Exactly. The deal here is that Netflix is paying for very low quality bandwidth (Cogent) and now they want AT&T to give them higher quality bandwidth for free.
You can buy dedicated bandwidth - that's what businesses buy, and it costs far more. What consumers buy is peak bandwidth.
The difference is:
Dedicated bandwidth is expensive, business-class service (i.e. what you buy if you run a real content site). If you buy 20 Mbps, you own the 20 Mbps and nothing can interfere with it. And you pay 100% of the cost for that capacity, whether you use it or not, because that's the cost of reserving the capacity on the ISP's network. And if you go over 20 Mbps you pay for the overage.
Shared bandwidht is cheap, consumer-grade service (i.e. what you get for $29/month). If you buy 20 Mbps, that's peak bandwidth, so you can get *up to* 20 Mbps, but you're not guaranteed anything (i.e. no SLA, no penalty for outages, no guarantees at all). The reason that it's cheap is that it's shared bandwidth, meaning that if lots of people are using their bandwidth at the same time, their traffic can interfere with yours, so you get less performance.
If you want dedicated bandwidth, be prepared to pay for it, just like real businesses do. If you want cheap bandwidth, live with the trade-offs that keep prices low.
Wrong. Netflix is trying to get direct transit to AT&T customers FOR FREE FROM AT&T. Every other content company has to pay for transit to deliver their content, but Netflix thinks that they can use their market muscle to get preferential treatment, which is the opposite of Net Neutrality. Sleazy.
"AT&T can't meet their customer's demand so they are charging the other end (Netflix) for being too popular. Yeah that sounds about right."
OK so you don't understand how the internet works. AT&T has plenty of capacity. And as an ISP, they're in the business of getting paid to deliver bandwidth. Netflix buys cheap, low-quality bandwidth from Cogent, and now they're trying to force ISPs to give them direct transit (i.e. better performance than Cogent can provide) for free. If Netflix wants better performance, they can buy it like everyone else. Trying to use their market muscle to get better terms than anyone else isn't Net Neutrality, it's the OPPOSITE.
They're not asking Netflix to pay anything for transit that Netflix is buying through Cogent - they paid Cogent for that bandwidth.
AT&T is an ISP, who delivers bandwidth to customers. ISPs do peering arrangements with other ISPs because they exchange data with each other roughly equally, and it make more sense to exchange bi-directional traffic for free than to waste time and money billing each other for charges that would roughly cancel each other out.
Netflix is asking for a peering arrangement with AT&T. Netflix isn't an ISP, they are a content provider. Content providers pay their ISPs for transit to push data into the internet for delivery to consumers. And in particular, Netflix doesn't exchange balanced traffic with AT&T - they push a lot of traffic into AT&T's network, and don't receive any traffic, so it's a completely one-sided traffic flow. And that you pay for.
It's not an issue of Net Neutrality. Any content provider who wants bandwidth from an ISP pays for it. And there's no indication that AT&T is differentiating between Netflix' traffic and anyone else's, which is what Net Neutrality is about. If anything, Netflix is demanding preferential treatment over other content providers (who pay for bandwidth, and don't have peering arrangements), and they're trying to use their market power to push AT&T into giving them preferential treatment. Which is exactly the OPPOSITE of Net Neutrality.
Netflix isn't stupid - they know all this quite well. So Netflix wanting to peer with AT&T and talking about Net Neutrality is a bunch of BS hand-waving trying to trick non-technical people into complaining about AT&T, generating some faked-up bad PR to pressure AT&T to sell bandwidth to Netflix cheaper.
Everywhere I've lived, or had friends who homeschooled, the homeschooled kids have to follow the same state curriculum and pass the same state assessments (FCAT, NJASK, etc.) as the kids in public or private schools. So if they don't take it seriously enough to at least pass those (fairly easy) tests, the parents can get into serious trouble.
Nobody's exempt from NCLB, which is it's biggest flaw. Schools are now "failing" because there's a percentage of the students who have issues that prevent them from being able to function at grade level (don't speak English, dysfunctional family, mental or physical handicaps, etc.). Yes, they can get some accommodations, but 100% of the students are tested and have to pass when NCLB reaches its "goal". That's impossible, of course. IMO, the real goal of NCLB was to create an impossible standard by which all public schools are "failing" so the funding can get directed to religious and other private schools, and destroy public education. And because Congress is dysfunctional, there's no possibility that NCLB can be refined to be more reasonable, and to fund the schools properly to provide the (unfunded) services called for by the NCLB.
What I've seen with Common Core is that what they're teaching the kids generally makes sense if you think it through, but that it confuses the heck out of the parents because it changes everything so they have no idea what their kids are doing. I was a math major in college, and I had to spend a fair amount of time proving to myself that the "weird" techniques that my kids were taught actually work. A lot of it is incorporating what works in other countries, which can often be very, very different from traditional US math (for example), even though the principles are the same. For example, the techniques that they use to multiply and divide in Asia (where schools are highly effective) is utterly different from the US. But it works, and kids are successful using those techniques, so the "confusion" is the transition.
I will say that I've been through this transition twice now, and both times the school system managed the transition horribly. In two states (NJ and Florida) they changed all grades at the same time, switching kids from the old system to the new system, so every kid in every grade, and every teacher, all had a huge disconnect in their education, because they'd been told the old way in one grade, and then the new way in the next grade but didn't have any of the knowledge that they should have had from the previous year in the new system. Among other things, you had test scores plummet because kids were being tested on stuff they hadn't been taught, and were being taught new skills that were based on previous skills that they hadn't been taught. And both times the teachers hadn't been given enough training in the new system and its principles so they were following a new system by "rote" for a year while they figured it out. And the parents had no idea what was going on, just that their kids were confused, and that they couldn't help their kids.
Instead, what they should do is introduce the new system in first grade, then move it up a grade every year, so each generation of students has a consistent education. Yes, it'd take 12 years to transition, but it would be a coherent transition.
Modern construction codes, materials and techniques are more resistant to damage. So a moderate earthquake that flattened cities in the past, or in parts of the world that don't use those techniques and materials, would do minimal damage in the US now.
The people making that claim aren't climatologists, they are people in construction and disaster recovery, who deal with earthquakes, floods, etc., professionally.
Your example with the car is flawed. Cars now are designed to make it more likely for the car to be damaged, because the car is designed to absorb the impact in order to protect the passengers. This is different from 50 years ago, when cars were rigid and could survive minor impacts with no damage, but would transmit the impact to the passengers. The result of these changes (and related changes, such as safety belts and reduced maximum speed limits) is that mortality per mile travelled in US autos is rd what it was 50 years ago. And presumably human lives are worth more than car parts, so it's a net reduction in the "cost" of an accident.
But you did make your point - when one operates outside of one's area of expertise, one can make naive mistakes.
It's easy to say that "both sides do it" and I'm sure that you can find at least one example on each "side" if you try. But you shouldn't equate the two sides - global climate change is well established science, with some debate about the details. So while it's human nature to cherry pick facts to support you in a debate, in science ultimately that has no effect - the correctness of one's theory isn't based on "arguments", it is based on making predictions that are independently verified by people challenging the theory. And the science all seems to solidly support the theory that global climate change is going on, and that human behavior (e.g. radically increased CO2 emissions) is a major factor. And so far there doesn't seem to be any solid science on the other side, just some debate about details.
Like, for example, the 538 article, which actually SUPPORTS global climate change, but raises questions about the short-term cost impact. They didn't cherry pick, as I read it, but they may have done too naive an analysis, missing factors that other analysis have taken into account, so when they disagreed with the other analysis that might be cause of flaws in the 538 article's analysis rather than the others.
The reason for obesity is that even though everyone agrees that obesity leads to heart attacks is that some of the "stakeholders", specifically the food companies, value ROI over customer health. So they specifically engineer foods that maximize sales and minimize cost, even though it's terrible for their customers, and they market it extremely aggressively. The end result is that the food you buy is generally much worse for you than 50 years ago, because it's full of fat and salt and non-natural ingredients that are often bad for you, is that people get fat, have high blood pressure, etc. For example, hydrogenated oils are very bad for people to consume, but they save manufacturers a few cents per product, so they replaced natural oils with hydrogenated oils, saving money but killing customers. Unfortunately the food companies generally get away with it, because they only care about whether their products are killing their customers if they actually lose lawsuits that cost them money, and they have massive legal budgets, and can always argue that theoretically people could all avoid buying the deadly stuff the food company sells by reading the labels carefully enough. Of course, the manufacturers fight the labeling requirements because they don't want people to know what they're being given to eat, which is why (in the US) it was only a few decades ago that you could even find out what ingredients and nutritional content were in the food you buy, and you still can't find out whether you're eating genetically modified food. And, of course, the food companies have stunningly high marketing budgets to get people to buy their products, in contrast to the $0B marketing budget for healthy food.
Outside of the US, many cars run on a wide range of fuels (diesel, ethanol, kerosene, etc.). It's really only in the US that everyone buys cars that refuse to run except on auto-grade gasoline. Works well for the oil companies, eh?
I've seen some electric vehicles at traditional dealers, and the salespeople seem to want to sell them, and are happy to explain them. But they have a challenge that a broad product line with gas, hybrid and EV cars is complex to explain. And so far the EV cars from the traditional car companies don't seem to be as well done as the Tesla.
I suspect that part of the issue is that Tesla doesn't want to pay the huge markup, which would either inflate the car's price or wipe out Tesla's profits. Their model of taking orders and building custom cars for each buyer is much more efficient, because not only do you give each buyer exactly what they want, but you don't have a bunch of pre-built cars tying up capital. The only down-side is that you can't walk out with a car the day you walk in, though I'd think anyone spending that much money isn't doing so on impulse.
The law in NJ was written in other ways to keep Tesla out. For example, the "dealership" is required to have lots of square footage and an inventory of cars on-hand to sell. But Tesla's model is to custom build each car exactly to the buyer's specifications and delivery it to them, so they don't need or want to have an inventory of pre-built cars to sell since they won't be exactly what anyone wants (except by chance). At most they would want to have a car or two on the floor for people to look at and a car or two to test drive, but they wouldn't want to sell them.
Good point. Once music companies realized that new forms of distribution were important they started writing contracts more broadly even though they didn't know what would come along. There's an amusing story of one band who's contract licensed the music for distribution anywhere on Earth, so the band bounced their album off of the moon (laser at moon, re-digitized via telescope) to get out of the contract. Which worked, because the moon wasn't on Earth. So contracts started putting in crazy phrases like "distributed through any means, known or unknown, anywhere in the known or unknown Universe". Must have been a weird time to be a lawyer. That was all well before iTunes - the same sorts of issues came up every time there's a new format - when cassettes came out, and CDs, some old contracts had to be renegotiated. The trick with digital distribution was that there's no physical product, so the legal definition of a sale via iTunes has to be defined, and covering terms for "purchased", "rented" and "streamed", which all have different terms and pricing, none of which was in a contract from the 80s. So when I was in music ten years ago, digital distribution for pretty much every single album in the back catalog required clearance, requiring someone to track down the current rights holder and negotiate a new contract. This kept huge teams of people busy doing detective work, trying to figure out who had the rights to (for example) a jazz album from 60 years ago where the artist, agent, etc., are no longer living, or a band that split up and the legal status between the members was murky, etc. So it's only easy for the music labels to do digital distribution deals now because they spent over a decade chasing this sort of thing down and getting new contracts signed.
Easy. The economics of journals and textbooks are completely different.
Journals are cheap to produce magazines where the publisher's goal is subscribers, so individual copies don't matter much economically. And they're cheap to convert to ePub because the formatting doesn't matter so much (typically).
Textbooks are huge, expensively produced content very precisely formatted and can't simply be re-flowed into ePub because the result (after some publishers tried this with Amazon a few years ago) was completely unusable by students. For example, when a professor tells you to look at the diagram on the right column on page 47, in an ePub it would be on a random page (wherever the reader's screen size, text size, etc., flowed it). So textbook publishers that produce digital textbooks have to invested a great deal of effort making a digital textbook that's essentially a content-oriented software application sold to students. And they get paid by students buying the textbook, not by subscribers, so every copy matters.
So as a result, journals are much more open to digital distribution, allowing previews, etc., while textbooks are much more locked-down.
I worked in the music industry (in IT). I have no idea where the idea came from that the music publishers didn't have to renegotiate contracts to get digital rights to the music. In reality, when digital rights became important, the music companies spent a huge amount of time and money having teams for at least a decade tracking down rights-holders and negotiating digital rights in order to sell their back catalog, and of course made sure that their new contracts covered selling through the digital service providers. Book publishers have essentially the same legal challenge (though admittedly the details are different).
What is really different is the production logistics.
Music has been digitally produced for a very long time, using open standard formats, and for pre-digital material it's relatively easy to digitize audio (and video) from master tapes, so you only need to do "work" to deal with some very old, obscure media, which is only done selectively. And the music publishers have built systems that are very, very good at managing and format converting huge libraries of audio and video. So, 99% of the time, digitally selling back-catalog music and video is logistically fairly easy - QA, package, price, and send the files to the digital service providers.
Books, however, have been authored in a series of random formats, and for older books there's only the physical book or manuscript and nothing digital. Which means that you often need to physically scan every page in the book/manuscript, OCR it, clean it up, QA the result, etc. And even for the digitally authored books, you need to track down whatever specific physical media and formats each publisher or author used (MacAuthor on 3.5" floppy, LaTeX, MS Word 3 on 5.25" floppy, etc.). So, overall, physically and logistically really complex to deal with for every single back-catalog book.
Look at what Project Gutenberg has produced - an amazing collection, but it required a massive investment of (volunteer) effort to process the books into digital formats.
Actually, it's running break-even as it's supposed to. While the Baby Boomers were working it accumulated a surplus, and now the Baby Boomers are retiring so they're consuming the surplus. But they worked out the math decades ago and it's proceeding as planned - the system is fine. It's possible that there might need to be a few percent adjustment in a decade or two (e.g. raise the cap on taxable income, or cut benefits slightly). But that's nothing to get worked up about, unless your goal is to lie to people to panic them so that you can destroy social security because your goal is social insecurity.
Luckily the people running the social security system are responsible adults who know math, so they saved up the surplus paid in during the years the Baby Boomers were working, so there's money there to pay out their retirement benefits.
Yes, anyone who thought that they could give away the money (e.g. Bush, Jr.) instead of saving it was an idiot.
It turns out that in practice, the smaller units of government are far more corrupt than the larger ones, because there's less oversight. Sure, corruption at the federal level gets news coverage, and it should. But if you knew what was going on at the state and local levels, you'd be horrified. But they usually get away with it, because the press has been nearly wiped out at the local and regional level, and the police aren't going to challenge the politically powerful most of the time. Look at, for example, NJ, Nevada, Texas, Arizona, Pennsylvania - a series of amazingly corrupt schemes that made individual politicians, police, etc., rich but destroyed the victim's lives. And there's almost no enforcement of anti-corruption laws except at the federal level - according to http://web.missouri.edu/~milyo... 95% of corruption arrests are made by federal prosecutors (NB: often of state or local officials), meaning that local corruption can fly "under the radar" much more easily than federal corruption.
The problem with your analysis is that the money isn't going to the poor majority, it's largely going to the already well off middle class and rich minority.
No. People who survive to retire collect more than they paid in, but that's paid for by people who die and thus don't collect anything. The total expenditures balance against payments, and don't require the population to be growing at all. The only ratio that has to hold is the ratio between people's working lifespan and their retired lifespan, which hasn't really changed ever. The increase in average lifespan is almost entirely driven by improved infant mortality rates; people who live to retirement live about as long now, on average, as they did 30 years ago, so the money paid in vs. paid out hasn't changed over the long term.
What did happen is that the baby boomers were a large bump in population, so as they were all working social security accumulated a huge surplus (because there were a "surplus" of people working), which is being paid out as those people retire (and there is a "surplus" of people retired), but neither of those changed the long term finances of social security, which is in (surprise) in fine shape, because the people who run the social security system are responsible people who plan decades ahead for these things because they have to.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I built that network, it grew to over 150m users, and was acquired. :-)
Exactly. The deal here is that Netflix is paying for very low quality bandwidth (Cogent) and now they want AT&T to give them higher quality bandwidth for free.
You can buy dedicated bandwidth - that's what businesses buy, and it costs far more. What consumers buy is peak bandwidth.
The difference is:
Dedicated bandwidth is expensive, business-class service (i.e. what you buy if you run a real content site). If you buy 20 Mbps, you own the 20 Mbps and nothing can interfere with it. And you pay 100% of the cost for that capacity, whether you use it or not, because that's the cost of reserving the capacity on the ISP's network. And if you go over 20 Mbps you pay for the overage.
Shared bandwidht is cheap, consumer-grade service (i.e. what you get for $29/month). If you buy 20 Mbps, that's peak bandwidth, so you can get *up to* 20 Mbps, but you're not guaranteed anything (i.e. no SLA, no penalty for outages, no guarantees at all). The reason that it's cheap is that it's shared bandwidth, meaning that if lots of people are using their bandwidth at the same time, their traffic can interfere with yours, so you get less performance.
If you want dedicated bandwidth, be prepared to pay for it, just like real businesses do. If you want cheap bandwidth, live with the trade-offs that keep prices low.
Wrong. Netflix is trying to get direct transit to AT&T customers FOR FREE FROM AT&T. Every other content company has to pay for transit to deliver their content, but Netflix thinks that they can use their market muscle to get preferential treatment, which is the opposite of Net Neutrality. Sleazy.
"AT&T can't meet their customer's demand so they are charging the other end (Netflix) for being too popular. Yeah that sounds about right."
OK so you don't understand how the internet works. AT&T has plenty of capacity. And as an ISP, they're in the business of getting paid to deliver bandwidth. Netflix buys cheap, low-quality bandwidth from Cogent, and now they're trying to force ISPs to give them direct transit (i.e. better performance than Cogent can provide) for free. If Netflix wants better performance, they can buy it like everyone else. Trying to use their market muscle to get better terms than anyone else isn't Net Neutrality, it's the OPPOSITE.
They're not asking Netflix to pay anything for transit that Netflix is buying through Cogent - they paid Cogent for that bandwidth.
AT&T is an ISP, who delivers bandwidth to customers. ISPs do peering arrangements with other ISPs because they exchange data with each other roughly equally, and it make more sense to exchange bi-directional traffic for free than to waste time and money billing each other for charges that would roughly cancel each other out.
Netflix is asking for a peering arrangement with AT&T. Netflix isn't an ISP, they are a content provider. Content providers pay their ISPs for transit to push data into the internet for delivery to consumers. And in particular, Netflix doesn't exchange balanced traffic with AT&T - they push a lot of traffic into AT&T's network, and don't receive any traffic, so it's a completely one-sided traffic flow. And that you pay for.
It's not an issue of Net Neutrality. Any content provider who wants bandwidth from an ISP pays for it. And there's no indication that AT&T is differentiating between Netflix' traffic and anyone else's, which is what Net Neutrality is about. If anything, Netflix is demanding preferential treatment over other content providers (who pay for bandwidth, and don't have peering arrangements), and they're trying to use their market power to push AT&T into giving them preferential treatment. Which is exactly the OPPOSITE of Net Neutrality.
Netflix isn't stupid - they know all this quite well. So Netflix wanting to peer with AT&T and talking about Net Neutrality is a bunch of BS hand-waving trying to trick non-technical people into complaining about AT&T, generating some faked-up bad PR to pressure AT&T to sell bandwidth to Netflix cheaper.
Everywhere I've lived, or had friends who homeschooled, the homeschooled kids have to follow the same state curriculum and pass the same state assessments (FCAT, NJASK, etc.) as the kids in public or private schools. So if they don't take it seriously enough to at least pass those (fairly easy) tests, the parents can get into serious trouble.
And with a very loose comprehension of German history.
Nobody's exempt from NCLB, which is it's biggest flaw. Schools are now "failing" because there's a percentage of the students who have issues that prevent them from being able to function at grade level (don't speak English, dysfunctional family, mental or physical handicaps, etc.). Yes, they can get some accommodations, but 100% of the students are tested and have to pass when NCLB reaches its "goal". That's impossible, of course. IMO, the real goal of NCLB was to create an impossible standard by which all public schools are "failing" so the funding can get directed to religious and other private schools, and destroy public education. And because Congress is dysfunctional, there's no possibility that NCLB can be refined to be more reasonable, and to fund the schools properly to provide the (unfunded) services called for by the NCLB.
"This is some serious confusion right here."
What I've seen with Common Core is that what they're teaching the kids generally makes sense if you think it through, but that it confuses the heck out of the parents because it changes everything so they have no idea what their kids are doing. I was a math major in college, and I had to spend a fair amount of time proving to myself that the "weird" techniques that my kids were taught actually work. A lot of it is incorporating what works in other countries, which can often be very, very different from traditional US math (for example), even though the principles are the same. For example, the techniques that they use to multiply and divide in Asia (where schools are highly effective) is utterly different from the US. But it works, and kids are successful using those techniques, so the "confusion" is the transition.
I will say that I've been through this transition twice now, and both times the school system managed the transition horribly. In two states (NJ and Florida) they changed all grades at the same time, switching kids from the old system to the new system, so every kid in every grade, and every teacher, all had a huge disconnect in their education, because they'd been told the old way in one grade, and then the new way in the next grade but didn't have any of the knowledge that they should have had from the previous year in the new system. Among other things, you had test scores plummet because kids were being tested on stuff they hadn't been taught, and were being taught new skills that were based on previous skills that they hadn't been taught. And both times the teachers hadn't been given enough training in the new system and its principles so they were following a new system by "rote" for a year while they figured it out. And the parents had no idea what was going on, just that their kids were confused, and that they couldn't help their kids.
Instead, what they should do is introduce the new system in first grade, then move it up a grade every year, so each generation of students has a consistent education. Yes, it'd take 12 years to transition, but it would be a coherent transition.
Modern construction codes, materials and techniques are more resistant to damage. So a moderate earthquake that flattened cities in the past, or in parts of the world that don't use those techniques and materials, would do minimal damage in the US now.
The people making that claim aren't climatologists, they are people in construction and disaster recovery, who deal with earthquakes, floods, etc., professionally.
Your example with the car is flawed. Cars now are designed to make it more likely for the car to be damaged, because the car is designed to absorb the impact in order to protect the passengers. This is different from 50 years ago, when cars were rigid and could survive minor impacts with no damage, but would transmit the impact to the passengers. The result of these changes (and related changes, such as safety belts and reduced maximum speed limits) is that mortality per mile travelled in US autos is rd what it was 50 years ago. And presumably human lives are worth more than car parts, so it's a net reduction in the "cost" of an accident.
But you did make your point - when one operates outside of one's area of expertise, one can make naive mistakes.
It's easy to say that "both sides do it" and I'm sure that you can find at least one example on each "side" if you try. But you shouldn't equate the two sides - global climate change is well established science, with some debate about the details. So while it's human nature to cherry pick facts to support you in a debate, in science ultimately that has no effect - the correctness of one's theory isn't based on "arguments", it is based on making predictions that are independently verified by people challenging the theory. And the science all seems to solidly support the theory that global climate change is going on, and that human behavior (e.g. radically increased CO2 emissions) is a major factor. And so far there doesn't seem to be any solid science on the other side, just some debate about details.
Like, for example, the 538 article, which actually SUPPORTS global climate change, but raises questions about the short-term cost impact. They didn't cherry pick, as I read it, but they may have done too naive an analysis, missing factors that other analysis have taken into account, so when they disagreed with the other analysis that might be cause of flaws in the 538 article's analysis rather than the others.
The reason for obesity is that even though everyone agrees that obesity leads to heart attacks is that some of the "stakeholders", specifically the food companies, value ROI over customer health. So they specifically engineer foods that maximize sales and minimize cost, even though it's terrible for their customers, and they market it extremely aggressively. The end result is that the food you buy is generally much worse for you than 50 years ago, because it's full of fat and salt and non-natural ingredients that are often bad for you, is that people get fat, have high blood pressure, etc. For example, hydrogenated oils are very bad for people to consume, but they save manufacturers a few cents per product, so they replaced natural oils with hydrogenated oils, saving money but killing customers. Unfortunately the food companies generally get away with it, because they only care about whether their products are killing their customers if they actually lose lawsuits that cost them money, and they have massive legal budgets, and can always argue that theoretically people could all avoid buying the deadly stuff the food company sells by reading the labels carefully enough. Of course, the manufacturers fight the labeling requirements because they don't want people to know what they're being given to eat, which is why (in the US) it was only a few decades ago that you could even find out what ingredients and nutritional content were in the food you buy, and you still can't find out whether you're eating genetically modified food. And, of course, the food companies have stunningly high marketing budgets to get people to buy their products, in contrast to the $0B marketing budget for healthy food.
Outside of the US, many cars run on a wide range of fuels (diesel, ethanol, kerosene, etc.). It's really only in the US that everyone buys cars that refuse to run except on auto-grade gasoline. Works well for the oil companies, eh?
I've seen some electric vehicles at traditional dealers, and the salespeople seem to want to sell them, and are happy to explain them. But they have a challenge that a broad product line with gas, hybrid and EV cars is complex to explain. And so far the EV cars from the traditional car companies don't seem to be as well done as the Tesla.
I suspect that part of the issue is that Tesla doesn't want to pay the huge markup, which would either inflate the car's price or wipe out Tesla's profits. Their model of taking orders and building custom cars for each buyer is much more efficient, because not only do you give each buyer exactly what they want, but you don't have a bunch of pre-built cars tying up capital. The only down-side is that you can't walk out with a car the day you walk in, though I'd think anyone spending that much money isn't doing so on impulse.
The law in NJ was written in other ways to keep Tesla out. For example, the "dealership" is required to have lots of square footage and an inventory of cars on-hand to sell. But Tesla's model is to custom build each car exactly to the buyer's specifications and delivery it to them, so they don't need or want to have an inventory of pre-built cars to sell since they won't be exactly what anyone wants (except by chance). At most they would want to have a car or two on the floor for people to look at and a car or two to test drive, but they wouldn't want to sell them.
Good point. Once music companies realized that new forms of distribution were important they started writing contracts more broadly even though they didn't know what would come along. There's an amusing story of one band who's contract licensed the music for distribution anywhere on Earth, so the band bounced their album off of the moon (laser at moon, re-digitized via telescope) to get out of the contract. Which worked, because the moon wasn't on Earth. So contracts started putting in crazy phrases like "distributed through any means, known or unknown, anywhere in the known or unknown Universe". Must have been a weird time to be a lawyer. That was all well before iTunes - the same sorts of issues came up every time there's a new format - when cassettes came out, and CDs, some old contracts had to be renegotiated. The trick with digital distribution was that there's no physical product, so the legal definition of a sale via iTunes has to be defined, and covering terms for "purchased", "rented" and "streamed", which all have different terms and pricing, none of which was in a contract from the 80s. So when I was in music ten years ago, digital distribution for pretty much every single album in the back catalog required clearance, requiring someone to track down the current rights holder and negotiate a new contract. This kept huge teams of people busy doing detective work, trying to figure out who had the rights to (for example) a jazz album from 60 years ago where the artist, agent, etc., are no longer living, or a band that split up and the legal status between the members was murky, etc. So it's only easy for the music labels to do digital distribution deals now because they spent over a decade chasing this sort of thing down and getting new contracts signed.
Easy. The economics of journals and textbooks are completely different.
Journals are cheap to produce magazines where the publisher's goal is subscribers, so individual copies don't matter much economically. And they're cheap to convert to ePub because the formatting doesn't matter so much (typically).
Textbooks are huge, expensively produced content very precisely formatted and can't simply be re-flowed into ePub because the result (after some publishers tried this with Amazon a few years ago) was completely unusable by students. For example, when a professor tells you to look at the diagram on the right column on page 47, in an ePub it would be on a random page (wherever the reader's screen size, text size, etc., flowed it). So textbook publishers that produce digital textbooks have to invested a great deal of effort making a digital textbook that's essentially a content-oriented software application sold to students. And they get paid by students buying the textbook, not by subscribers, so every copy matters.
So as a result, journals are much more open to digital distribution, allowing previews, etc., while textbooks are much more locked-down.
I worked in the music industry (in IT). I have no idea where the idea came from that the music publishers didn't have to renegotiate contracts to get digital rights to the music. In reality, when digital rights became important, the music companies spent a huge amount of time and money having teams for at least a decade tracking down rights-holders and negotiating digital rights in order to sell their back catalog, and of course made sure that their new contracts covered selling through the digital service providers. Book publishers have essentially the same legal challenge (though admittedly the details are different).
What is really different is the production logistics.
Music has been digitally produced for a very long time, using open standard formats, and for pre-digital material it's relatively easy to digitize audio (and video) from master tapes, so you only need to do "work" to deal with some very old, obscure media, which is only done selectively. And the music publishers have built systems that are very, very good at managing and format converting huge libraries of audio and video. So, 99% of the time, digitally selling back-catalog music and video is logistically fairly easy - QA, package, price, and send the files to the digital service providers.
Books, however, have been authored in a series of random formats, and for older books there's only the physical book or manuscript and nothing digital. Which means that you often need to physically scan every page in the book/manuscript, OCR it, clean it up, QA the result, etc. And even for the digitally authored books, you need to track down whatever specific physical media and formats each publisher or author used (MacAuthor on 3.5" floppy, LaTeX, MS Word 3 on 5.25" floppy, etc.). So, overall, physically and logistically really complex to deal with for every single back-catalog book.
Look at what Project Gutenberg has produced - an amazing collection, but it required a massive investment of (volunteer) effort to process the books into digital formats.
Actually, it's running break-even as it's supposed to. While the Baby Boomers were working it accumulated a surplus, and now the Baby Boomers are retiring so they're consuming the surplus. But they worked out the math decades ago and it's proceeding as planned - the system is fine. It's possible that there might need to be a few percent adjustment in a decade or two (e.g. raise the cap on taxable income, or cut benefits slightly). But that's nothing to get worked up about, unless your goal is to lie to people to panic them so that you can destroy social security because your goal is social insecurity.
That's not my goal.
Luckily the people running the social security system are responsible adults who know math, so they saved up the surplus paid in during the years the Baby Boomers were working, so there's money there to pay out their retirement benefits.
Yes, anyone who thought that they could give away the money (e.g. Bush, Jr.) instead of saving it was an idiot.
It turns out that in practice, the smaller units of government are far more corrupt than the larger ones, because there's less oversight. Sure, corruption at the federal level gets news coverage, and it should. But if you knew what was going on at the state and local levels, you'd be horrified. But they usually get away with it, because the press has been nearly wiped out at the local and regional level, and the police aren't going to challenge the politically powerful most of the time. Look at, for example, NJ, Nevada, Texas, Arizona, Pennsylvania - a series of amazingly corrupt schemes that made individual politicians, police, etc., rich but destroyed the victim's lives. And there's almost no enforcement of anti-corruption laws except at the federal level - according to http://web.missouri.edu/~milyo... 95% of corruption arrests are made by federal prosecutors (NB: often of state or local officials), meaning that local corruption can fly "under the radar" much more easily than federal corruption.
The problem with your analysis is that the money isn't going to the poor majority, it's largely going to the already well off middle class and rich minority.
Care to try again?
No. People who survive to retire collect more than they paid in, but that's paid for by people who die and thus don't collect anything. The total expenditures balance against payments, and don't require the population to be growing at all. The only ratio that has to hold is the ratio between people's working lifespan and their retired lifespan, which hasn't really changed ever. The increase in average lifespan is almost entirely driven by improved infant mortality rates; people who live to retirement live about as long now, on average, as they did 30 years ago, so the money paid in vs. paid out hasn't changed over the long term.
What did happen is that the baby boomers were a large bump in population, so as they were all working social security accumulated a huge surplus (because there were a "surplus" of people working), which is being paid out as those people retire (and there is a "surplus" of people retired), but neither of those changed the long term finances of social security, which is in (surprise) in fine shape, because the people who run the social security system are responsible people who plan decades ahead for these things because they have to.
The Texas Comptroller did the analysis, and (http://www.window.state.tx.us/specialrpt/undocumented/7conclusion.html) and the bottom line is:
EXHIBIT 18 State Costs, Revenues and Economic Impact to Texas of Undocumented Immigrants
Fiscal Year 2005
(in millions)
Costs
Education -$967.8
Healthcare -$58.0
Incarceration -$130.6*
Total -$1,156.4
Revenues
State Revenue $999.0
School Property Tax $582.1
Total $1,581.1
Net Impact to State $424.7 (i.e. illegal immigrants pay $424 million more in taxes than they cost the government)
Impact on the Economy
Gross State Product $17,700.0 (i.e. illegal immigrants contribute over $17 billion to the state economy)