Frankly, I don't think $24 a year is a sustainable price for unlimited streaming. You're free to think that $96 a year is too much, however, that's less than some people pay for 1 month of cable (with premium movie packages).
Actually you've got it wrong. They went from growing earnings while turning a profit to growing earners even further but not turning a profit for a few months. In both cases they're going to be increasing earnings. They are planning on taking a small and temporarily loss to grow the business.
Whether it works out for them or not is the real question.
Frankly, I think they were selling it at below cost to build market share. They increased the price to move from buying market share to generating profits on the service. So yes, corporation do give things away, they just have ulterior motives for doing this.
Frankly, I have to opposite reaction. Why would I care about DVD rentals? I can't be bothered to wait for a DVD to arrive in the mail or to mail it back. I find the instantly available nature of the streaming better than the slightly better selection for DVD rentals. And the most likely reason they don't stream more of the rental movies is because the studios either demand too much money or have signed idiotic exclusive deals with other distributors. In Canada, for example, the Netflix library is smaller because some of the Studios are so happy to get any money at all that they are willing to give Canadian cable and satellite companies multi-year exclusive deals for little or no extra money.
Actually that's why Warner Brothers (and other studios) should care. Evidence to show that they either understand that or that they actually care is lacking.
Except my price didn't increase. It's same it's always been since I signed up. Your problem is that you got used to a sweet deal and are upset that it was eventually discontinued. People keep saying "I went somewhere else and now I'm paying more to get the same or inferior service and I'm proud of it". Well, Congratulations.
Correlation does not imply causation. How can you prove that their surplus children (and the surplus children of their ancestors) are caused by their financial conditions rather than vice versa? It actually makes more sense that their financial conditions are due to their ancestors having too many children, limiting the families financial success. Since before modern farming techniques and the social safety net kept people alive, this group could have been effectively culled due to starvation or disease. This is no longer true.
As I understand it, in the poorest nations children are literally wealth. The families with more children face temporary privation until the children are able to start earning an income, then the additional income increases the family's wealth. So the more children they have the better off the family becomes. Given that relationship, it would seem that their poverty would have to be from the lack of children of their ancestors. However, as previously noted as the wealth of the country rises, the investment required to raise a productive child increases thus reducing the economic incentive to have children.
Looking at average population increase ignores the fact that people have varied strategies for continuing their bloodline. Some people will think about their quality of life, and realize that having kids won't improve it. These people will be weeded out in the genetic pool of future generations. But others won't, and now there is nothing stopping the offspring from a couple having eight kids all surviving until they are old enough to do the same.
Yet, the average number is what is important. If the average rate is declining then the overall rate is also declining. You are arguing that there is a demographic shift going on, but have yet to offer any evidence to support that.
A slight dip in the reproduction of the human species is not a trend I would rely on. Based on where we have come from, ie. the natural world, where whoever reproduces the most wins, and the fact that the game is now changed so that the more kids you have, the better chances of the survival of your genes, I can't believe that without some type of intervention, the number of human beings won't increase until there is absolutely no way the earth can support any more.
Never the less, analysis shows that as a country's affluence increases, it's fertility rate decreases. The trend has been steady for about 150 years. I'd say that after a 150 years it's more than a "slight dip".
Of course, if that's true, then colleges should be hugely profitable and they should be expanding available spaces as quickly as possible to attract more of these immensely profitable students... which should increase supply and lower prices. The argument appears to be either that the colleges are engaging in some anti-competitive behavior, are not governed by traditional economics, or are too slow at expanding the supply side of the equation.
But reproduction rate is the point of genetics! It doesn't matter what the disincentives to having a child are, if the parent is driven by an uncontrollable instinctual drive to reproduce.
That's a big if. I am not aware of any evidence to indicate that such a group actually exists. Those groups that have surplus children tend to be adequately explained by economic factors. There exist some individuals that are not explained by the usual economic factors, but their "uncontrollable urges" are likely explained by unique psychological or economic factors which do not appear to be hereditary.
The evidence runs contrary to your belief. Birth rates are falling when according to your theory indicates they should be rising.
The critical part you may have missed is that it is prosperity in our modern society that decreases birth rates. Take maternity leave for example, the more money that a mother makes the less likely she is to use the full maternity leave because maternity leave often pays the same rate as unemployment insurance unless her employer supplements it (most do not). Daycare is also expensive so it puts an economic limit on the number of children you can have without some form of corporate or government subsidy. Also pregnancy and maternity leave a permanent mark on a woman's career, after having one or more children she now earns less than her contemporaries because of her absence.
The economics are simple, the poorer you are, the lower the opportunity costs involved in having children. The only way for birth rates to start growing again is to trap a significant number of people in eternal poverty. There is, as far as I know, no genetic link to birth rates, and cultural influences are currently understood to be less influential than the economic factors.
Actually, it is. Frankly most organisations do a terrible job of evaluating the performance of any complicated role. If a job can't be automated, most businesses are unable to reliably evaluate performance. How do we evaluate doctors? Engineers? Software developers?
This things are difficult to evaluate and when pressed, businesses usually come up with terrible measures of performance. Just look at the games that CEOs play with their bonus requirements. They're often able to hit all of their bonus requirements even while the company struggles along with below market average performance.
I have no confidence that Bill and Melinda will come up with anything other than another wacky scheme that implodes after the first couple of years when it can be shown that it promotes people who game the system and punishes those who don't. After all, Bill Gates put Steve Ballmer in charge of Microsoft. If that doesn't call his judgement on competency into question, I don't know what will.
Let's put in economic terms, Ron Paul is complaining that too many people are able to go the College, thus driving the price up (Increased demand). His solution is to make sure less people are able to go to College (Decrease demand).
Frankly, it's nearly impossible to predict accurately what would happen to tuition if no government intervention were present. It could go down because people are less willing to spend present money then future money, or it might go up because government run colleges were shut down or privatised thus lowering demand and removing a stable price alternative.
Maybe private loan organisations would just take over when the government stopped student loan programs. Maybe you'd make the debt burden a lot worse for the average student. It's far too complicated for me to accurately predict the result and frankly, I doubt if even the experts could predict entirely what would happen.
I suspect cancelling the student loan program will have no discernible effect on tuition prices. I think it may slightly slow the growth rate of prices, but it will not do so to such an extent that it could ever be conclusively proven.
A simple and obvious possible reason could be that the corrected temperature series have been slightly over corrected. I'm not sure why you didn't think of that.
The solar output variance is going in the opposite direction of the warming trend. The world should be getting slightly cooler because the sun is in a period of minimum activity. It's not.
No one is pointing to a 15 year old model and saying "look look it works!". They are pointing to a model they continuously update and say "look look it is working".
That didn't appear to be the claim made by the plaintiff, the article indicated that the system produced results that contained tell-tale errors that indicate some of the data was copied from the manual from the plaintiff's system, which is a substantially lesser claim. Whether that data represents a significant portion of the system's functionality will be likely be a key question.
Except, of course, that everything I said is both true and accurate.
Both you and the other guy both appear to be tedious pendants. I offered my opinion and the reason for it, you are free to disagree with me, but you don't do yourself any favors when you're a dick about it.
You seem to have forgotten that most, if not all, of the states are also divided along the same lines. In each state you'll get the partisan arguments from each side over whether things are great or terrible. If one state comes up with a system that is really slick you can bet that no other states will give it a shot unless they modify so they can claim credit for it, and of course the plan will have to match the states ideological purity tests.
In a well-designed Federal system you would actually have trial programs that would allow for some measure of objective evaluation. When you have 50 state systems, the government of each state will always claim their system is working best. They want to get re-elected you know. I'm not saying the current system works, just that expecting 50 separate systems to work better seems to involve and unrealistic evaluation of the self-interest of the people in charge of those systems.
The system will need someone removed from state and inter-state politics to objectively evaluate them. That will likely end up being educational non-profits who will, of course, be accused of being "socialists" or "fascists" depending on which states get top ratings.
He's a libertarian. His goal is simply to cut the size of government. I'm reasonably sure that he believes that if people actually need the services, they will pay for them out of their own pockets. I'm also pretty sure that he believes whether that costs more or less, it's morally better.
Interestingly enough, in Toronto the opposite was found. When affordable housing was interspersed with regular residential areas they found that the people in the affordable house improved their economic performance. A long term study found that it was pretty effective way to get people out of poverty, I'm a little fuzzy on the details but the mixed housing program had a high success rate of people leaving the affordable housing program because they no longer needed it.
That didn't work out so well in Ontario when the provincial conservative party downloaded a lot of services to the cities. Mostly it left the cities with the choice between massive tax increases to cover the costs and subsequent unemployment for the local politicians or massive service cuts because they couldn't fund the services. Most cities came up with a three part solution:
1) Big tax increase blamed on the province. 2) Big service cuts, also blamed on the province. 3) Elimination of maintenance budgets to try and reduce the impact of 1 and 2.
Essentially, everything got worse when this was done in the late 90s. And you'll have a pretty hard time figuring out which way is really better as long as your country is divided between Republicans and Democrats because each side will say it's people are doing better than the other side.
Slashdot Mirror
Frankly, I don't think $24 a year is a sustainable price for unlimited streaming. You're free to think that $96 a year is too much, however, that's less than some people pay for 1 month of cable (with premium movie packages).
Actually you've got it wrong. They went from growing earnings while turning a profit to growing earners even further but not turning a profit for a few months. In both cases they're going to be increasing earnings. They are planning on taking a small and temporarily loss to grow the business.
Whether it works out for them or not is the real question.
Frankly, I think they were selling it at below cost to build market share. They increased the price to move from buying market share to generating profits on the service. So yes, corporation do give things away, they just have ulterior motives for doing this.
Frankly, I have to opposite reaction. Why would I care about DVD rentals? I can't be bothered to wait for a DVD to arrive in the mail or to mail it back. I find the instantly available nature of the streaming better than the slightly better selection for DVD rentals. And the most likely reason they don't stream more of the rental movies is because the studios either demand too much money or have signed idiotic exclusive deals with other distributors. In Canada, for example, the Netflix library is smaller because some of the Studios are so happy to get any money at all that they are willing to give Canadian cable and satellite companies multi-year exclusive deals for little or no extra money.
Actually that's why Warner Brothers (and other studios) should care. Evidence to show that they either understand that or that they actually care is lacking.
Except my price didn't increase. It's same it's always been since I signed up. Your problem is that you got used to a sweet deal and are upset that it was eventually discontinued. People keep saying "I went somewhere else and now I'm paying more to get the same or inferior service and I'm proud of it". Well, Congratulations.
Correlation does not imply causation. How can you prove that their surplus children (and the surplus children of their ancestors) are caused by their financial conditions rather than vice versa? It actually makes more sense that their financial conditions are due to their ancestors having too many children, limiting the families financial success. Since before modern farming techniques and the social safety net kept people alive, this group could have been effectively culled due to starvation or disease. This is no longer true.
As I understand it, in the poorest nations children are literally wealth. The families with more children face temporary privation until the children are able to start earning an income, then the additional income increases the family's wealth. So the more children they have the better off the family becomes. Given that relationship, it would seem that their poverty would have to be from the lack of children of their ancestors. However, as previously noted as the wealth of the country rises, the investment required to raise a productive child increases thus reducing the economic incentive to have children.
Looking at average population increase ignores the fact that people have varied strategies for continuing their bloodline. Some people will think about their quality of life, and realize that having kids won't improve it. These people will be weeded out in the genetic pool of future generations. But others won't, and now there is nothing stopping the offspring from a couple having eight kids all surviving until they are old enough to do the same.
Yet, the average number is what is important. If the average rate is declining then the overall rate is also declining. You are arguing that there is a demographic shift going on, but have yet to offer any evidence to support that.
A slight dip in the reproduction of the human species is not a trend I would rely on. Based on where we have come from, ie. the natural world, where whoever reproduces the most wins, and the fact that the game is now changed so that the more kids you have, the better chances of the survival of your genes, I can't believe that without some type of intervention, the number of human beings won't increase until there is absolutely no way the earth can support any more.
Never the less, analysis shows that as a country's affluence increases, it's fertility rate decreases. The trend has been steady for about 150 years. I'd say that after a 150 years it's more than a "slight dip".
Of course, if that's true, then colleges should be hugely profitable and they should be expanding available spaces as quickly as possible to attract more of these immensely profitable students... which should increase supply and lower prices. The argument appears to be either that the colleges are engaging in some anti-competitive behavior, are not governed by traditional economics, or are too slow at expanding the supply side of the equation.
But reproduction rate is the point of genetics! It doesn't matter what the disincentives to having a child are, if the parent is driven by an uncontrollable instinctual drive to reproduce.
That's a big if. I am not aware of any evidence to indicate that such a group actually exists. Those groups that have surplus children tend to be adequately explained by economic factors. There exist some individuals that are not explained by the usual economic factors, but their "uncontrollable urges" are likely explained by unique psychological or economic factors which do not appear to be hereditary.
It would have been clearer if he had just said "Only rich people can afford to not have kids".
The evidence runs contrary to your belief. Birth rates are falling when according to your theory indicates they should be rising.
The critical part you may have missed is that it is prosperity in our modern society that decreases birth rates. Take maternity leave for example, the more money that a mother makes the less likely she is to use the full maternity leave because maternity leave often pays the same rate as unemployment insurance unless her employer supplements it (most do not). Daycare is also expensive so it puts an economic limit on the number of children you can have without some form of corporate or government subsidy. Also pregnancy and maternity leave a permanent mark on a woman's career, after having one or more children she now earns less than her contemporaries because of her absence.
The economics are simple, the poorer you are, the lower the opportunity costs involved in having children. The only way for birth rates to start growing again is to trap a significant number of people in eternal poverty. There is, as far as I know, no genetic link to birth rates, and cultural influences are currently understood to be less influential than the economic factors.
Actually, it is. Frankly most organisations do a terrible job of evaluating the performance of any complicated role. If a job can't be automated, most businesses are unable to reliably evaluate performance. How do we evaluate doctors? Engineers? Software developers?
This things are difficult to evaluate and when pressed, businesses usually come up with terrible measures of performance. Just look at the games that CEOs play with their bonus requirements. They're often able to hit all of their bonus requirements even while the company struggles along with below market average performance.
I have no confidence that Bill and Melinda will come up with anything other than another wacky scheme that implodes after the first couple of years when it can be shown that it promotes people who game the system and punishes those who don't. After all, Bill Gates put Steve Ballmer in charge of Microsoft. If that doesn't call his judgement on competency into question, I don't know what will.
If it's commercial activity, $600 is a small expense, he should be expecting to get more than that in additional sales.
Let's put in economic terms, Ron Paul is complaining that too many people are able to go the College, thus driving the price up (Increased demand). His solution is to make sure less people are able to go to College (Decrease demand).
Frankly, it's nearly impossible to predict accurately what would happen to tuition if no government intervention were present. It could go down because people are less willing to spend present money then future money, or it might go up because government run colleges were shut down or privatised thus lowering demand and removing a stable price alternative.
Maybe private loan organisations would just take over when the government stopped student loan programs. Maybe you'd make the debt burden a lot worse for the average student. It's far too complicated for me to accurately predict the result and frankly, I doubt if even the experts could predict entirely what would happen.
I suspect cancelling the student loan program will have no discernible effect on tuition prices. I think it may slightly slow the growth rate of prices, but it will not do so to such an extent that it could ever be conclusively proven.
There's no logical flaw at all.
A simple and obvious possible reason could be that the corrected temperature series have been slightly over corrected. I'm not sure why you didn't think of that.
The solar output variance is going in the opposite direction of the warming trend. The world should be getting slightly cooler because the sun is in a period of minimum activity. It's not.
No one is pointing to a 15 year old model and saying "look look it works!". They are pointing to a model they continuously update and say "look look it is working".
Of course, no one ever looks at old models.
Indeed. They might as well say "If it had been on Bradley Manning's machines, no one would know about some of the crimes we've been covering up."
That didn't appear to be the claim made by the plaintiff, the article indicated that the system produced results that contained tell-tale errors that indicate some of the data was copied from the manual from the plaintiff's system, which is a substantially lesser claim. Whether that data represents a significant portion of the system's functionality will be likely be a key question.
"The two entrenched parties can only shoot holes in his ideas"
At last! Something they can both agree on.
Except, of course, that everything I said is both true and accurate.
Both you and the other guy both appear to be tedious pendants. I offered my opinion and the reason for it, you are free to disagree with me, but you don't do yourself any favors when you're a dick about it.
You seem to have forgotten that most, if not all, of the states are also divided along the same lines. In each state you'll get the partisan arguments from each side over whether things are great or terrible. If one state comes up with a system that is really slick you can bet that no other states will give it a shot unless they modify so they can claim credit for it, and of course the plan will have to match the states ideological purity tests.
In a well-designed Federal system you would actually have trial programs that would allow for some measure of objective evaluation. When you have 50 state systems, the government of each state will always claim their system is working best. They want to get re-elected you know. I'm not saying the current system works, just that expecting 50 separate systems to work better seems to involve and unrealistic evaluation of the self-interest of the people in charge of those systems.
The system will need someone removed from state and inter-state politics to objectively evaluate them. That will likely end up being educational non-profits who will, of course, be accused of being "socialists" or "fascists" depending on which states get top ratings.
He's a libertarian. His goal is simply to cut the size of government. I'm reasonably sure that he believes that if people actually need the services, they will pay for them out of their own pockets. I'm also pretty sure that he believes whether that costs more or less, it's morally better.
You do realize that most of the debt that BHO has added is paying for programs and tax cuts from GWB?
Tax cuts and programs that Congress won't let him get rid of.
Interestingly enough, in Toronto the opposite was found. When affordable housing was interspersed with regular residential areas they found that the people in the affordable house improved their economic performance. A long term study found that it was pretty effective way to get people out of poverty, I'm a little fuzzy on the details but the mixed housing program had a high success rate of people leaving the affordable housing program because they no longer needed it.
That didn't work out so well in Ontario when the provincial conservative party downloaded a lot of services to the cities. Mostly it left the cities with the choice between massive tax increases to cover the costs and subsequent unemployment for the local politicians or massive service cuts because they couldn't fund the services. Most cities came up with a three part solution:
1) Big tax increase blamed on the province.
2) Big service cuts, also blamed on the province.
3) Elimination of maintenance budgets to try and reduce the impact of 1 and 2.
Essentially, everything got worse when this was done in the late 90s. And you'll have a pretty hard time figuring out which way is really better as long as your country is divided between Republicans and Democrats because each side will say it's people are doing better than the other side.