Make something free (or nearly so), and people will use lots of it. CA's water problem is by no means insoluble.
1. Figure out how much water the state can sustainably use. 2. Set a price for water usage. Set a flat price for all users, residential, commercial, industrial. No reason that some users of water should get it more cheaply than others. 3. If usage remains above the level determine in #1, raise the price. 4. Repeat process until usage falls to the level determined in #1.
Of course, this process would likely result in a big chunk of the unsustainable agriculture in CA going under, but so be it - basing a business on the assumption that you'll get continued massive discounts on a key input isn't particularly wise planning, and there's no reason why other CA water users should be forced to subsidize those businesses.
Some really odd responses in here, that make me question the honestly of the responses. For example, on 35% of Chinese respondents believe their government restricts access to the Internet?
Secondly, on the Snowden question, the question calls out for a "yes, I have" response. People don't want to admit to surveyors that they don't know something, so a good study will actually test whether they actually know about Snowden, or are just not willing to admit ignorance.
Finally, it doesn't say what the "steps" people took actually are, so it's very hard to say what impact Snowden's actually had.
There is a section asking about what people are doing differently on the net vs. last year (changed password, not go to certain sites, etc. etc.), but that was asked of all respondents, not just those who say they know of Snowden, so there's no output on what specific changes people made. Would be interesting to see the responses to that question separated between those who know of Snowden, and those who don't.
1. PC gamers are a much smaller, and techier, market than the market for movies or music. Hardly representative. 2. Even in the PC game sector, DRM, outside of a few egregious cases, doesn't seem to be much of a barrier to success (a la most games on Steam).
To flip it around, extensive DRM doesn't seem to hurt console game sales, which far outstrip PC game sales in both units and $.
Weird, because Amazon in the US sorts on price+shipping, not just on price. It works out to the same thing for some products (i.e. books), since shipping outside of Prime is a standard $3.99. It will, however, include Prime, so if you have a book selling for $0.01, with $3.99 shipping, that would rank below a book that qualified for prime with a price of $3.98.
In my experience (never driven in Oz, but in NZ, Continental Europe, the UK, and the US), the turn signal stalk is always on the left, for left-hand drive cars, and on the right, for right hand drive cars.
You're not alone. You're _definitely_ a minority. If the studios offered the content for free, but with current DRM, people would be lined up down the block. If they dropped the FBI warnings, etc. from the start of DVDs, sales would go up 0.1%.
Working hard since 2003 to preserve your right to consume media without the annoyance of paying.
Working hard to enable people to download movies and music that will work on their streaming and mobile devices after they've paid for the original DRM encumbered media that forces them to watch adverts and FCC warnings every time they use the media.
There, fixed that for you.
Do you seriously think that a significant portion of Pirate Bay downloads are people who have purchased the content, and are just downloading a copy to get an unencumbered version? Honestly?
Problem is, people aren't identical. Take 1000 Macbooks, run the same code on them, and you'll get (almost always) identical results. You won't get the same asking 1000 people to interpret a law or contract.
Lawyers (at least good ones) attempt to deal with this issue by being as precise and comprehensive as possible. Often, they're derided for creating "1000 page contracts in legalese instead of a one page agreement," but 999 of those pages, and the legalese, are usually efforts to explicitly deal with the corner cases that can come up in a contract.
You're absolutely right, it's not a tragedy of the commons, it's a free rider problem. Brain failure last night. Still raises the question, what changes to our IP laws would fix that? In both tragedy of the commons and free rider problems, assigning excludable ownership fixes the problem, but would likely create others...
What aspect of current IP law do you believe creates this situation (i.e. the ease of free-riding on open source), and how should they be reformed?
This looks like a classic tragedy of the commons problem, in which case assigning ownership (i.e. eliminating the free-as-in-beer aspects of FOSS) is the relevant solution.
"Create a Basic Income (financed by the Fed at zero cost to taxpayers),"
How, out of curiosity, will this miracle be achieved? What magic wand will the Fed wave in order to create these resources from midair?
Now, there's a pretty decent argument for a basic income (from economists across the political spectrum, including Friedman, not generally known as a soft-headed liberal), but the money would have to be transferred from elsewhere in the economy via taxes.
Yes, absolutely. That's why I made the "back in February" comment. They need to make a judgment call then about the most likely strains, and manufacture to that.
I've spent the last couple of days wishing for sweet, sweet death, and I did get my flu shot. Still 100% glad I got my flu shot, though. Basically, I was wearing a bulletproof vest, but got shot in the leg. Not the vest's fault. A group of very highly trained professionals made a judgment call back in February about what strains this year's flu shot should protect against, and they got it wrong. C'est la vie.
1. Created a page at Amazon listing a $400 game console at $80, which would net them maybe $70, after fees. 2. Went into Walmart, and used that page to get the console for $80, plus tax. 3. Planned to sell that same console to whoever bought it through the Amazon link, losing $20 or so on each console.
Yes, that's theoretically possible.
It's also theoretically possible that they were purchasing test units for the Archons of Centauri 7, who will then gift us with their technology for unlimited clean energy, but have a religious objection to paying more than $80 for a PS4.
Retailers have the right to correct pricing errors, if they were clearly errors (i.e. Xbox for $40 rather than $400). This was no pricing error - there's no way the Amazon seller/Walmart buyer can argue that he made a pricing error on his webpage, but at the same time demand that Walmart match the pricing error.
Just because you can't believe it, doesn't mean it's not true. 65MHz, covering 315 million people. Spectrum's usually priced per MHz-POP (i.e. 10MHz of spectrum covering 1 million people is 10 million MHz-POPs).
There's a huge amount of variation in pricing, though. The most expensive license right now (on a MHz-POP basis) is for 10MHz covering the Chicago area (8.3M people) - $5.50 per MHz-POP. The most expensive license on an absolute basis is for 20MHz covering the NY Metro Area (27M people): $2 billion.
On the other hand, there are some licenses in rural Louisiana and South Dakota going for under $2k, or less than $0.01 per MHz-POP.
Walmart's cost of goods sold (i.e. the % of revenue that gets spent on the products they sell, doesn't include cost of labor, rent, light, etc.) is 75%, slightly above Amazon's 73%. So, WalMart is, on average, charging a SMALLER markup than Amazon.
Quite a number of states (Cali and Wisconsin come to mind) have laws prohibiting loss leaders, usually only if they're viewed as predatory pricing (i.e. trying to drive competitors out of business).
Wisconsin has a law that sets a minimum margin for gasoline. Idea is to prevent large operators with other revenue streams (i.e. a supermarket with a couple of gas pumps) from selling below cost to bring in shoppers, thereby driving out small operators
"they talk about people with amazon seller accounts creating sales in order to have them matched"
No, they're not creating "sales." They're creating sales pages they have no intention of actually delivering. Unless you think that the people pulling this scam would have happily shipped out hundreds of PS4s at $80 each, when the orders came in.
Slashdot Mirror
Make something free (or nearly so), and people will use lots of it. CA's water problem is by no means insoluble.
1. Figure out how much water the state can sustainably use.
2. Set a price for water usage. Set a flat price for all users, residential, commercial, industrial. No reason that some users of water should get it more cheaply than others.
3. If usage remains above the level determine in #1, raise the price.
4. Repeat process until usage falls to the level determined in #1.
Of course, this process would likely result in a big chunk of the unsustainable agriculture in CA going under, but so be it - basing a business on the assumption that you'll get continued massive discounts on a key input isn't particularly wise planning, and there's no reason why other CA water users should be forced to subsidize those businesses.
Actually, even if they did stand for something, they'd be initialisms, not acronyms. /pedantry
Some really odd responses in here, that make me question the honestly of the responses. For example, on 35% of Chinese respondents believe their government restricts access to the Internet?
Secondly, on the Snowden question, the question calls out for a "yes, I have" response. People don't want to admit to surveyors that they don't know something, so a good study will actually test whether they actually know about Snowden, or are just not willing to admit ignorance.
Finally, it doesn't say what the "steps" people took actually are, so it's very hard to say what impact Snowden's actually had.
There is a section asking about what people are doing differently on the net vs. last year (changed password, not go to certain sites, etc. etc.), but that was asked of all respondents, not just those who say they know of Snowden, so there's no output on what specific changes people made. Would be interesting to see the responses to that question separated between those who know of Snowden, and those who don't.
1. PC gamers are a much smaller, and techier, market than the market for movies or music. Hardly representative.
2. Even in the PC game sector, DRM, outside of a few egregious cases, doesn't seem to be much of a barrier to success (a la most games on Steam).
To flip it around, extensive DRM doesn't seem to hurt console game sales, which far outstrip PC game sales in both units and $.
Weird, because Amazon in the US sorts on price+shipping, not just on price. It works out to the same thing for some products (i.e. books), since shipping outside of Prime is a standard $3.99. It will, however, include Prime, so if you have a book selling for $0.01, with $3.99 shipping, that would rank below a book that qualified for prime with a price of $3.98.
In my experience (never driven in Oz, but in NZ, Continental Europe, the UK, and the US), the turn signal stalk is always on the left, for left-hand drive cars, and on the right, for right hand drive cars.
And I am by no stretch alone, or a minority.
You're not alone. You're _definitely_ a minority. If the studios offered the content for free, but with current DRM, people would be lined up down the block. If they dropped the FBI warnings, etc. from the start of DVDs, sales would go up 0.1%.
Working hard since 2003 to preserve your right to consume media without the annoyance of paying.
Working hard to enable people to download movies and music that will work on their streaming and mobile devices after they've paid for the original DRM encumbered media that forces them to watch adverts and FCC warnings every time they use the media.
There, fixed that for you.
Do you seriously think that a significant portion of Pirate Bay downloads are people who have purchased the content, and are just downloading a copy to get an unencumbered version? Honestly?
In most jurisdictions, it constitutes theft of services, in addition to (potentially) burglary (depending on exactly how you got in).
Problem is, people aren't identical. Take 1000 Macbooks, run the same code on them, and you'll get (almost always) identical results. You won't get the same asking 1000 people to interpret a law or contract.
Lawyers (at least good ones) attempt to deal with this issue by being as precise and comprehensive as possible. Often, they're derided for creating "1000 page contracts in legalese instead of a one page agreement," but 999 of those pages, and the legalese, are usually efforts to explicitly deal with the corner cases that can come up in a contract.
You're absolutely right, it's not a tragedy of the commons, it's a free rider problem. Brain failure last night. Still raises the question, what changes to our IP laws would fix that? In both tragedy of the commons and free rider problems, assigning excludable ownership fixes the problem, but would likely create others...
What aspect of current IP law do you believe creates this situation (i.e. the ease of free-riding on open source), and how should they be reformed?
This looks like a classic tragedy of the commons problem, in which case assigning ownership (i.e. eliminating the free-as-in-beer aspects of FOSS) is the relevant solution.
"Create a Basic Income (financed by the Fed at zero cost to taxpayers),"
How, out of curiosity, will this miracle be achieved? What magic wand will the Fed wave in order to create these resources from midair?
Now, there's a pretty decent argument for a basic income (from economists across the political spectrum, including Friedman, not generally known as a soft-headed liberal), but the money would have to be transferred from elsewhere in the economy via taxes.
The Flu vaccine is no more effective than random chance, but it's a huge money maker for the pharmaceutical industry.
Got any actual evidence for this claim? I see your unsupported assertion, and raise you a page of peer-reviewed studies.
http://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/q...
Yes, absolutely. That's why I made the "back in February" comment. They need to make a judgment call then about the most likely strains, and manufacture to that.
I've spent the last couple of days wishing for sweet, sweet death, and I did get my flu shot. Still 100% glad I got my flu shot, though. Basically, I was wearing a bulletproof vest, but got shot in the leg. Not the vest's fault. A group of very highly trained professionals made a judgment call back in February about what strains this year's flu shot should protect against, and they got it wrong. C'est la vie.
Yeah, because employees totally stopped using email because employers can and do archive it and read it when/if they want to.
So, your argument is that someone:
1. Created a page at Amazon listing a $400 game console at $80, which would net them maybe $70, after fees.
2. Went into Walmart, and used that page to get the console for $80, plus tax.
3. Planned to sell that same console to whoever bought it through the Amazon link, losing $20 or so on each console.
Yes, that's theoretically possible.
It's also theoretically possible that they were purchasing test units for the Archons of Centauri 7, who will then gift us with their technology for unlimited clean energy, but have a religious objection to paying more than $80 for a PS4.
Retailers have the right to correct pricing errors, if they were clearly errors (i.e. Xbox for $40 rather than $400). This was no pricing error - there's no way the Amazon seller/Walmart buyer can argue that he made a pricing error on his webpage, but at the same time demand that Walmart match the pricing error.
Very good point. Was trying to keep it simple. If I recall, the expected relocation costs are in the range of $6B for this spectrum.
Just because you can't believe it, doesn't mean it's not true. 65MHz, covering 315 million people. Spectrum's usually priced per MHz-POP (i.e. 10MHz of spectrum covering 1 million people is 10 million MHz-POPs).
There's a huge amount of variation in pricing, though. The most expensive license right now (on a MHz-POP basis) is for 10MHz covering the Chicago area (8.3M people) - $5.50 per MHz-POP. The most expensive license on an absolute basis is for 20MHz covering the NY Metro Area (27M people): $2 billion.
On the other hand, there are some licenses in rural Louisiana and South Dakota going for under $2k, or less than $0.01 per MHz-POP.
True, but in this case, the top bids, combined, are $34B. In other words, if the auction ended today, the government would receive $34 billion.
Hey, a deal's a deal. We didn't get Sun 2, the aliens don't get Europa as their private playground.
Walmart's cost of goods sold (i.e. the % of revenue that gets spent on the products they sell, doesn't include cost of labor, rent, light, etc.) is 75%, slightly above Amazon's 73%. So, WalMart is, on average, charging a SMALLER markup than Amazon.
Quite a number of states (Cali and Wisconsin come to mind) have laws prohibiting loss leaders, usually only if they're viewed as predatory pricing (i.e. trying to drive competitors out of business).
Wisconsin has a law that sets a minimum margin for gasoline. Idea is to prevent large operators with other revenue streams (i.e. a supermarket with a couple of gas pumps) from selling below cost to bring in shoppers, thereby driving out small operators
"they talk about people with amazon seller accounts creating sales in order to have them matched"
No, they're not creating "sales." They're creating sales pages they have no intention of actually delivering. Unless you think that the people pulling this scam would have happily shipped out hundreds of PS4s at $80 each, when the orders came in.