Indeed. This is just whining. No I don't make my windows myself, if I did they'd be more expensive, and leak heat like a seave, compared to a modern sealed triple-glass argon-filled thing. I could though, assuming I was satisfied with 100 year old standard of windows.
The main reason you replace instead of repairing is the same: a generation ago a washing-machine cost the equivalent of a months pay, thus if it was broken and could be repaired in a day, it was a no-brainer to do so. Today a (much better!) machine cost less than a weeks pay, thus it's less obvious that the repair is gonna be worth it.
None of this is universally true. But most of it is at least close to true for many people in USA. That's the unsurprising result of weak worker-protection laws, a government that is more or less company-owned, weak or non-existant labour-organization and high unemployment.
Of course any suggestion for improving any of the above is stamped as "socialist" and discarded. Meanwhile 93 cents out of every $1 of increas in national income over the last decade went to the top 1%.
On the flipside, Norways laws on that issue are fun. There's very few (and enumerated in law) situations where they can withhold your paycheck. If neither of those applies, you can file for their bankruptcy. That tends to get their attention, to put it mildly.
Bankruptcy-filings are public - they must be afterall, because all creditors of a company has a legitimate need to know. And if there's one kind of headline that companies would like to -avoid- in the newspapers then it's headlines of the "Acme files for bankruptcy, unable to make payroll."
The logic is that since everyone know they -should- pay you your salary, the only reasonable explanation for them not doing that is that they -can't- and if they are unable to meet their financial obligations they are, by definition, bankrupt.
That may be true - if and when you have zero interest in seeing the crime solved. Your assumption that overall, cops spend most of their time investigating crimes that nobody wants isn't universally valid.
No, I don't think so. US healthcare is unreasonably expensive even if you consider it not as fraction of GDP, but as cost relative to level of care offered. You can count how many doctors you have for each 1000 inhabitants, you can count how many times various procedures are performed, you can slice and dice it however you want, and still the conclusion is that the costs are much too high, relative to performance.
Swiss people *are* more healthy, but that doesn't explain why they get 3.6 doctors for each 1000 people while USA gets 2.3 doctors for each 1000 people -- despite paying less for healthcare, for example.
You answered your own question: USA *has* world-class healthcare for the most affluent people, those who have top-notch insurance or can afford to pay.
But on the *average* US healthcare is both more expensive, and poorer than that of all other similarly wealthy democratic countries I can think of. This makes a lot of sense: benefits of healthcare is diminishing-return, i.e. you get more additional health by spending $1000 more on someone who has no or very limited access to healthcare than you get by spending the same $1000 on someone who already have very good healthcare.
USA does the latter. The very good are turned into EXCELLENT. That's fine and good for those people who belong to that segment.
Meanwhile most other wealthy democracies are much better at turning poor into good. And this gives more benefits for less money. You do more for public health by going poor to good than by going very_good to excellent, it's also cheaper.
The main reason USA doesn't have socialized healthcare long ago, is that essentially all of the people with power and influence in USA belong to the "very good" category. For *them* it makes perfect sense to prefer very good to excellent instead of poor to good.
There's nothing magical about camping as such, agreed. But there is something important about learning to be able to take care of yourself, then learning to take care of others, to take responsibility, to lead, to solve a challenging problem as a team.
The thing is, it's easier to set new rules if you change the setting. Kids are used to living in a house, sleeping in a bed, washing under a shower, having clothes cleaned (by mommy) in a washing-machine etc. If you keep that setting, odds are the kids will expect that the rules are the same (or similar).
Except even that is a huge difference to how the world works here in Norway. You see, my kids do all of those things, but I've never had to "try to explain" why I let my child walk to school, play in the rain or use cooking-knives. Infact most other parents would consider me batshit overprotective.
Infact, prior to reading this article I wasn't aware that anyone, anywhere, could -possibly- consider "playing in rain" an example of a risky activity. Okay, so the kids didn't take their daytime-nap outdoors as babies when the temperature was lower than 5 below freezing, and they don't go out when there's an extreme-weather-warning for high winds, (this happens once or twice a year), but that's it as far as the weather is concerned.
It isn't hard. Look, it's a market. You can get any kind of person you want, if you pay what it costs. They're just whining that they don't get the people they want for the price they wish for, but that's how -markets- work.
The article is spot-on: we don't talk of a "gold gap", you can buy any amount of gold you wish for, but you need to pay the market-price, which is the price that someone is willing to sell for, not the price you *wish* it would be.
I went to interviews at 3 other potential employers before selecting my current job. I'm sure they would claim that getting qualified employees is "hard", but in actual fact their only problem was that they where not willing to pay market-price. (hint: offering 70% of the salary of the best offer is not paying "market-price")
Skills that are in demand are expensive. What a shock !
Reasonable, but I'd make it instead free for a decade, then start at $1000 and double every year. That way everyone gets protection and can -after- the fact purchase longer terms if a work is successful.
Saturating the market with older, free, works thus outcompeting the new works is the only effect of notice. We already know that essentially all works are commercially worthless after a decade, indeed most works are commercially worthless after 5 years.
There are some works that still pull in money after more than a decade - Harry Potter, Star Wars, The Beatles, but those are rare exceptions, and usually wildly profitable in the first 10 years too.
It clearly depends on the kind of work. For example, I think it's clear that for books, and music, competition from 10 year old books would harm sales of new works substantially.
For video-games, this is less clear. Final Fantasy X, for PS2 is a decade old, would people really flock to that rather than the current offerings if the price was zero ?
Notice how the price is *already* a tiny fraction of the price of new games, and that hasn't caused people to flock to it. If people aren't choosing FF-X at $5 over a current game at $50, would they really choose it at $0 ? I expect there'd be *some* who would since zero is a magical price - but I doubt it'd be a landslide.
Some of them perhaps. I think copyright should be determined experimentally in that it is progressively shortened until such point where you clearly see a fall in new works, then left at a point where they're short enough to hurt creators noticeably, but long enough that the effect is "noticeable" not "catastrophic".
For videogames, I think that'd mean 10 years. Certainly not 30. If all 10-year-old video-games where freely available, I think this would harm the new-game market noticeably, but not catastrophiccally. (notice how that's already close to true: 10 year old video-games, even AAA titles, can be had for a dollar a piece or something like that)
Copyright aren't supposed to stop people from independently creating their own similar works though: just because painter A made a portrait of a woman looking to the left while sitting in front of an oak-tree with a red apple in her hand, it doesn't stop painter B from doing the same thing.
The shape of the pieces in tetris aren't creatively distinct, instead they are mathemathically determined: they're the full set of all possible 4-squares connected pieces.
It's like claiming 000 001 010 011 100 101 110 111 is a creative selection of 3-digit binary numbers, when infact it's just an exhaustive list of *all* 3-digit binary numbers.
The only part of that which makes sense is that $0.01 is a too big price-increment for a penny-stock.
I agree, but that problem can be solved in atleast two different ways. One would be increasing price-granularity, there's no reason you can't have fractional-cent bids.
Second, they could simply insist on some minimum stock-price and thus force a stock merge or delisting on companies whose stock-price is under this limit. It doesn't make any real difference to anyone if there's a billion shares, each worth $0.50 or if there's 10 million shares, each worth $50. (okay, in the latter case you cannot invest less than $50 in the company, but that's not precisely a pressing need anyway)
I don't care about HFT personally since I'm an investor, not a speculator. When you hold a share for a decade, the traders can go wild all they like in the meantime with essentially zero influence on me. (okay, theorethically I lose half the spread or something of that magnitude to them, but if I buy AFK at 570, and sell it a decade later for 1900 it doesn't really influence me noticeably that it would've been 1900.50 HFT
A market where you can bid any price for any share you like, and have that order executed once a minute ain't "un-free", it's just un-abusive. Imagine if you tried behaving like HFT-traders do in a brick-and-mortar-shop:
I'm offering $3.97 for that chair. Then a millisecond later, long before any human can possibly even read the offer: No wait, I've redecided, I don't wanna buy it afterall, infact I'll sell you such a chair for $4.02. Then a millisecond later: No wait, it costs $4.04. A millisecond later. I don't want to sell it afterall, infact I want to buy at $3.98
It's bullshit. The fact that it's computerized doesn't make it less bullshit. And the above is an *understatement* typical HFT-algorithms make and retract in excess of *50* such millisecond-long withdrawn orders for every 1 that actually goes trough.
I don't know what you've smoked if you today actually believe that HFT speculators *stabilize* markets.
You'd only reduce latency by a factor of pi/2 because signals going around only have to traverse *half* the circumference of the earth to arrive at the other end. (yes, they do it again to get back, but that applies to the direct route too!)
Not really. Stock-exchanges should either just enforce once-a-minute matching (with lottery determining which trades to fulfill if there's several takers), or they should just set some minimal fee for every non-filled order which stands for less than a minute, 1% of the order-value would be plenty, probably even 0.1% of the order-value would be enough to stop HFT dead.
They're taking steps, some of them, but it's baby-steps. For example the Norwegian stock-exchange is adding a $0.01 fee for every trade - for those traders who file more than 70 orders for every *one* that goes trough, only orders which are withdrawn before 1 second has passed, are counted.
This is an *extremely* timid step. Make it $1, one in ten, and 1 minute rather than 1 second, and we're talking.
Let's say Company A has created Widget X, they sell this for $100, allthough real cost to them is $10. They invested $50M in building a factory for the Widgets, thus they had to sell half a million widgets before breaking even. That happened a year ago, and at the moment they're "printing money".
Now, your claim is that high profits would attract competition. But consider this from the POV of the would-be competitors.
They could set up their own factory, and start selling widgets at $80, this still leaves a healthy profit-margin, and is sufficiently cheaper than $100 that they think they can capture half the market within 6 months.
But in the real world it doesn't work like that. What happens is the competitor realize that allthough company A sells widgets for $100, they *could* sell them for $11 if they wanted to. They're not likely to sit still and watch you take over their entire market at $80, instead what will happen is that the moment your widget steals a significant fraction of their market, they lower their price to $75.
All else being equal, they'll win this price-war, if for no other reason than their factory being fully paid while yours is mortgaged to the chimney. In practice, ofcourse, all else *isn't* equal - consumers already know their widgets, and by now they've optimized their production-process so that their unit-cost is $5, while your unit-cost is $10.
Knowing all this, leads to the conclusion that *even* when an entrenched player is selling $100 widgets that can be produced for $10, it may very well be a horrible idea to start up a competitor.
Ads aren't worth it. Think about it. To exist at all, the advertiser *must* pay less than my attention is worth, if that wasn't so, he'd be better off dropping the ads.
Thus the advertiser pays less for the ads than the value of my attention is, even the tiny attention the average person gives to ads.
There's thus no way they could pay you to accept ads, and have that payment be adequate. Remember that the ad, to begin with, cost *less* than your attention is worth, thus even if you where paid 100% of what the ad cost, that'd still not be worth it.
There's been, and perhaps there still are, a few "get paid to look at ads" kind of programs. By mathemathical certanity they cannot work. The only people willing to do the job for the price offered, are those whose attention is worth less than the average person. But since the advertisers know this, they'll pay less and so on in a downward spiral.
Those people don't need a device to tidy up. They need treatment for their psychological disorder. If for a person it's really "can't" and not "doesn't want to", then it's a disease and should be treated as such.
Catering to the disease won't make it better. Quite the opposite.
So what's your alternative ? Never launch ? Wait another decade with Mariner 1, and have the Russians own space ? Quality-control until you're broken and -never- -ever- ship anything ?
What you don't get is that *everything* is a trade-off, there are no absolutes. It's always possible to do more testing, but that's only worth it if the benefits outweigh the drawbacks. The primary drawbacks is a) that it takes time and b) that it costs money.
Both are very real and very much relevant.
Being on the market at the right *time* and at the right *price* is critical in the real world. Your insistence on "they could test more" completely ignores this reality.
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Indeed. This is just whining. No I don't make my windows myself, if I did they'd be more expensive, and leak heat like a seave, compared to a modern sealed triple-glass argon-filled thing. I could though, assuming I was satisfied with 100 year old standard of windows.
The main reason you replace instead of repairing is the same: a generation ago a washing-machine cost the equivalent of a months pay, thus if it was broken and could be repaired in a day, it was a no-brainer to do so. Today a (much better!) machine cost less than a weeks pay, thus it's less obvious that the repair is gonna be worth it.
None of this is universally true. But most of it is at least close to true for many people in USA. That's the unsurprising result of weak worker-protection laws, a government that is more or less company-owned, weak or non-existant labour-organization and high unemployment.
Of course any suggestion for improving any of the above is stamped as "socialist" and discarded. Meanwhile 93 cents out of every $1 of increas in national income over the last decade went to the top 1%.
On the flipside, Norways laws on that issue are fun. There's very few (and enumerated in law) situations where they can withhold your paycheck. If neither of those applies, you can file for their bankruptcy. That tends to get their attention, to put it mildly.
Bankruptcy-filings are public - they must be afterall, because all creditors of a company has a legitimate need to know. And if there's one kind of headline that companies would like to -avoid- in the newspapers then it's headlines of the "Acme files for bankruptcy, unable to make payroll."
The logic is that since everyone know they -should- pay you your salary, the only reasonable explanation for them not doing that is that they -can't- and if they are unable to meet their financial obligations they are, by definition, bankrupt.
That may be true - if and when you have zero interest in seeing the crime solved. Your assumption that overall, cops spend most of their time investigating crimes that nobody wants isn't universally valid.
No, I don't think so. US healthcare is unreasonably expensive even if you consider it not as fraction of GDP, but as cost relative to level of care offered. You can count how many doctors you have for each 1000 inhabitants, you can count how many times various procedures are performed, you can slice and dice it however you want, and still the conclusion is that the costs are much too high, relative to performance.
Swiss people *are* more healthy, but that doesn't explain why they get 3.6 doctors for each 1000 people while USA gets 2.3 doctors for each 1000 people -- despite paying less for healthcare, for example.
You answered your own question: USA *has* world-class healthcare for the most affluent people, those who have top-notch insurance or can afford to pay.
But on the *average* US healthcare is both more expensive, and poorer than that of all other similarly wealthy democratic countries I can think of. This makes a lot of sense: benefits of healthcare is diminishing-return, i.e. you get more additional health by spending $1000 more on someone who has no or very limited access to healthcare than you get by spending the same $1000 on someone who already have very good healthcare.
USA does the latter. The very good are turned into EXCELLENT. That's fine and good for those people who belong to that segment.
Meanwhile most other wealthy democracies are much better at turning poor into good. And this gives more benefits for less money. You do more for public health by going poor to good than by going very_good to excellent, it's also cheaper.
The main reason USA doesn't have socialized healthcare long ago, is that essentially all of the people with power and influence in USA belong to the "very good" category. For *them* it makes perfect sense to prefer very good to excellent instead of poor to good.
There's nothing magical about camping as such, agreed. But there is something important about learning to be able to take care of yourself, then learning to take care of others, to take responsibility, to lead, to solve a challenging problem as a team.
The thing is, it's easier to set new rules if you change the setting. Kids are used to living in a house, sleeping in a bed, washing under a shower, having clothes cleaned (by mommy) in a washing-machine etc. If you keep that setting, odds are the kids will expect that the rules are the same (or similar).
Typo: they'd consider me overprotective if I *didn't* let the kids do all of those things.
Except even that is a huge difference to how the world works here in Norway. You see, my kids do all of those things, but I've never had to "try to explain" why I let my child walk to school, play in the rain or use cooking-knives. Infact most other parents would consider me batshit overprotective.
Infact, prior to reading this article I wasn't aware that anyone, anywhere, could -possibly- consider "playing in rain" an example of a risky activity. Okay, so the kids didn't take their daytime-nap outdoors as babies when the temperature was lower than 5 below freezing, and they don't go out when there's an extreme-weather-warning for high winds, (this happens once or twice a year), but that's it as far as the weather is concerned.
We do this: http://gfx.dagbladet.no/labrador/180/180193/18019346/jpg/active/978x.jpg
I'm not in the -slightest- kidding. Fine gear for taking your 1-year-old to the metal-concert.
Can't comment on the decibel-levels as I've not attended any North-American metal-concerts.
Socialist countries like Switzerland. Pull the other one !
It isn't hard. Look, it's a market. You can get any kind of person you want, if you pay what it costs. They're just whining that they don't get the people they want for the price they wish for, but that's how -markets- work.
The article is spot-on: we don't talk of a "gold gap", you can buy any amount of gold you wish for, but you need to pay the market-price, which is the price that someone is willing to sell for, not the price you *wish* it would be.
I went to interviews at 3 other potential employers before selecting my current job. I'm sure they would claim that getting qualified employees is "hard", but in actual fact their only problem was that they where not willing to pay market-price. (hint: offering 70% of the salary of the best offer is not paying "market-price")
Skills that are in demand are expensive. What a shock !
Reasonable, but I'd make it instead free for a decade, then start at $1000 and double every year. That way everyone gets protection and can -after- the fact purchase longer terms if a work is successful.
Saturating the market with older, free, works thus outcompeting the new works is the only effect of notice. We already know that essentially all works are commercially worthless after a decade, indeed most works are commercially worthless after 5 years.
There are some works that still pull in money after more than a decade - Harry Potter, Star Wars, The Beatles, but those are rare exceptions, and usually wildly profitable in the first 10 years too.
It clearly depends on the kind of work. For example, I think it's clear that for books, and music, competition from 10 year old books would harm sales of new works substantially.
For video-games, this is less clear. Final Fantasy X, for PS2 is a decade old, would people really flock to that rather than the current offerings if the price was zero ?
Notice how the price is *already* a tiny fraction of the price of new games, and that hasn't caused people to flock to it. If people aren't choosing FF-X at $5 over a current game at $50, would they really choose it at $0 ? I expect there'd be *some* who would since zero is a magical price - but I doubt it'd be a landslide.
Some of them perhaps. I think copyright should be determined experimentally in that it is progressively shortened until such point where you clearly see a fall in new works, then left at a point where they're short enough to hurt creators noticeably, but long enough that the effect is "noticeable" not "catastrophic".
For videogames, I think that'd mean 10 years. Certainly not 30. If all 10-year-old video-games where freely available, I think this would harm the new-game market noticeably, but not catastrophiccally. (notice how that's already close to true: 10 year old video-games, even AAA titles, can be had for a dollar a piece or something like that)
Copyright aren't supposed to stop people from independently creating their own similar works though: just because painter A made a portrait of a woman looking to the left while sitting in front of an oak-tree with a red apple in her hand, it doesn't stop painter B from doing the same thing.
The shape of the pieces in tetris aren't creatively distinct, instead they are mathemathically determined: they're the full set of all possible 4-squares connected pieces.
It's like claiming 000 001 010 011 100 101 110 111 is a creative selection of 3-digit binary numbers, when infact it's just an exhaustive list of *all* 3-digit binary numbers.
The only part of that which makes sense is that $0.01 is a too big price-increment for a penny-stock.
I agree, but that problem can be solved in atleast two different ways. One would be increasing price-granularity, there's no reason you can't have fractional-cent bids.
Second, they could simply insist on some minimum stock-price and thus force a stock merge or delisting on companies whose stock-price is under this limit. It doesn't make any real difference to anyone if there's a billion shares, each worth $0.50 or if there's 10 million shares, each worth $50. (okay, in the latter case you cannot invest less than $50 in the company, but that's not precisely a pressing need anyway)
I don't care about HFT personally since I'm an investor, not a speculator. When you hold a share for a decade, the traders can go wild all they like in the meantime with essentially zero influence on me. (okay, theorethically I lose half the spread or something of that magnitude to them, but if I buy AFK at 570, and sell it a decade later for 1900 it doesn't really influence me noticeably that it would've been 1900.50 HFT
A market where you can bid any price for any share you like, and have that order executed once a minute ain't "un-free", it's just un-abusive. Imagine if you tried behaving like HFT-traders do in a brick-and-mortar-shop:
I'm offering $3.97 for that chair. Then a millisecond later, long before any human can possibly even read the offer: No wait, I've redecided, I don't wanna buy it afterall, infact I'll sell you such a chair for $4.02. Then a millisecond later: No wait, it costs $4.04. A millisecond later. I don't want to sell it afterall, infact I want to buy at $3.98
It's bullshit. The fact that it's computerized doesn't make it less bullshit. And the above is an *understatement* typical HFT-algorithms make and retract in excess of *50* such millisecond-long withdrawn orders for every 1 that actually goes trough.
I don't know what you've smoked if you today actually believe that HFT speculators *stabilize* markets.
You'd only reduce latency by a factor of pi/2 because signals going around only have to traverse *half* the circumference of the earth to arrive at the other end. (yes, they do it again to get back, but that applies to the direct route too!)
Not really. Stock-exchanges should either just enforce once-a-minute matching (with lottery determining which trades to fulfill if there's several takers), or they should just set some minimal fee for every non-filled order which stands for less than a minute, 1% of the order-value would be plenty, probably even 0.1% of the order-value would be enough to stop HFT dead.
They're taking steps, some of them, but it's baby-steps. For example the Norwegian stock-exchange is adding a $0.01 fee for every trade - for those traders who file more than 70 orders for every *one* that goes trough, only orders which are withdrawn before 1 second has passed, are counted.
This is an *extremely* timid step. Make it $1, one in ten, and 1 minute rather than 1 second, and we're talking.
It's entirely legitimate, but the fruits of that research can be re-used infinitely at negligible cost.
That often doesn't work.
Let's say Company A has created Widget X, they sell this for $100, allthough real cost to them is $10. They invested $50M in building a factory for the Widgets, thus they had to sell half a million widgets before breaking even. That happened a year ago, and at the moment they're "printing money".
Now, your claim is that high profits would attract competition. But consider this from the POV of the would-be competitors.
They could set up their own factory, and start selling widgets at $80, this still leaves a healthy profit-margin, and is sufficiently cheaper than $100 that they think they can capture half the market within 6 months.
But in the real world it doesn't work like that. What happens is the competitor realize that allthough company A sells widgets for $100, they *could* sell them for $11 if they wanted to. They're not likely to sit still and watch you take over their entire market at $80, instead what will happen is that the moment your widget steals a significant fraction of their market, they lower their price to $75.
All else being equal, they'll win this price-war, if for no other reason than their factory being fully paid while yours is mortgaged to the chimney. In practice, ofcourse, all else *isn't* equal - consumers already know their widgets, and by now they've optimized their production-process so that their unit-cost is $5, while your unit-cost is $10.
Knowing all this, leads to the conclusion that *even* when an entrenched player is selling $100 widgets that can be produced for $10, it may very well be a horrible idea to start up a competitor.
Ads aren't worth it. Think about it. To exist at all, the advertiser *must* pay less than my attention is worth, if that wasn't so, he'd be better off dropping the ads.
Thus the advertiser pays less for the ads than the value of my attention is, even the tiny attention the average person gives to ads.
There's thus no way they could pay you to accept ads, and have that payment be adequate. Remember that the ad, to begin with, cost *less* than your attention is worth, thus even if you where paid 100% of what the ad cost, that'd still not be worth it.
There's been, and perhaps there still are, a few "get paid to look at ads" kind of programs. By mathemathical certanity they cannot work. The only people willing to do the job for the price offered, are those whose attention is worth less than the average person. But since the advertisers know this, they'll pay less and so on in a downward spiral.
Those people don't need a device to tidy up. They need treatment for their psychological disorder. If for a person it's really "can't" and not "doesn't want to", then it's a disease and should be treated as such.
Catering to the disease won't make it better. Quite the opposite.
He said that "academia pays in degrees, not dollars", which hints that he'd consider the wages paid in academia insufficient.
In actual facts, university-employees are paid in dollars. They're just lower paid than financial analysts etc.
So what's your alternative ? Never launch ? Wait another decade with Mariner 1, and have the Russians own space ? Quality-control until you're broken and -never- -ever- ship anything ?
What you don't get is that *everything* is a trade-off, there are no absolutes. It's always possible to do more testing, but that's only worth it if the benefits outweigh the drawbacks. The primary drawbacks is a) that it takes time and b) that it costs money.
Both are very real and very much relevant.
Being on the market at the right *time* and at the right *price* is critical in the real world. Your insistence on "they could test more" completely ignores this reality.