You most certainly did. You said "For employees it is evil a sort of substitute for slaves and indentured servants." It is nothing like a substitute for slavery and claiming so makes you look really clueless.
How is it NOT like indentured servitude if your employer's competitors have all agreed with your employer that you're not allowed to work for them, that you have to stay with your current employer?
Because Google and Facebook and Apple are not the extent of the IT universe no matter what they might want you to believe.
How is wage suppression via collusion that involves locking employees to one employer NOT like indentured servitude?
Are you really that stupid? You can't figure out the difference? Do you even know what indentured servitude is? Nobody was locked to Google. It's at will employment even if the employer is a douche. Indentured servitude is slavery. It means you are property. It means you don't own your own body. Nobody at Google is anything remotely resembling property.
Your attack on my statement is idiotic
Your statement was idiotic and absurdly hyperbolic nonsense.
For employees it is evil a sort of substitute for slaves and indentured servants.
Seriously folks. Let's not for a moment pretend that this is remotely similar to actual slavery. We're talking about two companies to collude to suppress wages for employees that by all objective standards are paid pretty well and have pretty good lives. Are you seriously going to claim that that is in any way comparable to being the property of another human being?
Yes this collusion is wrong. No it isn't even close to slavery. Claiming that the two are anything similar is unbelievably clueless.
Except the relationship is not symmetrical in any other ways either, e.g. the employees cannot fire the CEO and/or the board at any time for whatever reason
With a collective bargaining agreement in place the CEO often cannot fire a union employee at will either. In fact with a sufficiently restrictive CBA in place union employees can be nearly impossible to fire even for actions that arguably should get them fired, like showing up for work stoned.
So those that know how, can test and verify open-source alternatives are cryptographically secure, not back-doored, and safe for people to use.
Simple question. Since I don't know or trust any of those people doing the evaluation of the open source alternatives, exactly how do you propose I trust that they are not back-doored as well? It's not a trivial question. I am not a software developer nor am I a cryptography expert. No one I know fits both categories either. Open source stuff could be absolutely riddled with holes and I'd have really no way to know. Even if numerous parties declare it safe, how can I be certain the compiled copy hasn't been tampered with?
Driver training should not be a requirement. If it isn't a requirement for normal drivers, who use the same roads as the cabs, then why are cab drivers required to get some kind of special training?
Because when you drive other people they are literally entrusting their lives to your driving competence. While you cannot control what other drivers do, we can ensure that the people who do transport others are of a sufficient competency standard to minimize unnecessary risk to passengers. Not all drivers who can pass the basic driving test are sufficiently competent to drive other people in exchange for money. It's the exact same reason we demand that commercial airline pilots have a LOT more training than civil aviation pilots. It's about minimizing risk.
Furthermore, cab drivers/companies are granted a quasi-monopoly on their service. It's perfectly reasonable to insist that the standards be a bit higher in exchange for that privilege.
Car maintenance should not be a requirement. Normal drivers aren't required to follow any special maintenance schedule or get any inspections, so why should cabs?
Because if you want to drive you own heap of junk and endanger your own safety when the axle falls off then that is your choice. When you are transporting other people however, they should have a reasonable expectation that the axle is not going to fall off or that they will not find themselves stranded due reasonably preventable mechanical difficulties.
In the mean time, Japan - a country notoriously obsessed with cleanliness and purity - is eating discarded remains of scientific experiments.
There is not and never was any science involved. This was a fig leaf to protect commercial interests, nothing more. These were obviously fishing vessels for commercial purposes and everyone has known that from day one.
Agreed. I might just go along with the corporations-as-people idea just as soon as the first corporation is executed for having policies tantamount to murder, or gross negligence with lethal consequences, such as seems to be the case here.
Oh BULLSHIT. "Murder"? Really? You think GM has policies that are "tantamount to murder"? Put away the damn pitchfork. People die every single day due to engineering failures and that does not make them criminal failures. GM (probably) screwed up here but there is NO evidence whatsoever that they have "policies tantamount to murder". Bad things happen sometimes and that does not make them murder. In all likelihood this was simply a design flaw in the safety analysis system at GM and its suppliers. The problem was rare, unusual and apparently hard to diagnose. Furthermore the NTSB knew of the problem and didn't think GM needed to act either for a period of years.
For all you self-righteous engineers out there, are you willing to be held personally liable for the products you design? Are you willing to risk your personal property and jail time because of an unintentional design flaw? For those of you rooting for a corporate death penalty for GM, are you really willing to throw hundreds of thousands of people out of work over this? That is what you are suggesting. If you kill GM then you kill the livelihood of the people that work for GM as well as most of their supply base and probably cause another recession because GM is that big of a deal.
A corporation most assuredly DOES protect the employees from personal liability. I suggest you bone up on your knowledge of incorporation and the consequences. A corporation is a legal entity and actions taken by the employees for that corporation are generally protected against personal liability.
Generally, incorporation should protect from financial and business incompetence and bad luck to encourage people to take risks and create an active marketplace, driving the economy and innovation. It should never protect from actions breaking criminal or civil laws, because you don't want to build an incentive for that.
That's exactly what incorporation does. However just because something unfortunate happened doesn't mean any criminal or civil laws were broken. In this instance we had literally millions of these switches sold, most of which performed exactly as expected. There were a small number of (serious) failures with an unusual and hard to diagnose failure mode. Given the information available it is entirely feasible that GM and its employees were showing a good faith effort to exercise their duty of care. There is no legal or ethical requirement for them to be perfect because that is impossible.
Sometimes unfortunate things happen even with the best of intentions. First we need to find out what happened and why. Then we can worry about whether someone should be personally blamed for what in all likelihood was a system failure rather than a personal one. Until then put away the pitchforks and torches.
They can but you have to first establish that the CxO was specifically at fault for something. Explain to me exactly what criminal action Mary Barra, the current CEO of GM, or one of her predecessors engaged in that failed in their duty of care. Exactly what action did they knowingly take given the information available to them at the time of the decision that resulted in people's deaths. Remember that just because they were in charge at the time isn't adequate proof of anything. A CEO relies on the technical expertise and advice of the people that work for him/her. Remember that the NTSB also had access to this information years ago and did not think it sufficiently serious to force a recall either.
I assure you that the CEO isn't pouring over technical data so if the problem was never presented to the CEO as a serious problem then how can we reasonably blame the CEO personally? Do you really think the CEO of McDonalds should be personally liable for every instance of food poisoning that occurs even if they have instructed their organization to take every reasonable precaution available to them consistent with accepted safety standards? Would you think it appropriate for you to be held liable for the actions of your coworkers even if you had nothing to do with them?
then why can't individuals at the top be held civilly liable for decisions that they make that kill people, especially when they kill in multiple discrete instances?
They can be but the standard of proof is necessarily high. The general reason is that perfect safety is impossible and just because someone is in charge does not automatically mean they were negligent. We don't sue the CEO of Boeing personally because of an engineering failure in a Boeing jet that he had nothing to do with because that is not reasonable or fair. The question is whether they met their duty of care. 30,000 people each year die in car accidents in the US alone. If we held the officers of the companies that made those products liable for each of those deaths then there would be no cars because no one would be willing to run the company. We have the corporate veil for a very good reason and the standard of proof is high for good reason. You have to establish that there was clear evidence of a serious safety issue, that the information was known to the person (or should have been known) you were suing, that they made a knowing decision to disregard that information and that it was specifically their actions that were a proximal cause of the injuries that occurred.
If a dock worker can be criminally prosecuted to serve almost two decades in prison because he set what he intended to be a small fire in a submarine compartment to get off work early
That is a criminal and negligent action that can clearly be tied to the actions of that person. I assure you that no CEO of any major car company is poring over engineering data from faulty switches. They are actually quite removed from the process until such time as it is brought to their attention.
It looks like it should be a fairly simple matter.
I assure you it is not at all simple. Not At All.
Sue them for the entire quantity of bonus that they made working for the company as a punitive action.
Ok, so then companies don't award bonuses and they compensate in other ways. What's your next move?
BTW there are going to be PLENTY of lawsuits over this and there is a very good change Delphi (the Tier 1 supplier that sold the switches to GM) may go bankrupt again over the matter. There is going to be plenty of fallout without us pointlessly making a scapegoat out of a CEO and probably the wrong CEO at that since GM doesn't actually make the switches.
The headwear already famously suffered from a supply chain issue...
And Facebook was their choice to help with this? Facebook might be very good at some things but supply chain management isn't exactly in their wheelhouse. Facebook could provide the deep pockets to deal with problems but manufacturing isn't their thing.
The bit that made me laugh was an interview with a board member I heard recently on NPR where he said something (paraphrasing here) like "we thought long and hard about this acquisition". They were offered $2 billion for a company not worth a fraction of that. If they didn't sprain something saying "Yes!" too fast then they were in violation of their fiduciary duty.
Somewhat like bitcoin it has hit a segment of the geek population that thinks it's something especially cool and they've been selling it at a price point that hard core gamers can afford to give it a spin.
Do they have some intellectual property that will make them money, or are they just improving on 30 year old ideas
The later. Occulus is nifty but it's evolutionary improvement on technology that has existed for a long time. There still appears to be no killer use case for their product outside of a small segment of gamers. Facebook paying $2 billion for this company is an absurd overpayment. I seriously cannot figure out a reasonable scenario by which Facebook will recover that much money on this technology.
I would love to see a group of large merchants get together and pick one credit card company (let's say MasterCard) and simply refuse to accept it unless security is improved.
If they did that then Mastercard would have them in a courtroom faster than you can say "anti trust regulation". The term for that is collusion and it's clearly illegal.
Maybe Walmart is just being stupid. Did they ever consider that?
Walmart is many things but stupid is not among them.
My swipe fees are zero.
No they are not. They might be rolled in with some other charge but you aren't getting it for free. If you pay a flat fee per month then you do a good approximation of zero transaction volume.
Maybe they should have gotten a plan that doesn't suck.
Walmart has more negotiating power than pretty much any retail firm on earth and they squeeze every dime of cost out that they can. If a better deal could have been negotiated it would have been.
And how do they know that Walmart is the place to go for low prices?
Because most of the US population has gone there at one time or another and word tends to get around. Walmart has been around for over a 50 years. We're not talking about some new company which nobody has heard of here.
It's actually unusual to see serious injuries in major car crashes
You mean except for the 1.24 million deaths annually on roads? Or the 20-40,000 people who die each year in car crashes in the US alone? Interesting definition of unusual you have there.
Because that is their business model. If the win they lower prices which diverts more business from Target and KMart and the rest. A lot of shoppers buy primarily on price and go where they are likely to get the best deal. For all the bitching people engage in over Walmart, when push comes to shove they tend to vote for low prices and overlook everything else.
I'm not saying that walmart doesn't have it's problems. But any company that size would. They are not the big bad evil company everyone makes them out to be.
Yeah they kind of are the big bad company they are made out to be. Sure they aren't cartoon-character-evil but the choices they have made in how to run their business have some pretty serious negative consequences for which Walmart seems largely unconcerned. I'm not sure I need to repeat the list here but it's not a warm and fuzzy organization.
Wal-Mart competes primarily on the illusion of price through loss leaders on a minority of items.
There is a huge amount of publicly available research that proves that what you claim is not true. On a randomly chosen basket of goods, Walmart most of the time is the lowest price option. Not always but often enough that statistically speaking they have an advantage. They built their entire business model on low prices and the systems required to support them. Their lead is not huge but it definitely is there. The primary reason companies like Kmart have had so much trouble is that they are competing on price with Walmart when Walmart's prices are lower and pretty much everyone knows it.
The company's actual strengths are logistics and marketing.
Logistics yes, marketing no. Logistics is only an advantage in retail if you can lower costs and thus prices as a result. And marketing? Nobody is dazzled by Walmart's marketing. People go there because they sell stuff for cheap prices. It's certainly not for the shopping experience. Walmart demonstrably competes on price and always has. They also have the advantage of having a lot of their stores in small towns where there really isn't room for a competitor to come in and displace them. Their scale allows them to negotiate prices in a pretty brutal fashion with suppliers. I have close friends whose job it is to sell to Walmart and it isn't a fun experience. They take some pretty significant measures to keep costs low because their ability to keep their advantage is entirely rooted in price.
I'm rather sure that Walmart doesn't pay the full 3% that Visa/MasterCard like to charge for transactions
No, they don't in a lot of cases but the amount they do pay is VERY substantial. We're literally talking about billions of dollars here no matter what exact amount Walmart pays.
but when you look at the overhead of transactions in the cryptocurrency markets, you can see how ridiculously overpriced the credit card transactions are. The costs here are near 0, and so should the charges be
The cost of credit card transactions are nowhere near zero. Transaction processing in any form is not cheap, even at high volumes. There are significant costs for both on the front end (credit card machines + computers + accounting + banking fees), and on the back end (computers, customer service, accounting, security (yeah, ironic I know), billing, payment transaction costs, marketing, and more). While I agree completely that credit card companies overcharge, the assertion that their costs are anywhere close to zero is not supported by the facts. Building a payment infrastructure like the one Visa has costs many billions of dollars to build and more billions to operate on an ongoing basis.
Furthermore if you are going to make the absurd comparison between bitcoin and credit cards, you need to account for ALL the costs including currency exchange fees, exchange rate risk, opportunity cost, infrastructure cost (which bitcoin lacks), customer service (which bitcoin lacks), counterparty risk (no one is going to give you a refund), accounting, and the rest of them. Once you account for what bitcoin really costs and what it lacks, the cost of it is actually higher in most cases on a risk adjusted basis. (and if you aren't accounting for risk then you are being really really foolish)
Because if Walmart wins, they will surely use the money to raise your meager wages instead of buying the CEO a new yacht.
Raise wages? Probably not. Lower prices? Very possibly. Walmart competes primarily on price so anything they can do to lower costs tends to get at least partially passed on to customers in order to keep their competitive advantage. A lot of companies would pocket the savings but in this particular instance it might actually end up benefiting customers.
Plus Walmart beating up Visa on price is almost certainly going to benefit consumers in the long run and Walmart is big enough to actually succeed. The cost of credit card swipe fees gets rolled into the prices we pay for products so if they get lowered at least some of that money will flow through to us as end customers. Not all of course but definitely some.
You know what's not technologically necessary? An industry crippling monopoly. That's what's not technologically necessary.
Already have that. Comcast is pretty much the only game in town where I live. Everything that comes to my house comes across their lines. Trading one monopoly for another doesn't really change matters much for me. Furthermore that wasn't what I said. I want MULTIPLE ONE STOP SHOPPING SERVICES competing for my business across a fat dumb internet pipe. I also want my ISP to be declared a common carrier so I don't have to worry about them playing favorites and throttling services.
The only other actual "gap" you mentioned is Sports and that is also evolving quickly online
"Only" gap? Exactly where can I get ala-carte TV programming (legally) by station and by show? Where can I get every single movie in existence including current theater releases (legally)? I want to be able to set up a 70" TV with a nice sound system and be able to stream, store and search for any video in existence with a minimum of fuss. I have little interest in dealing with 20 different services to work around problems that shouldn't exist in the first place.
As it is, it is mostly being held back by legacy contracts based on the old business model. Otherwise, the relevant players are quite ready to embrace the new model.
Those are contradictory statements. The same people holding back ARE the relevant players. Nothing can happen without their agreement and as such there is no new model.
I don't think Netflix is anywhere near 100% satisfying but it comes pretty close. It's basically a replacement for 30 or so channels on cable that are dominated by re-runs.
In other words it replaces a source for a small percentage of stuff we've already seen. Swell. Don't know about you but I don't really care to watch the same movies over and over again. I've tried Netflix several times and I can never find enough to watch to make it worth the cost.
However, I think the idea that this has to be some sort of one stop option is bogus and stupid. There's no good reason that multiple services can't do the job
There also is no reason one service can't do the job. Why would I want to deal with multiple services when it is not technologically necessary? What I want is multiple one stop shopping services competing for my business. I want ala-carte programming for movies, tv and internet video for a single source and preferably for a reasonable flat fee. Just because it isn't done that way today doesn't mean it isn't a good idea.
We already have multiple channels in the old model.
Which is relevant how?
Netflix + Amazon(PPV) together is a pretty complete solution.
Really? How about live sporting events? Reruns of sports? Every movie currently available on DVD or in theaters? Ala-carte TV stations? "Complete solution"? Maybe for you but not for most of us.
Of course they are an energy company in the general sense
How many nuclear power plants does Exxon-Mobil own? Solar? Geothermal? Wind? Hydro? Fact is that they have very little meaningful investment outside of oil and gas and some coal. They make almost all their money from extraction, refining and distribution of fossil fuels particularly oil and gas. They are rightly described as an oil and gas company, not an "energy company" in much the same way Microsoft is a software company, not a computer company. There is nothing preventing Exxon from getting into the other parts of the energy market but they have chosen not to do so in any significant way. Until they do they remain an oil and gas company.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't say it is like slavery,
You most certainly did. You said "For employees it is evil a sort of substitute for slaves and indentured servants." It is nothing like a substitute for slavery and claiming so makes you look really clueless.
How is it NOT like indentured servitude if your employer's competitors have all agreed with your employer that you're not allowed to work for them, that you have to stay with your current employer?
Because Google and Facebook and Apple are not the extent of the IT universe no matter what they might want you to believe.
How is wage suppression via collusion that involves locking employees to one employer NOT like indentured servitude?
Are you really that stupid? You can't figure out the difference? Do you even know what indentured servitude is? Nobody was locked to Google. It's at will employment even if the employer is a douche. Indentured servitude is slavery. It means you are property. It means you don't own your own body. Nobody at Google is anything remotely resembling property.
Your attack on my statement is idiotic
Your statement was idiotic and absurdly hyperbolic nonsense.
For employees it is evil a sort of substitute for slaves and indentured servants.
Seriously folks. Let's not for a moment pretend that this is remotely similar to actual slavery. We're talking about two companies to collude to suppress wages for employees that by all objective standards are paid pretty well and have pretty good lives. Are you seriously going to claim that that is in any way comparable to being the property of another human being?
Yes this collusion is wrong. No it isn't even close to slavery. Claiming that the two are anything similar is unbelievably clueless.
Except the relationship is not symmetrical in any other ways either, e.g. the employees cannot fire the CEO and/or the board at any time for whatever reason
With a collective bargaining agreement in place the CEO often cannot fire a union employee at will either. In fact with a sufficiently restrictive CBA in place union employees can be nearly impossible to fire even for actions that arguably should get them fired, like showing up for work stoned.
So those that know how, can test and verify open-source alternatives are cryptographically secure, not back-doored, and safe for people to use.
Simple question. Since I don't know or trust any of those people doing the evaluation of the open source alternatives, exactly how do you propose I trust that they are not back-doored as well? It's not a trivial question. I am not a software developer nor am I a cryptography expert. No one I know fits both categories either. Open source stuff could be absolutely riddled with holes and I'd have really no way to know. Even if numerous parties declare it safe, how can I be certain the compiled copy hasn't been tampered with?
Driver training should not be a requirement. If it isn't a requirement for normal drivers, who use the same roads as the cabs, then why are cab drivers required to get some kind of special training?
Because when you drive other people they are literally entrusting their lives to your driving competence. While you cannot control what other drivers do, we can ensure that the people who do transport others are of a sufficient competency standard to minimize unnecessary risk to passengers. Not all drivers who can pass the basic driving test are sufficiently competent to drive other people in exchange for money. It's the exact same reason we demand that commercial airline pilots have a LOT more training than civil aviation pilots. It's about minimizing risk.
Furthermore, cab drivers/companies are granted a quasi-monopoly on their service. It's perfectly reasonable to insist that the standards be a bit higher in exchange for that privilege.
Car maintenance should not be a requirement. Normal drivers aren't required to follow any special maintenance schedule or get any inspections, so why should cabs?
Because if you want to drive you own heap of junk and endanger your own safety when the axle falls off then that is your choice. When you are transporting other people however, they should have a reasonable expectation that the axle is not going to fall off or that they will not find themselves stranded due reasonably preventable mechanical difficulties.
In the mean time, Japan - a country notoriously obsessed with cleanliness and purity - is eating discarded remains of scientific experiments.
There is not and never was any science involved. This was a fig leaf to protect commercial interests, nothing more. These were obviously fishing vessels for commercial purposes and everyone has known that from day one.
Agreed. I might just go along with the corporations-as-people idea just as soon as the first corporation is executed for having policies tantamount to murder, or gross negligence with lethal consequences, such as seems to be the case here.
Oh BULLSHIT. "Murder"? Really? You think GM has policies that are "tantamount to murder"? Put away the damn pitchfork. People die every single day due to engineering failures and that does not make them criminal failures. GM (probably) screwed up here but there is NO evidence whatsoever that they have "policies tantamount to murder". Bad things happen sometimes and that does not make them murder. In all likelihood this was simply a design flaw in the safety analysis system at GM and its suppliers. The problem was rare, unusual and apparently hard to diagnose. Furthermore the NTSB knew of the problem and didn't think GM needed to act either for a period of years.
For all you self-righteous engineers out there, are you willing to be held personally liable for the products you design? Are you willing to risk your personal property and jail time because of an unintentional design flaw? For those of you rooting for a corporate death penalty for GM, are you really willing to throw hundreds of thousands of people out of work over this? That is what you are suggesting. If you kill GM then you kill the livelihood of the people that work for GM as well as most of their supply base and probably cause another recession because GM is that big of a deal.
No, a corporation doesn't do that at all.
A corporation most assuredly DOES protect the employees from personal liability. I suggest you bone up on your knowledge of incorporation and the consequences. A corporation is a legal entity and actions taken by the employees for that corporation are generally protected against personal liability.
Generally, incorporation should protect from financial and business incompetence and bad luck to encourage people to take risks and create an active marketplace, driving the economy and innovation. It should never protect from actions breaking criminal or civil laws, because you don't want to build an incentive for that.
That's exactly what incorporation does. However just because something unfortunate happened doesn't mean any criminal or civil laws were broken. In this instance we had literally millions of these switches sold, most of which performed exactly as expected. There were a small number of (serious) failures with an unusual and hard to diagnose failure mode. Given the information available it is entirely feasible that GM and its employees were showing a good faith effort to exercise their duty of care. There is no legal or ethical requirement for them to be perfect because that is impossible.
Sometimes unfortunate things happen even with the best of intentions. First we need to find out what happened and why. Then we can worry about whether someone should be personally blamed for what in all likelihood was a system failure rather than a personal one. Until then put away the pitchforks and torches.
Why can't lawsuits touch CxOs?
They can but you have to first establish that the CxO was specifically at fault for something. Explain to me exactly what criminal action Mary Barra, the current CEO of GM, or one of her predecessors engaged in that failed in their duty of care. Exactly what action did they knowingly take given the information available to them at the time of the decision that resulted in people's deaths. Remember that just because they were in charge at the time isn't adequate proof of anything. A CEO relies on the technical expertise and advice of the people that work for him/her. Remember that the NTSB also had access to this information years ago and did not think it sufficiently serious to force a recall either.
I assure you that the CEO isn't pouring over technical data so if the problem was never presented to the CEO as a serious problem then how can we reasonably blame the CEO personally? Do you really think the CEO of McDonalds should be personally liable for every instance of food poisoning that occurs even if they have instructed their organization to take every reasonable precaution available to them consistent with accepted safety standards? Would you think it appropriate for you to be held liable for the actions of your coworkers even if you had nothing to do with them?
then why can't individuals at the top be held civilly liable for decisions that they make that kill people, especially when they kill in multiple discrete instances?
They can be but the standard of proof is necessarily high. The general reason is that perfect safety is impossible and just because someone is in charge does not automatically mean they were negligent. We don't sue the CEO of Boeing personally because of an engineering failure in a Boeing jet that he had nothing to do with because that is not reasonable or fair. The question is whether they met their duty of care. 30,000 people each year die in car accidents in the US alone. If we held the officers of the companies that made those products liable for each of those deaths then there would be no cars because no one would be willing to run the company. We have the corporate veil for a very good reason and the standard of proof is high for good reason. You have to establish that there was clear evidence of a serious safety issue, that the information was known to the person (or should have been known) you were suing, that they made a knowing decision to disregard that information and that it was specifically their actions that were a proximal cause of the injuries that occurred.
If a dock worker can be criminally prosecuted to serve almost two decades in prison because he set what he intended to be a small fire in a submarine compartment to get off work early
That is a criminal and negligent action that can clearly be tied to the actions of that person. I assure you that no CEO of any major car company is poring over engineering data from faulty switches. They are actually quite removed from the process until such time as it is brought to their attention.
It looks like it should be a fairly simple matter.
I assure you it is not at all simple. Not At All.
Sue them for the entire quantity of bonus that they made working for the company as a punitive action.
Ok, so then companies don't award bonuses and they compensate in other ways. What's your next move?
BTW there are going to be PLENTY of lawsuits over this and there is a very good change Delphi (the Tier 1 supplier that sold the switches to GM) may go bankrupt again over the matter. There is going to be plenty of fallout without us pointlessly making a scapegoat out of a CEO and probably the wrong CEO at that since GM doesn't actually make the switches.
The headwear already famously suffered from a supply chain issue...
And Facebook was their choice to help with this? Facebook might be very good at some things but supply chain management isn't exactly in their wheelhouse. Facebook could provide the deep pockets to deal with problems but manufacturing isn't their thing.
The bit that made me laugh was an interview with a board member I heard recently on NPR where he said something (paraphrasing here) like "we thought long and hard about this acquisition". They were offered $2 billion for a company not worth a fraction of that. If they didn't sprain something saying "Yes!" too fast then they were in violation of their fiduciary duty.
Does anyone know what's so special about Oculus?
Somewhat like bitcoin it has hit a segment of the geek population that thinks it's something especially cool and they've been selling it at a price point that hard core gamers can afford to give it a spin.
Do they have some intellectual property that will make them money, or are they just improving on 30 year old ideas
The later. Occulus is nifty but it's evolutionary improvement on technology that has existed for a long time. There still appears to be no killer use case for their product outside of a small segment of gamers. Facebook paying $2 billion for this company is an absurd overpayment. I seriously cannot figure out a reasonable scenario by which Facebook will recover that much money on this technology.
In a more sensible country which does have these features...
Yeah I stopped reading here when you started acting like a smug douche nozzle.
I would love to see a group of large merchants get together and pick one credit card company (let's say MasterCard) and simply refuse to accept it unless security is improved.
If they did that then Mastercard would have them in a courtroom faster than you can say "anti trust regulation". The term for that is collusion and it's clearly illegal.
Maybe Walmart is just being stupid. Did they ever consider that?
Walmart is many things but stupid is not among them.
My swipe fees are zero.
No they are not. They might be rolled in with some other charge but you aren't getting it for free. If you pay a flat fee per month then you do a good approximation of zero transaction volume.
Maybe they should have gotten a plan that doesn't suck.
Walmart has more negotiating power than pretty much any retail firm on earth and they squeeze every dime of cost out that they can. If a better deal could have been negotiated it would have been.
And how do they know that Walmart is the place to go for low prices?
Because most of the US population has gone there at one time or another and word tends to get around. Walmart has been around for over a 50 years. We're not talking about some new company which nobody has heard of here.
It's actually unusual to see serious injuries in major car crashes
You mean except for the 1.24 million deaths annually on roads? Or the 20-40,000 people who die each year in car crashes in the US alone? Interesting definition of unusual you have there.
If they win, why would they lower prices?
Because that is their business model. If the win they lower prices which diverts more business from Target and KMart and the rest. A lot of shoppers buy primarily on price and go where they are likely to get the best deal. For all the bitching people engage in over Walmart, when push comes to shove they tend to vote for low prices and overlook everything else.
I'm not saying that walmart doesn't have it's problems. But any company that size would. They are not the big bad evil company everyone makes them out to be.
Yeah they kind of are the big bad company they are made out to be. Sure they aren't cartoon-character-evil but the choices they have made in how to run their business have some pretty serious negative consequences for which Walmart seems largely unconcerned. I'm not sure I need to repeat the list here but it's not a warm and fuzzy organization.
Wal-Mart competes primarily on the illusion of price through loss leaders on a minority of items.
There is a huge amount of publicly available research that proves that what you claim is not true. On a randomly chosen basket of goods, Walmart most of the time is the lowest price option. Not always but often enough that statistically speaking they have an advantage. They built their entire business model on low prices and the systems required to support them. Their lead is not huge but it definitely is there. The primary reason companies like Kmart have had so much trouble is that they are competing on price with Walmart when Walmart's prices are lower and pretty much everyone knows it.
The company's actual strengths are logistics and marketing.
Logistics yes, marketing no. Logistics is only an advantage in retail if you can lower costs and thus prices as a result. And marketing? Nobody is dazzled by Walmart's marketing. People go there because they sell stuff for cheap prices. It's certainly not for the shopping experience. Walmart demonstrably competes on price and always has. They also have the advantage of having a lot of their stores in small towns where there really isn't room for a competitor to come in and displace them. Their scale allows them to negotiate prices in a pretty brutal fashion with suppliers. I have close friends whose job it is to sell to Walmart and it isn't a fun experience. They take some pretty significant measures to keep costs low because their ability to keep their advantage is entirely rooted in price.
I'm rather sure that Walmart doesn't pay the full 3% that Visa/MasterCard like to charge for transactions
No, they don't in a lot of cases but the amount they do pay is VERY substantial. We're literally talking about billions of dollars here no matter what exact amount Walmart pays.
but when you look at the overhead of transactions in the cryptocurrency markets, you can see how ridiculously overpriced the credit card transactions are. The costs here are near 0, and so should the charges be
The cost of credit card transactions are nowhere near zero. Transaction processing in any form is not cheap, even at high volumes. There are significant costs for both on the front end (credit card machines + computers + accounting + banking fees), and on the back end (computers, customer service, accounting, security (yeah, ironic I know), billing, payment transaction costs, marketing, and more). While I agree completely that credit card companies overcharge, the assertion that their costs are anywhere close to zero is not supported by the facts. Building a payment infrastructure like the one Visa has costs many billions of dollars to build and more billions to operate on an ongoing basis.
Furthermore if you are going to make the absurd comparison between bitcoin and credit cards, you need to account for ALL the costs including currency exchange fees, exchange rate risk, opportunity cost, infrastructure cost (which bitcoin lacks), customer service (which bitcoin lacks), counterparty risk (no one is going to give you a refund), accounting, and the rest of them. Once you account for what bitcoin really costs and what it lacks, the cost of it is actually higher in most cases on a risk adjusted basis. (and if you aren't accounting for risk then you are being really really foolish)
Because if Walmart wins, they will surely use the money to raise your meager wages instead of buying the CEO a new yacht.
Raise wages? Probably not. Lower prices? Very possibly. Walmart competes primarily on price so anything they can do to lower costs tends to get at least partially passed on to customers in order to keep their competitive advantage. A lot of companies would pocket the savings but in this particular instance it might actually end up benefiting customers.
Plus Walmart beating up Visa on price is almost certainly going to benefit consumers in the long run and Walmart is big enough to actually succeed. The cost of credit card swipe fees gets rolled into the prices we pay for products so if they get lowered at least some of that money will flow through to us as end customers. Not all of course but definitely some.
You know what's not technologically necessary? An industry crippling monopoly. That's what's not technologically necessary.
Already have that. Comcast is pretty much the only game in town where I live. Everything that comes to my house comes across their lines. Trading one monopoly for another doesn't really change matters much for me. Furthermore that wasn't what I said. I want MULTIPLE ONE STOP SHOPPING SERVICES competing for my business across a fat dumb internet pipe. I also want my ISP to be declared a common carrier so I don't have to worry about them playing favorites and throttling services.
The only other actual "gap" you mentioned is Sports and that is also evolving quickly online
"Only" gap? Exactly where can I get ala-carte TV programming (legally) by station and by show? Where can I get every single movie in existence including current theater releases (legally)? I want to be able to set up a 70" TV with a nice sound system and be able to stream, store and search for any video in existence with a minimum of fuss. I have little interest in dealing with 20 different services to work around problems that shouldn't exist in the first place.
As it is, it is mostly being held back by legacy contracts based on the old business model. Otherwise, the relevant players are quite ready to embrace the new model.
Those are contradictory statements. The same people holding back ARE the relevant players. Nothing can happen without their agreement and as such there is no new model.
I don't think Netflix is anywhere near 100% satisfying but it comes pretty close. It's basically a replacement for 30 or so channels on cable that are dominated by re-runs.
In other words it replaces a source for a small percentage of stuff we've already seen. Swell. Don't know about you but I don't really care to watch the same movies over and over again. I've tried Netflix several times and I can never find enough to watch to make it worth the cost.
However, I think the idea that this has to be some sort of one stop option is bogus and stupid. There's no good reason that multiple services can't do the job
There also is no reason one service can't do the job. Why would I want to deal with multiple services when it is not technologically necessary? What I want is multiple one stop shopping services competing for my business. I want ala-carte programming for movies, tv and internet video for a single source and preferably for a reasonable flat fee. Just because it isn't done that way today doesn't mean it isn't a good idea.
We already have multiple channels in the old model.
Which is relevant how?
Netflix + Amazon(PPV) together is a pretty complete solution.
Really? How about live sporting events? Reruns of sports? Every movie currently available on DVD or in theaters? Ala-carte TV stations? "Complete solution"? Maybe for you but not for most of us.
Of course they are an energy company in the general sense
How many nuclear power plants does Exxon-Mobil own? Solar? Geothermal? Wind? Hydro? Fact is that they have very little meaningful investment outside of oil and gas and some coal. They make almost all their money from extraction, refining and distribution of fossil fuels particularly oil and gas. They are rightly described as an oil and gas company, not an "energy company" in much the same way Microsoft is a software company, not a computer company. There is nothing preventing Exxon from getting into the other parts of the energy market but they have chosen not to do so in any significant way. Until they do they remain an oil and gas company.