Regulations that cause one-time costs do not normally shift the supply curves, and handicapped accommodations tend to be one-time costs.
Your argument here isn't that businesses don't pass on those costs, it's simply that those costs are negligible when amortized over time. In addition to being irrelevant to what we have been discussing, that argument is also wrong: handicapped accommodations are ongoing costs, whether it is the opportunity cost for handicap parking, or the cost of operating expensive handicap vehicles and charging regular prices for them.
In general, though, "passing the cost on to the consumer" is a PR move by the price setters.
If you think the journalists at WaPo are anything like the people that collect the crap Breitbart puts out,
I don't think that at all! The difference between WaPo and Breitbart is like the difference between an expensive "escort" and a street hooker, or between Goebbels and some nutty guy on a street corner: the WaPo takes a lot of money for its prostitution, and its propaganda is carefully crafted to serve the interests of the state and to fool people like you. With Breitbart, it's pretty obvious to everybody what it is and isn't.
then you're not very discerning in your news sources.
I am indeed not. I got rid of my "discerning tastes" years ago.
The thread will now include posts about nutcases who still believe in coal, petroleum, propane and propane accessoires and who believe solar and other renewables are a scam.
Whether something is a scam or not depends on whether you take away people's money under false pretenses or give them the value you promise.
Right now, presenting solar as an economical alternative to fossil fuel is a scam. In 2028 it won't be a scam anymore for people in sunny parts of the US because then it will, in fact, be an economical alternative to fossil fuel.
Institutional and corporate sources make up more combined (not quite majority), but they only make up more when combined.
So, calling it "listener funded" is misleading. And its listener demographics is overwhelmingly intellectuals, with their massive biases and special interests.
What inaccuracies have you seen in the WaPo?
I stopped reading them and I don't keep track. In addition to being often wrong, the WaPo was also just boring, a predictable echo chamber of the educated intellectual "moderate left" and their many delusions.
Have you compared them to other sources like Breitbart which have knowingly posted fake news stories (and aren't a fan of retractions)?
All news source publishes erroneous and fabricated materials, so you always need to fact check yourself. If you think you can trust the WaPo any more than Breitbart, you're a fool.
Businesses try to set their prices according to the supply and demand curves. They almost never have the opportunity to pass increased costs to the customer, no matter how much they complain about it.
I assume that you are reasoning that companies set the price according to the equilibrium price where supply and demand meet? That kind of reasoning fails on multiple grounds. A simple error in your (implicit) reasoning is that higher costs from regulations shift the supply curve towards higher prices.
Here's what really happens. Supply and demand curves actually describe the aggregate behavior of buyers and sellers entering and leaving a market (not the price setting behavior of individual companies). When companies pass on the costs of increased regulations, the supply curve shifts towards higher prices, demand decreases, and some suppliers exit the market. The equilibrium price increases (although not as much as costs, even though each company passed on the full costs), and buyers substitute other goods.
Incidentally, in the case of Uber and transportation companies, costly regulations cause consumers to substitute private automobiles, probably not what is intended.
Only Canada is a visa-free country with respect to the US. Visitors from Europe need a visa, but it can be "waived" in many cases when it is obvious that the person would have been granted a visa. A waiver can be denied for many benign reasons. In that case, he just needs to apply for a visa.
My guess is that this is either employment related (i.e., they are concerned that he is carrying out paid work in the US on a visitor visa), or that it is some legal issue on the Swedish side.
And I neither approve nor disapprove of NPR, but I certainly consider it strongly politically biased, towards the political preferences of both its donors and its listeners.
Wow so your evidence is that it's still in business and the CEO has "expectations"?
No, the evidence is the bias and inaccuracies in what the WaPo publishes, which happen to align with the interests of the owner.
I'm not at all convinced that we had stable hierarchies in small bands,
And I didn't say that we had permanent stable hierarchies in small bands.
I have worked primarily in smaller businesses, where people aggressively pursue goals, there's conflicts that are necessary for efficiency and managed to not get destructive, and hierarchies.
You have veered from interaction styles and behaviors to ways of pursuing goals. In any case, it's likely that you work in a male-dominated business, don't you?
I was responding to your claims that behaviors have been suppressed.
I didn't say that they "have been suppressed", I am saying that feminists and progressives are complaining that they are not being suppressed more and are arguing for organizing business, politics, and society more on cooperative, non-aggressive, non-hierarchical interactions.
Coming back to the origin of this thread, if a VC were to ask me for a blowjob in return for funding (I should be so lucky), I might laugh, I might take him up on his offer, or I might slap him in the face and walk out. Six months later, I would barely remember or care no matter which choice I made. That's typically male behavior.
I wouldn't gang up on him with a bunch of other "victims" months or years later and turn this into a public shaming; that's a typically female behavior (cooperation, conflict-avoidance, non-aggression), and it's ineffective in changing male behavior, in addition to being unprofessional and harmful to the business.
Which is why, as I said, I wouldn't want to work with either the men or the women involved in these incidents.
Giving Apple credit for "inventing the smartphone as it exists today" is dishonest. The iPhone was very similar to "earlier designs", and Android was also being developed independently and in parallel (its release delayed by its acquisition by Google).
What set the iPhone apart from other high volume offerings was its use of a capacitive screen and lack of keyboard, reasonable choices for the consumer market, but not so good for the business market. Other vendors dropped the keyboard only once capacitive screens caught up, which was the sensible thing to do. The iPhone was what a lot of Apple products are: products that realize a vision that a lot of people already have, just rushed out the door at a premium price.
Note that iOS always has been a minority player in the smartphone market; it used to be dominated by Symbian and RIM, and Android mostly just took over from those two systems.
The government can't pay for it, because so many complain when their taxes go up or are used for a service that has no value to them.
But they are paying for it, and in a very inefficient and regressive way. The fact that people like you are either too dumb to figure that out or deliberately lie to the American people about that doesn't change the economic facts.
So you want the disabled to pay for 'premium' services
No, I want tax payers to continue to pay for it, just more efficiently, more fairly, and more accountably. And preferably in a way that doesn't hurt the disabled, which is what ADA actually has done.
What isn't questionable that by keeping the regulations, existing transportation companies have created massive barriers to entry and are forcing existing riders to pay inflated prices in order to support those with disabilities. In addition, those regulations are a hidden, regressive form of taxation.
There is no logical reason why someone running a bus company or a taxi company should have to pay for services to the disabled; if we want to support the disabled with subsidized transportation, then we should pay for that out of tax dollars directly. Once we do that, your logic ("if they lift the regulations for Uber, then...") evaporates.
I think it's perfectly fine for society to decide to pay for special services for the handicapped. But politicians are cowards, so instead of paying for the cost of providing these services out of the general fund and raising taxes on everybody, they impose regulations; it seems so harmless: just tell people to run their business a bit differently and be nice to those poor suffering people with disabilities.
But here is absolutely no logical reason why transportation companies should bear the full cost of making provisions to transport people in wheelchairs. The decision to provide these services to people with disabilities is something the entire nation has made, so the entire nation should pay for it, out of taxes.
But, of course, it's not just politicians that like to hide taxes via regulations, many of the companies being regulated like it too: they pass on the costs to their customers (as a consumption tax, mostly hurting lower income people), while at the same time creating massive barriers to entry for competitors. And that's what you're seeing with this attack on Uber: once you start down the path of illogical and unfair regulations, they take on a life of their own and spiral out of control.
Well, if not for any other reason, the fact that it's still in business at all is an "influence", because without his purchase, it would have gone the way of the dodo.
And, of course, from the CEO down, people whose careers and income are on the line know what Bezos's expectations and politics actually are.
Where did he ever say that it was "just poor people" that are a drain on the IRS?
Washington is a cesspool of special interests and handouts: unsustainable social programs, government support and tax breaks for companies run by big donors, favorable regulation for some people and corporations, and unfavorable for others. Both parties have been buying votes with tax payer money.
And the people being "butthurt" about it should be the people footing the bill: young folks whose future has been stolen, retirees who have gotten a piss poor return on their retirement savings, entrepreneurs with great ideas that are beaten down by Washington DC ("you didn't build that"), etc.
I'm not sure about aggression, hierarchy, and conflict for people in relatively isolated groups of 150 or fewer. Such a group would have real problems with bullies or too much conflict.
Using aggression, hierarchy, and conflict doesn't mean physical violence or bullying, it means that people form stable hierarchies and resolve problems quickly and efficiently. Mechanisms like cooperation, negotiation, and conflict-avoidance seem positive, but can be very harmful when they are turned towards undermining the group goals in search of individual gain, which is often how they are used.
The confusion you exhibit between aggression/conflict and violence/bullying is really indicative of the root of the problem. Rather than channeling male traits like aggression and conflict-seeking towards something positive, these days, we are just trying to suppress them. I think the dominance of the educational system by women is partly responsible. In any case, it's just not going to work.
Male aggressiveness, conflict-seeking, dominance hierarchies, and sexuality are an essential part of human nature, just like their female counterparts, and trying to repress or eliminate them is simply not going to work. And that also means that typical men and typical women are not just interchangeable cogs in a social machine, it means that there will be male dominated parts of society and female dominated parts of society.
I'm really confused about the president's position on dodging taxes. If poor people don't pay taxes, that's bad. But if a rich person gets a tax break, that's good.
It's actually really simple: he wants a more equal sharing of the tax burden:
And Trump didn't even claim ownership, he simply linked the two:
The #AmazonWashingtonPost, sometimes referred to as the guardian of Amazon not paying internet taxes (which they should) is FAKE NEWS!
It should be obvious that Bezos bought the WaPo to promote his political views and the interests of his corporate empire, just like Carlos Slim bought into the NYT.
Everybody knows that WaPo is owned by a billionaire to spread his political views, mostly in favor of Democrats. But that's OK because billionaires like Bezos, Schmidt, and Soros are the kinds of billionaires Democrats love.
Cooperation, conflict avoidance, and negotiation have been part of common culture essentially forever, at least within the band.
Yes, part of. But aggression, hierarchy, and conflict have also been part of common culture essentially forever. They are both necessary. Societies primarily based on cooperation, conflict avoidance, and negotiation can't survive, any more than societies primarily based on aggression, hierarchy, and conflict.
That's neither male nor female.
Obviously, individuals of either sex are usually capable of all these behaviors. Nevertheless, some of these behaviors are typically male, others typically female, and that's rooted in biology.
What is it with creeps who insist on running companies>? Or what is it with idiots who think that creeps SHOULD run companies?
"SHOULD"? It's a free country. Anybody can run a company, and anybody can choose not to work for them. If people run companies well, they keep running them. If they run them poorly, they soon stop running them. It's as simple as that.
Nobody is trying to put you on your knees for a paycheck.
I'm a gay man. If Justin Caldbeck offered me $5 million in VC funding for a blowjob or a date or whatever, why would I be offended?
Much like him, you are not coming up with cunning logical fallacies, you're putting forth silly opinions.
Well, I'm glad that this has finally sunk in: we are talking about opinions (specifically, opinions about values), not facts. And I have simply stated that I have a low opinion of all principals involved: the sex crazed men, the whiny women, or the white knight defenders, for which you have accused me of all sorts of misconduct.
No dude, you brought that up not me. It's stupid to bring up terms then whine about the terms when I address your points.
I'm sorry, I should have anticipated that such political terms are confusing to you. As I was saying, the term "conservative" can have both a political and a moral meaning.
Well,I hope you're like that guy because the alternative is that you're (a) dead serious and (b) can vote.
Well, you certainly can't vote in California, which brings us back to the question why Brits like you have such an obsession with the US. Is it an inferiority complex? Or are your own politics and circumstances so miserable that you're trying to escape from them? Which is it?
Slashdot Mirror
If you're intelligent, you don't give a f*ck.
Your argument here isn't that businesses don't pass on those costs, it's simply that those costs are negligible when amortized over time. In addition to being irrelevant to what we have been discussing, that argument is also wrong: handicapped accommodations are ongoing costs, whether it is the opportunity cost for handicap parking, or the cost of operating expensive handicap vehicles and charging regular prices for them.
Proof by vigorous assertion!
I don't think that at all! The difference between WaPo and Breitbart is like the difference between an expensive "escort" and a street hooker, or between Goebbels and some nutty guy on a street corner: the WaPo takes a lot of money for its prostitution, and its propaganda is carefully crafted to serve the interests of the state and to fool people like you. With Breitbart, it's pretty obvious to everybody what it is and isn't.
I am indeed not. I got rid of my "discerning tastes" years ago.
Whether something is a scam or not depends on whether you take away people's money under false pretenses or give them the value you promise.
Right now, presenting solar as an economical alternative to fossil fuel is a scam. In 2028 it won't be a scam anymore for people in sunny parts of the US because then it will, in fact, be an economical alternative to fossil fuel.
So, calling it "listener funded" is misleading. And its listener demographics is overwhelmingly intellectuals, with their massive biases and special interests.
I stopped reading them and I don't keep track. In addition to being often wrong, the WaPo was also just boring, a predictable echo chamber of the educated intellectual "moderate left" and their many delusions.
All news source publishes erroneous and fabricated materials, so you always need to fact check yourself. If you think you can trust the WaPo any more than Breitbart, you're a fool.
I find the new layout a perfect reflection of the typical content on Google News: dumbed-down and low information density.
I assume that you are reasoning that companies set the price according to the equilibrium price where supply and demand meet? That kind of reasoning fails on multiple grounds. A simple error in your (implicit) reasoning is that higher costs from regulations shift the supply curve towards higher prices.
Here's what really happens. Supply and demand curves actually describe the aggregate behavior of buyers and sellers entering and leaving a market (not the price setting behavior of individual companies). When companies pass on the costs of increased regulations, the supply curve shifts towards higher prices, demand decreases, and some suppliers exit the market. The equilibrium price increases (although not as much as costs, even though each company passed on the full costs), and buyers substitute other goods.
Incidentally, in the case of Uber and transportation companies, costly regulations cause consumers to substitute private automobiles, probably not what is intended.
Only Canada is a visa-free country with respect to the US. Visitors from Europe need a visa, but it can be "waived" in many cases when it is obvious that the person would have been granted a visa. A waiver can be denied for many benign reasons. In that case, he just needs to apply for a visa.
My guess is that this is either employment related (i.e., they are concerned that he is carrying out paid work in the US on a visitor visa), or that it is some legal issue on the Swedish side.
NPR isn't "funded by listeners", it's majority funded by institutional and corporate sources; that's true even at the level of individual stations.
And I neither approve nor disapprove of NPR, but I certainly consider it strongly politically biased, towards the political preferences of both its donors and its listeners.
No, the evidence is the bias and inaccuracies in what the WaPo publishes, which happen to align with the interests of the owner.
And I didn't say that we had permanent stable hierarchies in small bands.
You have veered from interaction styles and behaviors to ways of pursuing goals. In any case, it's likely that you work in a male-dominated business, don't you?
I didn't say that they "have been suppressed", I am saying that feminists and progressives are complaining that they are not being suppressed more and are arguing for organizing business, politics, and society more on cooperative, non-aggressive, non-hierarchical interactions.
Coming back to the origin of this thread, if a VC were to ask me for a blowjob in return for funding (I should be so lucky), I might laugh, I might take him up on his offer, or I might slap him in the face and walk out. Six months later, I would barely remember or care no matter which choice I made. That's typically male behavior.
I wouldn't gang up on him with a bunch of other "victims" months or years later and turn this into a public shaming; that's a typically female behavior (cooperation, conflict-avoidance, non-aggression), and it's ineffective in changing male behavior, in addition to being unprofessional and harmful to the business.
Which is why, as I said, I wouldn't want to work with either the men or the women involved in these incidents.
Giving Apple credit for "inventing the smartphone as it exists today" is dishonest. The iPhone was very similar to "earlier designs", and Android was also being developed independently and in parallel (its release delayed by its acquisition by Google).
What set the iPhone apart from other high volume offerings was its use of a capacitive screen and lack of keyboard, reasonable choices for the consumer market, but not so good for the business market. Other vendors dropped the keyboard only once capacitive screens caught up, which was the sensible thing to do. The iPhone was what a lot of Apple products are: products that realize a vision that a lot of people already have, just rushed out the door at a premium price.
Note that iOS always has been a minority player in the smartphone market; it used to be dominated by Symbian and RIM, and Android mostly just took over from those two systems.
But they are paying for it, and in a very inefficient and regressive way. The fact that people like you are either too dumb to figure that out or deliberately lie to the American people about that doesn't change the economic facts.
No, I want tax payers to continue to pay for it, just more efficiently, more fairly, and more accountably. And preferably in a way that doesn't hurt the disabled, which is what ADA actually has done.
What isn't questionable that by keeping the regulations, existing transportation companies have created massive barriers to entry and are forcing existing riders to pay inflated prices in order to support those with disabilities. In addition, those regulations are a hidden, regressive form of taxation.
There is no logical reason why someone running a bus company or a taxi company should have to pay for services to the disabled; if we want to support the disabled with subsidized transportation, then we should pay for that out of tax dollars directly. Once we do that, your logic ("if they lift the regulations for Uber, then...") evaporates.
I think it's perfectly fine for society to decide to pay for special services for the handicapped. But politicians are cowards, so instead of paying for the cost of providing these services out of the general fund and raising taxes on everybody, they impose regulations; it seems so harmless: just tell people to run their business a bit differently and be nice to those poor suffering people with disabilities.
But here is absolutely no logical reason why transportation companies should bear the full cost of making provisions to transport people in wheelchairs. The decision to provide these services to people with disabilities is something the entire nation has made, so the entire nation should pay for it, out of taxes.
But, of course, it's not just politicians that like to hide taxes via regulations, many of the companies being regulated like it too: they pass on the costs to their customers (as a consumption tax, mostly hurting lower income people), while at the same time creating massive barriers to entry for competitors. And that's what you're seeing with this attack on Uber: once you start down the path of illogical and unfair regulations, they take on a life of their own and spiral out of control.
Well, if not for any other reason, the fact that it's still in business at all is an "influence", because without his purchase, it would have gone the way of the dodo.
And, of course, from the CEO down, people whose careers and income are on the line know what Bezos's expectations and politics actually are.
Where did he ever say that it was "just poor people" that are a drain on the IRS?
Washington is a cesspool of special interests and handouts: unsustainable social programs, government support and tax breaks for companies run by big donors, favorable regulation for some people and corporations, and unfavorable for others. Both parties have been buying votes with tax payer money.
And the people being "butthurt" about it should be the people footing the bill: young folks whose future has been stolen, retirees who have gotten a piss poor return on their retirement savings, entrepreneurs with great ideas that are beaten down by Washington DC ("you didn't build that"), etc.
Here you go:
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
Using aggression, hierarchy, and conflict doesn't mean physical violence or bullying, it means that people form stable hierarchies and resolve problems quickly and efficiently. Mechanisms like cooperation, negotiation, and conflict-avoidance seem positive, but can be very harmful when they are turned towards undermining the group goals in search of individual gain, which is often how they are used.
The confusion you exhibit between aggression/conflict and violence/bullying is really indicative of the root of the problem. Rather than channeling male traits like aggression and conflict-seeking towards something positive, these days, we are just trying to suppress them. I think the dominance of the educational system by women is partly responsible. In any case, it's just not going to work.
Male aggressiveness, conflict-seeking, dominance hierarchies, and sexuality are an essential part of human nature, just like their female counterparts, and trying to repress or eliminate them is simply not going to work. And that also means that typical men and typical women are not just interchangeable cogs in a social machine, it means that there will be male dominated parts of society and female dominated parts of society.
It's actually really simple: he wants a more equal sharing of the tax burden:
https://taxfoundation.org/inco...
Note that poor people don't just not pay taxes, they get money back from the IRS.
If you look at total transfers, it gets even worse: the bottom 60% of income earners get more than they pay in:
https://taxfoundation.org/60-p...
That's not sustainable. No other advanced country works that way.
And Trump didn't even claim ownership, he simply linked the two:
It should be obvious that Bezos bought the WaPo to promote his political views and the interests of his corporate empire, just like Carlos Slim bought into the NYT.
Everybody knows that WaPo is owned by a billionaire to spread his political views, mostly in favor of Democrats. But that's OK because billionaires like Bezos, Schmidt, and Soros are the kinds of billionaires Democrats love.
Yes, part of. But aggression, hierarchy, and conflict have also been part of common culture essentially forever. They are both necessary. Societies primarily based on cooperation, conflict avoidance, and negotiation can't survive, any more than societies primarily based on aggression, hierarchy, and conflict.
Obviously, individuals of either sex are usually capable of all these behaviors. Nevertheless, some of these behaviors are typically male, others typically female, and that's rooted in biology.
By "avoid" I obviously meant "choose not to work for" and "choose not to socialize with in person".
Talking on Slashdot is fine, since there is nothing personal at stake and I don't have to worry about not offending your sensibilities.
"SHOULD"? It's a free country. Anybody can run a company, and anybody can choose not to work for them. If people run companies well, they keep running them. If they run them poorly, they soon stop running them. It's as simple as that.
I'm a gay man. If Justin Caldbeck offered me $5 million in VC funding for a blowjob or a date or whatever, why would I be offended?
Well, I'm glad that this has finally sunk in: we are talking about opinions (specifically, opinions about values), not facts. And I have simply stated that I have a low opinion of all principals involved: the sex crazed men, the whiny women, or the white knight defenders, for which you have accused me of all sorts of misconduct.
I'm sorry, I should have anticipated that such political terms are confusing to you. As I was saying, the term "conservative" can have both a political and a moral meaning.
Well, you certainly can't vote in California, which brings us back to the question why Brits like you have such an obsession with the US. Is it an inferiority complex? Or are your own politics and circumstances so miserable that you're trying to escape from them? Which is it?