200 million people each with a dollar have more economic power that any one individual could ever have.
If this was true, Paul Allen could not have purchased the Portland Trail Blazers. 200 million of spending power is easy for a multi-billionaire.
The masses have loads of liquid cash, and they spend it on entertainment at an astounding rate.
Ah, but with patronage, you can have both. For example, more than half of the money that funds a typical major orchestra comes from private and government endowments, but then they charge admission for the general public as well. Without wealthy patrons (i.e., corporations, individuals, and the NEA), most of us could not afford to see a world-class orchestra perform, let alone go to concerts on a regular basis. They would have to charge hundreds of dollars per ticket, and sell out every show, just to break even.
Umm... You know that Amedeus was a work of fiction, right?
I seem to recall Beethoven once turning down an invitation to a prince's court. When asked about it, he said "there are a hundred princes out there, but only one Beethoven!"
Actuallly, the castrati opera singers were fantastically wealthy and famous, but they paid a terrible price for their fame. (If you don't already know what a castrati is... try not to think about it.)
Wagner was considered quite a cult superstar in his day, and some people traveled all over Europe to hear his stuff performed.
I think the rise of the celebrity to the masses can probably be mapped to coincide with the rise of the middle class... a large group of people with enough money and leasure time to obsess over their favorite performer.
since that system managed to leave Mozart in a pauper's grave at the age of 33
Mozart was well paid, but piddled all his money away... not unlike a lot of millionaire athletes of today that die broke because of bad decisions.
Also, the poster was making the case that good art will still be created without IP laws. Mozart might not have made Michael Jackson money, but that did not stop him from writing. Nice try.
Judging by what I've seen in corporate offices, patronage by corporations is NOT the way to make good art.
I dunno... I've seen some pretty interesting pieces in the various downtown Minneapolis buildings I've been in. Not everybody notices them while in "drone" mode, but a lot of people do.
I remember when I was working at a brokerage firm that had a policy of rotating their art between floors every couple months, to give people a little variety (and help the VP's resist the temptation to hoard the better works). I thought it was kind of nice.
The explosion in intellectual works over the past century has been because of strong IP law.
No, the explosion of the Bee Gees and Britany Spears has been because of strong IP law. It has also been a hinderance to certain types of artistic progress.
Classical composers used to write variations on each others work all the time. It was considered a very valuable learning tool. Beethoven and Dvorak both stole the "Ode to Joy" melody note-for-note from the public domain. Yet if I were to quote a Beatles refrain in a pop song of my own, I would face a lawsuit.
IP law is not all that good for artists or for art. It is very good for people and companies who re-sell artistic works, because it creates an artificial shortage of creative beauty.
Actually, the Internet opens the possibility of direct patronage by the masses, not just the wealthy.
From an artist's persective, patronage of the wealthy is better, for the obvious reason that they have more money.
Larry Ellison can probably find more money in his sofa than I have in my bank account, so artists will obviously benifit more from winning his enthusiasm than mine.
A good example of modern patronage is the way corporations tend to buy paintings and sculptures to decorate their offices with.
sarcasm() { You are so right. After all, nobody ever produced any creative works prior to the invention of the IP concept. I seem to remember hearing something about a "Renaissance", but that was before America even existed, so it can't have been all that important. }
The DoE wants increase their budget, while perhaps making people more open to the idea of nuclear plants. Fears of nationwide black-outs might help. There's your story.
As a side effect, the generator companies (who's sales have probably stagnated since Januarty) might get a lift, as will the pyramid schemes based on "geomagnetic home power generation" machines that don't work.
Remember the good old days, when we just thought nukes were going to kill us all? Now it's a different crisis every week, hailed by somebody who wants to sell stuff to us.
Tell me why the Catholic Church is the biggest landowner in the entire United States then??
They're not, that's why.
The single biggest land owner in the United States is the United States Federal Government. Thanks for playing, though. Enjoy your copy of the home game.
They also were the first movie fx team to utilize the Matrix 360-freeze-fram effect.
Nope. Lost in Space, another crap-fest, did it a year earlier.
The shoot was originally going to be a static rotation (like the Gap and Miller Beer commercials) from an arc of cameras all firing at once, but early tests looked like a single camera tracking around a bunch of dummies. (No pun intended... heh heh.)
So they staggered the cameras slightly to create a slo-mo effect during the shot. Most movies that used the rack-o-cameras trick (Wing Commander, Matrix, etc.) followed their example.
Matrix gets credit for the first film to do this that did not completely suck.
2) Buscemi was slumming it... again. In spite of his continued presence in horrible movies like Armageddon (and this ), he will forever be Mr. Pink as far as I'm concerned.:)
3) If I want to see a bad movie with Liv Tyler, I can see Empire Records , which was just as bad, but she was sexier in it.
4) Bruce Willis has done a lot of great work, but he did not add any "cool" to Armageddon. His presence does not guarantee entertainment; he also failed to redeem this , this , and this.
Sorry, but Armageddon wasted a good cast on a really, really stupid movie. The whole cast had to have known they were hired to make a stink bomb, and phoned in their performances.
While Battlefield Earth may have been even worse, at least they did a really bad job of promoting it, so most people had an idea of how bad it was beforehand.
There are plenty of bad movies, but a major studio release without a single redeeming quality is a rarity, historically significant in its own right.
Not as rare as you would think, take this one, for example.
The best thing I can say about the movie is that it will likely spell the end of Hollywood's love affair with Scientology. Terms like "amoral", "crackpot", and "scam", don't bother Hollywood types in the least when defending their philosophies; to be picked on is a badge of honor to them, or free publicity anyway.
However, Battlefield Earth has now associated Scientology with the term "box-office poison".
You can almost hear the mailing list cancellations being written.
The fact that Clinton was not removed does not mean that it is okay to lie to grand juries. The Congressional power to remove a President is a political power, not a means to enforce law.
Unless granted a pardon, Clinton will probably face criminal charges shortly after he leaves office. (He has already been found in contempt of court in the Paula Jones case, and fine excactly one buttload of money for his crime. Since he restated many of these untrue remarks before a grand jury, his problems did not end there.)
Of course, whoever our next president is, he might decide to pardon Clinton, as Ford did Nixon. Even a Republican President might choose to pardon him "for the good of the country."
In hindsight, I think Ford probably did the wrong thing. If we had set a precedent of throwing a former President in jail for crimes committed while in office, I doubt Clinton would have been so cavalier in the way he ran his administration.
I'll shut up now, because this is all way off topic.
Wasn't that the excact same defense that some of Clinton's backers were using during the impeachment? That if Clinton were removed, our 401K's would all go down the crapper with him?
It was starting to look like high tech was becoming the new voodoo, because so many people relied on it without understanding it. Superstitions tend to evolve in these situations.
Now it seems that the same is becoming true of macro-economics, because most of America's middle class has an IRA or mutual fund, but are clueless about how the market works.
If you are trying to persuade management to open source something that they spent money on developing, the question they will expect you to be able to answer is not "how" but "why".
They really won't care what your model is for managing the long-term growth of the project. Instead of reading about how the GNU team runs things, start thinking about these questions:
"Does doing this add value to our company?"
"If so, what are the specific benifits?"
"How can the value of these benifits be measured?"
"How much is this likely to cost?"
"Are the potential benifits likely to justify the trouble?"
If you go into a meeting with the PHB's, and don't have specific details of the reasons for doing the project, the goals of the project, how the goals can be evaluated, and the costs... they will pretend to listen to your presentation, and then move on to something else.
Knowing this kind of stuff is supposed to be management's job, but they didn't get where they are today by doing their own research. If you want the project to happen, it is up to you to do the thinking for them.
Then why not jeans? They are more comfortable than "casual" pants, less likely to wrinkle, look nice, and everybody already owns some. Yet most "casual friday" dress codes did not allow demim.
What you may not understand is that the corporations didn't do this because people like you went to them and said "I don't like ties, and I want to wear Dockers... but only one day a week, and no blue jeans, I can't stand being allowed to wear blue jeans! Also, keep making me wear a tie on Monday through Friday."
Back around 1990 or so, when companies were stuggling to find "intangible" (re: free) ways of improving employee retention, several clothing companies sponsored "surveys" which showed that employees would be more likely to stay at a job if they could wear casual clothes one day a week. Some of the surveys even said it would be a "major factor" in deciding where to work, even if it meant taking a job that payed less.
These surveys were rigged, of course. It was all about selling tan pants, designer colored socks, and golf shirts.
Casual Fridays suck, and Scott Adams got a few Dilbert strips out of them.
Mind you, being forced to put on a tie every day also sucked, but at least you could get by owning 5 identical oxfords, two jackets, and a hanger full of ties. The change meant you still had to own the jackets and ties, but also had to buy a closet full of polo shirts, or banded collars, or whatever.
Fortunately, the economy boomed again in the mid 90's, and a shortage of professional workers created a power shift. Now days, most of us can wear most stuff on most days, and fewer HR departments are sending out memoes telling us what to wear. (Some companies still seem to have a problem with jeans, though... what's up with that?)
"The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism"
By Thomas Frank University of Chicago Press, 287 pages
Thank you! That was it excactly.
It's astounding how many people think that the "casual Friday" trend of the 90's was the result of workers refusing to wear ties and suit-coats every day, instead of clothes companies trying to sell more Dockers(tm).
Are you sure there are many corporate executives that worry about getting "new control structures put in place to further secure their power"?
It seems to me that most of them concentrate on profits and stock value for 5-10 years, and then cash out their options and retire. Sure, a few of the high-rollers keep going back into the fray, out of the challenge of "winning" again to build their ego, but most corporations exist for one reason and one reason only: to make as much money as possible as quickly as possible. They are not known for long-term planning.
I gotta agree that you were shafted by moderators with an axe to grind in both cases. Even for those that disagree with you, it is obvious that your comment kicked off the most interesting thread under this article, so far.
Nike became a target when the $$$ involved in Jordan's endorsement contract was leaked, and they have been a favorite pin-cushion of the anti-corporatist set ever since.
Actually, there was a very good book a couple years ago (I wish I could remember the title) about how all this "individualism" and "anti-corporatism" was the direct and intended result of corporate campaigns of the 50's and 60's.
Specifically, they mentioned the Volkswagon Beetle as one of the products behind introducing the "hippie" philosophy to the zeitgeist. Record companies and other medea corporations provided a lot of the drive as well. We can hear echo's of it in Apple Computer's "for the rest of us" and "think different" ads, and in products like Fruitopia, Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream, and CD's from Geffin Records.
Gather any 10 "anti-corporate" Unix geeks at random, and 8 of them will be wearing Doc Martins. Rage Against The Machine fans pay through the nose for "Free Leonard Peltier" T-shirts. The rise of body piercing has created whole now markets for selling jewelry. Homeopathy and "alternative medicine" rakes in millions by getting people to trust their herbalist more than their family doctor.
The thesis of the book boiled down to the fact that there really is no revolution, but it is being marketed anyway.
Counterculture, as it exists today, was invented to sell us stuff.
The reason for the reccomendation to send the appeal directly to the Supreme Court was to prevent MICROS~1 from stalling.
Under the normal appeals procedure, Gates could drag this thing out for years. Sending it strait to the top means that Gates gets one more chance for appeal, and then he has to break up the company. Their chances of a successful appeal, based on the law as it is written, is slim to none.
The "conservaitive" appointees are probably the least likely to overturn the ruling, because Reagan and Bush went out of their way to find judges with a strong bias towards the philosphy of judicial restraint, as a reaction to the "activist judges" of the Berger court. Whatever reasons you may have for disliking O'Connor or Thomas, they are totally against political legislating from the bench.
MICROS~1 will almost definately be split up, and I could not be happier about it.
Name-calling just invalidates your argument... pinko.:)
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If this was true, Paul Allen could not have purchased the Portland Trail Blazers. 200 million of spending power is easy for a multi-billionaire.
The masses have loads of liquid cash, and they spend it on entertainment at an astounding rate.
Ah, but with patronage, you can have both. For example, more than half of the money that funds a typical major orchestra comes from private and government endowments, but then they charge admission for the general public as well. Without wealthy patrons (i.e., corporations, individuals, and the NEA), most of us could not afford to see a world-class orchestra perform, let alone go to concerts on a regular basis. They would have to charge hundreds of dollars per ticket, and sell out every show, just to break even.
He doesn't. He either 1) Pays a fee. 2) Uses IP that his label owns. or 3) Settles the lawsuit afterwards.
I seem to recall Beethoven once turning down an invitation to a prince's court. When asked about it, he said "there are a hundred princes out there, but only one Beethoven!"
Wagner was considered quite a cult superstar in his day, and some people traveled all over Europe to hear his stuff performed.
I think the rise of the celebrity to the masses can probably be mapped to coincide with the rise of the middle class... a large group of people with enough money and leasure time to obsess over their favorite performer.
Sorry to point out that your facts have no relationship with my original point.
Mozart was well paid, but piddled all his money away... not unlike a lot of millionaire athletes of today that die broke because of bad decisions.
Also, the poster was making the case that good art will still be created without IP laws. Mozart might not have made Michael Jackson money, but that did not stop him from writing. Nice try.
I dunno... I've seen some pretty interesting pieces in the various downtown Minneapolis buildings I've been in. Not everybody notices them while in "drone" mode, but a lot of people do.
I remember when I was working at a brokerage firm that had a policy of rotating their art between floors every couple months, to give people a little variety (and help the VP's resist the temptation to hoard the better works). I thought it was kind of nice.
No, the explosion of the Bee Gees and Britany Spears has been because of strong IP law. It has also been a hinderance to certain types of artistic progress.
Classical composers used to write variations on each others work all the time. It was considered a very valuable learning tool. Beethoven and Dvorak both stole the "Ode to Joy" melody note-for-note from the public domain. Yet if I were to quote a Beatles refrain in a pop song of my own, I would face a lawsuit.
IP law is not all that good for artists or for art. It is very good for people and companies who re-sell artistic works, because it creates an artificial shortage of creative beauty.
From an artist's persective, patronage of the wealthy is better, for the obvious reason that they have more money.
Larry Ellison can probably find more money in his sofa than I have in my bank account, so artists will obviously benifit more from winning his enthusiasm than mine.
A good example of modern patronage is the way corporations tend to buy paintings and sculptures to decorate their offices with.
sarcasm()
{
You are so right. After all, nobody ever produced any creative works prior to the invention of the IP concept. I seem to remember hearing something about a "Renaissance", but that was before America even existed, so it can't have been all that important.
}
As a side effect, the generator companies (who's sales have probably stagnated since Januarty) might get a lift, as will the pyramid schemes based on "geomagnetic home power generation" machines that don't work.
Remember the good old days, when we just thought nukes were going to kill us all? Now it's a different crisis every week, hailed by somebody who wants to sell stuff to us.
They're not, that's why.
The single biggest land owner in the United States is the United States Federal Government. Thanks for playing, though. Enjoy your copy of the home game.
Nope. Lost in Space, another crap-fest, did it a year earlier.
The shoot was originally going to be a static rotation (like the Gap and Miller Beer commercials) from an arc of cameras all firing at once, but early tests looked like a single camera tracking around a bunch of dummies. (No pun intended... heh heh.)
So they staggered the cameras slightly to create a slo-mo effect during the shot. Most movies that used the rack-o-cameras trick (Wing Commander, Matrix, etc.) followed their example.
Matrix gets credit for the first film to do this that did not completely suck.
2) Buscemi was slumming it... again. In spite of his continued presence in horrible movies like Armageddon (and this ), he will forever be Mr. Pink as far as I'm concerned. :)
3) If I want to see a bad movie with Liv Tyler, I can see Empire Records , which was just as bad, but she was sexier in it.
4) Bruce Willis has done a lot of great work, but he did not add any "cool" to Armageddon. His presence does not guarantee entertainment; he also failed to redeem this , this , and this.
Sorry, but Armageddon wasted a good cast on a really, really stupid movie. The whole cast had to have known they were hired to make a stink bomb, and phoned in their performances.
While Battlefield Earth may have been even worse, at least they did a really bad job of promoting it, so most people had an idea of how bad it was beforehand.
Not as rare as you would think, take this one, for example.
The best thing I can say about the movie is that it will likely spell the end of Hollywood's love affair with Scientology. Terms like "amoral", "crackpot", and "scam", don't bother Hollywood types in the least when defending their philosophies; to be picked on is a badge of honor to them, or free publicity anyway.
However, Battlefield Earth has now associated Scientology with the term "box-office poison".
You can almost hear the mailing list cancellations being written.
The fact that Clinton was not removed does not mean that it is okay to lie to grand juries. The Congressional power to remove a President is a political power, not a means to enforce law.
Unless granted a pardon, Clinton will probably face criminal charges shortly after he leaves office. (He has already been found in contempt of court in the Paula Jones case, and fine excactly one buttload of money for his crime. Since he restated many of these untrue remarks before a grand jury, his problems did not end there.)
Of course, whoever our next president is, he might decide to pardon Clinton, as Ford did Nixon. Even a Republican President might choose to pardon him "for the good of the country."
In hindsight, I think Ford probably did the wrong thing. If we had set a precedent of throwing a former President in jail for crimes committed while in office, I doubt Clinton would have been so cavalier in the way he ran his administration.
I'll shut up now, because this is all way off topic.
It was starting to look like high tech was becoming the new voodoo, because so many people relied on it without understanding it. Superstitions tend to evolve in these situations.
Now it seems that the same is becoming true of macro-economics, because most of America's middle class has an IRA or mutual fund, but are clueless about how the market works.
They really won't care what your model is for managing the long-term growth of the project. Instead of reading about how the GNU team runs things, start thinking about these questions:
"Does doing this add value to our company?"
"If so, what are the specific benifits?"
"How can the value of these benifits be measured?"
"How much is this likely to cost?"
"Are the potential benifits likely to justify the trouble?"
If you go into a meeting with the PHB's, and don't have specific details of the reasons for doing the project, the goals of the project, how the goals can be evaluated, and the costs... they will pretend to listen to your presentation, and then move on to something else.
Knowing this kind of stuff is supposed to be management's job, but they didn't get where they are today by doing their own research. If you want the project to happen, it is up to you to do the thinking for them.
What you may not understand is that the corporations didn't do this because people like you went to them and said "I don't like ties, and I want to wear Dockers... but only one day a week, and no blue jeans, I can't stand being allowed to wear blue jeans! Also, keep making me wear a tie on Monday through Friday."
Back around 1990 or so, when companies were stuggling to find "intangible" (re: free) ways of improving employee retention, several clothing companies sponsored "surveys" which showed that employees would be more likely to stay at a job if they could wear casual clothes one day a week. Some of the surveys even said it would be a "major factor" in deciding where to work, even if it meant taking a job that payed less.
These surveys were rigged, of course. It was all about selling tan pants, designer colored socks, and golf shirts.
Casual Fridays suck, and Scott Adams got a few Dilbert strips out of them.
Mind you, being forced to put on a tie every day also sucked, but at least you could get by owning 5 identical oxfords, two jackets, and a hanger full of ties. The change meant you still had to own the jackets and ties, but also had to buy a closet full of polo shirts, or banded collars, or whatever.
Fortunately, the economy boomed again in the mid 90's, and a shortage of professional workers created a power shift. Now days, most of us can wear most stuff on most days, and fewer HR departments are sending out memoes telling us what to wear. (Some companies still seem to have a problem with jeans, though... what's up with that?)
By Thomas Frank University of Chicago Press, 287 pages
Thank you! That was it excactly.
It's astounding how many people think that the "casual Friday" trend of the 90's was the result of workers refusing to wear ties and suit-coats every day, instead of clothes companies trying to sell more Dockers(tm).
It seems to me that most of them concentrate on profits and stock value for 5-10 years, and then cash out their options and retire. Sure, a few of the high-rollers keep going back into the fray, out of the challenge of "winning" again to build their ego, but most corporations exist for one reason and one reason only: to make as much money as possible as quickly as possible. They are not known for long-term planning.
Nike became a target when the $$$ involved in Jordan's endorsement contract was leaked, and they have been a favorite pin-cushion of the anti-corporatist set ever since.
Specifically, they mentioned the Volkswagon Beetle as one of the products behind introducing the "hippie" philosophy to the zeitgeist. Record companies and other medea corporations provided a lot of the drive as well. We can hear echo's of it in Apple Computer's "for the rest of us" and "think different" ads, and in products like Fruitopia, Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream, and CD's from Geffin Records.
Gather any 10 "anti-corporate" Unix geeks at random, and 8 of them will be wearing Doc Martins. Rage Against The Machine fans pay through the nose for "Free Leonard Peltier" T-shirts. The rise of body piercing has created whole now markets for selling jewelry. Homeopathy and "alternative medicine" rakes in millions by getting people to trust their herbalist more than their family doctor.
The thesis of the book boiled down to the fact that there really is no revolution, but it is being marketed anyway.
Counterculture, as it exists today, was invented to sell us stuff.
Under the normal appeals procedure, Gates could drag this thing out for years. Sending it strait to the top means that Gates gets one more chance for appeal, and then he has to break up the company. Their chances of a successful appeal, based on the law as it is written, is slim to none.
The "conservaitive" appointees are probably the least likely to overturn the ruling, because Reagan and Bush went out of their way to find judges with a strong bias towards the philosphy of judicial restraint, as a reaction to the "activist judges" of the Berger court. Whatever reasons you may have for disliking O'Connor or Thomas, they are totally against political legislating from the bench.
MICROS~1 will almost definately be split up, and I could not be happier about it.
Name-calling just invalidates your argument... pinko. :)