The cost of purchasing a home has gone up over 900% as well.
Just so we're clear, prices on houses that were in the $10-30k range 40 years ago are now in the $300-500k range. However, interest rates that were in the 15-20% range several decades ago are now in the 4% range. The interest rate factor shouldn't be ignored. It plays a role that makes blindly looking at prices then-and-now extremely faulty.
At one point in history about 50% the Dutch economy was spent purchasing outrageously priced $4000 tulip bulbs. This was on account of idiots blindly following a trend that didn't provide any tangible benefits except two weeks of exquisite beauty in early spring.
A book available POD from Amazon will not go out of print as long as Amazon stays in the POD business.
I'm happy to have the option to buy best sellers from Amazon or B&N or Google Books or local bookshop or borrow it from the library. But for obscure stuff I'm happy being forced into any single one of these options because demand it low. That said... I'd much prefer to hand an author $20 and get a dead-tree copy of their signed book or $10 to download a copy of their eBook. This isn't always practical, so Amazon's way is a happy substitute.
Amazon runs a program called Vine where a vendor can pay them money to they give away items for free to people known for writing high-quality reviews. There is scepticism that Vine Reviews are truly objective because - you know - everything is better when it's free. A savvy indie author would drop $300 to Amazon to give away 20 copies of their book and generate maybe 10 reviews over the course of the next few months. If the reviews are good, Amazon rank goes up. If the reviews are bad, rank goes down.
There are two reasons that the Big Six exist... (1) to print dead tree versions of manuscripts, and (2) to filter out the crap. Digital has eliminated a lot of the demand for (1) [thank E-Ink!] and Amazon is big enough that they have the ability to crowdsource (2) for everybody's benefit.
I think being a CEO is a lot like being a crackhead or an alcoholic.
The first step is always realizing that the problem is you.
The other 11 steps are fixing the problem without relapsing every six months.
Is the CEO of Verizon (or any other company) even on Facebook? Assuming he or she is -- what are the chances that they even maintain their own profile instead of hiring out maintenance to their support staff?
What are the chances that the "for the lulz" people could get (embarrassing) location data and mobile browsing for a few CEOs and publish it?
I recall that they are tested this way, and that on occasion they are tested until failure (in a heavily shielded test facility I hope!).
In fact, if you have seen a video online of an airplane having it's wings touch, you've seen the 787 test of this. It would surprise me if other planes have achieved the same level of flexibility.
From Netflix perspective, $1.50 out of $96 per year from every subscriber is being given to Dreamworks (presumably as a one-time fee?) per month, or $33 out of $96 for all 22 Dreamworks films. Assuming Netflix gets a license to carry the 22 films indefinitely, this seems like a big win for them. If they spend 30% of their annual revenues on "permanent high-quality movies" then within the next five or ten years they will have a very respectable listing of 200+ high-quality movies that don't cost then anything year-to-year.
I mean, if it gets them away from the "annual reoccurring cost" model that I assume they have with most studios, then it's a good thing. I assume the reason they stopped dealing with Starz was because Starz had rights to "take their ball and go home", I believe. It seems like Netflix future big money deals won't have this sort of clause that let's the studios pull their content catalog, right? Or am I wrong? I'm kinda guessing here... I don't really know the details.
Paint of an example for these people. Leave them voicemails about how important privacy is. Send them mail about how important privacy is. Use their credit card to buy yourself books from Barnes and Nobles (or buy books about privacy and ship the books to their addresses). But for the love of all that is good, leave their kids and families out of it.
Can they tax inheritance sitting in offshore bank accounts? Can they prevent rich people from transferring huge amounts of money into their child's offshore bank account before they die? It seems like these are two off-the-top-of-the-head loopholes that you'd want to close before having the "tax them when they die" discussion.
You get some content on Hulu Plus that is not available on the regular website Hulu for free. I recently watched Reservoir Dogs which I doubt is available on "Hulu Free". Also, with Hulu Plus you do get the freedom of streaming to devices such as Playstation. Having this integrated solution makes more sense to me than deploying a TV/Laptop Frankenstein System. This, to me, is still worth the $8.
Tax wealth not income, otherwise all you do is keep those who are already rich rich and make it harder for those who are up and coming to get somewhere.
This exists. It commonly goes by the name "inflation". Businesses typically give their middle-class employees "inflationary" raises each year to retain their continued commitment of loyalty. Governments build inflationary increases into their social welfare programs to maintain a steady support for the lower classes they support. As a result, prices generally go up every year or three so low and middle class people can't actually buy more stuff. As a secondary result, any business owner sitting on a pile of cash worth $x Million is now sitting on a pile of cash worth ($x Million - ($x Million * Inflation Percentage)).
Historically, inflation runs at a rate that chops the value of money in half every 18 years.
On the other hand, wealthy people can easily move their money into the stock market to avoid investing it into projects that create real value. Historically, the stock market rises at a rate greater than inflation. I believe the non-inflationary increase of stock market invested money is supposed to double every 12 years. I suppose if inflation and the stock market both behave according to these models, the true timeframe it takes money invested in the stock market to double is 36 years.
Surprisingly, investments in real estate rise at a rate very close to the value of inflation once you factor in things like lowering interest rates, interest rate subsidies, and the baseline housing values. This trend goes back to the last time interest rates were higher than 18% (contrasted with current 4% interest rates).
In any case... knowing how to make rich people pay fairly is indeed a difficult challenge. In the olden days of medieval times, the landlords had to keep the peasants happy or face a revolt. In modern times, it's hard to say whether revolting against the richest people in the world would be possible and/or accomplish anything.
And they could call the separate streaming brand.... Mailmovies. Seriously. Netflix. Internet Flicks. Movies delivered over the Internet. Movie Streaming has been their end-goal since Day 1. Mailmovies (or Qwikster) was a means to that end.
On the other hand, it amazes me that they haven't been able to negotiate equitable terms for their mail distribution model verses their streaming business model. The fact that you can't stream all movies in the mail system is bad form.
And while we're at it... why the hell does Hulu Plus have a subset of "Web Only" videos? I want to watch this stuff from my Playstation without doing an end-around to plug the laptop into the TV via HDMI. I pay them money to avoid this workaround. There is enough content to keep this from being a huge issue... but I'd rather have access to the full collection as a paying customer and the freedom to consume it over all of their supported distribution streams.
US government has been utterly failing to create electronic currency
I thought the governments role for regulating currency was limited to ensuring interstate commerce can occur without individual states introducing their own money systems. As long as companies developing electronic currency tie it into the federal currency system (i.e. printed greenbacks) there shouldn't be issues.
Also, credit card companies tend to have insurance for when electronic theft (i.e. identity theft) occurs. I don't think you'd want the government handling that sort of thing. Since electronic currency is about convenience and not security, the government really should state far-far-away from having any official policies for or against it.
Did you think MS and every software manufacturer were going to go and recompile every Windows program in existence just so you can run it on Windows 8?
No. But you'd think that MS would recompile their Office Suite to run on the Touchpad enabled version of their Operating System. My only guess why they wouldn't want to do this is that they expect there to be decisive fragmentation between Keyboard/Mouse input device machines and Touchpad input device machines.
Just what we need... a robotic voice to do automatic back-seat driving. Unless the plan is to have the car react automatically to radio signals? In which case they better put safe-guards in place for people who want to jam those signals.
The point is that a 1 TB harddrive is worth $100, but the same 1 TB harddrive - when loaded with certain bits - is said to be worth $5,000,100. The point is THAT IT'S NOT WORTH THAT MUCH. The "artist" doesn't accomplish anything in terms of getting the judge or a jury to agree that people who commit copyright infringement aren't hurting copyright owners. He only accomplishes the goal that the copyright holding megacorps are gigantic assholes.
"Follow" is a bit overloaded. Twitter has a public/private tradespace where things get fuzzy. For public Twitter accounts, "Following" is something anybody can do without approval. I am unsure if the account owners can then block certain "Followers" or not. In any case, for private Twitter accounts, the term "Follower" is pretty much equivalent to "Friend" on Facebook because a request must be accepted. Conversly, "Following" on Google Plus is strictly public and there is NO WAY to block people from seeing what you post on your Plus Feed (which is more akin to the actual security model of the internet than the Faux-Security "Private" Social Networks.
In any case, strictly speaking, schools should attempt to use communication protocols that they OWN to facilitate interactions between students and teachers. Ownership of assets is important when shit hits the fan. Having Facebook control official student exchanges with teachers is bad. Now -- if the teacher is truly a friend of the student because (maybe) they live in the same town and have similar interests -- there shouldn't be laws preventing unofficial exchanges. As long as the teacher and student are aware that these interactions are no safer than text message exchanges when the courts want them... then I can't think of why this is inappropriate.
On the other hand, I know teachers who set their Facebook accounts to be private because they fear having their students discover their private lives and see personal information about them. And yes... teacher's posting negatively about their students on Facebook risk having those posts made public and put their jobs on the line.
I love this idea. I also hope that we can figure out an exciting way of drafting rookies and institute better minimum salary's for players in the minor leagues or on the practice squad so that they can be assured of earning a living.
Also, we may consider a good way of including "instant replays" into the grand scheme of things.
Hey Mr President, we need jobs and stuff to be designed and built.
Why is this the President's problem? Most days I would argue for strong government, but creating jobs for society's intellectually elite (by which I mean engineers) is the responsibility of engineers. If you're an engineer who's out of work, then you're probably smart enough to figure out what skills you need to join the workforce. Though, I always thoughts engineering unemployment was drastically lower than the general population as a whole.
Creating engineers, on the other hand, is an education problem which the President ought to aim to accomplish.
Spying and espionage is a long game. People get the best information by building trust. If the cops can get 1 or 2 moles into every major criminal group in the world they can blow the whistle when any single one of those groups decides it's time to commit a major crime. Small crimes like drug dealing and minor intra-gang warfare are an easy pill to swallow when law-abiding citizens safety is maintained.
what the fuck kind of policing is this, assist & switch?
A mole in The Taliban / Al Qaeda in 1999-2001 would have been a true blessing. You don't get there by starting in 1999, though. You start in 1993-1995. Like I said, it's a long game. For some people, the potential of silently and unceremoniously saving thousands of their countrymen's lives is enough motivating factor to expose themselves to this lifestyle.
On this site, you know a post rated 4 or 5 is probably worth reading. The same cannot be said for something is 49 Likes or 287 +1's. Any idiot can tag comments with a +1 or a Like. The way Slashdot only gives mod points to registered users with a somewhat known reputation (karma) was really a genius move.
Statistically, you have less competition when you respond to somebody else's profile than when you post your profile and wait for people to contact you.
Competition when you respond to others --- the other people who have also responded to that person.
Competition when you simply post a profile --- everybody else who has a profile.
Fortune favors people who have a reasonably well put together profile and send intelligent, similarly-worded messages to the highest number of other people.
a robo-cleaner that maps out the best way to do housework
My Roomba is certainly not going to be taking over anytime soon. It drives around in a semi-autonomous pattern within a manually defined perimeter and has enough sense not to fall down a set of stairs. My house is big enough and the "virtual walls" are shitty enough that I close doors and throw couch cushions on the floor to regulate where Roomba gets to clean.
Roomba is a tool in very much the same way a vacuum, broom, or paper towel is a tool. I choose to use Roomba not because it is particularly good at cleaning (it isn't) but because I take 4-5 minutes clearing wires off the floor and setting up Roomba's boundaries and then it spend 90-100 minutes driving in circles, then I spend another few minutes cleaning it's brushes and dustbin. This is more desirable than having me spend 20-25 minutes operating an actual vacuum (which I don't actually own... so first I'd have to go buy one).
Slashdot Mirror
The cost of purchasing a home has gone up over 900% as well.
Just so we're clear, prices on houses that were in the $10-30k range 40 years ago are now in the $300-500k range. However, interest rates that were in the 15-20% range several decades ago are now in the 4% range. The interest rate factor shouldn't be ignored. It plays a role that makes blindly looking at prices then-and-now extremely faulty.
At one point in history about 50% the Dutch economy was spent purchasing outrageously priced $4000 tulip bulbs. This was on account of idiots blindly following a trend that didn't provide any tangible benefits except two weeks of exquisite beauty in early spring.
A book available POD from Amazon will not go out of print as long as Amazon stays in the POD business.
I'm happy to have the option to buy best sellers from Amazon or B&N or Google Books or local bookshop or borrow it from the library. But for obscure stuff I'm happy being forced into any single one of these options because demand it low. That said... I'd much prefer to hand an author $20 and get a dead-tree copy of their signed book or $10 to download a copy of their eBook. This isn't always practical, so Amazon's way is a happy substitute.
Amazon runs a program called Vine where a vendor can pay them money to they give away items for free to people known for writing high-quality reviews. There is scepticism that Vine Reviews are truly objective because - you know - everything is better when it's free. A savvy indie author would drop $300 to Amazon to give away 20 copies of their book and generate maybe 10 reviews over the course of the next few months. If the reviews are good, Amazon rank goes up. If the reviews are bad, rank goes down.
There are two reasons that the Big Six exist... (1) to print dead tree versions of manuscripts, and (2) to filter out the crap. Digital has eliminated a lot of the demand for (1) [thank E-Ink!] and Amazon is big enough that they have the ability to crowdsource (2) for everybody's benefit.
jump at the messenger instead of the problem
I think being a CEO is a lot like being a crackhead or an alcoholic.
The first step is always realizing that the problem is you.
The other 11 steps are fixing the problem without relapsing every six months.
Is the CEO of Verizon (or any other company) even on Facebook? Assuming he or she is -- what are the chances that they even maintain their own profile instead of hiring out maintenance to their support staff?
What are the chances that the "for the lulz" people could get (embarrassing) location data and mobile browsing for a few CEOs and publish it?
After the DBA, is there any chance we can have a contest to send a few lawyers into space?
I recall that they are tested this way, and that on occasion they are tested until failure (in a heavily shielded test facility I hope!).
In fact, if you have seen a video online of an airplane having it's wings touch, you've seen the 787 test of this. It would surprise me if other planes have achieved the same level of flexibility.
$30 mil ... let's do some math. Dreamworks has 22 movies that have grossed on average $163 Million in the box office. Approximately 16 Million tickets are sold for each Dreamworks film. Owning all the Dreamworks films on DVD or Bluray assuming a price of $15 each would cost $330. Meanwhile, Netflix has 20 Million subscribers paying at least $8/month. Subscribing to Netflix streaming for 3.5 years costs $336.
From Netflix perspective, $1.50 out of $96 per year from every subscriber is being given to Dreamworks (presumably as a one-time fee?) per month, or $33 out of $96 for all 22 Dreamworks films. Assuming Netflix gets a license to carry the 22 films indefinitely, this seems like a big win for them. If they spend 30% of their annual revenues on "permanent high-quality movies" then within the next five or ten years they will have a very respectable listing of 200+ high-quality movies that don't cost then anything year-to-year.
I mean, if it gets them away from the "annual reoccurring cost" model that I assume they have with most studios, then it's a good thing. I assume the reason they stopped dealing with Starz was because Starz had rights to "take their ball and go home", I believe. It seems like Netflix future big money deals won't have this sort of clause that let's the studios pull their content catalog, right? Or am I wrong? I'm kinda guessing here... I don't really know the details.
Phone, address, list of children, VISA numbers
Yes, yes, NO, Yes.
Paint of an example for these people. Leave them voicemails about how important privacy is. Send them mail about how important privacy is. Use their credit card to buy yourself books from Barnes and Nobles (or buy books about privacy and ship the books to their addresses). But for the love of all that is good, leave their kids and families out of it.
Can they tax inheritance sitting in offshore bank accounts? Can they prevent rich people from transferring huge amounts of money into their child's offshore bank account before they die? It seems like these are two off-the-top-of-the-head loopholes that you'd want to close before having the "tax them when they die" discussion.
You get some content on Hulu Plus that is not available on the regular website Hulu for free. I recently watched Reservoir Dogs which I doubt is available on "Hulu Free". Also, with Hulu Plus you do get the freedom of streaming to devices such as Playstation. Having this integrated solution makes more sense to me than deploying a TV/Laptop Frankenstein System. This, to me, is still worth the $8.
Tax wealth not income, otherwise all you do is keep those who are already rich rich and make it harder for those who are up and coming to get somewhere.
This exists. It commonly goes by the name "inflation". Businesses typically give their middle-class employees "inflationary" raises each year to retain their continued commitment of loyalty. Governments build inflationary increases into their social welfare programs to maintain a steady support for the lower classes they support. As a result, prices generally go up every year or three so low and middle class people can't actually buy more stuff. As a secondary result, any business owner sitting on a pile of cash worth $x Million is now sitting on a pile of cash worth ($x Million - ($x Million * Inflation Percentage)).
Historically, inflation runs at a rate that chops the value of money in half every 18 years.
On the other hand, wealthy people can easily move their money into the stock market to avoid investing it into projects that create real value. Historically, the stock market rises at a rate greater than inflation. I believe the non-inflationary increase of stock market invested money is supposed to double every 12 years. I suppose if inflation and the stock market both behave according to these models, the true timeframe it takes money invested in the stock market to double is 36 years.
Surprisingly, investments in real estate rise at a rate very close to the value of inflation once you factor in things like lowering interest rates, interest rate subsidies, and the baseline housing values. This trend goes back to the last time interest rates were higher than 18% (contrasted with current 4% interest rates).
In any case... knowing how to make rich people pay fairly is indeed a difficult challenge. In the olden days of medieval times, the landlords had to keep the peasants happy or face a revolt. In modern times, it's hard to say whether revolting against the richest people in the world would be possible and/or accomplish anything.
And they could call the separate streaming brand.... Mailmovies. Seriously. Netflix. Internet Flicks. Movies delivered over the Internet. Movie Streaming has been their end-goal since Day 1. Mailmovies (or Qwikster) was a means to that end.
On the other hand, it amazes me that they haven't been able to negotiate equitable terms for their mail distribution model verses their streaming business model. The fact that you can't stream all movies in the mail system is bad form.
And while we're at it... why the hell does Hulu Plus have a subset of "Web Only" videos? I want to watch this stuff from my Playstation without doing an end-around to plug the laptop into the TV via HDMI. I pay them money to avoid this workaround. There is enough content to keep this from being a huge issue... but I'd rather have access to the full collection as a paying customer and the freedom to consume it over all of their supported distribution streams.
US government has been utterly failing to create electronic currency
I thought the governments role for regulating currency was limited to ensuring interstate commerce can occur without individual states introducing their own money systems. As long as companies developing electronic currency tie it into the federal currency system (i.e. printed greenbacks) there shouldn't be issues.
Also, credit card companies tend to have insurance for when electronic theft (i.e. identity theft) occurs. I don't think you'd want the government handling that sort of thing. Since electronic currency is about convenience and not security, the government really should state far-far-away from having any official policies for or against it.
Did you think MS and every software manufacturer were going to go and recompile every Windows program in existence just so you can run it on Windows 8?
No. But you'd think that MS would recompile their Office Suite to run on the Touchpad enabled version of their Operating System. My only guess why they wouldn't want to do this is that they expect there to be decisive fragmentation between Keyboard/Mouse input device machines and Touchpad input device machines.
Just what we need... a robotic voice to do automatic back-seat driving. Unless the plan is to have the car react automatically to radio signals? In which case they better put safe-guards in place for people who want to jam those signals.
What's the point?
The point is that a 1 TB harddrive is worth $100, but the same 1 TB harddrive - when loaded with certain bits - is said to be worth $5,000,100. The point is THAT IT'S NOT WORTH THAT MUCH. The "artist" doesn't accomplish anything in terms of getting the judge or a jury to agree that people who commit copyright infringement aren't hurting copyright owners. He only accomplishes the goal that the copyright holding megacorps are gigantic assholes.
"Follow" is a bit overloaded. Twitter has a public/private tradespace where things get fuzzy. For public Twitter accounts, "Following" is something anybody can do without approval. I am unsure if the account owners can then block certain "Followers" or not. In any case, for private Twitter accounts, the term "Follower" is pretty much equivalent to "Friend" on Facebook because a request must be accepted. Conversly, "Following" on Google Plus is strictly public and there is NO WAY to block people from seeing what you post on your Plus Feed (which is more akin to the actual security model of the internet than the Faux-Security "Private" Social Networks.
In any case, strictly speaking, schools should attempt to use communication protocols that they OWN to facilitate interactions between students and teachers. Ownership of assets is important when shit hits the fan. Having Facebook control official student exchanges with teachers is bad. Now -- if the teacher is truly a friend of the student because (maybe) they live in the same town and have similar interests -- there shouldn't be laws preventing unofficial exchanges. As long as the teacher and student are aware that these interactions are no safer than text message exchanges when the courts want them... then I can't think of why this is inappropriate.
On the other hand, I know teachers who set their Facebook accounts to be private because they fear having their students discover their private lives and see personal information about them. And yes... teacher's posting negatively about their students on Facebook risk having those posts made public and put their jobs on the line.
We need a system like sports teams have.
I love this idea. I also hope that we can figure out an exciting way of drafting rookies and institute better minimum salary's for players in the minor leagues or on the practice squad so that they can be assured of earning a living.
Also, we may consider a good way of including "instant replays" into the grand scheme of things.
Hey Mr President, we need jobs and stuff to be designed and built.
Why is this the President's problem? Most days I would argue for strong government, but creating jobs for society's intellectually elite (by which I mean engineers) is the responsibility of engineers. If you're an engineer who's out of work, then you're probably smart enough to figure out what skills you need to join the workforce. Though, I always thoughts engineering unemployment was drastically lower than the general population as a whole.
Creating engineers, on the other hand, is an education problem which the President ought to aim to accomplish.
7 years into a known criminal gang?
Spying and espionage is a long game. People get the best information by building trust. If the cops can get 1 or 2 moles into every major criminal group in the world they can blow the whistle when any single one of those groups decides it's time to commit a major crime. Small crimes like drug dealing and minor intra-gang warfare are an easy pill to swallow when law-abiding citizens safety is maintained.
what the fuck kind of policing is this, assist & switch?
A mole in The Taliban / Al Qaeda in 1999-2001 would have been a true blessing. You don't get there by starting in 1999, though. You start in 1993-1995. Like I said, it's a long game. For some people, the potential of silently and unceremoniously saving thousands of their countrymen's lives is enough motivating factor to expose themselves to this lifestyle.
On this site, you know a post rated 4 or 5 is probably worth reading. The same cannot be said for something is 49 Likes or 287 +1's. Any idiot can tag comments with a +1 or a Like. The way Slashdot only gives mod points to registered users with a somewhat known reputation (karma) was really a genius move.
Statistically, you have less competition when you respond to somebody else's profile than when you post your profile and wait for people to contact you.
Competition when you respond to others --- the other people who have also responded to that person.
Competition when you simply post a profile --- everybody else who has a profile.
Fortune favors people who have a reasonably well put together profile and send intelligent, similarly-worded messages to the highest number of other people.
a robo-cleaner that maps out the best way to do housework
My Roomba is certainly not going to be taking over anytime soon. It drives around in a semi-autonomous pattern within a manually defined perimeter and has enough sense not to fall down a set of stairs. My house is big enough and the "virtual walls" are shitty enough that I close doors and throw couch cushions on the floor to regulate where Roomba gets to clean.
Roomba is a tool in very much the same way a vacuum, broom, or paper towel is a tool. I choose to use Roomba not because it is particularly good at cleaning (it isn't) but because I take 4-5 minutes clearing wires off the floor and setting up Roomba's boundaries and then it spend 90-100 minutes driving in circles, then I spend another few minutes cleaning it's brushes and dustbin. This is more desirable than having me spend 20-25 minutes operating an actual vacuum (which I don't actually own... so first I'd have to go buy one).