Move from the current "income" and "gain" tax basis to a gross receipts tax. Every transaction is a taxable event - retail, wholesale, personal, business. It turns out that the rate would be exceptionally low - 2-3% tops. It would result in larger markups on long supply chains, make day trading very costly from a tax perspective, increase the cost of most items at the retail level, and burden corporations - especially holding companies and multi-layer shell corporations meant to shield/dodge local taxes and reduce liability. OTOH, it would reward short supply chains (local suppliers would have an advantage over distributed goods), long term investments, and punish multi-layer shell corporations meant to shield/dodge local taxes and reduce liability.
I find it interesting that investment brokers, real estate agents, copier companies, energy supply companies - nearly everyone in business - basis their price on the cost of service or a fraction of the gross transaction, but the government only charges you based on your profit. Can you imagine if you offered to pay electric bill only if you made a profit, and you wrote the rules to minimize what constituted profit?
Why not take them to a conference center and then burn 150,000lbs of Jet A in the parking lot for spectators while they work their intellectual magic. Same effect, except they won't get the normal elevated dose of radiation, but I'm sure we could throw together something to zap them while they think deep thoughts.
After all, how long did it take for 9/11 to be known among the masses?
Longer than it took for the plane to hit the second tower. I'm sure there will be a Cydia app that will disable it, and if you're so concerned about this invading your rights and you STILL own an iphone, you will have certainly jailbroken it already.
While I don't disagree, the law does. The congress makes laws, the president signs then and (through the executive branch) implements them, and the courts decide if they are constitutional. Until you get to step three AND the courts rule it unconstitutional AND the president directly authorizes the circumvention of the court's ruling without new congressional action, it's neither an illegal act nor falsely swearing an oath to uphold the constitution. That's the thing about our government - you can't just decide what is and isn't against the constitution and prosecute someone - it has to go through the Supreme Court.
I am actually not sure if falsely swearing an oath is a criminal offense. It may be perjury, but I doubt it. And "clear as day" depends on your point of view. They all lie at some point. Reagan and Iran/Contra (right...he was asleep), Clinton shredding documents at Rose and (flip a coin) ignoring calls for security in Benghazi, Powell claiming that chemical weapons were found in Iraq.They all swore an oath of office. None are in prison.
That's sad, because it's already on its way. It's just a matter of time before a government agent will be asking for "your papers" no matter how you travel in the US.
You do realize that impeachment must occur as a result of a violation of a specific law on the books, not some general "he has over stepped his bounds". Not only hasn't he broken a law, he has the force of a current law behind him. Not that "he" has actually done anything personally. And conspiracy to over step some arbitrary trust line through a third party intermediary without direction is even less of a crime than actually overstepping it.
Clinton got impeached for perjury. Not for doing something actually wrong, but for his personal infidelity and his trying to cover up his mistress(es). Reagan wasn't impeached for anything related to Iran Contra. This president isn't going to be impeached because *somebody else* lied to congress to prevent the public dissemination of classified material.
High tech is sometimes advanced probabilistic models. I know a fellow who works for Kroger on the east coast, and when there's a power issue he's uot busting his tail to allocate the generator resources he has to keep the food stock viable. Thing is, there are so many stores and so few extended outages that it doesn't make financial sense to equip all stores with BUGs. They have a number of mobile generators which can be dynamically allocated as needed. If there's a superstorm they are short handed and some food goes to waste, but it's less loss than the fixed cost of installing a generator, fuel tanks, and maintenance at every site.
I presume you're taking about the Lisa, which was an utter flop. It also was nothing like this, except that it had an integrated enclosure and screen and was based on a graphical UI (which was about the same as the Macintosh, if that's what you meant). It was not portable, it was not battery powered, it did bot have a large interface, it was not a tablet form, it was not color, it had no touch screen.
Actually there are two niche markets for these, with side markets which will come on line when the price gets to the consumer level: Photographic retouchers and Architects. See, a 7" or 10" tablet is practically useless for these two sets because the images or drawings they are working with are much larger than a tablet's active area. What they really want is an A3 sized tablet. Which is difficult since everyone is going to the hideous 16:9 ratio - great for movies, lousy for everything else.
What this is missing is pixel-accurate pen input. Well, and a little higher resolution. That's why many architects got a bit of a boner over the Panasonic 20" version debuted last January, and the screen made even Cintiq users do a double take. That was, until Panasonic showed them the abortion that is their pen input - an actively powered optical monster with no pressure sensitivity. These aren't meant for the business traveler or little Johnny to watch movies on a plane, they're ffor getting actual work done on a surface large enough to be useful.
Loaded is loaded - you never get a perfect source. Even a concrete beam sags under load. 1.8v peak charge isn't too bad, and probably well within spec for AAA/AA/C/D batteries, and that's where the big deal may be. You can always run multiple cells in series to jack up the voltage, but it's much harder to cut the voltage in half to fit existing batteries. Isn't there an iron sulfate based battery that's 1.7-1.8V? The old Lithium AAs were 1/2 voltage at about 1.7x - I still have the same set in my Nikon camera I installed more than 10 years ago.
Without the poor and middle class, you can't have rich people. It's not strictly about money, it's about exclusivity - and money is an easy way to be exclusive. Capitalism in a post-scarcity society is all about maintaining class in a more traditional way, and (almost) nobody gives up what is "theirs" to others - especially those who value exclusivity and are currently at the top of the economic food chain.
It's still yours. In return for their hosting you provide them a non-exlusive license for use. Facebook is not an archive system for you, though - you should always have backups or - in this case - masters somewhere else. Really, it's not meant to be your personal blog, it's an ephemeral communication tool. I'm not quite sure why people keep thinking it's some kind of social Evernote.
Except for the top 0.1% of humans and those with nothing to lose, nobody innovates. Our entire race is built on greed and safety - and innovation is a danger to the establishment. The truly gifted do innovate, the rest plod along with marginally incremental improvements. Outside of the geniuses, there are those who either have everything or nothing - two conditions which offer the opportunity for idle time.
Successful startups have the 0.1%. Many fail, many aren't really innovative, the rest are lauded as "the new thing."
Oh, I have no illusion that Kroger - or anyplace else with a reward program - makes their money back somewhere. I also shop at Walmart - they may do shitty things to some vendors, but I have no worries that Kellog or General Mills is getting put out of business by the Waltons - and I know what market value is for much of what I buy. Kroger is close to me (6 blocks), so it has certain cost advantages for small purchases; their meat is of higher quality than most other non-specialty vendors in my area and, when on sale, is competitively priced in primal cuts. I actually shop based on loss leaders and buy what I can use before the sale date. I do pick up extras in the store, but generally only things I know the price of. If it's not a bargain, and I don't need it for a specific meal, it stays on the shelf.
Sadly, you describe how my wife shops, and it burns me to no end the money she seems to be willing to throw away for the sake of convenience - which is why I try to do the shopping for the more expensive items myself. The whole targeted setup does make it harder for those who aren't careful. For those who are, it is an advantage.Luckily, my signature holds in general and I get to be the one who benefits from their loss.
As a side note, I used to shop a Stater Bros. in So Cal. They were just plain awesome. The stores were older, but clean, and the prices were (back then) awesome because they never went into debt to fund expansion. Their stores were all served by the limits of their warehouse distribution and they stopped expanding when they hit that limit.
As a former aerospace engineer I always marveled at the discussions of planes on treadmills. It's all pretty straight forward once you look at what makes a plane fly (and wheels have nothing to do with it.)
I have a reasonable idea of when I don't want to be tracked and how to mostly avoid it. That said, most of my info I freely distribute. I'm not really a slave to commercialism, so I'm not heavily swayed by advertising. However, if I'm going to see ads, I'd rather see a bunch of ads for stuff I'm interested in than a page filled with "collectible" plates, Cialis, and feminine care products. If I get advertising which is appropriate and engaging (entertaining) in return for stuff that I'd be happy making public anyway, it seems pretty win-win. Google gives me several hundred dollars worth of hosting every year, Facebook gives me (probably) hundreds in hosting and communication, Pandora streams me music in return for my preferences and eyeballs, Kroger knows what kind of bread I buy and chips in $10-$20/mo for gas. I feel I'm getting value for my product (me), and that's good enough for me.
Discounts on groceries, gasoline, hotels, airline flights, free meals, free email, social network accounts, streaming music, streaming TV. We're getting compensated for our data, and those who do not participate are both less compensated and less tracked.
Now, if you're wondering whether individuals will become the sellers of their data for their financial gain - no. The value in data is in large aggregation of both quantitative (age, sex, ethnicity) and qualitative (likes, interests, behaviours) so that groups can be targeted for whatever an entity is looking for. You are not a beautiful jewel in a sea of dull pebbles, and even if you were you're value in paving the road to advertising is just that of a dull pebble. You don't go buy your stone a pebble at a time, you buy it from someone who has a quarry full and can give it to you by the truckload.
The value in personal data lies in the value many have in aggregate (get it - stones, aggregate - Ha!). It's not surprising that we will never find value in our personal data except to us, and those who market will have to have billions of data points. The value isn't great enough to warrant negotiation with every individual.
Have you ever handed an 85 f/1.4 or 300 f/2.8 lens to an amateur and had them take pictures of a busy scene on full auto mode? AF is good, but FF camera's depth of field is fucking treacherous if you don't know what you're doing. You'll get 100 out of 100 images with the focus in just the wrong spot. I've probably shot 200,000 frames in my life between my F4s and my D3, and I'm not embarrassed to say that I still get half of them with the focus not quite where I wanted it when shooting wide open.
The advantage of little sensors in the hands of amateurs is that they don't have to worry nearly as much about depth of field. No, they won't get that subject isolating bocah, but today a $20/hr photoshop operator can stick in some gaussian blur to simulate the effect for a newsprint-quality image.
For a daily, throw-away image you can get away with too much grain/noise, lower resolution due to cropping, poor colors, aberrations, etc. But if your photo subject is blurry it's going in the trash. Again - you can train amateurs who will be there anyway to shoot "just in case" pictures with a simple tool and know you have something. In return, you have $3,000,000 a year to pay for "that shot" from a freelancer when such work pops up. $5,000 a photo will buy a killer front page shot once or twice every week for 1/10 of the cost of the staff. Again - yes, it sucks. Computers and electronics offered to let us work less and do more. Everybody seems to have forgotten that every job a computer takes over is a job which is no longer done by a human. And we're not shrinking the population. The math is not in our favor.
I shot for my college paper with an F4s and publicity shots for a travelling performing group with that and a Pentax 67. I currently own a D3 (second hand from a pro moving up to a D3s, fwiw) and lenses with f/2.8 apertures from 14mm all the way up to 300mm, plus some sub f/2.0 lenses in the middle. I carried a Yashika T4 super for many years in my pocket. I sigh every time I think of how I much I want TechPan back - I used to buy it in 100' rolls and re-spool it myself.
I handed my D3 to my wife this weekend as I took the dance floor with my daughter, in full automatic mode. Not a single photo was focused perfectly; many were pretty far off. Though there were subjects in every frame which were tack sharp, she didn't know how to use the camera to make sure HER subject was the focus subject. She didn't know how to increase the aperture to increase the depth of focus, or even that she needed to. She would have gotten better shots with her iPhone.
Here's my point - you CAN get better shots with a trained pro and top gear. The question is (1) do you NEED them and (2) are you willing to PAY for them. What some people have realized is that if you miss the perfect shot, nobody will ever know. The expectation/quality that the general public has been trained to is at such a low level they'll be happy with a decent security cam shot run through several filters. It's awful, but true.
So I ask - how much more is it worth to have one perfect shot? What if you got the perfect shot every single day of the year - front page, in color, capturing the perfect moment? Is it worth $10,000 a day? What if they only get that "perfect" shot once a week? Is that worth $60,000? Because that's what it's costing them. I think it's a sucky move, too, but in a time when reporters are getting laid off and 3/4+ of my local paper is AP stories I read yesterday on the internet, it's an expensive item to keep.
No, it takes fantastic pictures...for a phone you always have with you anyway. It was one of the absolute standout features of the iPhone 4, and (with the purple flare issue fixed on the iPhone 5) is still top notch for a phone. It's no substitute for a professional level DSLR (or even an amateur, for that matter), but it can be operated to a very basic level of competence by a minimally trained person. You'll get much better shots from an iPhone than you will if you hand over a D4 or a MkIII to a non-photographer. I suspect everything they are teaching would apply to any phone camera.
One question worth asking is whether a large in-house photo staff is necessary for a publication which will never publish anything larger than 8x10 in 75-100dpi quality print, or will only be seen on a web page with 1000 pixel or less resolution in God-knows-what colorspace. I'm not saying that pros with pro gear can't get better pictures, with better composition, lighting, detail, and artistic style - I'm saying that the paper may have made a financial decision that $3M/yr is not the level of photo they need. Do you need a $20,000 photo shoot for a wedding? For some people the answer is yes, for most it's no - good enough is what they seek for their budget. Can you imagine how many typesetters and press operators lost their jobs when newspapers went to modern press printing? The quality is poorer, the resolution is poorer, and layout is less refined.
Yes, it totally sucks rocks for the people losing their jobs. Yes, we are less likely to have stunning photography of breaking news. Yes, there will still be a market for freelancers to cover the high profile events. Yes, there will ultimately be fewer jobs for professional photographers. That sucks if you're a photographer.
I think the OP's point was that we are creating and exporting staple products (food, fuel) and are importing discretionary items (toys, luxuries). If it all goes to hell in a handbasket, would you rather be the country producing food and gasoline* or the country producing cell phones and rubber ducks?
*Gasoline was our biggest export last year, and with the advent of abundant NG sources (fracking dangers, notwithstanding) the rise of LNG exporting is expected.
Slashdot Mirror
Move from the current "income" and "gain" tax basis to a gross receipts tax. Every transaction is a taxable event - retail, wholesale, personal, business. It turns out that the rate would be exceptionally low - 2-3% tops. It would result in larger markups on long supply chains, make day trading very costly from a tax perspective, increase the cost of most items at the retail level, and burden corporations - especially holding companies and multi-layer shell corporations meant to shield/dodge local taxes and reduce liability. OTOH, it would reward short supply chains (local suppliers would have an advantage over distributed goods), long term investments, and punish multi-layer shell corporations meant to shield/dodge local taxes and reduce liability.
I find it interesting that investment brokers, real estate agents, copier companies, energy supply companies - nearly everyone in business - basis their price on the cost of service or a fraction of the gross transaction, but the government only charges you based on your profit. Can you imagine if you offered to pay electric bill only if you made a profit, and you wrote the rules to minimize what constituted profit?
Why not take them to a conference center and then burn 150,000lbs of Jet A in the parking lot for spectators while they work their intellectual magic. Same effect, except they won't get the normal elevated dose of radiation, but I'm sure we could throw together something to zap them while they think deep thoughts.
After all, how long did it take for 9/11 to be known among the masses?
Longer than it took for the plane to hit the second tower. I'm sure there will be a Cydia app that will disable it, and if you're so concerned about this invading your rights and you STILL own an iphone, you will have certainly jailbroken it already.
While I don't disagree, the law does. The congress makes laws, the president signs then and (through the executive branch) implements them, and the courts decide if they are constitutional. Until you get to step three AND the courts rule it unconstitutional AND the president directly authorizes the circumvention of the court's ruling without new congressional action, it's neither an illegal act nor falsely swearing an oath to uphold the constitution. That's the thing about our government - you can't just decide what is and isn't against the constitution and prosecute someone - it has to go through the Supreme Court.
I am actually not sure if falsely swearing an oath is a criminal offense. It may be perjury, but I doubt it. And "clear as day" depends on your point of view. They all lie at some point. Reagan and Iran/Contra (right...he was asleep), Clinton shredding documents at Rose and (flip a coin) ignoring calls for security in Benghazi, Powell claiming that chemical weapons were found in Iraq.They all swore an oath of office. None are in prison.
That's sad, because it's already on its way. It's just a matter of time before a government agent will be asking for "your papers" no matter how you travel in the US.
http://www.kxan.com/dpp/news/local/austin/tsa-does-surprise-check-at-lamar-amtrak
Unconditioned metal box with no seats, no windows, and no restroom. Oh, well, I guess it couldn't be any worse than flying RyanAir in coach.
You do realize that impeachment must occur as a result of a violation of a specific law on the books, not some general "he has over stepped his bounds". Not only hasn't he broken a law, he has the force of a current law behind him. Not that "he" has actually done anything personally. And conspiracy to over step some arbitrary trust line through a third party intermediary without direction is even less of a crime than actually overstepping it.
Clinton got impeached for perjury. Not for doing something actually wrong, but for his personal infidelity and his trying to cover up his mistress(es). Reagan wasn't impeached for anything related to Iran Contra. This president isn't going to be impeached because *somebody else* lied to congress to prevent the public dissemination of classified material.
High tech is sometimes advanced probabilistic models. I know a fellow who works for Kroger on the east coast, and when there's a power issue he's uot busting his tail to allocate the generator resources he has to keep the food stock viable. Thing is, there are so many stores and so few extended outages that it doesn't make financial sense to equip all stores with BUGs. They have a number of mobile generators which can be dynamically allocated as needed. If there's a superstorm they are short handed and some food goes to waste, but it's less loss than the fixed cost of installing a generator, fuel tanks, and maintenance at every site.
I presume you're taking about the Lisa, which was an utter flop. It also was nothing like this, except that it had an integrated enclosure and screen and was based on a graphical UI (which was about the same as the Macintosh, if that's what you meant). It was not portable, it was not battery powered, it did bot have a large interface, it was not a tablet form, it was not color, it had no touch screen.
Actually there are two niche markets for these, with side markets which will come on line when the price gets to the consumer level: Photographic retouchers and Architects. See, a 7" or 10" tablet is practically useless for these two sets because the images or drawings they are working with are much larger than a tablet's active area. What they really want is an A3 sized tablet. Which is difficult since everyone is going to the hideous 16:9 ratio - great for movies, lousy for everything else.
What this is missing is pixel-accurate pen input. Well, and a little higher resolution. That's why many architects got a bit of a boner over the Panasonic 20" version debuted last January, and the screen made even Cintiq users do a double take. That was, until Panasonic showed them the abortion that is their pen input - an actively powered optical monster with no pressure sensitivity. These aren't meant for the business traveler or little Johnny to watch movies on a plane, they're ffor getting actual work done on a surface large enough to be useful.
Loaded is loaded - you never get a perfect source. Even a concrete beam sags under load. 1.8v peak charge isn't too bad, and probably well within spec for AAA/AA/C/D batteries, and that's where the big deal may be. You can always run multiple cells in series to jack up the voltage, but it's much harder to cut the voltage in half to fit existing batteries. Isn't there an iron sulfate based battery that's 1.7-1.8V? The old Lithium AAs were 1/2 voltage at about 1.7x - I still have the same set in my Nikon camera I installed more than 10 years ago.
Q: Why do you rob banks?
A: Because that's where the money is stored.
Without the poor and middle class, you can't have rich people. It's not strictly about money, it's about exclusivity - and money is an easy way to be exclusive. Capitalism in a post-scarcity society is all about maintaining class in a more traditional way, and (almost) nobody gives up what is "theirs" to others - especially those who value exclusivity and are currently at the top of the economic food chain.
It's still yours. In return for their hosting you provide them a non-exlusive license for use. Facebook is not an archive system for you, though - you should always have backups or - in this case - masters somewhere else. Really, it's not meant to be your personal blog, it's an ephemeral communication tool. I'm not quite sure why people keep thinking it's some kind of social Evernote.
Brilliant, though I'm not sure I ever post anything worth searching for again on FB. It is, after all, FB.
On the plus side, chocolate rations are scheduled to increase soon!
Except for the top 0.1% of humans and those with nothing to lose, nobody innovates. Our entire race is built on greed and safety - and innovation is a danger to the establishment. The truly gifted do innovate, the rest plod along with marginally incremental improvements. Outside of the geniuses, there are those who either have everything or nothing - two conditions which offer the opportunity for idle time.
Successful startups have the 0.1%. Many fail, many aren't really innovative, the rest are lauded as "the new thing."
Oh, I have no illusion that Kroger - or anyplace else with a reward program - makes their money back somewhere. I also shop at Walmart - they may do shitty things to some vendors, but I have no worries that Kellog or General Mills is getting put out of business by the Waltons - and I know what market value is for much of what I buy. Kroger is close to me (6 blocks), so it has certain cost advantages for small purchases; their meat is of higher quality than most other non-specialty vendors in my area and, when on sale, is competitively priced in primal cuts. I actually shop based on loss leaders and buy what I can use before the sale date. I do pick up extras in the store, but generally only things I know the price of. If it's not a bargain, and I don't need it for a specific meal, it stays on the shelf.
Sadly, you describe how my wife shops, and it burns me to no end the money she seems to be willing to throw away for the sake of convenience - which is why I try to do the shopping for the more expensive items myself. The whole targeted setup does make it harder for those who aren't careful. For those who are, it is an advantage.Luckily, my signature holds in general and I get to be the one who benefits from their loss.
As a side note, I used to shop a Stater Bros. in So Cal. They were just plain awesome. The stores were older, but clean, and the prices were (back then) awesome because they never went into debt to fund expansion. Their stores were all served by the limits of their warehouse distribution and they stopped expanding when they hit that limit.
As a former aerospace engineer I always marveled at the discussions of planes on treadmills. It's all pretty straight forward once you look at what makes a plane fly (and wheels have nothing to do with it.)
All the best acronyms which are way too long have BBQ at the end.
I have a reasonable idea of when I don't want to be tracked and how to mostly avoid it. That said, most of my info I freely distribute. I'm not really a slave to commercialism, so I'm not heavily swayed by advertising. However, if I'm going to see ads, I'd rather see a bunch of ads for stuff I'm interested in than a page filled with "collectible" plates, Cialis, and feminine care products. If I get advertising which is appropriate and engaging (entertaining) in return for stuff that I'd be happy making public anyway, it seems pretty win-win. Google gives me several hundred dollars worth of hosting every year, Facebook gives me (probably) hundreds in hosting and communication, Pandora streams me music in return for my preferences and eyeballs, Kroger knows what kind of bread I buy and chips in $10-$20/mo for gas. I feel I'm getting value for my product (me), and that's good enough for me.
Discounts on groceries, gasoline, hotels, airline flights, free meals, free email, social network accounts, streaming music, streaming TV. We're getting compensated for our data, and those who do not participate are both less compensated and less tracked.
Now, if you're wondering whether individuals will become the sellers of their data for their financial gain - no. The value in data is in large aggregation of both quantitative (age, sex, ethnicity) and qualitative (likes, interests, behaviours) so that groups can be targeted for whatever an entity is looking for. You are not a beautiful jewel in a sea of dull pebbles, and even if you were you're value in paving the road to advertising is just that of a dull pebble. You don't go buy your stone a pebble at a time, you buy it from someone who has a quarry full and can give it to you by the truckload.
The value in personal data lies in the value many have in aggregate (get it - stones, aggregate - Ha!). It's not surprising that we will never find value in our personal data except to us, and those who market will have to have billions of data points. The value isn't great enough to warrant negotiation with every individual.
Have you ever handed an 85 f/1.4 or 300 f/2.8 lens to an amateur and had them take pictures of a busy scene on full auto mode? AF is good, but FF camera's depth of field is fucking treacherous if you don't know what you're doing. You'll get 100 out of 100 images with the focus in just the wrong spot. I've probably shot 200,000 frames in my life between my F4s and my D3, and I'm not embarrassed to say that I still get half of them with the focus not quite where I wanted it when shooting wide open.
The advantage of little sensors in the hands of amateurs is that they don't have to worry nearly as much about depth of field. No, they won't get that subject isolating bocah, but today a $20/hr photoshop operator can stick in some gaussian blur to simulate the effect for a newsprint-quality image.
For a daily, throw-away image you can get away with too much grain/noise, lower resolution due to cropping, poor colors, aberrations, etc. But if your photo subject is blurry it's going in the trash. Again - you can train amateurs who will be there anyway to shoot "just in case" pictures with a simple tool and know you have something. In return, you have $3,000,000 a year to pay for "that shot" from a freelancer when such work pops up. $5,000 a photo will buy a killer front page shot once or twice every week for 1/10 of the cost of the staff. Again - yes, it sucks. Computers and electronics offered to let us work less and do more. Everybody seems to have forgotten that every job a computer takes over is a job which is no longer done by a human. And we're not shrinking the population. The math is not in our favor.
I shot for my college paper with an F4s and publicity shots for a travelling performing group with that and a Pentax 67. I currently own a D3 (second hand from a pro moving up to a D3s, fwiw) and lenses with f/2.8 apertures from 14mm all the way up to 300mm, plus some sub f/2.0 lenses in the middle. I carried a Yashika T4 super for many years in my pocket. I sigh every time I think of how I much I want TechPan back - I used to buy it in 100' rolls and re-spool it myself.
I handed my D3 to my wife this weekend as I took the dance floor with my daughter, in full automatic mode. Not a single photo was focused perfectly; many were pretty far off. Though there were subjects in every frame which were tack sharp, she didn't know how to use the camera to make sure HER subject was the focus subject. She didn't know how to increase the aperture to increase the depth of focus, or even that she needed to. She would have gotten better shots with her iPhone.
Here's my point - you CAN get better shots with a trained pro and top gear. The question is (1) do you NEED them and (2) are you willing to PAY for them. What some people have realized is that if you miss the perfect shot, nobody will ever know. The expectation/quality that the general public has been trained to is at such a low level they'll be happy with a decent security cam shot run through several filters. It's awful, but true.
So I ask - how much more is it worth to have one perfect shot? What if you got the perfect shot every single day of the year - front page, in color, capturing the perfect moment? Is it worth $10,000 a day? What if they only get that "perfect" shot once a week? Is that worth $60,000? Because that's what it's costing them. I think it's a sucky move, too, but in a time when reporters are getting laid off and 3/4+ of my local paper is AP stories I read yesterday on the internet, it's an expensive item to keep.
No, it takes fantastic pictures...for a phone you always have with you anyway. It was one of the absolute standout features of the iPhone 4, and (with the purple flare issue fixed on the iPhone 5) is still top notch for a phone. It's no substitute for a professional level DSLR (or even an amateur, for that matter), but it can be operated to a very basic level of competence by a minimally trained person. You'll get much better shots from an iPhone than you will if you hand over a D4 or a MkIII to a non-photographer. I suspect everything they are teaching would apply to any phone camera.
One question worth asking is whether a large in-house photo staff is necessary for a publication which will never publish anything larger than 8x10 in 75-100dpi quality print, or will only be seen on a web page with 1000 pixel or less resolution in God-knows-what colorspace. I'm not saying that pros with pro gear can't get better pictures, with better composition, lighting, detail, and artistic style - I'm saying that the paper may have made a financial decision that $3M/yr is not the level of photo they need. Do you need a $20,000 photo shoot for a wedding? For some people the answer is yes, for most it's no - good enough is what they seek for their budget. Can you imagine how many typesetters and press operators lost their jobs when newspapers went to modern press printing? The quality is poorer, the resolution is poorer, and layout is less refined.
Yes, it totally sucks rocks for the people losing their jobs. Yes, we are less likely to have stunning photography of breaking news. Yes, there will still be a market for freelancers to cover the high profile events. Yes, there will ultimately be fewer jobs for professional photographers. That sucks if you're a photographer.
I think the OP's point was that we are creating and exporting staple products (food, fuel) and are importing discretionary items (toys, luxuries). If it all goes to hell in a handbasket, would you rather be the country producing food and gasoline* or the country producing cell phones and rubber ducks?
*Gasoline was our biggest export last year, and with the advent of abundant NG sources (fracking dangers, notwithstanding) the rise of LNG exporting is expected.