Yes, but to be clear, they are saying that this one is not only going to bust, it is going to be worse because there is less fundamental real value.
From what are you deriving your analysis that the tech industry of today has less fundamental real value than in the first dot com era? Given that it's/., I'm guessing your statement is rectally-originated, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.
The real difference of today is that a lot of these companies actually DO have real value. 9- or 10-figure IPOs in 1999 were not unheard of, and they were happening for businesses that not only had no revenue streams, but had no plans for making revenue. The scale on which these companies operated could not be justified with the size of the potential customer base -- the number of millions of people online at the time could be counted on two hands, which makes selling a billion dollars of pet supplies in a year a rather daunting feat. The industry has changed, drastically, since then. Most of the money is around online marketing, which has a good reach, now that potential audiences are measured in billions, not millions. Microtransactions are now capable of supporting a multi-billion dollar operation. This was unheard of over 10 years ago.
This is not to say there won't be another tech bubble. It is legitimately scary when you consider the exuberance around a handful of companies whose path to money is sketchy at best. However, we'll see how severe the bubble is -- there is less investment money to go around, IPOs aren't popping out of thin air, and a very healthy portion of the companies in the general sector are at a minimum cash-positive.
Plateaus in innovation are natural. People aged 25-40 are your drivers of innovation. On a macro scale, the more brain power you put toward solving problems, the more innovation will result.
We have to look at what public policy has done to our ability to innovate. We've all but squashed our own entrepreneurial spirit through a variety of taxes, regulations, and attempts at social engineering. As control over industry goes up, only the big fish can survive. Corporate tax rates are obscene, and put small businesses at a real disadvantage. Taxes cut into a business' margins so drastically that the only way to make a business viable, outside of cheating on your taxes, is to operate on such an enormous scale that you make up for your margins in volume. Advantage: mega-corporations. With a quasi-monopoly, a company no longer is required to innovate its practices or its products. They can just keep selling the same cheap crap, because nobody can overcome the barriers to entry in order to mount a reasonable challenge.
Also, consider that we currently have a lot of brains engaged in solving non-technical problems. GE, for example, has a staff of 970 tax attorneys, whose sole charter is to optimize their tax bill by utilizing overseas tax shelters and the like. That represents a lot of powerful brain cycles effectively being flushed down the toilet.
Certainly there are still a great number of entrepreneurs out there, and companies like Apple are defying the trend of tech innovation. However, we should realize they are outliers, last vestiges of a bygone era, and not representative of the future. The first step to changing course is to identify policies that may be stifling us, and alter them.
If you were to just stick with #1, it would be a much better policy. As another reply had stated, taxing gross revenue would pretty much kill a great number of businesses.
However, there is nothing to say we can't put a tax on imported services and products (including in-house payrolls). Or, change accounting P & L regulations, so that only a percentage of overseas costs can be charged against revenue when calculating profit -- this would probably be the more palatable option, as it would stand less of a chance of violating any trade agreements, and the percentage scale could slide as the economic climate dictates.
Remember, it wouldn't take much to have companies in other countries using us as their tax shelter, nor does it take much to swing the flow of offshored jobs back into this country. All told, in spite of the huge difference in wages, offshoring jobs doesn't save a company so much money that there's nothing which would bring the jobs back. If you remember, back in 2008 when fuel prices were going through the roof, manufacturing had started to shift back from overseas to the US. A shift in tax policy would have a similar effect, I would guess.
Nothing slams the minds of the Slashdot masses shut like an article that finds similarities between faith and science.
Of course there is an element of belief involved in all science. You say "science delivers," but that's only because you implicitly put trust in your own senses and memories. Like it or not, you are still making a fundamental leap of faith to accept what you perceive to be the world around you. Even throwing out the "we don't see, touch, or feel the real experiments" argument, the demonstrableness and repeatability of science are predicated on the fact that we trust our own perceptions to be what reality is. Yet human perception and memory has proven to be incredibly fallible, be it through chemical inducement, electromagnetic interference, or disorder of the brain. If we are aware that our own minds are fallible, then trusting what we see does require a leap of faith, even if it is one we have taken for granted since birth.
This is all part of negotiation strategy. Amazon wants a favorable deal, so they're going to press forward. Recording companies are going to tread lightly here, because Amazon represents significant enough portion of those companies' revenue to be in a good bargaining position. It may seem unfathomable, but what if Amazon put the nuclear option on the table -- this is the way we're going to do it, and if you don't like it then we'll pull every single one of your products, all the way from CDs and DVDs to Kiss Army collectors' plates -- from our store. Do you really think the recording companies wouldn't blink first then? In the end, Amazon could walk out of this not only with still not having to expand their licensing agreements, but with a better share of the music they sell.
The best bet is actually to start saving and lower consumption over all.
I wonder if you recognize the irony of using electricity strictly for recreational purposes in order to suggest that people need to lower their electricity consumption.
And who will by the cheap Chines crap, then? Anything the Chinese do to cripple the West will come back on them. Unless their own people are granted liberty and upward mobility, they will not be able to sustain their economy through domestic purchasing. And if that does happens, their own producer prices will go through the roof, which opens up opportunity for production around the rest of the world.
Unless the Chinese government sees fit to raise the status of its own people, none of what you say shall come to pass.
OK. And even in the author's "Golden Age," the same things occurred.
You focus on extensions of Internet/web functionality, but ignore the overriding fact that there are orders of magnitude more pieces of freely-available content on the net today than we had in the "good ol' days."
Today, we can find practically any information we want on Wikipedia. We can watch TV shows and listen to music for free. Gigs and gigs of free e-mail and file storage are available through Google and Yahoo. And so one.
Yet there is lament for a better time, when downstream connections were measured in kilobits, and forum software was considered high technology.
"For-profit schools carry a stigma in some eyes because of their reputation for hard sales pitches, aggressive marketing tactics, and saddling students with big loans for dubious degrees or certificates."
I'm failing to see the distinction between for-profit schools and not-for-profit schools here.
If I'm in the same market as some other company, and the other company's production costs are higher than mine, that's really not my problem.
That aside, it still seems like a bit of a silly argument to me. Just because someone puts out some 3-dollar game that is worth just that, does not diminish the value of a more feature-rich game. If a game is worth 50 bucks to me, I'll lay down the 50 bucks. That has more to do with the individual game than what Angry Birds is going for. At least for the time being. I will admit that there is a psychological component to price ranges. However, I don't think many, if any, people equivocate simple mobile apps with bigger, richer console games.
It's fallacious to think you *need* the piece of paper. It may close a few doors, but there are still plenty of opportunities out there. Particularly in IT, which is mildly ironic since it's considered a "knowledge work" industry. Don't take this to mean that you shouldn't finish school (don't mean to be presumptuous about whatever your situation may be), but also don't consider it a death sentence should you choose your own path.
Because so many people go to college, curricula are dumbed-down to appease the masses. Universities want to be seen as paragons of learning. However, so many kids go to college for no other reason than because they feel compelled to do so, in order to prepare them for the working world. The providers are pushing knowledge for the sake of gaining knowledge, but the consumers are looking for job training. This is a big dislocation -- the majority of students do not have any interest in the core competencies of the university system, and the university system is ill-equipped to provide what much of their market demands (how many CS or IS grads come and work in your companies and have to unlearn just about everything they've learned over the previous four years?).
The notion that white-collar training should come from college should be obsolete. Reviving and expanding vocational training would have a positive effect on higher education. Take skill set programs, such as IS (not CS though), accounting, and (especially) management, just to name a few, out of the college system, and put them into a more vocation-oriented education system. You'd end up with happier students, more appropriately-focused universities, and a workforce whose younger members are more prepared to be productive.
We do have SOME control over it. As we should. That doesn't mean we should be able to dictate business conditions in their entirety.
In the case of net neutrality, we're talking about demanding regulation to address a problem that does not yet exist. The only thing you invite in such a strategy is a host of unintended consequences. It's much more efficient to wait for Comcast or some other provider to try to pull some sneaky BS, and then pull the plug on it.
That particular court was pretty much an arm of FDR's administration. They took his agenda as marching orders, granting him de facto dictatorial powers. After all, they also upheld his decision to inter over 100,000 innocent US citizens against their wills, simply because of how they looked. As much as we all complain about the government, nothing bad the modern federal government has come close to the abuses of power we had under FDR, particularly in his later terms.
Just because they put broad terminology in their charter doesn't mean they are magically imbued with limitless power over any domain encapsulated by that terminology.
The FCC regulates the communications that utilize resources that are owned and operated by the federal government. That's where their authority begins and ends. That's why radio and TV (over the air) can be regulated by the FCC, while satellite and cable are not.
I have every intention of ending world hunger. Do I get a prize, too?
If it seemed like you were 60% towards that goal, and giving you the Nobel Peace Prize would push you over the hump and give you the political capital to get you much nearer to 100%, they would probably give it to you.
60% toward the goal? According to whom? Using what as a measurement? If we're 60% toward a nuclear-free and war-free world by virtue of a few Obama speeches that have been largely ignored by the parties we most need to sway, then that leaves a pretty huge to-do list to get the other 40%. Do you work in the Obama administration, or are you just a bumper-sticker toting drone?
Mindless rhetoric is not "progress." There was a time when the Nobel honored achievement. Now it's just yet another meaningless piece of hardware, up there with last place kids' soccer trophies and Golden Globe awards.
Perhaps in a world where the insurance industry wasn't heavily regulated, I could see this happening. However, while insurance companies enjoy the benefit of compulsory customers, they also have the drawback of having a government entity telling them what they can and can't cover, and what they can and can't charge.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but to be clear, they are saying that this one is not only going to bust, it is going to be worse because there is less fundamental real value.
From what are you deriving your analysis that the tech industry of today has less fundamental real value than in the first dot com era? Given that it's /., I'm guessing your statement is rectally-originated, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.
The real difference of today is that a lot of these companies actually DO have real value. 9- or 10-figure IPOs in 1999 were not unheard of, and they were happening for businesses that not only had no revenue streams, but had no plans for making revenue. The scale on which these companies operated could not be justified with the size of the potential customer base -- the number of millions of people online at the time could be counted on two hands, which makes selling a billion dollars of pet supplies in a year a rather daunting feat. The industry has changed, drastically, since then. Most of the money is around online marketing, which has a good reach, now that potential audiences are measured in billions, not millions. Microtransactions are now capable of supporting a multi-billion dollar operation. This was unheard of over 10 years ago.
This is not to say there won't be another tech bubble. It is legitimately scary when you consider the exuberance around a handful of companies whose path to money is sketchy at best. However, we'll see how severe the bubble is -- there is less investment money to go around, IPOs aren't popping out of thin air, and a very healthy portion of the companies in the general sector are at a minimum cash-positive.
> you hate non-competes
> you'd still sign one anyway
facepalm.jpg
I hate waking up early. Yet I do anyway. Because I like being employed.
but I'm just going to take it to Fark.
Plateaus in innovation are natural. People aged 25-40 are your drivers of innovation. On a macro scale, the more brain power you put toward solving problems, the more innovation will result.
We have to look at what public policy has done to our ability to innovate. We've all but squashed our own entrepreneurial spirit through a variety of taxes, regulations, and attempts at social engineering. As control over industry goes up, only the big fish can survive. Corporate tax rates are obscene, and put small businesses at a real disadvantage. Taxes cut into a business' margins so drastically that the only way to make a business viable, outside of cheating on your taxes, is to operate on such an enormous scale that you make up for your margins in volume. Advantage: mega-corporations. With a quasi-monopoly, a company no longer is required to innovate its practices or its products. They can just keep selling the same cheap crap, because nobody can overcome the barriers to entry in order to mount a reasonable challenge.
Also, consider that we currently have a lot of brains engaged in solving non-technical problems. GE, for example, has a staff of 970 tax attorneys, whose sole charter is to optimize their tax bill by utilizing overseas tax shelters and the like. That represents a lot of powerful brain cycles effectively being flushed down the toilet.
Certainly there are still a great number of entrepreneurs out there, and companies like Apple are defying the trend of tech innovation. However, we should realize they are outliers, last vestiges of a bygone era, and not representative of the future. The first step to changing course is to identify policies that may be stifling us, and alter them.
If you were to just stick with #1, it would be a much better policy. As another reply had stated, taxing gross revenue would pretty much kill a great number of businesses.
However, there is nothing to say we can't put a tax on imported services and products (including in-house payrolls). Or, change accounting P & L regulations, so that only a percentage of overseas costs can be charged against revenue when calculating profit -- this would probably be the more palatable option, as it would stand less of a chance of violating any trade agreements, and the percentage scale could slide as the economic climate dictates.
Remember, it wouldn't take much to have companies in other countries using us as their tax shelter, nor does it take much to swing the flow of offshored jobs back into this country. All told, in spite of the huge difference in wages, offshoring jobs doesn't save a company so much money that there's nothing which would bring the jobs back. If you remember, back in 2008 when fuel prices were going through the roof, manufacturing had started to shift back from overseas to the US. A shift in tax policy would have a similar effect, I would guess.
...then Internet2 has delivered.
Nothing slams the minds of the Slashdot masses shut like an article that finds similarities between faith and science.
Of course there is an element of belief involved in all science. You say "science delivers," but that's only because you implicitly put trust in your own senses and memories. Like it or not, you are still making a fundamental leap of faith to accept what you perceive to be the world around you. Even throwing out the "we don't see, touch, or feel the real experiments" argument, the demonstrableness and repeatability of science are predicated on the fact that we trust our own perceptions to be what reality is. Yet human perception and memory has proven to be incredibly fallible, be it through chemical inducement, electromagnetic interference, or disorder of the brain. If we are aware that our own minds are fallible, then trusting what we see does require a leap of faith, even if it is one we have taken for granted since birth.
Funny, I always took you for a Laterran.
Also, "when will your next album be released?"
I'm interested to see what that's all about. Please, please, please bring back ",8,1"
Not sure why this surprises you.
This is all part of negotiation strategy. Amazon wants a favorable deal, so they're going to press forward. Recording companies are going to tread lightly here, because Amazon represents significant enough portion of those companies' revenue to be in a good bargaining position. It may seem unfathomable, but what if Amazon put the nuclear option on the table -- this is the way we're going to do it, and if you don't like it then we'll pull every single one of your products, all the way from CDs and DVDs to Kiss Army collectors' plates -- from our store. Do you really think the recording companies wouldn't blink first then? In the end, Amazon could walk out of this not only with still not having to expand their licensing agreements, but with a better share of the music they sell.
Remember this: The single-worst nuclear accident in human history was not on the watch of a corporation.
The best bet is actually to start saving and lower consumption over all.
I wonder if you recognize the irony of using electricity strictly for recreational purposes in order to suggest that people need to lower their electricity consumption.
And who will by the cheap Chines crap, then? Anything the Chinese do to cripple the West will come back on them. Unless their own people are granted liberty and upward mobility, they will not be able to sustain their economy through domestic purchasing. And if that does happens, their own producer prices will go through the roof, which opens up opportunity for production around the rest of the world.
Unless the Chinese government sees fit to raise the status of its own people, none of what you say shall come to pass.
OK. And even in the author's "Golden Age," the same things occurred.
You focus on extensions of Internet/web functionality, but ignore the overriding fact that there are orders of magnitude more pieces of freely-available content on the net today than we had in the "good ol' days."
Today, we can find practically any information we want on Wikipedia. We can watch TV shows and listen to music for free. Gigs and gigs of free e-mail and file storage are available through Google and Yahoo. And so one.
Yet there is lament for a better time, when downstream connections were measured in kilobits, and forum software was considered high technology.
"For-profit schools carry a stigma in some eyes because of their reputation for hard sales pitches, aggressive marketing tactics, and saddling students with big loans for dubious degrees or certificates."
I'm failing to see the distinction between for-profit schools and not-for-profit schools here.
Eh, not really.
If I'm in the same market as some other company, and the other company's production costs are higher than mine, that's really not my problem.
That aside, it still seems like a bit of a silly argument to me. Just because someone puts out some 3-dollar game that is worth just that, does not diminish the value of a more feature-rich game. If a game is worth 50 bucks to me, I'll lay down the 50 bucks. That has more to do with the individual game than what Angry Birds is going for. At least for the time being. I will admit that there is a psychological component to price ranges. However, I don't think many, if any, people equivocate simple mobile apps with bigger, richer console games.
It's fallacious to think you *need* the piece of paper. It may close a few doors, but there are still plenty of opportunities out there. Particularly in IT, which is mildly ironic since it's considered a "knowledge work" industry. Don't take this to mean that you shouldn't finish school (don't mean to be presumptuous about whatever your situation may be), but also don't consider it a death sentence should you choose your own path.
Because so many people go to college, curricula are dumbed-down to appease the masses. Universities want to be seen as paragons of learning. However, so many kids go to college for no other reason than because they feel compelled to do so, in order to prepare them for the working world. The providers are pushing knowledge for the sake of gaining knowledge, but the consumers are looking for job training. This is a big dislocation -- the majority of students do not have any interest in the core competencies of the university system, and the university system is ill-equipped to provide what much of their market demands (how many CS or IS grads come and work in your companies and have to unlearn just about everything they've learned over the previous four years?).
The notion that white-collar training should come from college should be obsolete. Reviving and expanding vocational training would have a positive effect on higher education. Take skill set programs, such as IS (not CS though), accounting, and (especially) management, just to name a few, out of the college system, and put them into a more vocation-oriented education system. You'd end up with happier students, more appropriately-focused universities, and a workforce whose younger members are more prepared to be productive.
We do have SOME control over it. As we should. That doesn't mean we should be able to dictate business conditions in their entirety.
In the case of net neutrality, we're talking about demanding regulation to address a problem that does not yet exist. The only thing you invite in such a strategy is a host of unintended consequences. It's much more efficient to wait for Comcast or some other provider to try to pull some sneaky BS, and then pull the plug on it.
That particular court was pretty much an arm of FDR's administration. They took his agenda as marching orders, granting him de facto dictatorial powers. After all, they also upheld his decision to inter over 100,000 innocent US citizens against their wills, simply because of how they looked. As much as we all complain about the government, nothing bad the modern federal government has come close to the abuses of power we had under FDR, particularly in his later terms.
Just because they put broad terminology in their charter doesn't mean they are magically imbued with limitless power over any domain encapsulated by that terminology.
The FCC regulates the communications that utilize resources that are owned and operated by the federal government. That's where their authority begins and ends. That's why radio and TV (over the air) can be regulated by the FCC, while satellite and cable are not.
I have every intention of ending world hunger. Do I get a prize, too?
If it seemed like you were 60% towards that goal, and giving you the Nobel Peace Prize would push you over the hump and give you the political capital to get you much nearer to 100%, they would probably give it to you.
60% toward the goal? According to whom? Using what as a measurement? If we're 60% toward a nuclear-free and war-free world by virtue of a few Obama speeches that have been largely ignored by the parties we most need to sway, then that leaves a pretty huge to-do list to get the other 40%. Do you work in the Obama administration, or are you just a bumper-sticker toting drone?
Mindless rhetoric is not "progress." There was a time when the Nobel honored achievement. Now it's just yet another meaningless piece of hardware, up there with last place kids' soccer trophies and Golden Globe awards.
I have every intention of ending world hunger. Do I get a prize, too?
Perhaps in a world where the insurance industry wasn't heavily regulated, I could see this happening. However, while insurance companies enjoy the benefit of compulsory customers, they also have the drawback of having a government entity telling them what they can and can't cover, and what they can and can't charge.