poor candidate for $300,000 30 year mortgage. There are much better indicators than income level for predicting financial risk, and there's no indication there was any public pressure to ignore credit scores, or the ratio of the income level of the loan applicant to the value of the loan and property, or any other indicator.
and felt pressure from stock holders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits.
Not particularly a government problem, but it does shed some light on how we got to the point where in 2005 more than 80% of mortgage lending -- including mortgage lending in the subprime segments -- was done by private firms not subject to any particular legal pressure to do so.
It was the Congress under Bill Clinton that mandated banks sell homes to people without money ("no money down" mortgages),
This seems to go around quite a bit, but I've been unable to find a reference to a specific law that forced banks to lend to people who could not demonstrate an ability to repay on a loan associated with a given property.
The Republican Congress and the Clinton Administration still did some unwise things -- in particular Gramm-Leach-Bliley -- but no forced lending as far as I can tell.
BTW you probably won't believe my first paragraph, so here's the videos so you can see yourself. Even after Bush, McCain, and other republicans tried to fix the impending housing bubble, Democrats refused to listen:
Republicans tried to fix the housing bubble? How? Republicans had majorities in both houses during the 108th and 109th Congress. And the Presidency, which gave them not only the power of the executive bully pulpit and veto, but also executive regulatory authority.
If they'd actually tried to fix anything, there'd be a significantly greater trail than a senate bill that languished in committee and some videos on YouTube.
Well, there's been CB and HAM for decades, really, but if you're emphasizing the broad in broadcast, then yeah, we largely sold out that use of the spectrum years ago, partly because that's mostly how we knew how to do it (aside from the ad hoc community or public access station), partly because it's always been that case that money talks.
But yeah, citizen's broadcast? Here, on the internet, the first really democratic broad communications medium.
So, by this rationale, in order to get more top talent in science, we need to let more talent choose other fields, leaving a scarcity of science grads, which will drive up salaries, and lead more top talent back into science? That's kind of like the argument that cold water boils faster than hot water
Don't see the similarity.
This is an economic argument about supply and demand for a certain kind of skilled labor. For whatever reason, it's pretty much true that salaries for engineers and scientists have remained more or less flat in real terms over the last 30 years. And in relative terms -- compared to careers in medicine, law, finance, etc, they're increasingly less competitive.
Who wouldn't consider an alternative field?
Instead, our business and public leaders seem to believe the solution is to magically increase the supply of this kind of skilled labor via educational (but not career!) incentives and immigration policy. Increased supply should mean decreased price. Decreased price will mean decreased incentive -- particularly for the brightest who will always have other options -- and the labor market will equilibrate accordingly.
The article argues we should let compensation for skilled engineers rise, and the labor market will equilibrate with more of the brightest with options again choosing science and technology.
Along the same lines, I'd like to hear the author's explanation of why employees in finance continue to get paid more and more, even as more talent floods into that profession.
In theory, this is pretty much to be expected over successive iterations in even an efficient market economy where some people accumulate more wealth than others and some people have a talent for managing it profitably. People with money are happy to pay other people lots of money if they can make them more money.
In practice, I suspect there are other factors involving perception and asymmetric information.
"Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in the United States."
I studied Math. Not the worst possible choice for an undergrad, really: the level of conceptual abstraction and logical rigor make it difficult, maybe even somewhat more so than some other technical fields, but in terms of sheer number of hours of coursework, it's considerably shorter than engineering, which allows a student to take a lot of other courses and still graduate in a reasonable amount of time. And it's a pretty good education, too.
I don't think I'd do it again.
It's exceptionally clear that not only does the marketplace value other skills (law, finance, business adminstration, plumbing) more highly, but that 90% of the population doesn't even understand what it is you learned. I'd have been far better off to pick a Math minor for core skills and rigor and pair it with an Econ or Business Major. And let's not even go to the Electrical Engineering degree I originally considered. Unless you're doing it for sheer love, it's a waste of time.
That's the general prognosis. As a career choice, STEM fields offer mediocre to middlin' rewards. Particularly when you consider the alternatives.
Red Herring. The current argument advanced by this guy and the various copyright agencies is that copyright is the only way to do it.
No red herrings here. The comment I responded to clearly said "Want to get paid more? Do some more work." That's an equivalent statement to "Patronage is the only acceptable model" when it comes to creative work.
Another Red Herring. There's also fee-for-product.
If you don't have a copyright, the creative work is not a product, particularly in an era when digital reproduction is vanishingly cheap.
Not to mention that if you take the "Want to get paid? Do some more work" philosophy seriously, there's no such thing as fee-for-product, really. You wouldn't get paid for the *product*, you'd get paid for the *work* you did to create it. No setting the price for it, only the price for your labor. In fact, under this model, there's nothing else to sell *other* than labor.
As for your dig about cursing, your sarcasm isn't a sign of elevated argumentation either. If you want to throw rocks, make sure it isn't your glass house your throwing them at.
There's a huge difference between being sarcastic and saying "fuck you." The former might indicate disdain for language or an idea, but the latter is pretty much the most powerful succinct expression for conveying personal disregard and contempt.
Slashdot Mirror
And where did I say a single insurance market?
If you have people buying insurance across state lines, you have a single national market.
You may have local regulators, which may be a plus, but it won't change the economics of the insurance industry, which will still massively favor consolidation.
And we don't have that now?
Is there some kind of misunderstanding that I'm defending the status quo?
If so, I'll make it clear: I'm not. I think the current state of affairs sucks. What I'm trying to say is that unless you change those specific problems I mention, it doesn't matter what else you change. Next to the inherent lack of consumer power and choice in any free market insurance system, issues like state boundaries are irrelevant.
Ever hear of courts and lawsuits?
Yes. Not only did I mention them in my last post and explain why they're problematic venues for redress at best, I'm happy to elaborate further. For example, one insurer that I dropped because they were essentially committing fraud -- MEGA Life and Health, often selling under NASE or AAS, don't bite if you're ever offered -- has been slapped with two class action lawsuits in the last 10 years and tens of millions in regulatory fines. They're still selling and profitable. No apparent widespread damage to reputation. Just a part of the cost of doing business.
Punishments that involve revocation of charter and associated losses for owners/shareholders might have enough teeth to present real disincentives for misbehavior, and I find that idea intriguing. But it'd still have the problem that pursuing any form of redress in court has right now, and I don't think even with a backer of the stature of Thomas Jefferson that we're going to see political will for that right now. Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans would consider the consumer protection worthwhile when weighed against the downsides for investors.
Without competition you wouldn't have such a powerful computer that you're using. Competition brought it to you. Why is it so hard to believe competition can't do the same with health care and insurance?
Because competition only works for consumers when it's paired with consumer choice, and as I've explained, consumer choice doesn't exist in a free insurance market.
Because it doesn't fit into the socialist ideology?
At least up until now, I've assumed you're discussing the topic in good faith, and haven't made any particular assumptions about your motivations or politics. I'd appreciate the same courtesy. I don't believe I've espoused anything that can properly be called socialism, and if this needs clarifying, I'll state for the record that in the abstract, I think markets are generally the best means of providing most goods and services. And on a personal level, I've enjoyed participating not only as a consumer but as a worker, an investor, and even an entrepreneur in a market economy. I don't, however, believe that markets are magic. They're tools, like any other social institution, and like any tool, no matter how flexible, they have limits and require certain conditions to work effectively. And for a number of services (and even a few goods) where it's difficult to set up incentives correctly, they don't work very well at all. Whatever that set of beliefs is, I'm pretty certain it's not socialism.
Not if all health care providers, hospitals and doctors, refuse to accept certain insurance policies. Do you really think insurance companies are more powerful than hospitals and doctors?
Not unless they're really big. That's my point: most insurance companies are actually less powerful than providers -- unless they get to the point where they have a significant share of the market. And the bigger you get, the bigger your advantage is in negotiating prices with providers. That's why a single national insurance market will do exactly what state markets have done: boil down to 2-3 players.
But let's say for a moment that you get a national market with, I don't know, two dozen players. Competition, right? So, you pick one that seems pretty good, premiums are reasonable for the deductible, the benefits seem right for what you're looking for. And you pay into their pool for, say, three or four years, occasional doctor visit for your standard basic bacterial or viral infection, maybe trip to the opthamologist, periodic standard test. And *then*, one day, something big hits. Bad auto accident? Cancer? MS? Doesn't matter, but it requires a lot of care. Not just in one instance, over months. Maybe years. Maybe the rest of your life. And all of the sudden, you are suddenly a very different prospect than you were to the insurance company the day before. From here on out, you're a liability that has to be managed in some way. Higher premiums? Maybe. Or maybe the insurance company isn't very cooperative: every claim gets challenged, some they may relent on, but some they find an excuse and won't budge. Others they point to "usual and customary" charges for, paying far less of the claim than you expected. Either way, at best, they're a more expensive bargain than they used to be, and at worst, they're not only failing you as a service, they're an active obstruction. What are you going to do?
In a free market, here's what you'll do: nothing. Absolutely nothing.
Leave and go somewhere else? You have weeks to months to years of medical services ahead of you. What kind of rational profit-driven actor in a free market is going to take you on?
Use the law for redress? Perhaps if you can afford to employ a better team of lawyers than the team of lawyers the insurance company employs as part of the cost of doing business, and assuming there are laws favorable to your case (particularly when the same insurance companies employ lobbyists as part of the cost of doing business). And assuming you can hire and direct this team of lawyers while you're dealing with your health challenges.
Are you going to challenge their reputation? This is going to sound familiar, but as part of the cost of doing business, they have marketing and PR efforts that *start* in six figures. You have whatever you can garner via complaining to your social circle, posting on the internet, and maybe, if you're lucky, getting the attention of someone working at a sizable media outlet.
This is the other real reason there's no competition in a free health insurance market: there's a huge information and power asymmetry between insurers and customers, and there's no real incentive for insurers to compete on service, *especially* for the business of the most expensive customers. Not the kind of problem any amount of deregulation can solve -- even ignoring the market-favors-size problem I've mentioned above.
OS X vs Ubuntu have not only entirely different target audiences but are entirely different experiences.
I don't know about entirely: I'm certainly in the audience for both and find them both to have well-thought out desktop experiences on top of unixy goodness.
OS X wins out for me largely because of support for a number of commercial apps that I find valuable, but I like Ubuntu quite a bit, and in a world where it had those useful apps, I might well choose it over Apple's stuff.
Is didglennbeckrapeandmurderayounggirlin1991.com taken?
I'm not saying it is or isn't taken, I'm just saying that a lot of Americans are interested in this question, and somebody needs to ask it.
Oh, I know, some of you are saying "Hey, why not just use nslookup?" Did you know that's part of the "BIND" -- now there's a scary name if there ever was one -- package from Berkeley? Have you ever thought about what the "N" and the "S" stand for? Did you that there's a magazine called "New Socialist" -- and they're now online?
Don't you think this is all pretty interesting?
Oh, and whether or not didglennbeckrapeandmurderayounggirlin1991.com is taken .... gb1990.com is. In fact, they're carrying -- and I know this is a little spooky -- the same content that was at didglennbeckrapeandmurderayounggirlin1990.com. Now that's a pretty interesting fact right there, isn't it? I'm not saying what's there is or isn't "true", but I hope Mr. Beck comes clean about these charges, because if he's innocent, we need him without this cloud over his head.
I mean, it's a pretty big struggle right now for conservative voices, nearly drowned out and lost in the liberal sea of the Mainstream Media.
Maybe some kind of "Fairness Doctrine" that compelled media outlets to give time to opposing viewpoints could help boost their message?
That's easy to deal with. Wasn't there talk about hearings and an investigation when Microsoft sought to buy Yahoo!? Didn't the FTC investigate Google's buyout of Doubleclick?
The FTC really only got in the game at that point because those are markets that have essentially already boiled down to 2-3 players. Although the difference between search and ad-networks and insurance is that there's a lot more consumer choice -- not number of choices, but freedom to switch at any time. This is the big reason why insurance isn't and doesn't need to be competitive: there's really little consumer pressure.
Someone in a post above wrote about how a hospital in, AZ I think, started refusing the coverage from one insurance company because of what it wasw doing. That forced the company to change it's policy or behavior.
This is actually an example of why it's a *major* advantage to be huge if you're an insurance company. Until you get to a certain size, providers like that hospital you're mentioning actually have more power in negotiating terms than you do, and the only way to get more leverage is to increase your customer base, and the easiest way to do that in a market that doesn't have a lot of consumer choice is to merge.
Also many insurance companies are corporations and the charter which grants them limited liability can be revoked. If businesses are allowed to get away with anything it's because people allow it to not because it can't be punished.
An intriguing idea.
Allow people to go across state lines to buy insurance. Right now each state can say who can and can not sell insurance in that state, I can not go across a state line and buy insurance in another state which may have lower insurance premiums. In other words there is no competition.
This isn't the reason there's no competition. There *might* be a brief increase in competition if you were to remove individual state's rights to regulate and create a national market, but it's pretty likely what would happen before too long would be the same thing that's happened in telecom, broadcast, newspapers, and a bunch of other industries: we'll consolidate nationally to 2-3 players. If anything, it'll happen faster: profitability as an insurance company depends strongly on what you can negotiate with providers, and when it comes to that, bigger is better.
Programming a computer is as hard for most musicians as playing guitar is for you. There's nothing special about it.
I also think computer programming is hard, but that might be because I've only been doing it for 25 years. :)
I'm being a little tongue-in-cheek here: my experience is that the longer I spend on refining any skill, the more I find that *mastery* seems elusive, the greater capacity I have to appreciate the difference between my own skills and people who are farther along the road, and the depth of the investment really required to get there.
It doesn't hurt a musician a bit to spread his music around
I completely agree with you that it's often to their advantage -- in fact, I think I noted in my original comment in this thread.
But I think this is really different from the arguments that music is cheap to create and therefore shouldn't be seen as being as valuable as $10-$12 for an album or $1/song. Because this:
f I hear a great song I'm going to look for another one. Two great songs? Time to buy the album.
only creates a winning economic proposition for the artist if at the time someone decides to buy, they're willing to pay more than peanuts.
You may make money making art, but you can't make art by trying to make money.
I also agree with this as a general philosophy -- not just for art, for anything. You can't do your best work if all you've got in mind is the bottom line, whether it's code, medicine, law, or art.
The flip side is that in order to get to a level of mastery, you have to spend a *lot* of time. If your life is already set up such that you don't have to sell your time to take care of yourself, that gives you a fantastic platform to pursue whatever you like with artistry and craftsmanship in mind rather than rewards. Most people aren't that lucky, and that's the root of the day job, but every hour you work there is time you're not spending refining your skills and sweating over your next creation. People who can figure out a way to get paid for working on their art can spend more time becoming better at it and making better work.
And if they didnt sign the exclusive deal with Apple, what do you think that growth would have been?
Given the common wisdom that the iPhone isn't actually useful -- it's basically a shiny fashion accessory, right? -- one ought to be skeptical that the deal with Apple has anything to do with increased data usage.
The Academic fantasizes about the Technocrat that will eventually lead us all into utopia by prescribing us "plebes" the perfect formula to live our lives
For example, the Chicago or Austrian Schools of Economics.
See, difference between taxes and equity venture-funded capitalism, is...
You can safely spare me the obvious points. I'm keenly aware of the underlying differences in the fundraising mechanisms, in how competition operates within both worlds, in the different investment vehicles, and in where the yields go. Just pointing out one similarity (among a number) that appears to be non-obvious.
Of course, seeing your signature, its obvious that you dislike competition and pray at the alter of big, all powerful government.
You're quite wrong. The only thing you should conclude from my sig is that the consternation among movement conservatives over TFD is one of the pieces of evidence that the conventional wisdom they're underdogs in broadcast media is false.
Not only do I have a considerable amount of theoretical respect for private enterprise and markets as mediating social institutions, I like participating: I've spent the better part of my career working startups and hanging out my own shingle.
But I definitely take exception at unsubtle analyses and digs at other social institutions, including those apparent in the GP. The fact is that academic institutions have to compete for funds, that individuals who participate in it have to compete with each other for project and research funding as well, that there are real incentives even beyond this competition to produce good and useful work, and that these institutions yield dividends to the communities that sponsor them. And that the real business world is full of people who aren't concerned about whether they're using other people's money effectively.
Does that mean that private enterprise sucks and academia is better? Hardly (leaving aside the fact that the question presents a false dichotomy). No single tool, however versatile, is the right one for *every* job.
Perhaps you should move to Europe. They love big unaccountable government.
I expect it would be pleasant. Many if not most European states arguably have economic freedom and prosperity that equal or rival ours, interesting cultural heritages, function as representative democracies (what was that about unaccountability?), and have their own opportunities for entrepreneurs who can find the right space. But I enjoy it here in the US as well, and care about it too much to leave it to people who don't seem to have more than a single idea about what makes a successful and prosperous society.
if your product sucks, you dont have to worry about it because your really just spending someone elses money.
Pretty much the story of most equity-funded businesses (particularly venture-funded.
And C-level agents.
As opposed to the cost of training anyone to program, or do anything else? There's nothing special about musicians;
There's nothing unique about having a specialization, but by definition, there's something special about musicians: they have a specialization.
I've been playing guitar since about 1966
Maybe because I've only been playing for 14 years it still seems hard to me.
I have a lot of very talented friends who have recorded CDs and whose performances are the highest quality, but they're not rich either. 19 out of 20 artists signed by the major labels don't sell diddly squat, yet they had to get the same training and cost the same as the occasional winner.
In other words, even for most people who develop this specialization, it's still a losing economic proposition.
Sounds like de-valuing it further isn't likely to make things any better.
Apple still is a Wolf, right?
I mean, sure, even if they apparently haven't done this, they still could, right?
Why take a chance? Don't buy Apple's locked-down hard--- wait, that's the iPhone rant. Don't buy Apple's potentially locked-down software.
I used to write music at school. I even have a GCSE qualification in music. Writing music is easy.
Was it easy before you invested the time in studying it?
Writing music is quick too. Someone at the top of their game could knock together a decent tune in a day. Another day to add some words. Another day for some polish.
Perhaps I'm just not on top of the game, but my experience is that writing something compelling and then creating a good performance of it often takes longer.
I do. The cost of everything about making a record album have dropped dramatically in the last few decades, while the price of CDs has remained what it was.
In real terms, I'm not sure that's the case. CDs were around $12-$20 in the late 1980s. They're the same cost now, but a late 1980s dollar had more purchasing power.
In 1975 it cost a musician $200 to record one demo, for a demo the price now is essentially free. Studio costs have dropped to the point that any band that can afford musical instrumants can afford to record.
The cost of production technology has definitely dropped dramatically, but it's not really the issue I'm referring to. It's the cost in human labor to refine the skills necessary to compose something compelling and produce a high quality performance.
wouldn't even be so much of a problem if the music industry (these publishers) charged a reasonable price for a CD
I don't think that $12-$15 (or a buck or two per track) is really an unfair price for even a half-decent CD, really (and I don't think many people pay $30). It may be vanishingly cheap to transmit bits or print them into plastic and foil discs, but it's a lot of work to create music. Paying for it is one good way to make sure the people who make it can keep doing it. Not that it's not good for artists to sometimes sell lower or even give music away, and not that I don't agree there's a lot of crap out there that isn't worth paying for. Just that the most common prices don't seem unreasonable to me given the work involved in making music.
The labels and publishers, on the other hand... increasingly irrelevant middlemen and control freaks who add a lot of overhead and a questionable amount of value.
How's this for an idea. A band signs with a college instead of a record label. The college pays the band, everyone at the college gets their music for free.
Awesome. And the band gets an education from the college, instead of the record industry!
Though to be fair, I'm sure the record industry is a very educational experience...
Fannie Mae, the nation's biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people
Income level doesn't have much to do with the risk level of a given loan. Someone making $30k might be a fantastic candidate for a $100,000 30 year mortgage. Someone making $100k might be a poor candidate for $300,000 30 year mortgage. There are much better indicators than income level for predicting financial risk, and there's no indication there was any public pressure to ignore credit scores, or the ratio of the income level of the loan applicant to the value of the loan and property, or any other indicator.
and felt pressure from stock holders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits.
Not particularly a government problem, but it does shed some light on how we got to the point where in 2005 more than 80% of mortgage lending -- including mortgage lending in the subprime segments -- was done by private firms not subject to any particular legal pressure to do so.
It was the Congress under Bill Clinton that mandated banks sell homes to people without money ("no money down" mortgages),
This seems to go around quite a bit, but I've been unable to find a reference to a specific law that forced banks to lend to people who could not demonstrate an ability to repay on a loan associated with a given property.
The Republican Congress and the Clinton Administration still did some unwise things -- in particular Gramm-Leach-Bliley -- but no forced lending as far as I can tell.
BTW you probably won't believe my first paragraph, so here's the videos so you can see yourself. Even after Bush, McCain, and other republicans tried to fix the impending housing bubble, Democrats refused to listen:
Republicans tried to fix the housing bubble? How? Republicans had majorities in both houses during the 108th and 109th Congress. And the Presidency, which gave them not only the power of the executive bully pulpit and veto, but also executive regulatory authority.
If they'd actually tried to fix anything, there'd be a significantly greater trail than a senate bill that languished in committee and some videos on YouTube.
Here.
Well, there's been CB and HAM for decades, really, but if you're emphasizing the broad in broadcast, then yeah, we largely sold out that use of the spectrum years ago, partly because that's mostly how we knew how to do it (aside from the ad hoc community or public access station), partly because it's always been that case that money talks.
But yeah, citizen's broadcast? Here, on the internet, the first really democratic broad communications medium.
So, by this rationale, in order to get more top talent in science, we need to let more talent choose other fields, leaving a scarcity of science grads, which will drive up salaries, and lead more top talent back into science? That's kind of like the argument that cold water boils faster than hot water
Don't see the similarity.
This is an economic argument about supply and demand for a certain kind of skilled labor. For whatever reason, it's pretty much true that salaries for engineers and scientists have remained more or less flat in real terms over the last 30 years. And in relative terms -- compared to careers in medicine, law, finance, etc, they're increasingly less competitive.
Who wouldn't consider an alternative field?
Instead, our business and public leaders seem to believe the solution is to magically increase the supply of this kind of skilled labor via educational (but not career!) incentives and immigration policy. Increased supply should mean decreased price. Decreased price will mean decreased incentive -- particularly for the brightest who will always have other options -- and the labor market will equilibrate accordingly.
The article argues we should let compensation for skilled engineers rise, and the labor market will equilibrate with more of the brightest with options again choosing science and technology.
Along the same lines, I'd like to hear the author's explanation of why employees in finance continue to get paid more and more, even as more talent floods into that profession.
In theory, this is pretty much to be expected over successive iterations in even an efficient market economy where some people accumulate more wealth than others and some people have a talent for managing it profitably. People with money are happy to pay other people lots of money if they can make them more money.
In practice, I suspect there are other factors involving perception and asymmetric information.
"Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in the United States."
I studied Math. Not the worst possible choice for an undergrad, really: the level of conceptual abstraction and logical rigor make it difficult, maybe even somewhat more so than some other technical fields, but in terms of sheer number of hours of coursework, it's considerably shorter than engineering, which allows a student to take a lot of other courses and still graduate in a reasonable amount of time. And it's a pretty good education, too.
I don't think I'd do it again.
It's exceptionally clear that not only does the marketplace value other skills (law, finance, business adminstration, plumbing) more highly, but that 90% of the population doesn't even understand what it is you learned. I'd have been far better off to pick a Math minor for core skills and rigor and pair it with an Econ or Business Major. And let's not even go to the Electrical Engineering degree I originally considered. Unless you're doing it for sheer love, it's a waste of time.
That's the general prognosis. As a career choice, STEM fields offer mediocre to middlin' rewards. Particularly when you consider the alternatives.
There is no such thing as a market failure.
Citation needed.
Red Herring. The current argument advanced by this guy and the various copyright agencies is that copyright is the only way to do it.
No red herrings here. The comment I responded to clearly said "Want to get paid more? Do some more work." That's an equivalent statement to "Patronage is the only acceptable model" when it comes to creative work.
Another Red Herring. There's also fee-for-product.
If you don't have a copyright, the creative work is not a product, particularly in an era when digital reproduction is vanishingly cheap.
Not to mention that if you take the "Want to get paid? Do some more work" philosophy seriously, there's no such thing as fee-for-product, really. You wouldn't get paid for the *product*, you'd get paid for the *work* you did to create it. No setting the price for it, only the price for your labor. In fact, under this model, there's nothing else to sell *other* than labor.
As for your dig about cursing, your sarcasm isn't a sign of elevated argumentation either. If you want to throw rocks, make sure it isn't your glass house your throwing them at.
There's a huge difference between being sarcastic and saying "fuck you." The former might indicate disdain for language or an idea, but the latter is pretty much the most powerful succinct expression for conveying personal disregard and contempt.