Yes but they are calculating that "optimal price" under the assumption everyone else follows that price.
They can't make that assumption because they don't have a monopoly: they are competing against taxis, Lyft, and other transportation services.
That is it is optimal only under the assumption of no defectors competing. that is when you fix the price by any means it is price "fixing".
And that is why we shouldn't have anti-price-fixing legislation in the first place: price fixing only works under the assumption of no defectors competing. But, obviously, defectors will be competing sooner or later because there is money to be made.
So, you just basically showed: (1) Uber isn't engaging in price fixing, and (2) even if they did, price fixing isn't a stable business strategy because it is vulnerable to defectors. QED.
Do taxi drivers have the capability to set their own rates, or are all the ones working for the same company colluding and charging the same rate?
There, the price fixing happens via the government. Getting screwed and overcharged is OK if it's the government screwing you and the inflated prices and bad service happen as the result of lobbying and crony capitalism. Progressives, in fact, welcome that.
In the same way that kissing your sleeping boyfriend in the morning might meet some legal definition of "non-consensual sex" but probably shouldn't be counted as such in a court of law. Price fixing laws, whether they technically apply or not, shouldn't apply.
Taxi companies have to pay to purchase, service and garage their taxis whereas Uber pays exactly $0 for the above expensive costs, instead it leeches them from the driver. Given the above, since the driver is doing the bulk of the investing of resources, he should get more than the 70%.
As a driver, you have two choices: you work for a taxi company or you work for Uber/Lyft/... Working for a taxi company, you get about $12/hour, at inflexible working hours and little personal freedom. The benefits of the taxi monopoly do indeed accrue to the "taxi companies", crony capitalists who have managed to snag medallions. Working for Uber, you are probably going to make more than that, even after expenses. But even if you made the same hourly money, you'd still be better off because of better working conditions and more flexibility.
We can hope there are dozens of internet-taxi booking services like Uber, making their service a commodity.
There won't be if idiots like you keep supporting crony capitalism and keep creating legal hurdles for companies to jump through. After all the shit that Uber has had to deal with, only a fool would start a competitor.
If they - and all other tech companies - impose a duty on government purchasers of their products to reveal any security breaches, then if the government fails to do so, it doesn't get any more toys until it conforms to the requirements of the contract.
What you describe is basically a boycott. Apple can certainly boycott the US government if they want to, but that has nothing to do with "adding conditions to a contract".
This is why such clauses would be 'enforceable', not because a court wouldn't enforce them.
How does Apple refusing to sell phones to someone make unenforceable contract clauses enforceable? Apple's option of not selling devices to some customers has nothing to do with the clauses they put into the sales contract or their enforceability.
It's not a case of it being ruled 'invalid'. It's that the companies refuse to sell unless the governments sign up to the terms. Otherwise - no phones.
Whether they sign up to those terms is not the issue, the issue is whether those terms are enforceable and what the remedies would be. Courts don't just rubber-stamp "if-then-else" clauses in contracts, they look at what kinds of damages either party suffered, what kinds of valuable consideration was exchanged, how the parties would stand if the contract had never been entered. In addition, governments generally can simply refuse to be the target of lawsuits at all.
If IFTTT provides large additional value over general browsing then yeah maybe they can overturn these tables, but they need to prove that they provide the level of value that they are claiming and they need to prove their value is worth the cost. The cost they are thrusting onto "partners" is REALLY high.
The costs are high for a one-man operation like Pinboard. Big operations like Nest, Dropcam, D-Link, Belkin, etc. have no problem dedicating a few developers to IFTTT integration, and that's who IFTTT is catering to these days. Changing their terms is probably also intended to weed out small services like Pinboard.
I really doubt they are in a market leader position to foist unfair terms on providers who had no prior relationship with them (just because their content was available through IFTTT scraping doesn't mean there is a relationship.)
IFTTT doesn't "scrape", they connect to some REST or other RPC API; they usually need authentication for that as well. You don't become an IFTTT channel by accident. Furthermore, IFTTT is saying "we've done this for free using your APIs so far, but now we are going to change and unify our APIs and if you want to continue to interface with us, you need to do some work on your end". That's neither "unfair" nor is it "foisting" anything on anybody; it's a simple offer, take it or leave it. Finally, IFTTT has millions of users and caters mainly to the IoT market. Maybe they cared a little about Pinboard a few years ago, but the service is just clutter to them now. Ceglowski is right that his service is competing with IFTTT to some degree, and he is losing because he simply can't match their functionality no matter how much he may try; it's still his choice how he wants to deal with that, by joining IFTTT or fighting them. Apparently, he has settled on trying to badmouth them for now.
Either releasing CO2 from fossil fuels is bad for the environment...or its not and we shouldn't care about what we do to produce energy. The consensus is that it's quite bad and getting worse rapidly.
The IPCC predicts around a 1% economic impact at the end of the century. That isn't "quite bad", it is negligible, and it is probably an overestimate.
But even if it were real, fossil fuels are already taxed, so the cost they supposedly impose according to alarmists are already more than accounted for. Of course, many of those taxes were originally created to pay for infrastructure, instead of being justified by arguments about climate change, but that doesn't change the fact that they already raise the price of fossil fuels to the level, or above the level, that people claim is needed to account for the emissions impact.
You also need to put subsidies in relation to the maturity of the product.
No, I don't. I oppose all forms of crony capitalism, whether for "mature" or "immature" products. I just point out that the subsidies for fossil fuels are negligible compared to the volume at which they are sold. And, in fact, those "subsidies" are far less than the gas taxes that get diverted to unrelated purposes. So, those so-called "subsidies" don't actually make gas cheaper.
The states of Oklahoma, Kansas are both perpetually hovering above bankruptcy because of the tax cuts and credits given to the oil industry (among the other stupid failed red state experiments).
The fiscal condition of Oklahoma and Kansas seems to be pretty good compared to states like California, New York, Massachusetts, and New Jersey.
If you think that these states would balance their budget any better if they had $600 million / year more, I have a bridge to sell you.
Mind you, I think the way natural resource rights are handled in the US is atrocious, with massive government handouts to industry and massive crony capitalism. But fixing that isn't going to fix budgets, and it's not going to change the advantage fossil fuels have over renewables.
Fossil fuels receive $5.3 Trillion in subsidies annually.
Let's take that "study" at face value just for the sake of argument. Does it support the argument that PV is having trouble in the US because of subsidies? Not at all. Most of the "subsidies" in the study are externalities and consumption subsidies outside the US. If those "subsidies" were ended, i.e., if consumers of fossil fuels outside the US had to pay more, fossil fuel prices in the US would go down, making renewables even less competitive in the US.
(Of course, that study is a mix of fabricated numbers and spurious reasoning. Leave it to people like you to trust IMF "studies".)
It's really hard to compete in an unfair market. When your competition is given 10s of billions in tax breaks annually and allowed to pollute with impunity... Those gov subsidies to solar are pennies in the dollar compared to what Fossil fuel gets every single year
You got it backwards. Fossil fuels are heavily taxed and regulated. And subsidies to fossil fuels are next to nothing, as opposed to solar, which is heavily subsidized.
Guns in the US are generally required by law to look like guns. Before those laws, there used to be a wide variety of stealth guns available to the public (later only available to the secret service): cane guns, palm guns, lipstick pistols, flashlight guns, tiny ring guns, skeleton key guns,
So, you agree that IFTTT is just a shakedown racket, with no business model other than conning people into maintaining their product, and with an over-inflated sense of the value what they bring to the table?
I can only speak for myself, and I find IFTTT limited by still useful. I've actually quit a for-pay service because it didn't provide IFTTT integration. YMMV
So in your opinion we are damned if we do and damned if we don't?
False dichotomy. Apple's mistake was pretending that their backdoored phone was secure. They should have simply admitted that the iPhone 5C wasn't secure and moved on, instead of pretending that they are out defending everybody's rights.
We know such a phone would be affordable, easy to use, and popular
You may believe that, but I see no reason to believe you are correct. There is a cost, even if not in money, to a completely secure phone. The costs are time and the hassle of remembering, or sharing it when you ask someone else to use your phone for you, etc.
Well, I'm sorry you don't see it. But the fact is that a secure iPhone 5C would look and work exactly the same way the current iPhone 5C works, it would simply do the PIN checking in its crypto processor.
And unless you've got real evidence, that is just an opinion. And not even one that is logically consistent, since one of the issues at the heart of this case is that the iPhone 6 and 6S are even more secure, meaning the work around that the FBI wants Apple to implement for the 5C won't work on these newer phones.
It is quite logically consistent: the iPhone 5C has a backdoor that was apparent from its published architecture. The iPhone 6 and 6S likely have backdoors that are not apparent from their published architectures. But it is implausible that they don't have backdoors because even if the FBI is reined in, China and Russia won't be, and Apple isn't going to give up on those markets.
The only thing rooted in fact is IFTTT is now demanding someone else maintain the parts which allows IFTTT to generate money,
IFTTT doesn't generate money from users. In fact, I expect they generate, or will generate, money from sites they provide access to. That is, in the future, Pinboard would probably have to pay for being listed in IFTTT. This is all completely normal day-to-day business stuff: freemium models, for-pay infrastructure, loss leaders, etc.
"Nice content, shame if it stopped being featured in our product" is not providing a fucking service.
If Pinboard thinks IFTTT isn't useful to them or their users, then they don't need to do anything. I don't see why that is a reason for you or their CEO to get pushed out of shape.
You want your "service" to keep working? Write it your own damned self, and piss off with your demands someone else use your API or adhere to your license.
I don't understand your hostility. IFTTT simply said "if you want to continue to be an IFTTT channel, you need to provide these APIs and sign a service agreement". I expect that in the future, they will likely say "if you want to continue to be an IFTTT channel, you need to pay a subscription fee of $X/month". These are simple business propositions. If Pinboard doesn't think that IFTTT is useful to them, they don't take the deal, IFTTT drops them, and that's the end of the story.
Claiming the users couldn't get your package without redirecting it through you... well, that's pretty much bullshit.
IFTTT really does provide functionality that no single web site provides: it moves data and notifications between many different services under user control. They are free to users, and they don't do anything with the content they ship around either. The only way they are going to get revenue is from sites that they connect to, and I expect they will start charging sites for being available as IFTTT channels. Their bet is that they provide a valuable service to those sites. Maybe that bet is wrong, but so far, it looks like they are right. Pinboard, however, probably isn't high on their priority list.
And the delivery company demands that you build a special gate, just for them. You agree to modify the gate whenever they ask you to, and no one else is allowed to use the gate, even you.
If you are a business using a commercial package delivery company, that's exactly the sort of arrangements you make with them.
Slashdot Mirror
They can't make that assumption because they don't have a monopoly: they are competing against taxis, Lyft, and other transportation services.
And that is why we shouldn't have anti-price-fixing legislation in the first place: price fixing only works under the assumption of no defectors competing. But, obviously, defectors will be competing sooner or later because there is money to be made.
So, you just basically showed: (1) Uber isn't engaging in price fixing, and (2) even if they did, price fixing isn't a stable business strategy because it is vulnerable to defectors. QED.
I don't think that means what you think it means.
They are using a platform that calculates optimal prices for them, and that platform happens to give them all the same price. Why wouldn't it?
If that is illegal, then there is something wrong with the price fixing laws, not with what Uber does.
There, the price fixing happens via the government. Getting screwed and overcharged is OK if it's the government screwing you and the inflated prices and bad service happen as the result of lobbying and crony capitalism. Progressives, in fact, welcome that.
In the same way that kissing your sleeping boyfriend in the morning might meet some legal definition of "non-consensual sex" but probably shouldn't be counted as such in a court of law. Price fixing laws, whether they technically apply or not, shouldn't apply.
As a driver, you have two choices: you work for a taxi company or you work for Uber/Lyft/... Working for a taxi company, you get about $12/hour, at inflexible working hours and little personal freedom. The benefits of the taxi monopoly do indeed accrue to the "taxi companies", crony capitalists who have managed to snag medallions. Working for Uber, you are probably going to make more than that, even after expenses. But even if you made the same hourly money, you'd still be better off because of better working conditions and more flexibility.
There won't be if idiots like you keep supporting crony capitalism and keep creating legal hurdles for companies to jump through. After all the shit that Uber has had to deal with, only a fool would start a competitor.
What you describe is basically a boycott. Apple can certainly boycott the US government if they want to, but that has nothing to do with "adding conditions to a contract".
How does Apple refusing to sell phones to someone make unenforceable contract clauses enforceable? Apple's option of not selling devices to some customers has nothing to do with the clauses they put into the sales contract or their enforceability.
Whether they sign up to those terms is not the issue, the issue is whether those terms are enforceable and what the remedies would be. Courts don't just rubber-stamp "if-then-else" clauses in contracts, they look at what kinds of damages either party suffered, what kinds of valuable consideration was exchanged, how the parties would stand if the contract had never been entered. In addition, governments generally can simply refuse to be the target of lawsuits at all.
The costs are high for a one-man operation like Pinboard. Big operations like Nest, Dropcam, D-Link, Belkin, etc. have no problem dedicating a few developers to IFTTT integration, and that's who IFTTT is catering to these days. Changing their terms is probably also intended to weed out small services like Pinboard.
IFTTT doesn't "scrape", they connect to some REST or other RPC API; they usually need authentication for that as well. You don't become an IFTTT channel by accident. Furthermore, IFTTT is saying "we've done this for free using your APIs so far, but now we are going to change and unify our APIs and if you want to continue to interface with us, you need to do some work on your end". That's neither "unfair" nor is it "foisting" anything on anybody; it's a simple offer, take it or leave it. Finally, IFTTT has millions of users and caters mainly to the IoT market. Maybe they cared a little about Pinboard a few years ago, but the service is just clutter to them now. Ceglowski is right that his service is competing with IFTTT to some degree, and he is losing because he simply can't match their functionality no matter how much he may try; it's still his choice how he wants to deal with that, by joining IFTTT or fighting them. Apparently, he has settled on trying to badmouth them for now.
Real world contracts don't work that way. Such clauses would simply be considered invalid.
The IPCC predicts around a 1% economic impact at the end of the century. That isn't "quite bad", it is negligible, and it is probably an overestimate.
But even if it were real, fossil fuels are already taxed, so the cost they supposedly impose according to alarmists are already more than accounted for. Of course, many of those taxes were originally created to pay for infrastructure, instead of being justified by arguments about climate change, but that doesn't change the fact that they already raise the price of fossil fuels to the level, or above the level, that people claim is needed to account for the emissions impact.
Microsoft has already released their source code to Russia and China under pressure from their governments; isn't that evidence enough?
Yes, that is how discovery usually works. Apple might have argued an "undue burden", but not that the FBI isn't entitled to this in principle.
I don't think they do align in this case. Apple wanted to use this fight as a PR stunt; win or lose, your data wouldn't have been any more secure.
No, I don't. I oppose all forms of crony capitalism, whether for "mature" or "immature" products. I just point out that the subsidies for fossil fuels are negligible compared to the volume at which they are sold. And, in fact, those "subsidies" are far less than the gas taxes that get diverted to unrelated purposes. So, those so-called "subsidies" don't actually make gas cheaper.
The fiscal condition of Oklahoma and Kansas seems to be pretty good compared to states like California, New York, Massachusetts, and New Jersey.
http://mercatus.org/statefisca...
If you think that these states would balance their budget any better if they had $600 million / year more, I have a bridge to sell you.
Mind you, I think the way natural resource rights are handled in the US is atrocious, with massive government handouts to industry and massive crony capitalism. But fixing that isn't going to fix budgets, and it's not going to change the advantage fossil fuels have over renewables.
Let's take that "study" at face value just for the sake of argument. Does it support the argument that PV is having trouble in the US because of subsidies? Not at all. Most of the "subsidies" in the study are externalities and consumption subsidies outside the US. If those "subsidies" were ended, i.e., if consumers of fossil fuels outside the US had to pay more, fossil fuel prices in the US would go down, making renewables even less competitive in the US.
(Of course, that study is a mix of fabricated numbers and spurious reasoning. Leave it to people like you to trust IMF "studies".)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Note that you need to put any subsidies in relation to the market share; PV and wind receive enormous subsidies relative to their miniscule impact.
You got it backwards. Fossil fuels are heavily taxed and regulated. And subsidies to fossil fuels are next to nothing, as opposed to solar, which is heavily subsidized.
Guns in the US are generally required by law to look like guns. Before those laws, there used to be a wide variety of stealth guns available to the public (later only available to the secret service): cane guns, palm guns, lipstick pistols, flashlight guns, tiny ring guns, skeleton key guns,
I can only speak for myself, and I find IFTTT limited by still useful. I've actually quit a for-pay service because it didn't provide IFTTT integration. YMMV
False dichotomy. Apple's mistake was pretending that their backdoored phone was secure. They should have simply admitted that the iPhone 5C wasn't secure and moved on, instead of pretending that they are out defending everybody's rights.
Well, I'm sorry you don't see it. But the fact is that a secure iPhone 5C would look and work exactly the same way the current iPhone 5C works, it would simply do the PIN checking in its crypto processor.
It is quite logically consistent: the iPhone 5C has a backdoor that was apparent from its published architecture. The iPhone 6 and 6S likely have backdoors that are not apparent from their published architectures. But it is implausible that they don't have backdoors because even if the FBI is reined in, China and Russia won't be, and Apple isn't going to give up on those markets.
IFTTT doesn't generate money from users. In fact, I expect they generate, or will generate, money from sites they provide access to. That is, in the future, Pinboard would probably have to pay for being listed in IFTTT. This is all completely normal day-to-day business stuff: freemium models, for-pay infrastructure, loss leaders, etc.
If Pinboard thinks IFTTT isn't useful to them or their users, then they don't need to do anything. I don't see why that is a reason for you or their CEO to get pushed out of shape.
I don't understand your hostility. IFTTT simply said "if you want to continue to be an IFTTT channel, you need to provide these APIs and sign a service agreement". I expect that in the future, they will likely say "if you want to continue to be an IFTTT channel, you need to pay a subscription fee of $X/month". These are simple business propositions. If Pinboard doesn't think that IFTTT is useful to them, they don't take the deal, IFTTT drops them, and that's the end of the story.
IFTTT really does provide functionality that no single web site provides: it moves data and notifications between many different services under user control. They are free to users, and they don't do anything with the content they ship around either. The only way they are going to get revenue is from sites that they connect to, and I expect they will start charging sites for being available as IFTTT channels. Their bet is that they provide a valuable service to those sites. Maybe that bet is wrong, but so far, it looks like they are right. Pinboard, however, probably isn't high on their priority list.
If you are a business using a commercial package delivery company, that's exactly the sort of arrangements you make with them.