The real problem here is less the USPS and more that the USPS isn't allowed to change anything without reactionaries in Congress interfering.
Since you seem to be a Canadian, I'll forgive your lack of a clue as to the real issue here. If you're American, you're an ignorant jackass if you don't understand the real issue here.
The main difference between the two postal systems is that Canada Post is strongly discouraged to lose money. So when they saw mail volumes declining, they started acting to reduce costs.
The real issue isn't delivery costs or mail volume - the real issue is that Congress has mandated that the USPS fully fund pensions and medical benefits for the next seventy five years over the next decade. Even if they stopped delivering mail entirely, they'd still go broke.
Next step - in what way is putting content on the public airwaves not placing it in the public domain?
In what way is it placing the content in the public domain?
Or maybe you're unaware of how anything becomes public domain, it's just a buzzphrase to you. You repeat it like a parrot or a three year old without a single clue as to what it actually means.
It used to be that publishers had to take a big risk publishing anyone who wasn't an A-list author. The way it worked is that the publisher would do a big print run. They'd send cases of the book to bookstores, who'd put them on the shelves. After awhile if all the copies didn't sell, the bookstores would ship back the unsold copies and the publisher would pulp them. All very expensive.
Um, mostly right but with one glaring error. They didn't 'send' books to bookstores, bookstores bought books. With that correction, that's exactly how things still work today.
All things being equal, that should mean there's a lot more diversity in books on bookstore shelves -- but there isn't.
The reason of course being that your understanding of the publishing industry is deeply faulty. No, it's not "now feasible and affordable to do much smaller print runs" - because that means editing and marketing and other overhead must now be spread across a much smaller number of books. (When reality fails to meet your assumptions, the first step isn't to create some elaborate theory that further diverges from reality - it's to check your assumptions.) In the same way, you're deeply ignorant of the bookselling end of the business... Everyy linear inch of bookshelf costs the same. whether it's occupied by Stephen King or J. Random Nobody. Bookstores have very little incentive to stock J. Random Nobody without a reasonable expectation that he will sell. (Even if the publisher pays for unsold books, that doesn't cover the rent the book didn't pay on it's few square inches.)
It's just that as a whole it's more of the same old thing.
It has always has been more of the same old thing. What part of this is so hard to grasp?
I know plenty of people who hate Star Wars, not a lot since I chose not to associate with those sorts
That explains, at least in part, why you're so clueless about Star Wars. (Not that you're not as clueless about everything else in your post, just this part stood out.) You're a fanboy, and anything that diminishes the stature of your fandom is banished from your world.
IMHO cult status trumps block buster opening any day.
Here's a free clue for you - it's a rare movie that doesn't do well at the box office that makes the big bucks later on as a cult favorite. The movies Disney is making bank on are their hits - their flops, you very, very rarely hear of. They aren't stupid.
Movies used to be a form of art, not a form of science. And the science is not there to make a good movie, but how to extract as much money as possible.
Seriously, am I the only Slashdot reader to not have been raised in a cave or otherwise completely disconnected from reality? Except for a brief period right at the dawn of movies, and indies and fringies since then - movies have always been about making as much money as possible. Sure, sure, the actors, producers, and directors yak away about art - but they're not the guys paying the bills.
I've made something of an effort over the last couple of years to go back and re-read many classic sci-fi novels from the 40s - 80s, and almost without exception the great stories break some canons of taste.
Two words: survivorship bias.
I think this is because on a spreadsheet at least, it looks like you can make money without risk these days, if you just get the formula right.
I think that, like is virtually always the case, you're remembering a golden age that never existed. Hollywood has always been like that. Publishing has always been like that. They're both in the business to make money. Always have been. Exceptions are rare and on the fringe.
Of the three, pretty much only Doctor Zhivago had an intricate plot. (I presume, I've never read it or seen it.) GWTW has a lot going on in various places, but that's not the same as intricate. ET's plot is about as simple and straightforward as they come.
The USAF seems to be having trouble balancing their personnel pipeline.
It's hard throughout the armed services, because it's a dynamic problem and often the controlling factors are outside the control of the planners. There's also a delay effect more-or-less proportional to the length of the pipeline.
What does piss off pilots and ruin RETENTION (which creates shortages) is their "extra duties" and square-filling they are tasked with when not flying. If the Air Force wanted to retain pilots it would reduce the bullshit they have to put up with.
This, plus the 'up or out' system. They've both been known problems for decades.
But any solution to these leads to it's own potential problem - pilots do not like being commanded by non-pilots. (And arguably should not be.) And you do need experienced pilots in places like contract management, maintenance support, etc.... So you have to come up with a solution that lets some pilots filter outwards and upwards without requiring them all to do so. Pay is another huge issue, while there are plenty of guys who'll fly forever if the chAir Force let them, they won't do so for a butterbar's salary.
However, nothing Lucas did was based upon a system that went into such detail that it told you every event that had to happen and what pages of the screenplay these events should occur at.
Well, the system he used may not have been that detailed, but the general principles behind system has been around for centuries - it's part and parcel of almost all literature and films. And he certainly would have learned the basics of that system in film school. Heck, I got an outline of the basics in high school literature classes.
There will always be the classics - and then, like now, a bunch of crap was made. We're seeing the survivor effect - the ones we call classics today people remember. They just forgot that at the time, there was a ton of crap as well. The proportions of crap vs. good haven't changed, it's just the crap got forgotten and the good lasted. Movie theatres played more than Gone With the Wind in the past, after all.
Well, yes and no.
The fundamental economics of movies have altered radically over the last sixty odd years. In the early 50's, they turned out movies like a firehose because all but the smallest town had two or three screens, practically everyone went to the movies, and movies pretty much had to make their nut on their first run. Since then, TV had taken audiences away from the movies, but offered studios the chance to make some money back by showing it on TV. (When I was a kid in the 70's it was a big deal when a major picture came to the small screen for the first time.) The VCR, and now the DVD and Blu-ray offer further opportunities to cash in - opportunities that span years if not decades. (Not to mention the streaming services.)
Because screens are fewer, there's really no room in the market for 'B' movies. Because production costs are so high, low budget productions have all but vanished. Because they're competing against many more entertainment options, the emphasis is on making the movies attract as many eyeballs as possible.
So the result is that the major studios make fewer films today than they did then... And the pressure is high to ensure they'll be successful enough on the screen to ensure success in the 'long tail' of disk sales and streaming media. Hence the increasing emphasis on formula and sticking with what works. The result is the difference between the crap and the classics-to-be is much less marked than in days past even though the proportion is roughly the same.
If you watch older films and don't grasp that they're equally formulaic... well, I don't know what to say. Few films, except at the very dawn of cinema, are unique or vary fat from the formulas for the era/genre.
I think I'm as amused by the reactions of the thirty-and-under-somethings here as I am by the vaccinations-cause-autism crowd. I'm not yet 60, and for my generation, measles, mumps, rubella (German measles) and chicken pox were childhood rites of passage.
This indeed, and I'm not (quite) yet fifty. From their hype and horror you'd think these diseases were the return of the Black Plague and mowed children down left and right.
A bunch of submarines were lost. Some of these were marked as "sunk", some of these were marked as "overdue, presumed lost". To many people there is something unfinished, something sadder, about "overdue, presumed lost".
FWIW, to the Brothers of the 'Phin, they're all the same - they're all our brothers on Enternal Patrol.
Moving a ship and crew from the "overdue, presumed lost" list to the "sunk" list, giving a location, is meaningful. Especially to family members.
That's why so many have been found in recent years - the gear has gotten (relatively) cheap and the children of those men are retiring, and have the money and the time to go find them.
A quack is someone who doesn't use the right process, who avoids peer review, who insists they can't be wrong.
Which pretty much describes his behavior on the vitamin issue - He used dodgy medical trials, shoddy statistics, and anecdotal evidence to build his case. Don't assume that because he was a competent and careful scientist in one area (the one where he he earned the Nobel Prize), that he couldn't or didn't have a bee in his bonnet in another (in which he had no formal training or qualifications).
Taking vitamins is something tens of thousands of doctors and medical professionals have advised. Researchers the world over have endorsed it.
That's the whole point of the article - vitamin supplements been pushed for decades (long before Linus Pauling in fact), but rarely if ever studied in detail. It's been assumed by the medical community for most of a century that vitamin supplements are A Good Thing.
you're using words and making accusations that you don't really understand.
Pot, meet kettle. Your faith in scientists is charming, but badly misplaced here. Your defense of them is ludicrous and sounds more like a cargo cult than science.
Outside of the data selling and privacy issues (which are, to be sure, BIG issues), the platform isn't actually bad. It's fairly straightforward and usually works just fine. Which might be a problem, actually, for Facebook, since there's not much they can offer for people to want to pay for.
This. The only people bothered by Facebook's mostly unobtrusive ads are those who are already hypersensitive to advertising - and it's not clear they're more than a relatively small minority.
This. But I really can't see any argument for making an apology either. Nobody currently occupying office is responsible for the law or Turing's prosecution, and thus has nothing to apologize for.
Dig up some old fossil who actually bears responsibility for either, or give it a rest.
In a world where the law was alike to computer code - utterly black and white and able to be compared one-to-one with reality, such a thing would make sense and work.
A bit later, I thought that such a system was too easy to abuse...imagine an Amber Alert that says it's for a kidnapped child but actually happens to be for a political dissident like Snowden...
People like you make me wish my retirement fund was invested solely in aluminum foil stocks.
Slashdot Mirror
Since you seem to be a Canadian, I'll forgive your lack of a clue as to the real issue here. If you're American, you're an ignorant jackass if you don't understand the real issue here.
The real issue isn't delivery costs or mail volume - the real issue is that Congress has mandated that the USPS fully fund pensions and medical benefits for the next seventy five years over the next decade. Even if they stopped delivering mail entirely, they'd still go broke.
In what way is it placing the content in the public domain?
Or maybe you're unaware of how anything becomes public domain, it's just a buzzphrase to you. You repeat it like a parrot or a three year old without a single clue as to what it actually means.
Um, mostly right but with one glaring error. They didn't 'send' books to bookstores, bookstores bought books. With that correction, that's exactly how things still work today.
The reason of course being that your understanding of the publishing industry is deeply faulty. No, it's not "now feasible and affordable to do much smaller print runs" - because that means editing and marketing and other overhead must now be spread across a much smaller number of books. (When reality fails to meet your assumptions, the first step isn't to create some elaborate theory that further diverges from reality - it's to check your assumptions.) In the same way, you're deeply ignorant of the bookselling end of the business... Everyy linear inch of bookshelf costs the same. whether it's occupied by Stephen King or J. Random Nobody. Bookstores have very little incentive to stock J. Random Nobody without a reasonable expectation that he will sell. (Even if the publisher pays for unsold books, that doesn't cover the rent the book didn't pay on it's few square inches.)
It has always has been more of the same old thing. What part of this is so hard to grasp?
That explains, at least in part, why you're so clueless about Star Wars. (Not that you're not as clueless about everything else in your post, just this part stood out.) You're a fanboy, and anything that diminishes the stature of your fandom is banished from your world.
Here's a free clue for you - it's a rare movie that doesn't do well at the box office that makes the big bucks later on as a cult favorite. The movies Disney is making bank on are their hits - their flops, you very, very rarely hear of. They aren't stupid.
Seriously, am I the only Slashdot reader to not have been raised in a cave or otherwise completely disconnected from reality? Except for a brief period right at the dawn of movies, and indies and fringies since then - movies have always been about making as much money as possible. Sure, sure, the actors, producers, and directors yak away about art - but they're not the guys paying the bills.
Two words: survivorship bias.
I think that, like is virtually always the case, you're remembering a golden age that never existed. Hollywood has always been like that. Publishing has always been like that. They're both in the business to make money. Always have been. Exceptions are rare and on the fringe.
Of the three, pretty much only Doctor Zhivago had an intricate plot. (I presume, I've never read it or seen it.) GWTW has a lot going on in various places, but that's not the same as intricate. ET's plot is about as simple and straightforward as they come.
Welcome to our planet, yours sounds wonderful but it bears no relation to ours.
It's hard throughout the armed services, because it's a dynamic problem and often the controlling factors are outside the control of the planners. There's also a delay effect more-or-less proportional to the length of the pipeline.
This, plus the 'up or out' system. They've both been known problems for decades.
But any solution to these leads to it's own potential problem - pilots do not like being commanded by non-pilots. (And arguably should not be.) And you do need experienced pilots in places like contract management, maintenance support, etc.... So you have to come up with a solution that lets some pilots filter outwards and upwards without requiring them all to do so. Pay is another huge issue, while there are plenty of guys who'll fly forever if the chAir Force let them, they won't do so for a butterbar's salary.
Well, the system he used may not have been that detailed, but the general principles behind system has been around for centuries - it's part and parcel of almost all literature and films. And he certainly would have learned the basics of that system in film school. Heck, I got an outline of the basics in high school literature classes.
Well, yes and no.
The fundamental economics of movies have altered radically over the last sixty odd years. In the early 50's, they turned out movies like a firehose because all but the smallest town had two or three screens, practically everyone went to the movies, and movies pretty much had to make their nut on their first run. Since then, TV had taken audiences away from the movies, but offered studios the chance to make some money back by showing it on TV. (When I was a kid in the 70's it was a big deal when a major picture came to the small screen for the first time.) The VCR, and now the DVD and Blu-ray offer further opportunities to cash in - opportunities that span years if not decades. (Not to mention the streaming services.)
Because screens are fewer, there's really no room in the market for 'B' movies. Because production costs are so high, low budget productions have all but vanished. Because they're competing against many more entertainment options, the emphasis is on making the movies attract as many eyeballs as possible.
So the result is that the major studios make fewer films today than they did then... And the pressure is high to ensure they'll be successful enough on the screen to ensure success in the 'long tail' of disk sales and streaming media. Hence the increasing emphasis on formula and sticking with what works. The result is the difference between the crap and the classics-to-be is much less marked than in days past even though the proportion is roughly the same.
If you watch older films and don't grasp that they're equally formulaic... well, I don't know what to say. Few films, except at the very dawn of cinema, are unique or vary fat from the formulas for the era/genre.
This indeed, and I'm not (quite) yet fifty. From their hype and horror you'd think these diseases were the return of the Black Plague and mowed children down left and right.
FWIW, to the Brothers of the 'Phin, they're all the same - they're all our brothers on Enternal Patrol.
That's why so many have been found in recent years - the gear has gotten (relatively) cheap and the children of those men are retiring, and have the money and the time to go find them.
Which pretty much describes his behavior on the vitamin issue - He used dodgy medical trials, shoddy statistics, and anecdotal evidence to build his case. Don't assume that because he was a competent and careful scientist in one area (the one where he he earned the Nobel Prize), that he couldn't or didn't have a bee in his bonnet in another (in which he had no formal training or qualifications).
That's the whole point of the article - vitamin supplements been pushed for decades (long before Linus Pauling in fact), but rarely if ever studied in detail. It's been assumed by the medical community for most of a century that vitamin supplements are A Good Thing.
Pot, meet kettle. Your faith in scientists is charming, but badly misplaced here. Your defense of them is ludicrous and sounds more like a cargo cult than science.
This. The only people bothered by Facebook's mostly unobtrusive ads are those who are already hypersensitive to advertising - and it's not clear they're more than a relatively small minority.
*Yawn* obvious comment is obvious karmawhore.
This. But I really can't see any argument for making an apology either. Nobody currently occupying office is responsible for the law or Turing's prosecution, and thus has nothing to apologize for.
Dig up some old fossil who actually bears responsibility for either, or give it a rest.
A completely different set of prosecutors. But hey, why let facts get in the way of a good whine.
In a world where the law was alike to computer code - utterly black and white and able to be compared one-to-one with reality, such a thing would make sense and work.
We don't live in such a world.
In other words, you either didn't read a word I wrote, or lack the intelligence to understand what I write, or are just utterly fucking clueless.
Because your reply does nothing but repeat your original ignorance.
People like you make me wish my retirement fund was invested solely in aluminum foil stocks.
Ah, so you'll be calling for the repeal of child pornography laws?
You're an outlier - experience proves that in the real world, over the long run, it does work for the vast majority of the trainees.