The artists and the executives make so much money because they can do what they do better than most anyone else, and their audience is willing to compensate them for it.
Further evidence that reading Ayn Rand is no substitute for understanding economics or having common sense.
First, the audience doesn't give a shit about the executives, so the audience is not willing to compensate them for anything. Second, "what they do" has as much to do with self-promotion, backstabbing and kissing ass as it has to do with productive activity. Third, executives are overhead. The only reason they get paid as much as they do is because the corporate governance structures disempower shareholders. It's well-known that there is no correlation between executive compensation and corporate performance. Furthermore, US levels of executive pay are an aberration in the global marketplace and they are getting in the way of our companies' ability to compete outside our own increasingly stagnant backwater.
Competition for resources happens not only between corporations (when they don't rig the market to evade it, which they'll do whenever they can get away with it). It also happens within corporations. There are a number of strategies for individuals to get a bigger slice of the pie that don't necessarily align with the interests of the shareholders or employees of the company. In fact, one of the toughest challenges of management is how to encourage real performance while weeding out the self-promoting narcissistic sociopaths who attach themselves to revenue streams the same way maggots flock to roadkill.
Another thing to consider is just how people find out about music. There is a lot more music than anyone can physically listen to, and in the old-school model of music distribution, unless the music is broadcast on mass-market radio or cross-promoted (say, by including a song in a movie), audiences won't hear it. And what they don't hear, they won't buy. But the access to these markets is controlled by a small number of firms. Only they can get enough ears to hear your song so that you have a chance of selling those millions of records. But that also sets them up as gatekeepers who keep the largest share of the proceeds. In addition, the balance of power between five guys, a handful of roadies and a manager versus a multi-billion-dollar conglomerate does not favor the smaller party during contract negotiations.
Based on this, my hope is that the Internet has enabled the exchange of music over social networks at such a low cost that the middlemen (middleweasels?) have lost their clout. And those highly-paid music-industry execs? They can taste the market economy's power of creative destruction and move on to other jobs that their "unique" skill sets qualify them for, such as giving blowjobs through knotholes in the walls of truckstop restrooms for spare change.
Capitalism is no more a meritocracy than Darwinism is. The "fittest" are those who win the game-- by definition. The Social Darwinists believed that this made the winners morally superior. That was based on a misunderstanding of both Darwin and of capitalism, and anyone who has ever met some of the "winners" will understand just how wrong that notion is. The only thing the winners are better at is winning under the present system. Change the selective pressures and different selections will occur. Anyway, there is more corruption than competition in American so-called "capitalism" so the real competition is about who can most effectively buy off a legislator or give a kickback to a media outlet.
Either way, we're getting a valuable lesson in two-party politics.
Tweedledum and Tweedledee. There is only one party, the corporate party. The so-called parties just represent different corporate factions within that party. There's going to have to be a lot more pushing back from the public before the Democrats will do anything. Even then it will be reluctant and half-assed. They're just playing good cop to the Republicans' bad cop. If you want to understand the Democrats, go back and learn about Kennedy's response to the civil rights movement. And in 45 years it hasn't changed much. This is not the party of real change. It's a party of mitigation and excuses. They're the PR shills for the ruling class; the Republicans are the goons with tire irons. But they ultimately serve the same interests.
Positive change will never originate from Washington. They will have to be dragged along, as always.
One of the great things about NYC is that cool stuff goes on in public -- it would be a shame to see that curtailed.
That's precisely why they're putting in the cameras: because they don't want people out in the streets doing unpredictable things-- cultural expression, political demos, you name it. Crime is just a pretext. If they cared about crime they'd address the root causes. The cameras are to induce a chilling effect that encourages us to stay in our homes or in closely managed quasi-public spaces such as shopping centers. These assholes can't stand the fact that there's such a thing as civil society. They want us to be docile and to be good at saying "Yeah boss." Visit your typical lifeless suburb populated by wage-slave zombies: that's their vision of utopia. Every possible human interaction monetized and closely managed.
I wonder about countermeasures-- for example, everyone dressing alike and hiding their faces. Presumably they'll have to ban that too, or treat it as indication that you have something to hide. And, unlike London, there are plenty of people in NYC who will be willing to disable the cameras.
And what happens when communities organize and tell the authorities that they don't want the cameras?
CENTCOM is the US military's Central Command. They cover the middle east, so spinning the Iraq War is part of what they do. But the main thing is that they also fight that war. The Security Transition Command is responsible for handing off security to the Iraqi police. Looks like your person is some military-can-do-no-wrong fanboy (or -girl) attached to CENTCOM. May or may not be their day job-- there are a lot of nutcases in the military who will do things like that just because they believe in it.
Quantico: that's something more likely to be a real cause for concern.
If one of your customers is worth over $60,000,000 a year, and they are working on small margins, retail sites and are getting undercut by some guy flogging stuff in the back of his van/ebay, how long till they turn round and stop selling your product, and therefore you potentially just lost $60 million.
Nope. At most, you lost $60M of revenue on that channel, and the assurance of whatever margin you made on that $60M. Most likely your real loss is the difference between the margin on that $60M and the margin on the next-most-profitable channel you can divert those sales to. That's not likely to be anywhere near $60M.
The whole idea behind the channel sales model is the ability to practice price discrimination. Grey markets and auction sites give price transparency, which provides consumers with more information. That reduces sellers' pricing power that was gained through divide-and-rule tactics and concealing information from buyers.
Since the courts have done the wrong thing, now it's up to legislators to make retail-price maintenance agreements unenforceable.
Pass a federal law that states (reiterates?) that an individual has ownership of their personal data.
Any use of that data would require opt-in or, better yet, payment to its owner.
The credit reporting firms are snooping on us now and making money from it. Let's see how viable their business model would be if the free lunch were taken away. Screw parasitic middlemen.
C++ has a mix of very low-level and high-level features. That, plus a plethora of side-effects and a huge range of features, means that your chances of a large "clean" C++ code base aren't great. Someone would have to enforce coding standards that limit the use of certain language features in order to get it to a maintainable state. Only then can a code base be well-maintained. If you like clean code, semantic complexity is your enemy, and C++ has highly complex semantics once all those overlapping features start interacting.
So there might be clean C++ apps out there, but it's going to be like the proverb about a dog walking on its hind legs.
Ruby or Python, on the other hand, are a different story.
Exactly. What the court decided is that, as long as the government says something is a state secret, they get a free pass.
And since the court has no authority to review what does and does not get classified as a state secret, we're down to "Because I said so" as the legal basis for whatever the executive branch decides to do. That rationale also has an older name: the Divine Right of Kings.
The only hope is that there's still enough vestigial democracy in the system that some other party will get in and be able to find out what's been going on. Pity the Democrats don't seem to want to be that party.
the Democrats do not have the balls to impeach Cheney, let alone Bush, etc.
I don't want to see them impeached. I want them put on trial for crimes against humanity-- specifically the rendition program and torture, as well as waging war on false pretexts against a country that did not and cound not attack the US. Mass-murder charges should also brought against them for the 100,000-plus civilians who have been killed during the war.
Impeachment is a sideshow. I want real accountability to be established, and those slimebags put behind bars for the rest of their lives. We in the US who are not brainwashed will have to clean this mess up, and the sooner we come to realize just what needs to happen to do that, the better. The Democrats are afraid of how big that job is, and are trying to duck their responsibility. But impunity is not a morally tolerable option.
And yes, I'm talking Nuremberg II. George and Dick in a plexiglas cage at the Hague. However, I do not advocate the death penalty as it was done in the 40's. Opinion in the civilized world in the past 60 years has come round to accepting the barbarity of that. Life in the slammer is sufficient. And anything less is a free pass.
Firstly define 'wasn't going to purchase' for me. If I know absolutely 100% that I can not get a piece of software / movie / game for free, I am pretty sure I am much more likely to admit to myself and others that I want it, and will purchase it, than if I have a big demon sat on my shoulder whispering "don't be a mug, you can warez it!".
So are you hypothesizing that music, movies and games are completely price-inelastic? There is some music that I would never pay to listen do, quite a bit that I would want to listen to before paying for it, and some that I would pay money to have in a convenient format that works with the music players I prefer to use. There is no possible way that I would pay to have the same song in two or more different crippled media formats, though. And the fact that I would pay for some music does not imply that my price point is within laughing range of the price that Big Media tries to extract from its market now. So if the choice is "Pay through the nose or do without," in a very large number of cases I would do without. In fact, that's generally what I've been doing.
The *AA's represent businesses with powerful market-research understanding. They know very well that the current rigged prices and current market share are not independent of each other. And it is an undeniable fact that the number of people who will listen to music at zero cost to them is going to be immensely greater than those who would pay even a nominal fee. So it is nothing but propaganda to assert that every non-paying listener is someone who would have paid retail. The missing word is "potentially." And that potential is on a sliding scale based on price, and P=0 is the extreme point.
This is the same as a pickpocket saying that every twenty-dollar-bill in its rightful owner's pocket is a direct cost to the thief. You wanting it doesn't make it yours. And it really doesn't matter how badly you want it. It's still pointing and screaming "Mine!" in Mommy's ear as a business model.
They're shifting the paradigm (pardon my French) from "copyright is a government granted monopoly" to "copyright is ours by default and you're a pirate."
Notice how the FPP/shill mentioned the "free market" as if a government-granted monopoly had anything to do with freedom or markets. It's a remnant of the Royal Warrant: permission from on high to do a certain kind of business.
Me, I'm fed up with the simplistic equating of wildly extrapolated property rights with any sort of freedom. Right, the Highland Enclosures were about freedom for the landlords. But to a crofter it looked more like a land grab. Same goes for the current copyright insanity. The *AA's are parasitic and we need to stop the gravy train so that they can become more productively employed: say, pounding farts out of shirttails at the local laundry.
Yeah, and the lame-ass greedhead musicians who are willing to serve as their mouthpieces. And the horse they rode in on too.
I'm pleased to hear that they were driven by pure hearts and ethical imperatives as they made that decision.
But if so, ethics aligned with financial incentives: in particular, the differences in revenue generated by the consulting partners (in Accenture) versus that generated by the audit partners (in Arthur). While they were a single firm, revenue was pooled (well, partially), so Accenture was essentially subsidizing Arthur. Going independent enabled the Accenture partners to keep a bigger piece of the pie. And also, I'm sure, to feel ethical.
And the "loss" in the spinoff was a payment of revenue AC had withheld from Arthur Andersen during litigation. As part of the settlement, they had to pay that. It was part of the pre-separation agreement.
And it also appears to me that the separation didn't have to do with the SEC pressure on audit firms to divest their consulting operations. That came later. Furter evidence of that is that Arthur Andersen were building up their own consulting operations prior to the Enron debacle.
I don't think they're choirboys either, or devils either. But there are some strong temptations, weak regulation, and a climate of corruption in the higher echelons of both government and business. So it's plausible that at least some of those guys may have stepped over the line. It's likely that the majority of Arthur Andersen people were clean, too, but that didn't do them much good when Enron blew up.
Come visit Scotland some time if you can face coming back, there's a lot of friendly people here.
I second that. I'm an American of mostly Irish origin. My wife is from the Middle East. We lived in England for a number of years. But now, when we visit Britain we prefer to go somewhere in Scotland. Generally there's less xenophobia, much less class obsession, the people are sometimes reserved but genuinely friendly. And I think the best English is spoken by the Scots.
Of course it's not all sweetness and light. For one thing, there are midges. And I still don't understand how someone can eat a deep-fried Mars bar, but I'll just have to live with that mystery.
Relative to fossil fuels, biofuels don't improve the greenhouse gas situation at all. In many regards they make it worse once the energy inputs for the agriculture and processing are taken into account. The only advantages of biofuels are political (pork for agricultural states) and economic in the narrow sense of helping with the balance of trade with oil producing countries.
Improving cars' gas mileage is a way of mitigating an environmental disaster, but it's in no way a long-term solution. Real transportation-related energy savings will be achieved only by driving up the cost of personal transportation to the point at which public transportation becomes the better choice. Since the existing pricing structures don't in any way reflect the social or environmental costs of the use of carbon fuels, this needs to happen. And it doesn't need to have a negative impact on the economy either. The US has a very poor rate of GDP creation per unit of energy input compared to most developed countries, so we're just doing a lousy job of making efficient use of resources. Little wonder once you consider all the subsidies and distortions that encourage wasteful use of energy.
The consequences of such a change will include greater urbanization and a differential impact on suburbs depending on their structure. "Sprawl" suburbs (those with grid-type road systems and relatively uniform population density) will become less desirable than suburbs consisting of dense towns surrounded by low-density housing, since the towns can connect to the city by public transportation and local shopping is possible if you live near the town center.
I've lived in big cities (Seattle, London and SF) and both kinds of suburbs (LA, outer London, SF bay area). "Sprawl" suburbs (Dallas, Denver, LA/Orange County/San Diego, new towns in Outer London) have by far the worst quality of life. I'm currently living in a small, dense town not far from San Francisco and it's nothing at all like the featureless burbs of (for example) Orange County. There's a thriving downtown and a sense of community. And the arguments in some posts about urban crowding are far from the mark too: in a non-decaying city, you don't spend as much time in your home as you're forced to in the suburbs, since there's more to do outside. You don't need huge amounts of space. My flat in London was tiny by US standards, but we never felt claustrophobic in it. And it didn't have the sterile feel of McMansions in the US: square footage makes a poor substitute for connectedness.
So if we're going to focus on changing the energy economy in the US, the aims should be to reduce consumption radically, and to quit feeding the carbon monkey. And when looking at alternatives, we should look at life cycle costs. That probably will mean that nuclear still comes out a poor option relative to solar, wind, tidal power, and (despite is environmental problems) hydropower. And this will drive oil, coal and biofuel off the agenda entirely.
So what I want to see are carbon taxes, congestion charges, and a lot more buses (which should be more fuel-efficient, and which should not be diesel, since the particulate emissions are another environmental disaster). Buses are a good choice since rail-based public transportation solutions tend to provide poor rates of return, are inflexible, and become single points of failure. You'll need the flexibility since the impact of higher energy pricing on suburbs will cause population shifts that will alter commuting patterns.
And co-generation is a great thing for houses, as is improving efficiency of lights, fridges and heating/insulation systems. Also, when there's a need to rewire, reducing the resistance of home wiring is a good idea.
Mod parent up. They're not that afraid of terrorists. There is no plausible scenario in which Binladen or someone like him is going to threaten the US system. They're much more afraid of honest, decent people finding out what they're up to, and getting organized enough to do something about it. That's why they're constantly pushing for more intrusive surveillance and control.
You can be assured that, whatever information is collected on you by the government will not be adequately protected, and will be abused. Power grabs like this one must be resisted.
The system works. Its objectives: (1) To allow big corporations to protect their oligopoly positions by creating barriers to entry. (2) To delay innovation, which was proceeding at such a rapid pace that repression and control weren't keeping up.
I use email for anything where you need a document trail, and for communications that can lead to a resolution in one or two rounds of messages. I use phone calls, IM, a handwritten note, leaving documents on someone's chair, or face-to-face for anything else. "Anything else" includes most things that matter. For example, giving feedback via email is generally not optimal.
The ancient Greeks taught their ambitious young men (not women, those were even more sexist times than we're in now) logic and rhetoric. Both were necessary in order to be effective. I learned to be more persuasive and more effective at emotionally engaging with my coworkers and customers because people are not solely motivated by logic when making decisions. Even people who regard themselves as entirely rational. There were far too many times when technically correct decisions were stymied by other concerns that were emotional in origin. It's one thing to know the right thing to do. It's entirely another thing to convince other people that it's right. People are judging you all the time, and part of what they're judging is your conviction, your confidence, your sense of urgency, their impression of your ability to make something happen, and whether you're such a pain in the ass that they don't want to deal with you even if you do get things done. In business (as opposed to peer-reviewed journals) all those things matter, and initiatives fail if the chemistry is wrong. Even in peer-reviewed journals, reviewers are responsive to the reputation of the authors and social interactions influence review outcomes.
So sometimes you need to use irrational means to achieve rational ends. And that's because we are not machines, we're social. We need to engage on more than just the level of logic, even though we're in a business where logical decision-making is necessary.
It's also worth keeping in mind that people work, think and interact differently, so email might work well for one person but face-to-face is the best way to interact with someone else. These simplistic "works for men, not for women" conclusions are too shallow to be actionable.
The principle I follow is to over-communicate, never to rely on a single communication channel when communicating anything important, and to learn what works best for different people.
When the adoption rate reaches critical mass where I can pick up a copy of Turbo Tax for Linux and Quicken will be the day MS stock has a bad day. There isn't many markets with more price concious buyers than the SOHO market.
Overall I agree with your point. You might be encouraged to know that I just did my taxes on Linux using TurboTax. Granted, I used the web client, but it worked just fine despite a page full of dire warnings from Intuit that I was using an unsupported browser.
The SOHO market, in my experience, is a mixed bag. They're risk-averse, price-conscious and time-constrained. I think that the last of these is the greater barrier to Linux adoption, since they're afraid they'll have to learn something new and it'll take time away from their small business that's already consuming every waking hour.
The availability of apps is perceived to be an issue, but I think that there's not much fact behind that belief. I have friends who have run fairly complex small businesses on GnuCash for several years without incident, so I question the indispensability of Quicken. And few small businesses have unique requirements that cannot be satisfied by either Linux apps or going to an ASP such as Salesforce.com.
Much of what I hear from small businesses is focused on the assumption that they need a particular product rather than a solution: "I've gotta have Outlook." No, you've gotta have a way to do email and calendaring that works for you and your customers. Same goes for document formats. And another barrier to Linux adoption is migration cost. They're already in a hole and it'll cost them effort (which more or less equals money) to get out.
So... yeah, they're cost-conscious, but some of those costs aren't where they're commonly believed to be. Even when they understand the relative costs, they're still willing to endure the continuing short-term pain because of the greater one-time pain of making a transition to what will often turn out to be a lower-TCO end state. To put it another way, they're in an energy well.
Based on that, improved Linux usability and improved migration tools is likely to further encourage defection from MS, since it lowers to "barrier to exit." That might matter as much as or more than the availability of specific application functionality.
The difference being one
side wants power in the hands of corporations and the government while the other just wants government to have the power.
If you associate left and right with USian Democrats and Republicans, it would be more correct to say: "The difference being that one side wants power in the hands of corporations, and the other side wants power in the hands of other corporations."
One of the reasons some framers didn't like the Bill of Rights was that they worried that courts or the government would believe the list to be an exhaustive enumeration of all our rights. This ran against the principle that the Constitution should grant powers to the government by exception, and that any but those specific powers should be forbidden.
This narrow interpretation of our rights has been exactly the approach taken by authoriarians ever since, whether they're troglodyte Supreme Court justices or executive-branch sycopants of power-hugry Presidents. So the fact that the Constitution does not mention a right to privacy, in the world-view of the framers, cannot be used by the courts to conclude that we have no such right. Nor is it necessary for the courts to derive our rights from the short list in the Bill of Rights.
For this reason alone, Alberto Gonzalez should be driven from office, since he is deliberately undermining the constitution he swore to uphold. Then, for his support for torture, he should be tried and imprisoned for crimes against humanity.
Property is not an absolute right in that not everyone is guaranteed property, however, you do have the right to be generally secure from the government seizing your property.
Nope. When you check out, you cash in your chips, with a decent provision for the widows and kiddies.
If the government is taking private property in the form of taxation, it better be made damn clear why exactly they feel the need to take that particular piece of property.
There are two values that must be balanced: people should be rewarded for their industriousness and innovation, so society should encourage competition. But that race will not go to the swiftest if some start closer to the finish line than others because they were given a massive head start that they did nothing to earn. Don't lecture me about the beauty of a set of differential equations when the boundary conditions are rigged.
I have no problem at all with wealth. But inherited wealth is a deadweight on society.
If the government wants to tax rich folks more, why not increase the upper tax brackets in a straightforward method? Wouldn't that be more effective than only taxing people when they die?
Because income taxes are levied based on the rate at which you acquire wealth, while having little impact on those sitting on huge piles of unproductive assets. So those who have, keep having. Those who are getting, pay high marginal taxes. And those who don't have, well, they're already SOL. This leads to a society with a hereditary plutocracy and a huge underclass, with little class mobility. Been to Brazil? That's what the current system converges towards.
Kinda lame, but I guess we just agree to disagree. I do get a distinct impression that you have an extremely hostile view towards property owners because of the language you use. Wealth is not a bad thing. Creating wealth is a positive benefit to society. It should not be punished. If it wasn't for individuals saving and investing capital, other people wouldn't have jobs. There would not be growth in industry. You should encourage people to amass large amounts of capital in your country, not discourage. The view of the government taking from the bourgeoisie as being a good thing needs to die.
I grew up in near-poverty and my PNW is now somewhere north of $2M. I earned every penny of it. So, though I'm not rolling in it, I've got some skin in this game. I guess that puts me in the low-to-mid-bourgeoisie. Throughout my career I've been forced to deal with parasites, hangers-on, boss's sons-in-law and (as they say) those who were born on third base and act like they hit a triple. And I fully believe that those who earn good money should pay a higher marginal rate of tax than those who don't. And I pay more property tax than my neighbors whose houses are worth less than mine, and that's fine. And, having attended a private university with the children of the well-off, it didn't escape my notice that unearned money was a largely destructive, corrupting force in their lives. You make it sound like the nasty government is seizing our precious money and dumping it into a shredder. But that's not what happens. They spend it. I don't like where they spend a lot of it, but I'd rather see it go towards universal single-payer healthcare, or fixing potholes, than for it to go from dead granny the successful dentist to Chadwick the trustafarian to Chad's coke dealer to the Cali Cartel.
Me, I'd limit intergenerational inheritance to, say, two sigmas above the median income. That's about what my kids will be getting from us. The rest is going to be given away to various charitable organizations whose aims you are likely not to approve of. And it's not that I don't love my kids. It's that the most disastrous things you can give your children are complacency and a sense of entitlement.
Anyway, for the most part, the very wealthy respect no national boundaries and give l
A good friend of mine calls his position "apatheism." Doesn't know for sure either way, but it doesn't matter to him.
Agnosticism was an attempt to soften the absolutist tone of atheism. The position was that there's little or (more likely) no credible evidence supporting the existence of a deity, but it's logically difficult to prove a negative, so there's always going to be a provisional element in such a judgement. This is very different from a position of being undecided. It's quite possible to be agnostic but to believe that the evidence in support of atheism is somewhere between "beyond a reasonable doubt" and "beyond the shadow of a doubt." But if a deity showed up tomorrow and bought me a Guinness, or unzipped the sky from the horizon, the preponderance of evidence would shift. Meanwhile, I'm not going to be out slaughtering ruminants on the solstice Just In Case. Pascal's Wager doesn't make sense when you have mutually contradictory religious beliefs to choose from.
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First, the audience doesn't give a shit about the executives, so the audience is not willing to compensate them for anything. Second, "what they do" has as much to do with self-promotion, backstabbing and kissing ass as it has to do with productive activity. Third, executives are overhead. The only reason they get paid as much as they do is because the corporate governance structures disempower shareholders. It's well-known that there is no correlation between executive compensation and corporate performance. Furthermore, US levels of executive pay are an aberration in the global marketplace and they are getting in the way of our companies' ability to compete outside our own increasingly stagnant backwater.
Competition for resources happens not only between corporations (when they don't rig the market to evade it, which they'll do whenever they can get away with it). It also happens within corporations. There are a number of strategies for individuals to get a bigger slice of the pie that don't necessarily align with the interests of the shareholders or employees of the company. In fact, one of the toughest challenges of management is how to encourage real performance while weeding out the self-promoting narcissistic sociopaths who attach themselves to revenue streams the same way maggots flock to roadkill.
Another thing to consider is just how people find out about music. There is a lot more music than anyone can physically listen to, and in the old-school model of music distribution, unless the music is broadcast on mass-market radio or cross-promoted (say, by including a song in a movie), audiences won't hear it. And what they don't hear, they won't buy. But the access to these markets is controlled by a small number of firms. Only they can get enough ears to hear your song so that you have a chance of selling those millions of records. But that also sets them up as gatekeepers who keep the largest share of the proceeds. In addition, the balance of power between five guys, a handful of roadies and a manager versus a multi-billion-dollar conglomerate does not favor the smaller party during contract negotiations.
Based on this, my hope is that the Internet has enabled the exchange of music over social networks at such a low cost that the middlemen (middleweasels?) have lost their clout. And those highly-paid music-industry execs? They can taste the market economy's power of creative destruction and move on to other jobs that their "unique" skill sets qualify them for, such as giving blowjobs through knotholes in the walls of truckstop restrooms for spare change.
Capitalism is no more a meritocracy than Darwinism is. The "fittest" are those who win the game-- by definition. The Social Darwinists believed that this made the winners morally superior. That was based on a misunderstanding of both Darwin and of capitalism, and anyone who has ever met some of the "winners" will understand just how wrong that notion is. The only thing the winners are better at is winning under the present system. Change the selective pressures and different selections will occur. Anyway, there is more corruption than competition in American so-called "capitalism" so the real competition is about who can most effectively buy off a legislator or give a kickback to a media outlet.
Positive change will never originate from Washington. They will have to be dragged along, as always.
I wonder about countermeasures-- for example, everyone dressing alike and hiding their faces. Presumably they'll have to ban that too, or treat it as indication that you have something to hide. And, unlike London, there are plenty of people in NYC who will be willing to disable the cameras.
And what happens when communities organize and tell the authorities that they don't want the cameras?
CENTCOM is the US military's Central Command. They cover the middle east, so spinning the Iraq War is part of what they do. But the main thing is that they also fight that war. The Security Transition Command is responsible for handing off security to the Iraqi police. Looks like your person is some military-can-do-no-wrong fanboy (or -girl) attached to CENTCOM. May or may not be their day job-- there are a lot of nutcases in the military who will do things like that just because they believe in it.
Quantico: that's something more likely to be a real cause for concern.
The whole idea behind the channel sales model is the ability to practice price discrimination. Grey markets and auction sites give price transparency, which provides consumers with more information. That reduces sellers' pricing power that was gained through divide-and-rule tactics and concealing information from buyers.
Since the courts have done the wrong thing, now it's up to legislators to make retail-price maintenance agreements unenforceable.
Pass a federal law that states (reiterates?) that an individual has ownership of their personal data.
Any use of that data would require opt-in or, better yet, payment to its owner.
The credit reporting firms are snooping on us now and making money from it. Let's see how viable their business model would be if the free lunch were taken away. Screw parasitic middlemen.
C++ has a mix of very low-level and high-level features. That, plus a plethora of side-effects and a huge range of features, means that your chances of a large "clean" C++ code base aren't great. Someone would have to enforce coding standards that limit the use of certain language features in order to get it to a maintainable state. Only then can a code base be well-maintained. If you like clean code, semantic complexity is your enemy, and C++ has highly complex semantics once all those overlapping features start interacting.
So there might be clean C++ apps out there, but it's going to be like the proverb about a dog walking on its hind legs.
Ruby or Python, on the other hand, are a different story.
Exactly. What the court decided is that, as long as the government says something is a state secret, they get a free pass.
And since the court has no authority to review what does and does not get classified as a state secret, we're down to "Because I said so" as the legal basis for whatever the executive branch decides to do. That rationale also has an older name: the Divine Right of Kings.
The only hope is that there's still enough vestigial democracy in the system that some other party will get in and be able to find out what's been going on. Pity the Democrats don't seem to want to be that party.
Impeachment is a sideshow. I want real accountability to be established, and those slimebags put behind bars for the rest of their lives. We in the US who are not brainwashed will have to clean this mess up, and the sooner we come to realize just what needs to happen to do that, the better. The Democrats are afraid of how big that job is, and are trying to duck their responsibility. But impunity is not a morally tolerable option.
And yes, I'm talking Nuremberg II. George and Dick in a plexiglas cage at the Hague. However, I do not advocate the death penalty as it was done in the 40's. Opinion in the civilized world in the past 60 years has come round to accepting the barbarity of that. Life in the slammer is sufficient. And anything less is a free pass.
The *AA's represent businesses with powerful market-research understanding. They know very well that the current rigged prices and current market share are not independent of each other. And it is an undeniable fact that the number of people who will listen to music at zero cost to them is going to be immensely greater than those who would pay even a nominal fee. So it is nothing but propaganda to assert that every non-paying listener is someone who would have paid retail. The missing word is "potentially." And that potential is on a sliding scale based on price, and P=0 is the extreme point.
This is the same as a pickpocket saying that every twenty-dollar-bill in its rightful owner's pocket is a direct cost to the thief. You wanting it doesn't make it yours. And it really doesn't matter how badly you want it. It's still pointing and screaming "Mine!" in Mommy's ear as a business model.
Me, I'm fed up with the simplistic equating of wildly extrapolated property rights with any sort of freedom. Right, the Highland Enclosures were about freedom for the landlords. But to a crofter it looked more like a land grab. Same goes for the current copyright insanity. The *AA's are parasitic and we need to stop the gravy train so that they can become more productively employed: say, pounding farts out of shirttails at the local laundry.
Yeah, and the lame-ass greedhead musicians who are willing to serve as their mouthpieces. And the horse they rode in on too.
I'm pleased to hear that they were driven by pure hearts and ethical imperatives as they made that decision.
But if so, ethics aligned with financial incentives: in particular, the differences in revenue generated by the consulting partners (in Accenture) versus that generated by the audit partners (in Arthur). While they were a single firm, revenue was pooled (well, partially), so Accenture was essentially subsidizing Arthur. Going independent enabled the Accenture partners to keep a bigger piece of the pie. And also, I'm sure, to feel ethical.
And the "loss" in the spinoff was a payment of revenue AC had withheld from Arthur Andersen during litigation. As part of the settlement, they had to pay that. It was part of the pre-separation agreement.
And it also appears to me that the separation didn't have to do with the SEC pressure on audit firms to divest their consulting operations. That came later. Furter evidence of that is that Arthur Andersen were building up their own consulting operations prior to the Enron debacle.
I don't think they're choirboys either, or devils either. But there are some strong temptations, weak regulation, and a climate of corruption in the higher echelons of both government and business. So it's plausible that at least some of those guys may have stepped over the line. It's likely that the majority of Arthur Andersen people were clean, too, but that didn't do them much good when Enron blew up.
Of course it's not all sweetness and light. For one thing, there are midges. And I still don't understand how someone can eat a deep-fried Mars bar, but I'll just have to live with that mystery.
Relative to fossil fuels, biofuels don't improve the greenhouse gas situation at all. In many regards they make it worse once the energy inputs for the agriculture and processing are taken into account. The only advantages of biofuels are political (pork for agricultural states) and economic in the narrow sense of helping with the balance of trade with oil producing countries.
Improving cars' gas mileage is a way of mitigating an environmental disaster, but it's in no way a long-term solution. Real transportation-related energy savings will be achieved only by driving up the cost of personal transportation to the point at which public transportation becomes the better choice. Since the existing pricing structures don't in any way reflect the social or environmental costs of the use of carbon fuels, this needs to happen. And it doesn't need to have a negative impact on the economy either. The US has a very poor rate of GDP creation per unit of energy input compared to most developed countries, so we're just doing a lousy job of making efficient use of resources. Little wonder once you consider all the subsidies and distortions that encourage wasteful use of energy.
The consequences of such a change will include greater urbanization and a differential impact on suburbs depending on their structure. "Sprawl" suburbs (those with grid-type road systems and relatively uniform population density) will become less desirable than suburbs consisting of dense towns surrounded by low-density housing, since the towns can connect to the city by public transportation and local shopping is possible if you live near the town center.
I've lived in big cities (Seattle, London and SF) and both kinds of suburbs (LA, outer London, SF bay area). "Sprawl" suburbs (Dallas, Denver, LA/Orange County/San Diego, new towns in Outer London) have by far the worst quality of life. I'm currently living in a small, dense town not far from San Francisco and it's nothing at all like the featureless burbs of (for example) Orange County. There's a thriving downtown and a sense of community. And the arguments in some posts about urban crowding are far from the mark too: in a non-decaying city, you don't spend as much time in your home as you're forced to in the suburbs, since there's more to do outside. You don't need huge amounts of space. My flat in London was tiny by US standards, but we never felt claustrophobic in it. And it didn't have the sterile feel of McMansions in the US: square footage makes a poor substitute for connectedness.
So if we're going to focus on changing the energy economy in the US, the aims should be to reduce consumption radically, and to quit feeding the carbon monkey. And when looking at alternatives, we should look at life cycle costs. That probably will mean that nuclear still comes out a poor option relative to solar, wind, tidal power, and (despite is environmental problems) hydropower. And this will drive oil, coal and biofuel off the agenda entirely.
So what I want to see are carbon taxes, congestion charges, and a lot more buses (which should be more fuel-efficient, and which should not be diesel, since the particulate emissions are another environmental disaster). Buses are a good choice since rail-based public transportation solutions tend to provide poor rates of return, are inflexible, and become single points of failure. You'll need the flexibility since the impact of higher energy pricing on suburbs will cause population shifts that will alter commuting patterns.
And co-generation is a great thing for houses, as is improving efficiency of lights, fridges and heating/insulation systems. Also, when there's a need to rewire, reducing the resistance of home wiring is a good idea.
Mod parent up. They're not that afraid of terrorists. There is no plausible scenario in which Binladen or someone like him is going to threaten the US system. They're much more afraid of honest, decent people finding out what they're up to, and getting organized enough to do something about it. That's why they're constantly pushing for more intrusive surveillance and control.
You can be assured that, whatever information is collected on you by the government will not be adequately protected, and will be abused. Power grabs like this one must be resisted.
The system works. Its objectives: (1) To allow big corporations to protect their oligopoly positions by creating barriers to entry. (2) To delay innovation, which was proceeding at such a rapid pace that repression and control weren't keeping up.
I use email for anything where you need a document trail, and for communications that can lead to a resolution in one or two rounds of messages. I use phone calls, IM, a handwritten note, leaving documents on someone's chair, or face-to-face for anything else. "Anything else" includes most things that matter. For example, giving feedback via email is generally not optimal.
The ancient Greeks taught their ambitious young men (not women, those were even more sexist times than we're in now) logic and rhetoric. Both were necessary in order to be effective. I learned to be more persuasive and more effective at emotionally engaging with my coworkers and customers because people are not solely motivated by logic when making decisions. Even people who regard themselves as entirely rational. There were far too many times when technically correct decisions were stymied by other concerns that were emotional in origin. It's one thing to know the right thing to do. It's entirely another thing to convince other people that it's right. People are judging you all the time, and part of what they're judging is your conviction, your confidence, your sense of urgency, their impression of your ability to make something happen, and whether you're such a pain in the ass that they don't want to deal with you even if you do get things done. In business (as opposed to peer-reviewed journals) all those things matter, and initiatives fail if the chemistry is wrong. Even in peer-reviewed journals, reviewers are responsive to the reputation of the authors and social interactions influence review outcomes.
So sometimes you need to use irrational means to achieve rational ends. And that's because we are not machines, we're social. We need to engage on more than just the level of logic, even though we're in a business where logical decision-making is necessary.
It's also worth keeping in mind that people work, think and interact differently, so email might work well for one person but face-to-face is the best way to interact with someone else. These simplistic "works for men, not for women" conclusions are too shallow to be actionable.
The principle I follow is to over-communicate, never to rely on a single communication channel when communicating anything important, and to learn what works best for different people.
Why not just recall the arrogant SOBs?
Or wait a couple years and pass a binding referendum next time since you can't trust the bastards.
The SOHO market, in my experience, is a mixed bag. They're risk-averse, price-conscious and time-constrained. I think that the last of these is the greater barrier to Linux adoption, since they're afraid they'll have to learn something new and it'll take time away from their small business that's already consuming every waking hour.
The availability of apps is perceived to be an issue, but I think that there's not much fact behind that belief. I have friends who have run fairly complex small businesses on GnuCash for several years without incident, so I question the indispensability of Quicken. And few small businesses have unique requirements that cannot be satisfied by either Linux apps or going to an ASP such as Salesforce.com.
Much of what I hear from small businesses is focused on the assumption that they need a particular product rather than a solution: "I've gotta have Outlook." No, you've gotta have a way to do email and calendaring that works for you and your customers. Same goes for document formats. And another barrier to Linux adoption is migration cost. They're already in a hole and it'll cost them effort (which more or less equals money) to get out.
So... yeah, they're cost-conscious, but some of those costs aren't where they're commonly believed to be. Even when they understand the relative costs, they're still willing to endure the continuing short-term pain because of the greater one-time pain of making a transition to what will often turn out to be a lower-TCO end state. To put it another way, they're in an energy well.
Based on that, improved Linux usability and improved migration tools is likely to further encourage defection from MS, since it lowers to "barrier to exit." That might matter as much as or more than the availability of specific application functionality.
It's false advertising.
Oh, yeah, Republican administration. Never mind.
I can never remember TweedleWhich.
One of the reasons some framers didn't like the Bill of Rights was that they worried that courts or the government would believe the list to be an exhaustive enumeration of all our rights. This ran against the principle that the Constitution should grant powers to the government by exception, and that any but those specific powers should be forbidden.
This narrow interpretation of our rights has been exactly the approach taken by authoriarians ever since, whether they're troglodyte Supreme Court justices or executive-branch sycopants of power-hugry Presidents. So the fact that the Constitution does not mention a right to privacy, in the world-view of the framers, cannot be used by the courts to conclude that we have no such right. Nor is it necessary for the courts to derive our rights from the short list in the Bill of Rights.
For this reason alone, Alberto Gonzalez should be driven from office, since he is deliberately undermining the constitution he swore to uphold. Then, for his support for torture, he should be tried and imprisoned for crimes against humanity.
Nope. When you check out, you cash in your chips, with a decent provision for the widows and kiddies.
There are two values that must be balanced: people should be rewarded for their industriousness and innovation, so society should encourage competition. But that race will not go to the swiftest if some start closer to the finish line than others because they were given a massive head start that they did nothing to earn. Don't lecture me about the beauty of a set of differential equations when the boundary conditions are rigged.
I have no problem at all with wealth. But inherited wealth is a deadweight on society.
Because income taxes are levied based on the rate at which you acquire wealth, while having little impact on those sitting on huge piles of unproductive assets. So those who have, keep having. Those who are getting, pay high marginal taxes. And those who don't have, well, they're already SOL. This leads to a society with a hereditary plutocracy and a huge underclass, with little class mobility. Been to Brazil? That's what the current system converges towards.
I grew up in near-poverty and my PNW is now somewhere north of $2M. I earned every penny of it. So, though I'm not rolling in it, I've got some skin in this game. I guess that puts me in the low-to-mid-bourgeoisie. Throughout my career I've been forced to deal with parasites, hangers-on, boss's sons-in-law and (as they say) those who were born on third base and act like they hit a triple. And I fully believe that those who earn good money should pay a higher marginal rate of tax than those who don't. And I pay more property tax than my neighbors whose houses are worth less than mine, and that's fine. And, having attended a private university with the children of the well-off, it didn't escape my notice that unearned money was a largely destructive, corrupting force in their lives. You make it sound like the nasty government is seizing our precious money and dumping it into a shredder. But that's not what happens. They spend it. I don't like where they spend a lot of it, but I'd rather see it go towards universal single-payer healthcare, or fixing potholes, than for it to go from dead granny the successful dentist to Chadwick the trustafarian to Chad's coke dealer to the Cali Cartel.
Me, I'd limit intergenerational inheritance to, say, two sigmas above the median income. That's about what my kids will be getting from us. The rest is going to be given away to various charitable organizations whose aims you are likely not to approve of. And it's not that I don't love my kids. It's that the most disastrous things you can give your children are complacency and a sense of entitlement.
Anyway, for the most part, the very wealthy respect no national boundaries and give l
Agnosticism was an attempt to soften the absolutist tone of atheism. The position was that there's little or (more likely) no credible evidence supporting the existence of a deity, but it's logically difficult to prove a negative, so there's always going to be a provisional element in such a judgement. This is very different from a position of being undecided. It's quite possible to be agnostic but to believe that the evidence in support of atheism is somewhere between "beyond a reasonable doubt" and "beyond the shadow of a doubt." But if a deity showed up tomorrow and bought me a Guinness, or unzipped the sky from the horizon, the preponderance of evidence would shift. Meanwhile, I'm not going to be out slaughtering ruminants on the solstice Just In Case. Pascal's Wager doesn't make sense when you have mutually contradictory religious beliefs to choose from.