Well said. On a slight tangent it reminds me of the Area 51 story where government employees (military iirc) were burning some toxic waste to remove it. Many of the workers down wind ended up pretty sick and sued the government. The governments defense was first they were not liable because they were the government and second they couldn't be liable because Area 51 didn't exist. That would mean that the place people were working didn't actually exist according to government.
You are absolutely correct that responsibility is first always denied and then shifted from those with the most power to those with less when the fact is that it should be shared among all those involved including the government. Evil corporations are the in thing to attack though.
So you think if we got rid of scalpers there would be no sold out shows? More people go to events now than ever before, and they are willing to pay a premium to do it. A popular event will sell out with or without scalpers.
If the event still has tickets available when you decide to buy then buy them from the event. In those instances I still go the scalpers because it's going to be cheaper since demand is so low. In those cases I can easily get my tickets below face value. Win for me, loss for the scalper. In scenarios where the event is in high demand scalpers make it possible for me to buy a ticket at market prices instead of just winning click lottery. Does it cost more? Sure, that's how high demand/low supply items work. If the price is too high I simply don't go, but I'm happy to at least have the option to go.
It's better in every way because you were able to buy a seat AT ALL.
Events with tons of free seats are not the ones where the inflated prices occur. In fact, with these events you can often get tickets below face value. The events where you see the inflated prices are the sold out in 5 minute shows. Right now if you miss the click lottery you can still get tickets to the event, although at a market price that reflects the demand. With this new system if you miss the click lottery you have no other options.
So you're saying the biggest fans will only pay $100, but the not biggest fans will pay $2500?
The brokers are reselling the seats at market prices. The fastest real way to stop scalpers would be to raise ticket prices from the start. A more complicated process would be a dutch auction or any other way to maximally charge each person what they will pay for a ticket.
You are correct. This isn't Ticketmaster fighting scalpers for the good of the people, it's Ticketmaster pissed that they are missing out on the extra some people are willing to pay.
Personally I have no problem with secondary brokers. I don't have the time or patience to win the click lottery and secondary brokers have allowed me to see whatever show/event I have felt like going to. I've actually gotten pretty good at timing for sporting events where I end up paying much less than ticket value since many season ticket holders simply want to sell their unused tickets for something rather than leave them empty.
The problem is that there really isn't anything to fix. If you want to 'fix' people buying tickets and selling them at a higher price, then start them at a higher price to begin with. If there wasn't a market for the higher price tickets then the whole situation would go away.
If tickets are gone in 45 seconds I can tell you that the tickets were very under priced to begin with and there are still going to be a ton of people who can't see the show. What you have now is at least an option to see the show at 10x the price if you missed the ticket click lottery.
Ticketmaster isn't doing anything good for anyone. What Ticketmaster and the venue would like (and they are experimenting with) is a dutch auction style system where all tickets are bid for. This will raise the price of tickets for everyone to a market clearing price which will likely end up close to the scalper price except Ticketmaster and the venue will get the money instead of the scalper. Oh, and people will have less options of buying tickets last minute or selling the ticket the purchased.
And that's fine, but I would think Apple would have hooked the phone up to a device that could read in detail the signal and then tested it by touching the antenna. There is no way Apple relied on the bars to determine if the antenna worked or not. It's simply not specific enough. Even with a cell tower in the lab, these problems should have shown up in their readings during testing.
Or, maybe the engineering department really was that bad and they all got canned? Who knows.
Have you used the 'Mark the Spot' app from AT&T? When I moved into a new neighborhood I couldn't go more than 5 minutes on any call without it dropping. I used that app every time it dropped and then one day the drops stopped and I haven't dropped a call in months. At this point I really can't remember the last time I dropped a call.
Not defending the iPhone problem, but the only place I've seen information about other phones having problems are on the forums of various carriers. Other phones do have problems and people do complain. The second issue with your post is volume. A phone like the Evo might have the same % of complaints as the new iPhone, yet since the iPhone has sold so many many more the raw number of complaints will be higher.
Finally, I've yet to see any proof of an 'obvious design defect.' If they can't fix it with a software patch, then I'll agree. Until then it's all speculation about what the problem might be since many people don't seem to have any problem while others can reproduce it every time and still others can only sporadically reproduce the issue.
Does the env3 show bars or an actual signal number? The problem with bars is that they can be calibrated in a non-linear way. For example, on a scale of 0-100 in signal strength, 50-100 might be 5 bars since the manufacturer decided that anything over 50 is considered good enough to be perfect when making calls. When you cover your env3 edges (and it might not be the edges where the antenna is located) you could be losing 20-30 points of signal strength that is never reflected on the bars graphic.
I'm not sure if gold would be completely worthless because even if society collapsed today, eventually trade would occur again. Obviously it would begin with normal bartering, but over time people would move to some sort of currency and like in the past gold would more than likely be the top level of that currency.
The last 3 movies I've gotten from Netflix have had unskippable previews. The only way through them was to fast forward (I always try both the 'menu' button and the 'skip track' button to no avail). Each of these discs also had written on them that they were for rental only so maybe they put different stuff on those?
The problem is that when you start doing retail you have to staff like a retail company. This means you now need a call center and CSRs and all of the management staff and capabilities around doing that. I can imagine that selling in retail is NOT something Google wants to be doing.
I agree. If they are going to give you the phone as a rent to own device then the phone payment should show up as a separate line item on the bill. Obviously the carriers don't want this because people will quickly realize how much they are paying for the phone over the 2 years and the carriers can't keep the same service rate even when the cost of the phone+interest has been recovered.
Carriers should be fighting for my business monthly or giving me really good deals to make me sign up for 1-2 years.
Depends how old you are. The Facebook generation has little problem sharing anything and everything about their life. I'm right on the edge of that generation so I have friends on both sides and one side will tell you just about anything while the other is more like what you're talking about.
I also have some nudist friends, but that's an entirely different conversation.
The math you need to know is basic probability. I would say it's more important to have a good memory. When you end up in a showdown with another player can you remember all the other players previous hands and build a mental model off that to what they may do/might have?
You mentioned earlier that people admire players who play a certain way. Few players play that same way all the time. The most skilled players can switch styles mid game and adjust to the table. It's the switching styles that makes it hard for another skilled player to build a accurate mental model of their opponent.
When you see players on TV guess another players cards what they are 'reading' is all the past bets of the their opponent. The particular opponent has been playing a certain style and it shows up fairly quickly in his betting habits.
The trick is identifying who is skilled and who is lucky.
If you can't figure out who the sucker is at the table, it's you.
Last time I seriously played I was in Phoenix. It only took about 2-3 trips around the table to recognize the only other good player at the table and from then on we just stayed out of each others way. I made quite a bit of money that night.
I agree. Biological cues are the things people like to point to in movies. When a player is sitting there staring down another player he is going over every hand that other player has played. Being able to take lots of imprecise information and do pattern recognition is one place where the skilled human brain is still often better than a computer.
Duke won the NCAA men's basketball championship, but they were clearly not the most talented team. Even in games of skill, there is luck involved. Does the ball bounce your way? Do you get an easy tournament draw? Heck, how do you feel that day? What about single game upsets? Those games where the favored team is clearly better and has more skill yet the other team 'got lucky.' Do those individual games suddenly become luck while the others are skill?
To say that because there is luck in a game that it can't also be a game of skill is simply not true.
Last estimates I saw were that they had maybe 200k pre-orders, but even that article made sure to mention that pre-orders had slowed down A LOT since the first 2 days. You have a link for million pre-orders? Best I could find was that analyst estimate 1M sold by the end of April if the Apple can keep the frenzy going.
You have to admit though that a large part of Apple sales comes completely from the "I want to show I'm fashionable/high status/popular" crowd. I own Apple products for a lot of the same reasons you describe, but a lot of people buy Apple simply because it's cool right now. They have built a brand image that goes along with hip and $300 jeans.
What bothers me the most though is that Apple itself seems to have shifted from a computer maker to more of a consumer electronics makers. They are embracing the fashion crowd at the expense of the technical crowd. I guess I can't fault them because there can be much more money in the fashion crowd, but don't forget about the people who make all the content that drive the sales of their 'magical' devices.
The problem is that on one side you have Apple screaming RAND and the other side with Nokia screaming the same thing. From what I've read when other companies have licensed GSM they usually give a little cash and some cross licensing. Knowing Apple they probably want nothing to do with cross licensing and instead just want to pay cash.
Of course I don't think there are many official court documents out there yet so we really don't know what Apple offered and what Nokia wanted. All we have is clips of both side posturing.
I would start by reading this article, then look at the trade data on your own here.
I don't know if any countries are exporting anything at all times highs right now because of the global recession, though the trade data does show some detail about the US import/export ratios for certain products. For example, in January '10 the US exported over 2x more airplane engine parts, plastics, coal, corn, cotton and metal ore than it imported. If you remove crude oil from the equation the trade imbalance shrinks dramatically.
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Well said. On a slight tangent it reminds me of the Area 51 story where government employees (military iirc) were burning some toxic waste to remove it. Many of the workers down wind ended up pretty sick and sued the government. The governments defense was first they were not liable because they were the government and second they couldn't be liable because Area 51 didn't exist. That would mean that the place people were working didn't actually exist according to government.
You are absolutely correct that responsibility is first always denied and then shifted from those with the most power to those with less when the fact is that it should be shared among all those involved including the government. Evil corporations are the in thing to attack though.
So you think if we got rid of scalpers there would be no sold out shows? More people go to events now than ever before, and they are willing to pay a premium to do it. A popular event will sell out with or without scalpers.
If the event still has tickets available when you decide to buy then buy them from the event. In those instances I still go the scalpers because it's going to be cheaper since demand is so low. In those cases I can easily get my tickets below face value. Win for me, loss for the scalper. In scenarios where the event is in high demand scalpers make it possible for me to buy a ticket at market prices instead of just winning click lottery. Does it cost more? Sure, that's how high demand/low supply items work. If the price is too high I simply don't go, but I'm happy to at least have the option to go.
It's better in every way because you were able to buy a seat AT ALL.
Events with tons of free seats are not the ones where the inflated prices occur. In fact, with these events you can often get tickets below face value. The events where you see the inflated prices are the sold out in 5 minute shows. Right now if you miss the click lottery you can still get tickets to the event, although at a market price that reflects the demand. With this new system if you miss the click lottery you have no other options.
So you're saying the biggest fans will only pay $100, but the not biggest fans will pay $2500?
The brokers are reselling the seats at market prices. The fastest real way to stop scalpers would be to raise ticket prices from the start. A more complicated process would be a dutch auction or any other way to maximally charge each person what they will pay for a ticket.
You are correct. This isn't Ticketmaster fighting scalpers for the good of the people, it's Ticketmaster pissed that they are missing out on the extra some people are willing to pay.
Personally I have no problem with secondary brokers. I don't have the time or patience to win the click lottery and secondary brokers have allowed me to see whatever show/event I have felt like going to. I've actually gotten pretty good at timing for sporting events where I end up paying much less than ticket value since many season ticket holders simply want to sell their unused tickets for something rather than leave them empty.
The problem is that there really isn't anything to fix. If you want to 'fix' people buying tickets and selling them at a higher price, then start them at a higher price to begin with. If there wasn't a market for the higher price tickets then the whole situation would go away.
If tickets are gone in 45 seconds I can tell you that the tickets were very under priced to begin with and there are still going to be a ton of people who can't see the show. What you have now is at least an option to see the show at 10x the price if you missed the ticket click lottery.
Ticketmaster isn't doing anything good for anyone. What Ticketmaster and the venue would like (and they are experimenting with) is a dutch auction style system where all tickets are bid for. This will raise the price of tickets for everyone to a market clearing price which will likely end up close to the scalper price except Ticketmaster and the venue will get the money instead of the scalper. Oh, and people will have less options of buying tickets last minute or selling the ticket the purchased.
And that's fine, but I would think Apple would have hooked the phone up to a device that could read in detail the signal and then tested it by touching the antenna. There is no way Apple relied on the bars to determine if the antenna worked or not. It's simply not specific enough. Even with a cell tower in the lab, these problems should have shown up in their readings during testing.
Or, maybe the engineering department really was that bad and they all got canned? Who knows.
Have you used the 'Mark the Spot' app from AT&T? When I moved into a new neighborhood I couldn't go more than 5 minutes on any call without it dropping. I used that app every time it dropped and then one day the drops stopped and I haven't dropped a call in months. At this point I really can't remember the last time I dropped a call.
Not defending the iPhone problem, but the only place I've seen information about other phones having problems are on the forums of various carriers. Other phones do have problems and people do complain. The second issue with your post is volume. A phone like the Evo might have the same % of complaints as the new iPhone, yet since the iPhone has sold so many many more the raw number of complaints will be higher.
Finally, I've yet to see any proof of an 'obvious design defect.' If they can't fix it with a software patch, then I'll agree. Until then it's all speculation about what the problem might be since many people don't seem to have any problem while others can reproduce it every time and still others can only sporadically reproduce the issue.
Does the env3 show bars or an actual signal number? The problem with bars is that they can be calibrated in a non-linear way. For example, on a scale of 0-100 in signal strength, 50-100 might be 5 bars since the manufacturer decided that anything over 50 is considered good enough to be perfect when making calls. When you cover your env3 edges (and it might not be the edges where the antenna is located) you could be losing 20-30 points of signal strength that is never reflected on the bars graphic.
I'm not sure if gold would be completely worthless because even if society collapsed today, eventually trade would occur again. Obviously it would begin with normal bartering, but over time people would move to some sort of currency and like in the past gold would more than likely be the top level of that currency.
The last 3 movies I've gotten from Netflix have had unskippable previews. The only way through them was to fast forward (I always try both the 'menu' button and the 'skip track' button to no avail). Each of these discs also had written on them that they were for rental only so maybe they put different stuff on those?
The problem is that when you start doing retail you have to staff like a retail company. This means you now need a call center and CSRs and all of the management staff and capabilities around doing that. I can imagine that selling in retail is NOT something Google wants to be doing.
I agree. If they are going to give you the phone as a rent to own device then the phone payment should show up as a separate line item on the bill. Obviously the carriers don't want this because people will quickly realize how much they are paying for the phone over the 2 years and the carriers can't keep the same service rate even when the cost of the phone+interest has been recovered.
Carriers should be fighting for my business monthly or giving me really good deals to make me sign up for 1-2 years.
Exactly! I would also like to point out that like the iD engines the Penumbra engine is already multi-platform and runs on osx/linux/win.
I don't know how anyone can see this release as anything other than a good thing. /shrug
Depends how old you are. The Facebook generation has little problem sharing anything and everything about their life. I'm right on the edge of that generation so I have friends on both sides and one side will tell you just about anything while the other is more like what you're talking about.
I also have some nudist friends, but that's an entirely different conversation.
The math you need to know is basic probability. I would say it's more important to have a good memory. When you end up in a showdown with another player can you remember all the other players previous hands and build a mental model off that to what they may do/might have?
You mentioned earlier that people admire players who play a certain way. Few players play that same way all the time. The most skilled players can switch styles mid game and adjust to the table. It's the switching styles that makes it hard for another skilled player to build a accurate mental model of their opponent.
When you see players on TV guess another players cards what they are 'reading' is all the past bets of the their opponent. The particular opponent has been playing a certain style and it shows up fairly quickly in his betting habits.
If you can't figure out who the sucker is at the table, it's you.
Last time I seriously played I was in Phoenix. It only took about 2-3 trips around the table to recognize the only other good player at the table and from then on we just stayed out of each others way. I made quite a bit of money that night.
I agree. Biological cues are the things people like to point to in movies. When a player is sitting there staring down another player he is going over every hand that other player has played. Being able to take lots of imprecise information and do pattern recognition is one place where the skilled human brain is still often better than a computer.
Duke won the NCAA men's basketball championship, but they were clearly not the most talented team. Even in games of skill, there is luck involved. Does the ball bounce your way? Do you get an easy tournament draw? Heck, how do you feel that day? What about single game upsets? Those games where the favored team is clearly better and has more skill yet the other team 'got lucky.' Do those individual games suddenly become luck while the others are skill?
To say that because there is luck in a game that it can't also be a game of skill is simply not true.
Last estimates I saw were that they had maybe 200k pre-orders, but even that article made sure to mention that pre-orders had slowed down A LOT since the first 2 days. You have a link for million pre-orders? Best I could find was that analyst estimate 1M sold by the end of April if the Apple can keep the frenzy going.
You have to admit though that a large part of Apple sales comes completely from the "I want to show I'm fashionable/high status/popular" crowd. I own Apple products for a lot of the same reasons you describe, but a lot of people buy Apple simply because it's cool right now. They have built a brand image that goes along with hip and $300 jeans.
What bothers me the most though is that Apple itself seems to have shifted from a computer maker to more of a consumer electronics makers. They are embracing the fashion crowd at the expense of the technical crowd. I guess I can't fault them because there can be much more money in the fashion crowd, but don't forget about the people who make all the content that drive the sales of their 'magical' devices.
The problem is that on one side you have Apple screaming RAND and the other side with Nokia screaming the same thing. From what I've read when other companies have licensed GSM they usually give a little cash and some cross licensing. Knowing Apple they probably want nothing to do with cross licensing and instead just want to pay cash.
Of course I don't think there are many official court documents out there yet so we really don't know what Apple offered and what Nokia wanted. All we have is clips of both side posturing.
I would start by reading this article, then look at the trade data on your own here.
I don't know if any countries are exporting anything at all times highs right now because of the global recession, though the trade data does show some detail about the US import/export ratios for certain products. For example, in January '10 the US exported over 2x more airplane engine parts, plastics, coal, corn, cotton and metal ore than it imported. If you remove crude oil from the equation the trade imbalance shrinks dramatically.