Actually, Apple and other manufacturers are NOT responsible for their SUPPLIERS' mishaps.
Sure they are. Apple has almost certainly been sued for problems that are/were caused by their suppliers. Apple chooses who they want to do business with and as a result bears at least some responsibility for the actions of their suppliers. While it is unrealistic to expect Apple to be responsible for every action of their suppliers, they most definitely are responsible for some of them. The supplier and Apple share responsibility for the products they jointly create AND any by-products or problems they create as well.
It's not about the 4 megs, it's about the 99c/costs to produce the song, which presumably had at least $5,000 of studio overhead per album.
If the recording studio can't control their costs, that isn't my problem. While I don't pretend to be an expert in the music industry, I am actually a certified accountant and I'm quite comfortable saying that everything I've observed about that industry indicates they aren't very good at cost control. While there is a meaningful cost to the production of an album, the overhead is fixed and can be amortized over numerous projects. The labor to produce the record is also basically fixed. It's fairly similar to R&D in that once it goes to market there are no more costs, especially with digital distribution.
Most of the costs in a record label should be in sales and marketing (rather like a software firm actually). The actual product development is rather inexpensive - maybe 10-20% of the total costs. The real expense is in promotion (and formerly in distribution) so the labels haven't really needed to care much about cost control in the actual studio time because it is tiny by comparison. That doesn't mean though that I as the customer should be willing to pay for their inefficiency.
Ask yourself this. Are you really willing to pay the record companies the money it costs you to market a record to you? Are you really willing to pay some extravagant rate for studio time? Personally I have no interest at all in paying for their marketing budget or other production inefficiencies. I'm pretty confident that even at $0.99/song, the margins are pretty fat for the record companies given that the marginal cost of sales done digitally is a good approximation of zero.
but the government needs to overhaul the system of taxation to a simple system without loopholes
No such thing exists. It can be simple or without loopholes but it is pretty much impossible to do both. Finance is quite simply more complicated than you seem to imagine.
How can a democracy function effectively when the government is more complex than the average voter can understand?
You could ask the same thing about science or business. How can science function when the average person does not understand organic chemistry? How can a business function when most people know little about corporate accounting. The answer is that they don't have to. We elect or appoint specialists to manage those functions but retain the right to remove them from office. Any reasonably large organization is more complicated than a single person can fully comprehend but that doesn't mean they can't work.
Besides, the US at least is not and never has been a democracy. Properly speaking it is a republic.
America's comparative advantage is marketing, for good or bad.
Nonsense. Economies don't and can't grow on the back of marketing - not for any meaningful length of time. You have to have a valuable product to market or it isn't sustainable. You are just being cynical.
As Dick Cheney said, "America's business is business
That was said by President Calvin Coolidge. If fact it is his most famous quote in all likelihood. Cheney may have repeated it but he is most definitely not the originator.
Had this been an issues with a new blackberry, you know they would be crucified.
Research In Motion HAS had plenty of issues lately and they have been crucified for them. Their stock price has taken an enormous beating, their phone offerings are mediocre at best, their strategy is muddled and they have had outages in their email service which is the single reason anyone still even cares about Blackberry devices.
The media loves to let apple getaway with stuff like this all the time, but any mistakemade by RIM and it means the end of the company
Blackberry has made a huge string of mistakes, most of them worse than Apple's missteps and yet they are still around. There is nothing wrong with RIM that a genuinely good phone won't fix. But they haven't produced such a device and don't appear to be in any danger of producing a good phone any time soon. Until they do, Android and Apple will continue to put RIM in the hurt locker.
If this is a software bug, why are we waiting weeks for a fix?
Quite possible because it takes that long to identify and fix the bug. Not to mention you need to actually test the fix before rolling it out to millions of phones. Of course we don't know for certain but it's not exactly difficult to figure out why it might take some time. Furthermore it appears to be something that isn't a showstopper and affects only a small percentage of users. Plus it seems pretty clear that some sort of fix is on the way soon. It's just not that big a deal.
Because apple knows they can do as they please, and these devices will still fly off the shelves faster then they can build them.
Even if true you only get that privilege by building a quality product that people like and trust. RIM has produced crappy phones that nobody really wants. People are buying Android and iPhones because they are quite simply better. While I'm sure they exist, I'm not personally aware of anyone who has purchased a Blackberry for personal use. Literally everyone I know has either an iPhone or some sort of Android device if they have a smartphone that was not provided by their company.
They should also explain how cities and towns across the country have these buildings with lots of high-quality books that anybody can read completely for free
Last time I checked I paid taxes to support those libraries. I'm a huge supporter of libraries and think that money spent on them is a usually money well spent but let's not pretend they are free.
The scarcity isn't the issue - it's that you purchased a thing. The issue is that people's brains break when they can't physically touch it, but there should be no difference.
People grasp buying intangible goods just fine. Look at any balance sheet of a major corporation and you'll see some form of intangible goods on there. People buy music from the iTunes store every day. We understand it just fine. That doesn't mean that every type of transaction makes sense. Lending an electronic copy of a digital book is an absurd attempt to replicate a practice that arose due to scarcity of physical goods.
Scarcity is very much the issue. Lending makes no sense for a good that is not scarce. In the case of ebooks you haven't bought a tangible good but you can just as easily buy an intangible good (information, intellectual property, etc) or a service. I'm an accountant and we even have formal accounting treatments for these things. But the price of anything is based on its scarcity. If I can get it easily it will have a low cost. If it is hard to get the price will be higher. If someone controls the supply of something they can create artificial scarcity and thereby command higher prices.
Copyright and patents exist because the best available solution we have to the free rider problem is artificial scarcity. It's not a perfect solution (and our current laws aren't helping any) but no one has come up with a better one yet.
That would be incorrect. If you want to get pedantic it is zero marginal cost. You ALREADY are spending the money for those electrons and bandwidth and admin costs and what costs they do present are spread out widely among lots of people and other services. The additional cost of putting a single ebook into the mix once you've already bought a computer and set up the infrastructure is so small that it is effectively zero. There is effectively zero variable cost involved. All the costs are fixed costs and you would pay them anyway even if ebooks didn't exist.
"Lending" something that has zero cost to reproduce is insane. This has somehow eluded Amazon and the rest of these lunatics.
We lend physical books because they were and are a scarce physical resource. At first books were rare and expensive due to the physical constraints of making them. Later on copyright was created to artificially reinforce the scarcity once publishers gained the ability to print enough books to destroy any hope of profits and with it the impetus to create books. The concept is a good one even if the current execution is rather nuts. People could lend books because it didn't infringe on copyright (nothing was copied), the societal value of exchange of information was a good one, and books do have a meaningful cost to create, reproduce and distribute.
But "lending" an ebook is a rather stupid concept. The cost of reproducing and distributing an ebook is a good approximation of zero so the notion of lending makes a lot less sense. The exchange of information work equally well whether the book is lent or copied so that doesn't really matter. The only argument possibly in favor of the practice is that not "lending" would somehow damage the motivation to create and disseminate useful works. However you could accomplish feat of keeping markets viable by simply lowering the price of the book to a non-monopolistic price, thereby selling more of the book. This is possible because the role of publishers is drastically reduced when you do away with the need for a physical distribution system.
The natural price of an ebook is nowhere near $10. There is a cost to the creation of the work but the publishers are to a large extent middlemen who provide relatively little value without their monopoly on the old physical distribution system. Think of books a little like apps on your Android or iPhone. Most aren't worth much and will sell for small amounts of money but there also isn't the cost of a physical distribution system and its attendant middlemen. There is SOME cost but you can be certain it's a lot less than $10/book. We need to protect the incentive to create but we have no obligation to protect old obsolete monopolies.
So the answer is outlawing unions and having all workers negotiate their own contract terms?
Depends on the situation. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. There is no one size fits all answer. Unions have their place but they aren't the answer to everything.
Sure, that worked really good for the industrial revolution. Welcome to your 112 hour work week, don't like it? Fuck off, there's a line of people behind you waiting for a job.
Nice straw man. That's not really an issue in the current world.
After working for a Federal Contractor for 10 years, a document accidentally leaked to employees by the contractor illustrated the incredible disparity between what the Contractor was paying us and what they were charging the government.
It's a for profit company. Does he seriously think they were not charging any sort of a markup on his services? Furthermore there is a LOT more cost that just the salaries. Even for companies whose main cost is labor, overhead is huge and can easily double costs without even considering profit margins. This is especially true for business with high insurance costs. Furthermore if you've ever dealt with the government, the amount of bureaucratic cost can be off the charts. Doing business with the federal government involves all sorts of red tape and bureaucratic hurdles (some necessary, some not so much) which are very expensive to deal with. Frankly with my own dealings with government contracts, I wouldn't touch that work unless there was a fairly steep markup on it. Not worth the hassle otherwise.
When the top 100 Defense Contractors cost taxpayers $306 billion, eliminating the Federal Contractor middle-man seems like an obvious place to start the austerity measures."
$306 billion is a lot of money but that doesn't establish whether it is cheaper or more expensive for the government to provide those tasks. It might very easily cost the government more. It might cost less. There is no evidence here one way or the other aside from a unsupported insinuation that there must be some sort of inefficiency here.
It's not hard to imagine that Boeing actually drove the delays - at least in part - themselves to try to find a way out of their labor contracts.
I appreciate the general distaste for a lot of union behavior but the union appear to have little to do with the delays. The delays were largely a result of Boeing trying to outsource a lot of sub-assembly work to smaller companies, many of which it turned out were not sufficiently capable to handle the increase in complexity. They had various part shortages, design issues and other delays. You don't have to take my word for it either.
He doesn't mention two crucial things. One is that step 2. may take a very long time.
He also doesn't seem to grasp the concept of market failure. It is extremely well proven that market forces cannot solve some problems. Market forces will not build many types of infrastructure, operate a military, pay for policing, emergency services, and certainly will not operate a judiciary. We have financial regulations and regulatory bodies in place precisely because people abused the lack of those same regulations in the past.
In short, Ron Paul is an idealistic charismatic imbecile. His ideas are long on simplicity and short on reality. His "solutions" never really add up to something that will work in the real world. They play on American's (justified) distrust of government and unfortunately a lot of people think he is actually talking sense. The real world is simply more complicated than he makes it out to be.
I wasn't able to attend post-secondary because I didn't have a car.
Bullshit. That's an excuse, not a reason. I didn't have a car for my first two years of college and yet somehow I managed just fine. If you want to go to college the only thing stopping you is you and your ability (or lack thereof). Financing is absurdly easy to arrange if you bother to try. And take the freakin' bus or live on campus. Figure it out and stop whining that someone about how unfair it all is.
They're the rich fucks who have all their bills paid by mommy and daddy.
Go to hell. I've managed to put myself through both undergrad and two masters programs and the only thing I got from Mommy and Daddy was a co-signature to buy a beater car to get me there. My parents weren't rich and couldn't really do more. I paid for it myself with loans, grants and a lot of hard work. I worked through college, didn't graduate until I was 24 and got a lot of great experience along the way. And I resent losers who whine about how impossible their lot in life is. Grow up.
Just because you feel inadequate doesn't mean everyone else does. Guy's like Ferraris because they are cool, fast and amazingly fun to drive. (Yes I have driven a Ferrari though I've never owned one)
But over 10 million people have bought a Camry. There must be something right about it.
There is. It's fairly practical and reliable and relatively cheap basic transportation. That doesn't mean people won't buy something better when they have the means or that there aren't better cars available. A BMW 3 Series is a better car than a Camry but it also is more expensive. There is a reason it is called a luxury car.
And the Toyota Corolla is the all-time best seller with over 36 million vehicles produced.
It provides good value for money. So what? It's still a boring soulless econobox that people almost never buy when they can afford something better.
Oh Jeez, not this **** again! Look, I know it's hard to believe, but the US market is not the be all and end all, nor is it always reflective of the rest of the world.
It's just the biggest single market in the world. Nothing important there. [/sarcasm] The Amiga did not sell well enough anywhere and it died. Has nothing to do with the US or any other single market.
Sure, it didn't sell well in Buttf***, Illinois, but the Amiga enjoyed *massive* mainstream success in Europe in the late-80s and early-90s.
And yet it still died. Must not have really been all that popular in "Buttf***" Europe either.
That said, though it was amazing and ahead of its time 20-25 years ago, the Amiga is way too long gone to serve any meaningful purpose in bringing back now. Things have long moved on.
I'm pretty sure that was exactly my point. Thanks for repeating it.
But to be honest, this product is really aimed at the obessive hardcore Amiga fanbase
The netbook Amiga will set a mark in computer history as the first portable Amiga to see the light of the day since the Amiga 1000 was introduced to the U.S. market in 1985.
Even if true, so what? The Amiga was a fine machine 20 years ago. It died. Things have moved on rather considerably since then. I don't really understand why anyone is trying to resurrect a proprietary platform that died out eons ago and that even most geeks didn't buy back during its heyday. If all they are doing is slapping the Amiga brand on a more modern system, again I have to ask why? Nobody cared about the Amiga back then and even fewer people care now.
I say this as a iPhone owner. I don't hate Apple, but I hate the incorrect praise they get for inventing things they did not invent.
Nobody with a clue is saying Apple invented the digital music player. Even Apple never claimed to be first. Apple created their own because the ones that were on the market pretty much sucked and they saw an opportunity. And they were right, the competition did pretty much suck.
What Apple did bring to the party in the case of the iPod was a complete system. There were devices that were good and there was software that was acceptable but NOBODY made a good version of both and made them work together. Furthermore, prior to 2001 USB 2.0 was not widely available which meant that most other devices had to sync using very slow connections. The original iPod used Firewire which actually mattered a lot at the time because it allowed syncing of the library SO much faster. Everyone fixates on just the iPod or just iTunes but they don't consider the whole system which was the key to Apple's success. THAT was their innovation.
Oh, the Ferrari is special: it's an overpriced, unreliable, impractical car for guys who feel inadequate.
Even if all that is true, what does it tell you that virtually EVERY guy still wants one? Nobody dreams about owning a Toyota Camry precisely because there is absolutely nothing interesting, fast, beautiful, fun or enjoyable about it.
Kind of like Apple products.
Right. And Windows is just a model of reliability...
You're right, in 2001, the iPod was extremely expensive, ugly and wouldn't work with anything other than a Mac
Ugly is a matter of opinion and taste and based on sales and design awards I'd say your opinion is in the minority on that one but if you think it is ugly that's up to you. The original iPod was pricier than some (though not all) of the competition but it also worked better than most of the competition. Apple seems to have been the first to realize that it wasn't just the device but also the software to manage the music collection as well that mattered. They provided the most complete product, not just a cheap player and crappy, poorly compatible software written by someone else.
It shouldn't really be shocking that Apple started iTunes as a Mac only product since, duh, those are the computers Apple makes and sells. Furthermore USB 2.0 had only just been released and USB 1.0 wasn't fast enough for efficient transfers. Only Firewire was and few PCs at that time had Firewire available whereas every Mac did. I shudder at the thought of trying to sync my music collection over a USB 1.0 cable. Eventually they moved on to selling it to the Windows crowd too once they ported iTunes and USB 2.0 became ubiquitous.
And as for the iPhone, it wasn't going up against Windows phones, it was going up against RIM's Blackberry, who knows what would have happened had RIM not been criminally incompetent.
When the iPhone was first released Windows Mobile was among the market leaders. Nokia sold far and away the largest number of "smartphones" and RIM was the market leader among the business crowd as you mention at least in North America. Few people thought the iPhone would make much of a dent but the iPhone managed to redefine what we expect from a smartphone and pretty much every phone maker out there including Microsoft, RIM, Google and Nokia have blatantly copied from the iPhone.
There's nothing special about iPods. They're a digital music player, just like every other digital music player out there
That's like saying a Ferrari is nothing special. It's a car just like every other car out there.
Fact is that there are differences and the differences matter greatly. The differences in Apple's products and competing products may not matter to you or me but they do matter. If you don't grasp this then you will never understand why Apple sells so many of them.
They know they produce an inferior car to most well below their price points in terms of performance...
Any car that costs more than about $50,000 is well into diminishing returns on the price. Nobody buys a $100,000 car because it is a rational economic decision. You are well into conspicuous consumption territory which has nearly nothing to do with any reasonable evaluation of performance per dollar.
As far as I have seen, their strongest ad campaign has been through drag races against the Dodge Viper and the Porsche GT and those are very apples-to-oranges races. The Porsche and Viper are 180mph+ cars and are geared to do so; the Roadster is geared to do about 125mph.
I have a truck that is geared to do about 125mph but I'm pretty sure it won't beat a Viper in any race. Fact is that electric motors should be very good at drag races and the Tesla bears this out. And frankly who the hell cares if a car can go 180mph? You will never, ever drive it that fast. In fact I'd wager to say that close to no one who reads this has been much over 140mph unless they actually race cars or live in Germany. I guess it makes for good marketing but it's a retarded statistic. Like buying a first generation Hummer when you live in the suburbs - it makes no sense whatsoever.
Don't seem to realise that Top Gear is a comedy show.
It's a comedy show much like The Daily Show is a comedy show. Both are genuinely funny but both also make some very serious points while making you laugh as well.
Honestly though, I can't imagine any car manufacturer honestly expecting to get a fair shake from Clarkson and company. I believe the opinions they give are actually honest (it's what makes the show genuinely interesting) but they also come into car reviews with strong prejudices about the likely outcome. They tend to typecast car manufacturers and often as not their evaluations are highly subjective and irrational. It's a fun show to watch and you will get an unvarnished opinion about the cars they review but any vehicle flaws will be pointed out and probably exaggerated for comedic effect. Apparently Tesla never watched the show or completely misunderstood what they were getting into.
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Actually, Apple and other manufacturers are NOT responsible for their SUPPLIERS' mishaps.
Sure they are. Apple has almost certainly been sued for problems that are/were caused by their suppliers. Apple chooses who they want to do business with and as a result bears at least some responsibility for the actions of their suppliers. While it is unrealistic to expect Apple to be responsible for every action of their suppliers, they most definitely are responsible for some of them. The supplier and Apple share responsibility for the products they jointly create AND any by-products or problems they create as well.
It's not about the 4 megs, it's about the 99c/costs to produce the song, which presumably had at least $5,000 of studio overhead per album.
If the recording studio can't control their costs, that isn't my problem. While I don't pretend to be an expert in the music industry, I am actually a certified accountant and I'm quite comfortable saying that everything I've observed about that industry indicates they aren't very good at cost control. While there is a meaningful cost to the production of an album, the overhead is fixed and can be amortized over numerous projects. The labor to produce the record is also basically fixed. It's fairly similar to R&D in that once it goes to market there are no more costs, especially with digital distribution.
Most of the costs in a record label should be in sales and marketing (rather like a software firm actually). The actual product development is rather inexpensive - maybe 10-20% of the total costs. The real expense is in promotion (and formerly in distribution) so the labels haven't really needed to care much about cost control in the actual studio time because it is tiny by comparison. That doesn't mean though that I as the customer should be willing to pay for their inefficiency.
Ask yourself this. Are you really willing to pay the record companies the money it costs you to market a record to you? Are you really willing to pay some extravagant rate for studio time? Personally I have no interest at all in paying for their marketing budget or other production inefficiencies. I'm pretty confident that even at $0.99/song, the margins are pretty fat for the record companies given that the marginal cost of sales done digitally is a good approximation of zero.
but the government needs to overhaul the system of taxation to a simple system without loopholes
No such thing exists. It can be simple or without loopholes but it is pretty much impossible to do both. Finance is quite simply more complicated than you seem to imagine.
How can a democracy function effectively when the government is more complex than the average voter can understand?
You could ask the same thing about science or business. How can science function when the average person does not understand organic chemistry? How can a business function when most people know little about corporate accounting. The answer is that they don't have to. We elect or appoint specialists to manage those functions but retain the right to remove them from office. Any reasonably large organization is more complicated than a single person can fully comprehend but that doesn't mean they can't work.
Besides, the US at least is not and never has been a democracy. Properly speaking it is a republic.
America's comparative advantage is marketing, for good or bad.
Nonsense. Economies don't and can't grow on the back of marketing - not for any meaningful length of time. You have to have a valuable product to market or it isn't sustainable. You are just being cynical.
As Dick Cheney said, "America's business is business
That was said by President Calvin Coolidge. If fact it is his most famous quote in all likelihood. Cheney may have repeated it but he is most definitely not the originator.
Had this been an issues with a new blackberry, you know they would be crucified.
Research In Motion HAS had plenty of issues lately and they have been crucified for them. Their stock price has taken an enormous beating, their phone offerings are mediocre at best, their strategy is muddled and they have had outages in their email service which is the single reason anyone still even cares about Blackberry devices.
The media loves to let apple getaway with stuff like this all the time, but any mistakemade by RIM and it means the end of the company
Blackberry has made a huge string of mistakes, most of them worse than Apple's missteps and yet they are still around. There is nothing wrong with RIM that a genuinely good phone won't fix. But they haven't produced such a device and don't appear to be in any danger of producing a good phone any time soon. Until they do, Android and Apple will continue to put RIM in the hurt locker.
If this is a software bug, why are we waiting weeks for a fix?
Quite possible because it takes that long to identify and fix the bug. Not to mention you need to actually test the fix before rolling it out to millions of phones. Of course we don't know for certain but it's not exactly difficult to figure out why it might take some time. Furthermore it appears to be something that isn't a showstopper and affects only a small percentage of users. Plus it seems pretty clear that some sort of fix is on the way soon. It's just not that big a deal.
Because apple knows they can do as they please, and these devices will still fly off the shelves faster then they can build them.
Even if true you only get that privilege by building a quality product that people like and trust. RIM has produced crappy phones that nobody really wants. People are buying Android and iPhones because they are quite simply better. While I'm sure they exist, I'm not personally aware of anyone who has purchased a Blackberry for personal use. Literally everyone I know has either an iPhone or some sort of Android device if they have a smartphone that was not provided by their company.
They should also explain how cities and towns across the country have these buildings with lots of high-quality books that anybody can read completely for free
Last time I checked I paid taxes to support those libraries. I'm a huge supporter of libraries and think that money spent on them is a usually money well spent but let's not pretend they are free.
The scarcity isn't the issue - it's that you purchased a thing. The issue is that people's brains break when they can't physically touch it, but there should be no difference.
People grasp buying intangible goods just fine. Look at any balance sheet of a major corporation and you'll see some form of intangible goods on there. People buy music from the iTunes store every day. We understand it just fine. That doesn't mean that every type of transaction makes sense. Lending an electronic copy of a digital book is an absurd attempt to replicate a practice that arose due to scarcity of physical goods.
Scarcity is very much the issue. Lending makes no sense for a good that is not scarce. In the case of ebooks you haven't bought a tangible good but you can just as easily buy an intangible good (information, intellectual property, etc) or a service. I'm an accountant and we even have formal accounting treatments for these things. But the price of anything is based on its scarcity. If I can get it easily it will have a low cost. If it is hard to get the price will be higher. If someone controls the supply of something they can create artificial scarcity and thereby command higher prices.
Copyright and patents exist because the best available solution we have to the free rider problem is artificial scarcity. It's not a perfect solution (and our current laws aren't helping any) but no one has come up with a better one yet.
Not zero cost at all, actually.
That would be incorrect. If you want to get pedantic it is zero marginal cost. You ALREADY are spending the money for those electrons and bandwidth and admin costs and what costs they do present are spread out widely among lots of people and other services. The additional cost of putting a single ebook into the mix once you've already bought a computer and set up the infrastructure is so small that it is effectively zero. There is effectively zero variable cost involved. All the costs are fixed costs and you would pay them anyway even if ebooks didn't exist.
Disclosure: I'm a cost accountant in my day job.
"Lending" something that has zero cost to reproduce is insane. This has somehow eluded Amazon and the rest of these lunatics.
We lend physical books because they were and are a scarce physical resource. At first books were rare and expensive due to the physical constraints of making them. Later on copyright was created to artificially reinforce the scarcity once publishers gained the ability to print enough books to destroy any hope of profits and with it the impetus to create books. The concept is a good one even if the current execution is rather nuts. People could lend books because it didn't infringe on copyright (nothing was copied), the societal value of exchange of information was a good one, and books do have a meaningful cost to create, reproduce and distribute.
But "lending" an ebook is a rather stupid concept. The cost of reproducing and distributing an ebook is a good approximation of zero so the notion of lending makes a lot less sense. The exchange of information work equally well whether the book is lent or copied so that doesn't really matter. The only argument possibly in favor of the practice is that not "lending" would somehow damage the motivation to create and disseminate useful works. However you could accomplish feat of keeping markets viable by simply lowering the price of the book to a non-monopolistic price, thereby selling more of the book. This is possible because the role of publishers is drastically reduced when you do away with the need for a physical distribution system.
The natural price of an ebook is nowhere near $10. There is a cost to the creation of the work but the publishers are to a large extent middlemen who provide relatively little value without their monopoly on the old physical distribution system. Think of books a little like apps on your Android or iPhone. Most aren't worth much and will sell for small amounts of money but there also isn't the cost of a physical distribution system and its attendant middlemen. There is SOME cost but you can be certain it's a lot less than $10/book. We need to protect the incentive to create but we have no obligation to protect old obsolete monopolies.
So the answer is outlawing unions and having all workers negotiate their own contract terms?
Depends on the situation. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. There is no one size fits all answer. Unions have their place but they aren't the answer to everything.
Sure, that worked really good for the industrial revolution. Welcome to your 112 hour work week, don't like it? Fuck off, there's a line of people behind you waiting for a job.
Nice straw man. That's not really an issue in the current world.
After working for a Federal Contractor for 10 years, a document accidentally leaked to employees by the contractor illustrated the incredible disparity between what the Contractor was paying us and what they were charging the government.
It's a for profit company. Does he seriously think they were not charging any sort of a markup on his services? Furthermore there is a LOT more cost that just the salaries. Even for companies whose main cost is labor, overhead is huge and can easily double costs without even considering profit margins. This is especially true for business with high insurance costs. Furthermore if you've ever dealt with the government, the amount of bureaucratic cost can be off the charts. Doing business with the federal government involves all sorts of red tape and bureaucratic hurdles (some necessary, some not so much) which are very expensive to deal with. Frankly with my own dealings with government contracts, I wouldn't touch that work unless there was a fairly steep markup on it. Not worth the hassle otherwise.
When the top 100 Defense Contractors cost taxpayers $306 billion, eliminating the Federal Contractor middle-man seems like an obvious place to start the austerity measures."
$306 billion is a lot of money but that doesn't establish whether it is cheaper or more expensive for the government to provide those tasks. It might very easily cost the government more. It might cost less. There is no evidence here one way or the other aside from a unsupported insinuation that there must be some sort of inefficiency here.
It's not hard to imagine that Boeing actually drove the delays - at least in part - themselves to try to find a way out of their labor contracts.
I appreciate the general distaste for a lot of union behavior but the union appear to have little to do with the delays. The delays were largely a result of Boeing trying to outsource a lot of sub-assembly work to smaller companies, many of which it turned out were not sufficiently capable to handle the increase in complexity. They had various part shortages, design issues and other delays. You don't have to take my word for it either.
He doesn't mention two crucial things. One is that step 2. may take a very long time.
He also doesn't seem to grasp the concept of market failure. It is extremely well proven that market forces cannot solve some problems. Market forces will not build many types of infrastructure, operate a military, pay for policing, emergency services, and certainly will not operate a judiciary. We have financial regulations and regulatory bodies in place precisely because people abused the lack of those same regulations in the past.
In short, Ron Paul is an idealistic charismatic imbecile. His ideas are long on simplicity and short on reality. His "solutions" never really add up to something that will work in the real world. They play on American's (justified) distrust of government and unfortunately a lot of people think he is actually talking sense. The real world is simply more complicated than he makes it out to be.
I wasn't able to attend post-secondary because I didn't have a car.
Bullshit. That's an excuse, not a reason. I didn't have a car for my first two years of college and yet somehow I managed just fine. If you want to go to college the only thing stopping you is you and your ability (or lack thereof). Financing is absurdly easy to arrange if you bother to try. And take the freakin' bus or live on campus. Figure it out and stop whining that someone about how unfair it all is.
They're the rich fucks who have all their bills paid by mommy and daddy.
Go to hell. I've managed to put myself through both undergrad and two masters programs and the only thing I got from Mommy and Daddy was a co-signature to buy a beater car to get me there. My parents weren't rich and couldn't really do more. I paid for it myself with loans, grants and a lot of hard work. I worked through college, didn't graduate until I was 24 and got a lot of great experience along the way. And I resent losers who whine about how impossible their lot in life is. Grow up.
That virtually every guy feels inadequate.
Just because you feel inadequate doesn't mean everyone else does. Guy's like Ferraris because they are cool, fast and amazingly fun to drive. (Yes I have driven a Ferrari though I've never owned one)
But over 10 million people have bought a Camry. There must be something right about it.
There is. It's fairly practical and reliable and relatively cheap basic transportation. That doesn't mean people won't buy something better when they have the means or that there aren't better cars available. A BMW 3 Series is a better car than a Camry but it also is more expensive. There is a reason it is called a luxury car.
And the Toyota Corolla is the all-time best seller with over 36 million vehicles produced.
It provides good value for money. So what? It's still a boring soulless econobox that people almost never buy when they can afford something better.
Oh Jeez, not this **** again! Look, I know it's hard to believe, but the US market is not the be all and end all, nor is it always reflective of the rest of the world.
It's just the biggest single market in the world. Nothing important there. [/sarcasm] The Amiga did not sell well enough anywhere and it died. Has nothing to do with the US or any other single market.
Sure, it didn't sell well in Buttf***, Illinois, but the Amiga enjoyed *massive* mainstream success in Europe in the late-80s and early-90s.
And yet it still died. Must not have really been all that popular in "Buttf***" Europe either.
That said, though it was amazing and ahead of its time 20-25 years ago, the Amiga is way too long gone to serve any meaningful purpose in bringing back now. Things have long moved on.
I'm pretty sure that was exactly my point. Thanks for repeating it.
But to be honest, this product is really aimed at the obessive hardcore Amiga fanbase
All three of them
The netbook Amiga will set a mark in computer history as the first portable Amiga to see the light of the day since the Amiga 1000 was introduced to the U.S. market in 1985.
Even if true, so what? The Amiga was a fine machine 20 years ago. It died. Things have moved on rather considerably since then. I don't really understand why anyone is trying to resurrect a proprietary platform that died out eons ago and that even most geeks didn't buy back during its heyday. If all they are doing is slapping the Amiga brand on a more modern system, again I have to ask why? Nobody cared about the Amiga back then and even fewer people care now.
I say this as a iPhone owner. I don't hate Apple, but I hate the incorrect praise they get for inventing things they did not invent.
Nobody with a clue is saying Apple invented the digital music player. Even Apple never claimed to be first. Apple created their own because the ones that were on the market pretty much sucked and they saw an opportunity. And they were right, the competition did pretty much suck.
What Apple did bring to the party in the case of the iPod was a complete system. There were devices that were good and there was software that was acceptable but NOBODY made a good version of both and made them work together. Furthermore, prior to 2001 USB 2.0 was not widely available which meant that most other devices had to sync using very slow connections. The original iPod used Firewire which actually mattered a lot at the time because it allowed syncing of the library SO much faster. Everyone fixates on just the iPod or just iTunes but they don't consider the whole system which was the key to Apple's success. THAT was their innovation.
Oh, the Ferrari is special: it's an overpriced, unreliable, impractical car for guys who feel inadequate.
Even if all that is true, what does it tell you that virtually EVERY guy still wants one?
Nobody dreams about owning a Toyota Camry precisely because there is absolutely nothing interesting, fast, beautiful, fun or enjoyable about it.
Kind of like Apple products.
Right. And Windows is just a model of reliability...
You're right, in 2001, the iPod was extremely expensive, ugly and wouldn't work with anything other than a Mac
Ugly is a matter of opinion and taste and based on sales and design awards I'd say your opinion is in the minority on that one but if you think it is ugly that's up to you. The original iPod was pricier than some (though not all) of the competition but it also worked better than most of the competition. Apple seems to have been the first to realize that it wasn't just the device but also the software to manage the music collection as well that mattered. They provided the most complete product, not just a cheap player and crappy, poorly compatible software written by someone else.
It shouldn't really be shocking that Apple started iTunes as a Mac only product since, duh, those are the computers Apple makes and sells. Furthermore USB 2.0 had only just been released and USB 1.0 wasn't fast enough for efficient transfers. Only Firewire was and few PCs at that time had Firewire available whereas every Mac did. I shudder at the thought of trying to sync my music collection over a USB 1.0 cable. Eventually they moved on to selling it to the Windows crowd too once they ported iTunes and USB 2.0 became ubiquitous.
And as for the iPhone, it wasn't going up against Windows phones, it was going up against RIM's Blackberry, who knows what would have happened had RIM not been criminally incompetent.
When the iPhone was first released Windows Mobile was among the market leaders. Nokia sold far and away the largest number of "smartphones" and RIM was the market leader among the business crowd as you mention at least in North America. Few people thought the iPhone would make much of a dent but the iPhone managed to redefine what we expect from a smartphone and pretty much every phone maker out there including Microsoft, RIM, Google and Nokia have blatantly copied from the iPhone.
There's nothing special about iPods. They're a digital music player, just like every other digital music player out there
That's like saying a Ferrari is nothing special. It's a car just like every other car out there.
Fact is that there are differences and the differences matter greatly. The differences in Apple's products and competing products may not matter to you or me but they do matter. If you don't grasp this then you will never understand why Apple sells so many of them.
For the same money you could actually go out and buy a lotus elise, not just a car that looks like one.
And in doing so end up with a car that is a FAR less interesting than the Tesla. Not like the Lotus is a practical vehicle either.
They know they produce an inferior car to most well below their price points in terms of performance...
Any car that costs more than about $50,000 is well into diminishing returns on the price. Nobody buys a $100,000 car because it is a rational economic decision. You are well into conspicuous consumption territory which has nearly nothing to do with any reasonable evaluation of performance per dollar.
As far as I have seen, their strongest ad campaign has been through drag races against the Dodge Viper and the Porsche GT and those are very apples-to-oranges races. The Porsche and Viper are 180mph+ cars and are geared to do so; the Roadster is geared to do about 125mph.
I have a truck that is geared to do about 125mph but I'm pretty sure it won't beat a Viper in any race. Fact is that electric motors should be very good at drag races and the Tesla bears this out. And frankly who the hell cares if a car can go 180mph? You will never, ever drive it that fast. In fact I'd wager to say that close to no one who reads this has been much over 140mph unless they actually race cars or live in Germany. I guess it makes for good marketing but it's a retarded statistic. Like buying a first generation Hummer when you live in the suburbs - it makes no sense whatsoever.
Don't seem to realise that Top Gear is a comedy show.
It's a comedy show much like The Daily Show is a comedy show. Both are genuinely funny but both also make some very serious points while making you laugh as well.
Honestly though, I can't imagine any car manufacturer honestly expecting to get a fair shake from Clarkson and company. I believe the opinions they give are actually honest (it's what makes the show genuinely interesting) but they also come into car reviews with strong prejudices about the likely outcome. They tend to typecast car manufacturers and often as not their evaluations are highly subjective and irrational. It's a fun show to watch and you will get an unvarnished opinion about the cars they review but any vehicle flaws will be pointed out and probably exaggerated for comedic effect. Apparently Tesla never watched the show or completely misunderstood what they were getting into.