Ticket retailers are both a monopoly and an oligopoly. Essentially all retailer has a monopoly over a given venue. The venue may be allowed a small amount of ticket blocks which are used for their own purposes (direct sales, gifts, charity, marketing, etc..) but the vast direct-sales come through a single distributor.
Those ticket distributors are largely an oligopoly, since venues only want to deal with reputable outlets with large market shares in order to maximize sales.
All of them (Venue, Talent, Distributor) have a very shaky interest in eliminating scalping at all. Tickets are sold, the stadium is filled, most people are happy. Scalping only hurts one group of people: Consumers. In the long long term, people will be so jaded with going to 'ticketed' shows that the attendances will drop below capacity. That also hurts the smaller acts far more disproportionately than the rich ones (which have a more captivated audience to saturate the scalping tax). The arts dies and we all point fingers at one another instead of 'fixing the problem', whatever that looks like (I've given my 2 cents in a different post).
That's not how it works. You stopped describing the process halfway through and then waved your hands and said "the arts dies". QED. Scalpers are drawn by profit motive. That profit motive exists because, clearly, there is untapped demand. A scalper is a speculative investor looking to realize the remaining value in that untapped demand. Scalpers don't just go out there and buy up every ticket for every show, any more than business investors tell their portfolio manager: "Go buy 100 shares of every company in existence!"
In the long term, yes, people will get jaded with ticketed shows where it's 35 dollars to get into some dive bar with a 3 meter box along one wall serving as a "stage", and then attendances will drop below capacity. That is, the market will cease to generate extra demand for many concerts at the prices offered. In the instances when this happens, the speculative investors who bought up blocks of tickets will actually LOSE money, because they will have to resell the tickets at/below face value, or may not be able to resell them at all because demand has already been turned off by the hefty asking price. Next season when that band comes through or when a similar band plays that venue, the investors already know, "Hey, almost no one is spending 50 bucks to go see The Decemberists play in a ramshackle beer hall, no matter how much hipster hype they get on college radio". They don't buy up all the available tickets. This leaves more tickets in the hands of the original ticket seller. Word gets around among fans that "Hey there are still lots of tickets left to that show and this year they're only $18.50! Me and Kaiteleighn are going - come with us!"
The market adjusts. You are talking about this as if tickets have some durable value and are being snatched up and hoarded forever by greedy scalpers. That isn't the case. Tickets are a commodity. Scalpers are commodities traders. Scalpers won't keep buying up tickets that don't return profit. Profit doesn't exist unless demand is higher than supply.
You can't force a company to spend money and man hours making something that doesn't exist so that you can use their product they way you want to,
Why not? I can be forced to spend money (and therefore the man hours necessary for me to earn that money) in order to consume a product -- health insurance -- so why can't a company be forced to spend money and man hours making a product?
In the 21st century we've already established that the government can compel behavior whenever it suits the public interest. Everything else from here on out is just a temporary quibble over details, until all regulations are permitted.
I think it's an interesting thought, but disagree. To many places say "go to oursite.com" or "getfreebies.net" for that to be true. I believe you are attempting to equate laziness with ignorance, which is wrong. Most users are lazy, but they know what an address is. Hell, most technical people are lazy too. We just maintain truckloads of bookmarks.
This isn't something you can "disagree" on. I spend a significant portion of my time teaching/training/educating users up and down the food chain. Let me assure you -- there are a LOT of people out there who do not have any idea what the address bar in a browser is and how to use it. When you show them something as simple as typing "maps.google.com" they look at you like you've just given them a pill which regenerated their kidneys and cured their need for dialysis.
- Universally Ubiquitous - Nationalized - Lowest Common Denominator - (for POTS anyway) Pretty damn rock solid in most of the world
Did Facebook kill Email? No. Did Google kill the address bar? No. Did Apple kill the PC? No. Did solar panels (insert any other energy technology) kill the grid? No. Will Facebook messenger (or any company-centric IM system) kill telephones? No.
Next flamebait topic please.
It is easy to sit here on Slashdot and say that Google did not kill the address bar, because I've no doubt at least 85% of the people here know what "URL" stands for, how a URL is composed and read by a browser, and are also people who desire a high level of direct control over their computing and therefore don't mind memorizing dozens of unique URL strings for the sites/pages they use most often.
Actual normal users, on the other hand, only know whatever their current system tells them. I work with/around hundreds of people every day who only know one URL: google.com. I rarely get more than 1-2 days without observing a user go to google and type "yahoo mail" as the search string, then click a google result for the Yahoo! Mail site. This is how they always access their email. Going to the address bar and typing in mail.yahoo.com is like asking them to interpret ancient copies of the Bible written in Greek. The address bar wasn't totally 'killed' by Google, but the google mentality and in-browser search providers have so heavily obfuscated the site/page address that a significant percentage of computer users would be stymied by a browser operating at, say, the Netscape 4 level, and it would take them a very long time to find things they access every day.
It's a very apt comparison to phone numbers, which for many people under 25, they don't know ANY numbers of their friends' or family members. They have been using name-based electronic lists of contacts since they were 17 or earlier. If they lost their cell phone and were standing at a pay phone they would have no idea how to contact anyone without calling Directory Assistance... i.e. Google for phone numbers.
to pay for basic income, everyone has to earn less
I don't think that's accurate. Productivity since the 70s has doubled, but real-terms wages have been stagnant. In the last 3 decades, the top 0.1% of Americans have doubled their wealth. It's obvious that improved technology can maintain the same lifestyle for the same number of people but with the labour of fewer people - the maintenance of employment levels has mostly been due to the improvement of that basic lifestyle (smartphones, better medical technology, etc) providing jobs for displaced farm workers etc. The system we have encourages spending the extra productivity of technology and economic growth on an expanded lifestyle, but it could be diverted instead to providing a basic lifestyle without requiring extra labour.
But as I understand it the critique of your position is that "the extra productivity of technology" came from the inventor/entrepreneur class specifically because of the profit motive -- that is, the motive to earn more profit than the other guy. And therefore when you say "it could be diverted instead to providing a basic lifestyle", you are falsifying the equation by doing an operation on one side that you're not doing to the other. You are assuming that you wipe the profit motive out of existence while still keeping the innovation and economic activity which arose from the profit motive. That innovation and economic activity doesn't exist on its own absolute terms.
So the critique of your position is that sure, you could take the results of increased capital/production/capacity and divert it to people who didn't invent or bring to market the innovation which made it possible... one time, and maybe for a full generation if there was a previous extraordinary growth to draw from. But rather quickly human nature adapts to the new reality. Once you have removed that more-profit-than-the-other-guy motive, there is zero incentive for the remaining inventors/producers/entrepreneurs to continue to invent and produce and bring new things to market. So what happens over time is that the previous increase in productivity is spent by the redistributionists, and then the rate of increase slows dramatically without motive to drive it drives it, and then the market re-normalizes at a new level where yes everyone is closer to equal but at a lower equilibrium point.
None of the other people or nationalities you listed have books from God that tell them to kill nonbelievers ask a means to please their God.
That is the difference. But, by all means, if you feel differently about it, you can travel to Syria and make nice with Isis.
I'm sure you're up to the task, after all, you're so fair minded and much better than the rest of us.
Huh? What comment are you replying to? What makes you think I am asking for fairness or being nice to terrorists. On the contrary that is my entire point -- the GP I was replying to was saying that this kid's supposed isolation as a result of the incident is the most effective way to make him into a terrorist. I am pointing out that isolation doesn't make someone into a terrorist. There are millions upon millions of people leading "lives of quiet desperation" every day and they don't become terrorists, and it is ridiculous to support anything remotely resembling any kind of understandable rational path to murdering people and blowing things up for a political/religious ideology. If feeling a bit isolated leads you to bombing civilians, then you were already a terrorist in your heart, and the isolation was just a minor catalyst which would have inevitably happened in thousands of future social situations.
I don't see the relevance of your reply. If you are trying to make a point that belief in Islam makes terrorists, well that's your own thread, go for it.
They made this kid feel like an isolated second class person and to be honest, I can't imagine a more effective way to turn this kid into an actual terrorist.
The attention he got was more about undoing the damage than rewarding any actual genius.
So we're on Slashdot, the official Internet home of mom's basement losers and Magic The Gathering addicts.... in other words, hundreds of thousands of people for whom the first 25 years of their lives consisted of nothing but "[being made to ] feel like an isolated second class person". How many Slashdot users go blow up innocent people as a political ploy?
If feeling a little isolated and second class is the most effective way to turn you into a terrorist, why didn't all of the isolated second class Italians and Irish and Germans and Chinese and Japanese immigrants who barely made it to this country with the clothes on their back and didn't have 30,438 federal assistance programs, become raging terrorists? How is this country even still standing -- what with all the mass bombings and slayings and blood running in the streets from all those angry disaffected young Japanese men terrorizing San Francisco?
There is absolutely 0.000% of anything in this kid's history in the United States which should explain/justify/rationalize him turning into a terrorist in the future. You're simply making another instance of the Bundy-porn argument made by the James Dobsonites in the 1990s -- Bundy watched a lot of porn; Bundy raped/killed a lot of women; therefore if someone watches a lot of porn, "I can't imagine a more effective way to turn this kid into an actual serial rapist".
Ugh, quote FAIL. The final paragraph belongs to the comment I was replying to.
Speech used by an individual to express ideas is free speech. Advertisements -- especially advertisements representing a very large organization -- are not. Corporations should not have the same rights individuals have and I feel that free speech is one of those clear cut distinctions. There is a long history of consumer protection everywhere in the world -- learn about your own country's struggles with it. It's not a simple issue and advertisement should not be regarded as free speech.
But the truth of the matter is that, as a consumer, we only have so many hours in a day to decide which of the thousands of products we consume in a year we should spend our money on. So it does come down to federal guidelines for what is "Grade A" or "Organic" or "Green" when there is a label espousing these properties and there are consumers paying a premium for this notion. Without those guidelines those words will mean absolutely nothing and there will be no way to tell where your product was made, how much cadmium it has in it or whether it is the end result of spewing carbon into the atmosphere. Without similar laws, you wouldn't be able to trust the nutritional information at the grocery store. Is it free speech to claim that my potato chips cure cancer and lead to weight loss no matter how many of them you eat? People will know that I'm lying? Cigarettes used to sooth sore throats. Trans fats used to taste awesome.
Okay, how about "Tasty" or "Chunky" or "Kids love it!"? How can we allow companies to just sling those words around willy-nilly without a few hundred men in Washington DC taxing and regulating everything to make sure we aren't led astray? I pay an extra 12% per can for "Thick and Chunky" stew instead of the plain stew, which must in comparison be thin and runny. Since corporations are evil and out to deceive me to trick me into giving them money, how can I be sure the Safeway-brand frozen pizza actually is "Tasty"? What happens when the can of "thick and chunky" soup only has two pieces of beef and a couple little cubes of carrots? How about when I try to serve my child the raisin oat bran cereal and not only do they not love it, they refuse to eat it?
"Green" or "Organic" are just words. They are words which marketers observed in daily use and wanted consumers to identify with their product, in exactly the same way marketers want you to associate their products with words like "Zesty" or "Bursting With Fruit Flavor!"
Design a conceptual framework which allows the government to regulate the word "Organic" which does not also allow them to regulate "Healthy" or "Very Berry!" or "Extra Bold Taste".
Speech used by an individual to express ideas is free speech. Advertisements -- especially advertisements representing a very large organization -- are not. Corporations should not have the same rights individuals have and I feel that free speech is one of those clear cut distinctions. There is a long history of consumer protection everywhere in the world -- learn about your own country's struggles with it. It's not a simple issue and advertisement should not be regarded as free speech.
My mom had that rule when i was young for a while, I would get nothing else till it was eaten.... I went to bed many times without eating anything.
So this plan may work on some, but is going to harm others.
But the question is, did your mom really plate the veggie course and only the veggies and bring those plates to the table, then everyone sat with them for 10 minutes before your mom went back into the kitchen and finished the next course? That is what AthanasiusKircher is describing. That is not the same as putting all of dinner on the table and then setting a mere verbal rule that kids have to eat some broccoli first even though the kids can see and smell the skillet of sausage links.
I have more trust for the government than I have for a benefits-dodger like Uber. The company shows hate by using contractors as a dodge against benefits as well as implying a second-tier status.
The government responds and answers to me without regard to stock ownership, while Uber responds primarily to some faceless individuals.
"The company shows hate"? Really? Hate? Is that seriously what you mean? Why in the 21st century can we no longer have a discussion about the relative advantages/disadvantages of various sets of policies without any disagreement having to be cast in some binary in/out group "hating" the other?
Make an objective scientific argument in favor of the survival of the human animal as a species. For bonus points, make sure that you do not co-incidentally argue for the preservation of all species on the planet.
All existence is subjective. I think therefore I reach. I don't really care about objectivity, because I'm not objective.
But, if I were to try, I guess I'd base it on the existence of self awareness. Science cannot exist without the self-aware mind to posit, observe, and reflect. For there to be a science or logic within which this argument can be judged valid or invalid there must, therefore exist that mind. Given that you find value in scientific objectivism, you by extension hold value in the self aware mind.
I doubt that's acceptable, as you'll probably call it circular, but, as I said initially...I'm not objective when it comes to my own existence.
You are correct. There are zero non-circular objective arguments for preservation of mankind. Every animal has an instinct for self-preservation, because over time natural selection cannot help but produce such an instinct. When a hungry dog rips into an unlucky rabbit, murdering it for no other reason than to preserve itself, we do not attempt to make a rational argument in favor of the dog's moral right to murder other animals. Does the dog have a right to exist? Is there some absolute standard against which we measure the survival of humankind and find a moral justification? Certainly not. All we have done with our wonderful Sentience (and we know it is wonderful, because we sentiently tell ourselves so every day) is cloak the plain savagery of nature in successive onion layers of Meaning. In this way, our Sentience actually makes us the lowest, most depraved species on the planet. Because at least the dog (or any other creature) doesn't craft for itself elaborate lies about why the rabbit deserves to die and the dog deserves to live.
'She,' began Weston.
'I'm sorry,' interrupted Ransom, 'but I've forgotten who She is.'
'Life, of course,' snapped Weston. 'She has ruthlessly broken down all obstacles and liquidated all failures and today in her highest form civilized man - and in me as his representative, she presses forward to that interplanetary leap which will, perhaps, place her for ever beyond the reach of death.'
'He says,' resumed Ransom, 'that these animals learned to do many difficult things, except those who could not; and those ones died and the other animals did not pity them. And he says the best animal now is the kind of man who makes the big huts and carries the heavy weights and does all the other things I told you about; and he is one of these and he says that if the others all knew what he was doing they would be pleased. He says that if he could kill you all and bring our people to live in Malacandra, then they might be able to go on living here after something had gone wrong with our world. And then if something went wrong with Malacandra they might go and kill all the hnau in another world. And then another - and so they would never die out.
*
'It is in her right,' said Weston, 'the right, or, if you will, the might of Life herself, that I am prepared without flinching to plant the flag of man on the soil of Malacandra: to march on, step by step, superseding, where necessary, the lower forms of life that we find, claiming planet after planet, system after system, till our posterity - whatever strange form and yet unguessed mentality they have assumed - dwell in the universe wherever the universe is habitable.'
'He says,' translated Ransom, 'that because of this it would not be a bent action - or else, he says, it would be a possible action - for him to kill you all and bring us here. He says he would feel no pity. He is saying again that perhaps they would be able to keep moving from one world to another and wherever they came they would kill everyone. I think he is now talking about worlds
ah, i'm being accused of accused of carrying on too long. fair enough accusation. but it is coming from someone who makes believes their own posts in tandem don't exist. that's some heavy psychological projection there friend
You definitely have been carrying on too long. You should've passed on with Ruston and the other early Kurobots. It's always astonishing to run into your persona online, still going ~20 years later. You have been practicing the desperate need for self-validation provided by Internet discussion for lo these many years, but apparently you like Bono still haven't found what you're looking for. How long til your soul gets it right? Can any human being ever reach that kind of light? You should call on the resting soul of Galileo, king of night vision, king of insight.
There's a great West Wing episode which discusses why we should, but somehow I think that wouldn't gain me much here. Discussions of the nature of man, and the establishment of wonder being particularly squishy in hard science terms.
Instead I'd point out that all safety critical systems are engineered around the notion of redundancy. Shit happens, and when it does, things break down. When that unexpected thing happens to our Earth-bound ecology, what, exactly, is our safety strategy? Hide in a hole? For how long? What if it's biological? What happens if someone accidently creates Card's molecular disruption device. We can't reasonably colonize another star system (yet) but we aren't *that* far from being able to establish some very worthwhile planetary redundancy. It's worth it because we are stuck on this rock that I think we should rename 'The Single Point of Failure'.
Make an objective scientific argument in favor of the survival of the human animal as a species. For bonus points, make sure that you do not co-incidentally argue for the preservation of all species on the planet.
Re:Yes, we should give up because it is hard..
on
Let's Not Go To Mars
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Well, colonizing other worlds is arguably more important for the survival of humanity than peace in the middle east. After all, we are an asteroid away from total annihilation, and there is nothing we can do with the currently technology available to avert such disaster in a relative short term.
And face it, the world at large is already sick and tired of their tribal hatreds and their barbaric behavior.
What, specifically, is so valuable about homo sapiens that makes it worth saving? The butterflies are also one asteroid away from total annihilation. As are the panda bears, the peacock, and the dikdik. Surely you don't propose we skedaddle selfishly away and leave the rest of the planet to their doom?
Obama did the right thing, IMO. The people who did this need to be embarrassed, personally.
Inviting the kid to the White House immediately shows how fucked up the school district is.
Were I president, I would have done it even if I had to pay out of pocket.
Oh please! This deserves a meme image taken from the old anti-drug commercial where the kid says to his day, "I learned it by watching you!!" Where did local ISDs and municipalities learn zero tolerance policy, heavy-handed antiterrorism persecution, and rapidly expanding abuse of investigatory power? From the national political trends over the past 30 years. What the President did is nothing more than clever well-calculated recognition of a photo op. If he truly wanted to show leadership on the issue, how about rolling back the Patriot Act? How about directing his FBI/DOJ/TSA staff not to pursue warrantless wiretaps and obscure no-fly lists and nude body scans and mass data surveillance and on and on?
Even though many users objected to the inclusion of the Ask.com toolbar, Oracle only recently discontinued including it in Java downloads after Microsoft changed their definition of malware which then classified the Ask.com toolbar as malware."
Um, like how Microsoft by default makes Bing your search engine in IE, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari? And changes your homepage to be MSN.com? Like that?
So does Microsoft consider Microsoft to be malware?
On the flip side such devices probably do less, having a more narrow mission (assuming no scope-creep). This may balance out the additional effort of trying to fit tighter hardware constraints.
On the flip side of that such devices, by virtue of doing less, have less capacity to do more in the future, and so in the first several waves of experimentation before the market gets firmly established (if it ever does, CueCat I'm looking at you), you have devices which are obsolete very shortly after they are successfully implemented, so that the cost savings for limited devices may be balanced out (eaten up) by the need to re-buy a bunch of new limited narrow devices 3-4 years from now.
Come on, dude. You REALLY believe that the.gov contract does not go to the cheapest bidder, the one who uses off-the-shelf components?
Computing has an interesting problem right now: The most viable, the most powerful, the cheapest components are the ones available to consumers (or at least very closely related to them), because of the sheer amout of units shipped and the harsh competition in the market. Any we-don't-use-off-the-shelf-components attempt at computing right now is doomed to be late, extremely expensive, full of bugs, and at least two generations behind.
Yes but if you've worked for the government nearly all your life as I have, you'll know that the bolded part is going to happen for any government-grown solution regardless of whether it's a piece of software or a tilt-rotor aircraft. My point being, if you're offering that result as something that is supposed to stimulate government agencies to avoid that approach, well, it usually doesn't.
I don't know what the normal procedure is in American hospitals but at least in Finland where I live, you're 100 % the hospital's responsibility once you're there - i.e. they have to ask the right questions and even if you're dishonest with your answers they can still be held responsible, if it's something they "should" have noticed (which of course is relative). So if you go to the ER and staff ask if you've been drinking and you lie and say no and some nasty shit happens because drugs they administer have contraindications with the alcohol in your system it's a case of malpractice because they should rely on a blood sample and not a patient's word.
From the perspective of one American, that sounds insane to me. Patients absolutely must share the responsibility for receiving proper care. Holding staff responsible for a patient who directly lies about their medical history is incredibly cruel to the staff and terribly inefficient because then it would logically mean staff must test for any and all potentially relevant conditions, genetic markers, chemicals, antibodies, bacterial cultures, etc. for every patient. That would be very costly to the system. If patients expect that society has an obligation to take care of them, doesn't it seem logical that the patient has a reciprocal obligation to society to be forthright in their medical history so as to free up as many of society's resources as possible for the next, potentially sicker, patient?
It's like you have no clue how jury selection works; and have only seen the movie Runaway Jury. Juries can vary in size, anywhere between 6-12 plus backups totaling about 15-30. Attorneys can only challenge the selection a set number of times. Most cases this is 3. So in a majority of cases at least one juror is completely untouchable by the attorneys (if you exclude the backup set).
I've been through voir dire twice and in both cases (criminal assault) not only did the attorneys get their allotted strikes, but toward the end of the questioning process the judge also had notes and called certain members of the pool to the bench and further questioned them about their opinions, dismissing some of them to go home. The judge is already there as a representative of the State, so naturally his dismissals will also tend to enforce jury orthodoxy. No libertarian who believes in nullification is EVER getting on a jury unless he perjures himself.
If this system can automate driving, then we should be for it.
The worst system are ones that rely on the public for its reliability and safety.
Systems should be engineered so that the public can do whatever the fuck they want, because they will, and it will still be safe.
I don't want my safety to be based upon somebody else's responsibility, because I know the public is irresponsible.
We need our systems architects to assume such.
This is why we liberals prefer a socialized government, because we assume the worst in people, and design our systems around that, whereas conservatives place their responsibility on the public, because they assume people are good and responsible and hard working and careful, which they obviously are not.
Personal responsibility is equivalent to government irresponsibility.
What a complete logic fail. Your semantic processing is so myopic and shallow that you end up believing something exactly the opposite of reality. Here's your homework assignment: describe what a "socialized government" consists of; include especially its component parts such as the agents which enact its rules, maintain its structure, and execute its policies. Then tell me that you "assume the worst in people".
Or do you perhaps have citizenship in some heretofore unknown computer-operated Algorithm Nation? Even if so, please describe the agents which write and implement your nation's algorithms.
Always struck me an odd line. Imprisonment must surely count as taking the sky from someone.
You're being too literal. The song is the psychological theme of the entire series -- the ship's crew are all in their own way voluntary rebels or involuntary outcasts who for one reason or another are only at home IN "the sky", that is, trawling through space visiting world after world with no solid ground, only the ship as "home" and only each other as "family/friend". They are ramblers and frontiersmen. The song isn't actually claiming that it is physically impossible to prevent them from seeing or entering "the sky". It's their creed; both a statement of defiance and a statement of purpose -- no matter what else each one of them may have lost, they are determined to preserve their freedom.
"The sky" isn't just the physical sky. The lyric is a metaphor.
Slashdot Mirror
Ticket retailers are both a monopoly and an oligopoly. Essentially all retailer has a monopoly over a given venue. The venue may be allowed a small amount of ticket blocks which are used for their own purposes (direct sales, gifts, charity, marketing, etc..) but the vast direct-sales come through a single distributor.
Those ticket distributors are largely an oligopoly, since venues only want to deal with reputable outlets with large market shares in order to maximize sales.
All of them (Venue, Talent, Distributor) have a very shaky interest in eliminating scalping at all. Tickets are sold, the stadium is filled, most people are happy. Scalping only hurts one group of people: Consumers. In the long long term, people will be so jaded with going to 'ticketed' shows that the attendances will drop below capacity. That also hurts the smaller acts far more disproportionately than the rich ones (which have a more captivated audience to saturate the scalping tax). The arts dies and we all point fingers at one another instead of 'fixing the problem', whatever that looks like (I've given my 2 cents in a different post).
That's not how it works. You stopped describing the process halfway through and then waved your hands and said "the arts dies". QED.
Scalpers are drawn by profit motive. That profit motive exists because, clearly, there is untapped demand. A scalper is a speculative investor looking to realize the remaining value in that untapped demand. Scalpers don't just go out there and buy up every ticket for every show, any more than business investors tell their portfolio manager: "Go buy 100 shares of every company in existence!"
In the long term, yes, people will get jaded with ticketed shows where it's 35 dollars to get into some dive bar with a 3 meter box along one wall serving as a "stage", and then attendances will drop below capacity. That is, the market will cease to generate extra demand for many concerts at the prices offered. In the instances when this happens, the speculative investors who bought up blocks of tickets will actually LOSE money, because they will have to resell the tickets at/below face value, or may not be able to resell them at all because demand has already been turned off by the hefty asking price. Next season when that band comes through or when a similar band plays that venue, the investors already know, "Hey, almost no one is spending 50 bucks to go see The Decemberists play in a ramshackle beer hall, no matter how much hipster hype they get on college radio". They don't buy up all the available tickets. This leaves more tickets in the hands of the original ticket seller. Word gets around among fans that "Hey there are still lots of tickets left to that show and this year they're only $18.50! Me and Kaiteleighn are going - come with us!"
The market adjusts. You are talking about this as if tickets have some durable value and are being snatched up and hoarded forever by greedy scalpers. That isn't the case. Tickets are a commodity. Scalpers are commodities traders. Scalpers won't keep buying up tickets that don't return profit. Profit doesn't exist unless demand is higher than supply.
You can't force a company to spend money and man hours making something that doesn't exist so that you can use their product they way you want to,
Why not? I can be forced to spend money (and therefore the man hours necessary for me to earn that money) in order to consume a product -- health insurance -- so why can't a company be forced to spend money and man hours making a product?
In the 21st century we've already established that the government can compel behavior whenever it suits the public interest. Everything else from here on out is just a temporary quibble over details, until all regulations are permitted.
I think it's an interesting thought, but disagree. To many places say "go to oursite.com" or "getfreebies.net" for that to be true. I believe you are attempting to equate laziness with ignorance, which is wrong. Most users are lazy, but they know what an address is. Hell, most technical people are lazy too. We just maintain truckloads of bookmarks.
This isn't something you can "disagree" on. I spend a significant portion of my time teaching/training/educating users up and down the food chain. Let me assure you -- there are a LOT of people out there who do not have any idea what the address bar in a browser is and how to use it. When you show them something as simple as typing "maps.google.com" they look at you like you've just given them a pill which regenerated their kidneys and cured their need for dialysis.
- Universally Ubiquitous
- Nationalized
- Lowest Common Denominator
- (for POTS anyway) Pretty damn rock solid in most of the world
Did Facebook kill Email? No.
Did Google kill the address bar? No.
Did Apple kill the PC? No.
Did solar panels (insert any other energy technology) kill the grid? No.
Will Facebook messenger (or any company-centric IM system) kill telephones? No.
Next flamebait topic please.
It is easy to sit here on Slashdot and say that Google did not kill the address bar, because I've no doubt at least 85% of the people here know what "URL" stands for, how a URL is composed and read by a browser, and are also people who desire a high level of direct control over their computing and therefore don't mind memorizing dozens of unique URL strings for the sites/pages they use most often.
Actual normal users, on the other hand, only know whatever their current system tells them. I work with/around hundreds of people every day who only know one URL: google.com. I rarely get more than 1-2 days without observing a user go to google and type "yahoo mail" as the search string, then click a google result for the Yahoo! Mail site. This is how they always access their email. Going to the address bar and typing in mail.yahoo.com is like asking them to interpret ancient copies of the Bible written in Greek. The address bar wasn't totally 'killed' by Google, but the google mentality and in-browser search providers have so heavily obfuscated the site/page address that a significant percentage of computer users would be stymied by a browser operating at, say, the Netscape 4 level, and it would take them a very long time to find things they access every day.
It's a very apt comparison to phone numbers, which for many people under 25, they don't know ANY numbers of their friends' or family members. They have been using name-based electronic lists of contacts since they were 17 or earlier. If they lost their cell phone and were standing at a pay phone they would have no idea how to contact anyone without calling Directory Assistance... i.e. Google for phone numbers.
to pay for basic income, everyone has to earn less
I don't think that's accurate. Productivity since the 70s has doubled, but real-terms wages have been stagnant. In the last 3 decades, the top 0.1% of Americans have doubled their wealth. It's obvious that improved technology can maintain the same lifestyle for the same number of people but with the labour of fewer people - the maintenance of employment levels has mostly been due to the improvement of that basic lifestyle (smartphones, better medical technology, etc) providing jobs for displaced farm workers etc. The system we have encourages spending the extra productivity of technology and economic growth on an expanded lifestyle, but it could be diverted instead to providing a basic lifestyle without requiring extra labour.
But as I understand it the critique of your position is that "the extra productivity of technology" came from the inventor/entrepreneur class specifically because of the profit motive -- that is, the motive to earn more profit than the other guy. And therefore when you say "it could be diverted instead to providing a basic lifestyle", you are falsifying the equation by doing an operation on one side that you're not doing to the other. You are assuming that you wipe the profit motive out of existence while still keeping the innovation and economic activity which arose from the profit motive. That innovation and economic activity doesn't exist on its own absolute terms.
So the critique of your position is that sure, you could take the results of increased capital/production/capacity and divert it to people who didn't invent or bring to market the innovation which made it possible... one time, and maybe for a full generation if there was a previous extraordinary growth to draw from. But rather quickly human nature adapts to the new reality. Once you have removed that more-profit-than-the-other-guy motive, there is zero incentive for the remaining inventors/producers/entrepreneurs to continue to invent and produce and bring new things to market. So what happens over time is that the previous increase in productivity is spent by the redistributionists, and then the rate of increase slows dramatically without motive to drive it drives it, and then the market re-normalizes at a new level where yes everyone is closer to equal but at a lower equilibrium point.
My phone has no problems reading barcodes from over 40 years ago.
No reason to believe it won't work in another 40 years.
And where is the ZIPDrive slot on your phone?
Where is the 5-1/4" floppy drive on your laptop?
None of the other people or nationalities you listed have books from God that tell them to kill nonbelievers ask a means to please their God.
That is the difference.
But, by all means, if you feel differently about it, you can travel to Syria and make nice with Isis.
I'm sure you're up to the task, after all, you're so fair minded and much better than the rest of us.
Huh? What comment are you replying to? What makes you think I am asking for fairness or being nice to terrorists. On the contrary that is my entire point -- the GP I was replying to was saying that this kid's supposed isolation as a result of the incident is the most effective way to make him into a terrorist. I am pointing out that isolation doesn't make someone into a terrorist. There are millions upon millions of people leading "lives of quiet desperation" every day and they don't become terrorists, and it is ridiculous to support anything remotely resembling any kind of understandable rational path to murdering people and blowing things up for a political/religious ideology. If feeling a bit isolated leads you to bombing civilians, then you were already a terrorist in your heart, and the isolation was just a minor catalyst which would have inevitably happened in thousands of future social situations.
I don't see the relevance of your reply. If you are trying to make a point that belief in Islam makes terrorists, well that's your own thread, go for it.
They made this kid feel like an isolated second class person and to be honest, I can't imagine a more effective way to turn this kid into an actual terrorist.
The attention he got was more about undoing the damage than rewarding any actual genius.
So we're on Slashdot, the official Internet home of mom's basement losers and Magic The Gathering addicts.... in other words, hundreds of thousands of people for whom the first 25 years of their lives consisted of nothing but "[being made to ] feel like an isolated second class person". How many Slashdot users go blow up innocent people as a political ploy?
If feeling a little isolated and second class is the most effective way to turn you into a terrorist, why didn't all of the isolated second class Italians and Irish and Germans and Chinese and Japanese immigrants who barely made it to this country with the clothes on their back and didn't have 30,438 federal assistance programs, become raging terrorists? How is this country even still standing -- what with all the mass bombings and slayings and blood running in the streets from all those angry disaffected young Japanese men terrorizing San Francisco?
There is absolutely 0.000% of anything in this kid's history in the United States which should explain/justify/rationalize him turning into a terrorist in the future. You're simply making another instance of the Bundy-porn argument made by the James Dobsonites in the 1990s -- Bundy watched a lot of porn; Bundy raped/killed a lot of women; therefore if someone watches a lot of porn, "I can't imagine a more effective way to turn this kid into an actual serial rapist".
Ugh, quote FAIL. The final paragraph belongs to the comment I was replying to.
Speech used by an individual to express ideas is free speech. Advertisements -- especially advertisements representing a very large organization -- are not. Corporations should not have the same rights individuals have and I feel that free speech is one of those clear cut distinctions. There is a long history of consumer protection everywhere in the world -- learn about your own country's struggles with it. It's not a simple issue and advertisement should not be regarded as free speech.
But the truth of the matter is that, as a consumer, we only have so many hours in a day to decide which of the thousands of products we consume in a year we should spend our money on. So it does come down to federal guidelines for what is "Grade A" or "Organic" or "Green" when there is a label espousing these properties and there are consumers paying a premium for this notion. Without those guidelines those words will mean absolutely nothing and there will be no way to tell where your product was made, how much cadmium it has in it or whether it is the end result of spewing carbon into the atmosphere. Without similar laws, you wouldn't be able to trust the nutritional information at the grocery store. Is it free speech to claim that my potato chips cure cancer and lead to weight loss no matter how many of them you eat? People will know that I'm lying? Cigarettes used to sooth sore throats. Trans fats used to taste awesome.
Okay, how about "Tasty" or "Chunky" or "Kids love it!"? How can we allow companies to just sling those words around willy-nilly without a few hundred men in Washington DC taxing and regulating everything to make sure we aren't led astray? I pay an extra 12% per can for "Thick and Chunky" stew instead of the plain stew, which must in comparison be thin and runny. Since corporations are evil and out to deceive me to trick me into giving them money, how can I be sure the Safeway-brand frozen pizza actually is "Tasty"? What happens when the can of "thick and chunky" soup only has two pieces of beef and a couple little cubes of carrots? How about when I try to serve my child the raisin oat bran cereal and not only do they not love it, they refuse to eat it?
"Green" or "Organic" are just words. They are words which marketers observed in daily use and wanted consumers to identify with their product, in exactly the same way marketers want you to associate their products with words like "Zesty" or "Bursting With Fruit Flavor!"
Design a conceptual framework which allows the government to regulate the word "Organic" which does not also allow them to regulate "Healthy" or "Very Berry!" or "Extra Bold Taste".
Speech used by an individual to express ideas is free speech. Advertisements -- especially advertisements representing a very large organization -- are not. Corporations should not have the same rights individuals have and I feel that free speech is one of those clear cut distinctions. There is a long history of consumer protection everywhere in the world -- learn about your own country's struggles with it. It's not a simple issue and advertisement should not be regarded as free speech.
My mom had that rule when i was young for a while, I would get nothing else till it was eaten.... I went to bed many times without eating anything.
So this plan may work on some, but is going to harm others.
But the question is, did your mom really plate the veggie course and only the veggies and bring those plates to the table, then everyone sat with them for 10 minutes before your mom went back into the kitchen and finished the next course? That is what AthanasiusKircher is describing. That is not the same as putting all of dinner on the table and then setting a mere verbal rule that kids have to eat some broccoli first even though the kids can see and smell the skillet of sausage links.
I have more trust for the government than I have for a benefits-dodger like Uber. The company shows hate by using contractors as a dodge against benefits as well as implying a second-tier status.
The government responds and answers to me without regard to stock ownership, while Uber responds primarily to some faceless individuals.
"The company shows hate"? Really? Hate? Is that seriously what you mean? Why in the 21st century can we no longer have a discussion about the relative advantages/disadvantages of various sets of policies without any disagreement having to be cast in some binary in/out group "hating" the other?
Dang, posting to undo moderation error. Didn't mean to click the parent as "flamebait".
Make an objective scientific argument in favor of the survival of the human animal as a species.
For bonus points, make sure that you do not co-incidentally argue for the preservation of all species on the planet.
All existence is subjective. I think therefore I reach. I don't really care about objectivity, because I'm not objective.
But, if I were to try, I guess I'd base it on the existence of self awareness. Science cannot exist without the self-aware mind to posit, observe, and reflect. For there to be a science or logic within which this argument can be judged valid or invalid there must, therefore exist that mind. Given that you find value in scientific objectivism, you by extension hold value in the self aware mind.
I doubt that's acceptable, as you'll probably call it circular, but, as I said initially...I'm not objective when it comes to my own existence.
You are correct. There are zero non-circular objective arguments for preservation of mankind. Every animal has an instinct for self-preservation, because over time natural selection cannot help but produce such an instinct. When a hungry dog rips into an unlucky rabbit, murdering it for no other reason than to preserve itself, we do not attempt to make a rational argument in favor of the dog's moral right to murder other animals. Does the dog have a right to exist? Is there some absolute standard against which we measure the survival of humankind and find a moral justification? Certainly not. All we have done with our wonderful Sentience (and we know it is wonderful, because we sentiently tell ourselves so every day) is cloak the plain savagery of nature in successive onion layers of Meaning. In this way, our Sentience actually makes us the lowest, most depraved species on the planet. Because at least the dog (or any other creature) doesn't craft for itself elaborate lies about why the rabbit deserves to die and the dog deserves to live.
ah, i'm being accused of accused of carrying on too long. fair enough accusation. but it is coming from someone who makes believes their own posts in tandem don't exist. that's some heavy psychological projection there friend
You definitely have been carrying on too long. You should've passed on with Ruston and the other early Kurobots. It's always astonishing to run into your persona online, still going ~20 years later. You have been practicing the desperate need for self-validation provided by Internet discussion for lo these many years, but apparently you like Bono still haven't found what you're looking for. How long til your soul gets it right? Can any human being ever reach that kind of light? You should call on the resting soul of Galileo, king of night vision, king of insight.
There's a great West Wing episode which discusses why we should, but somehow I think that wouldn't gain me much here. Discussions of the nature of man, and the establishment of wonder being particularly squishy in hard science terms.
Instead I'd point out that all safety critical systems are engineered around the notion of redundancy. Shit happens, and when it does, things break down. When that unexpected thing happens to our Earth-bound ecology, what, exactly, is our safety strategy? Hide in a hole? For how long? What if it's biological? What happens if someone accidently creates Card's molecular disruption device. We can't reasonably colonize another star system (yet) but we aren't *that* far from being able to establish some very worthwhile planetary redundancy. It's worth it because we are stuck on this rock that I think we should rename 'The Single Point of Failure'.
Make an objective scientific argument in favor of the survival of the human animal as a species.
For bonus points, make sure that you do not co-incidentally argue for the preservation of all species on the planet.
Well, colonizing other worlds is arguably more important for the survival of humanity than peace in the middle east. After all, we are an asteroid away from total annihilation, and there is nothing we can do with the currently technology available to avert such disaster in a relative short term.
And face it, the world at large is already sick and tired of their tribal hatreds and their barbaric behavior.
What, specifically, is so valuable about homo sapiens that makes it worth saving? The butterflies are also one asteroid away from total annihilation. As are the panda bears, the peacock, and the dikdik. Surely you don't propose we skedaddle selfishly away and leave the rest of the planet to their doom?
All good things come to an end, Picard.
Obama did the right thing, IMO. The people who did this need to be embarrassed, personally.
Inviting the kid to the White House immediately shows how fucked up the school district is.
Were I president, I would have done it even if I had to pay out of pocket.
Oh please! This deserves a meme image taken from the old anti-drug commercial where the kid says to his day, "I learned it by watching you!!"
Where did local ISDs and municipalities learn zero tolerance policy, heavy-handed antiterrorism persecution, and rapidly expanding abuse of investigatory power? From the national political trends over the past 30 years. What the President did is nothing more than clever well-calculated recognition of a photo op. If he truly wanted to show leadership on the issue, how about rolling back the Patriot Act? How about directing his FBI/DOJ/TSA staff not to pursue warrantless wiretaps and obscure no-fly lists and nude body scans and mass data surveillance and on and on?
Um, like how Microsoft by default makes Bing your search engine in IE, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari? And changes your homepage to be MSN.com?
Like that?
So does Microsoft consider Microsoft to be malware?
On the flip side such devices probably do less, having a more narrow mission (assuming no scope-creep). This may balance out the additional effort of trying to fit tighter hardware constraints.
On the flip side of that such devices, by virtue of doing less, have less capacity to do more in the future, and so in the first several waves of experimentation before the market gets firmly established (if it ever does, CueCat I'm looking at you), you have devices which are obsolete very shortly after they are successfully implemented, so that the cost savings for limited devices may be balanced out (eaten up) by the need to re-buy a bunch of new limited narrow devices 3-4 years from now.
Come on, dude. You REALLY believe that the .gov contract does not go to the cheapest bidder, the one who uses off-the-shelf components?
Computing has an interesting problem right now: The most viable, the most powerful, the cheapest components are the ones available to consumers (or at least very closely related to them), because of the sheer amout of units shipped and the harsh competition in the market. Any we-don't-use-off-the-shelf-components attempt at computing right now is doomed to be late, extremely expensive, full of bugs, and at least two generations behind.
Yes but if you've worked for the government nearly all your life as I have, you'll know that the bolded part is going to happen for any government-grown solution regardless of whether it's a piece of software or a tilt-rotor aircraft. My point being, if you're offering that result as something that is supposed to stimulate government agencies to avoid that approach, well, it usually doesn't.
I don't know what the normal procedure is in American hospitals but at least in Finland where I live, you're 100 % the hospital's responsibility once you're there - i.e. they have to ask the right questions and even if you're dishonest with your answers they can still be held responsible, if it's something they "should" have noticed (which of course is relative). So if you go to the ER and staff ask if you've been drinking and you lie and say no and some nasty shit happens because drugs they administer have contraindications with the alcohol in your system it's a case of malpractice because they should rely on a blood sample and not a patient's word.
From the perspective of one American, that sounds insane to me. Patients absolutely must share the responsibility for receiving proper care. Holding staff responsible for a patient who directly lies about their medical history is incredibly cruel to the staff and terribly inefficient because then it would logically mean staff must test for any and all potentially relevant conditions, genetic markers, chemicals, antibodies, bacterial cultures, etc. for every patient. That would be very costly to the system. If patients expect that society has an obligation to take care of them, doesn't it seem logical that the patient has a reciprocal obligation to society to be forthright in their medical history so as to free up as many of society's resources as possible for the next, potentially sicker, patient?
It's like you have no clue how jury selection works; and have only seen the movie Runaway Jury. Juries can vary in size, anywhere between 6-12 plus backups totaling about 15-30. Attorneys can only challenge the selection a set number of times. Most cases this is 3. So in a majority of cases at least one juror is completely untouchable by the attorneys (if you exclude the backup set).
I've been through voir dire twice and in both cases (criminal assault) not only did the attorneys get their allotted strikes, but toward the end of the questioning process the judge also had notes and called certain members of the pool to the bench and further questioned them about their opinions, dismissing some of them to go home. The judge is already there as a representative of the State, so naturally his dismissals will also tend to enforce jury orthodoxy. No libertarian who believes in nullification is EVER getting on a jury unless he perjures himself.
If this system can automate driving, then we should be for it.
The worst system are ones that rely on the public for its reliability and safety.
Systems should be engineered so that the public can do whatever the fuck they want, because they will, and it will still be safe.
I don't want my safety to be based upon somebody else's responsibility, because I know the public is irresponsible.
We need our systems architects to assume such.
This is why we liberals prefer a socialized government, because we assume the worst in people, and design our systems around that, whereas conservatives place their responsibility on the public, because they assume people are good and responsible and hard working and careful, which they obviously are not.
Personal responsibility is equivalent to government irresponsibility.
What a complete logic fail. Your semantic processing is so myopic and shallow that you end up believing something exactly the opposite of reality. Here's your homework assignment: describe what a "socialized government" consists of; include especially its component parts such as the agents which enact its rules, maintain its structure, and execute its policies. Then tell me that you "assume the worst in people".
Or do you perhaps have citizenship in some heretofore unknown computer-operated Algorithm Nation?
Even if so, please describe the agents which write and implement your nation's algorithms.
Soylent green is people.
Always struck me an odd line. Imprisonment must surely count as taking the sky from someone.
You're being too literal. The song is the psychological theme of the entire series -- the ship's crew are all in their own way voluntary rebels or involuntary outcasts who for one reason or another are only at home IN "the sky", that is, trawling through space visiting world after world with no solid ground, only the ship as "home" and only each other as "family/friend". They are ramblers and frontiersmen. The song isn't actually claiming that it is physically impossible to prevent them from seeing or entering "the sky". It's their creed; both a statement of defiance and a statement of purpose -- no matter what else each one of them may have lost, they are determined to preserve their freedom.
"The sky" isn't just the physical sky. The lyric is a metaphor.