Why? The cost to produce a product has no bearing on price; it only determines wether or not a product will be produced based on teh demand - driven price.
Who modded this idiot insightful? Only on Slashdot...
Look. If we were to assume that a perfectly free market economy were at work here (which it definitely isn't because of illegal practices by the phone companies), price is set by SUPPLY and demand. And guess what decides the slope of the supply curve? The marginal cost for providing the extra unit!
The cost to produce a product does have a bearing on price. Absent illegal market manipulation (such as the one that all phone companies are guilty of), if someone sets their price too high, someone else will be willing to sell it for lower price because they still make profit at lower price, and price ought to eventually reflect what it costs to produce them. If the price does not reflect the cost, it's a good indication (as it is the case here) that illegal market manipulation is at hand.
Go take some economics class before you spew B.S. on Slashdot again.
It would appear that your grasp of economics is either tenuous or minimal.
You fail to consider the information value of pricing above marginal cost - pricing at marginal cost would result in an under investment of capital in items such as cell phone infrastructure or software whose marginal costs of production are near zero; it is neither efficient nor desirable and pricing above marginal cost is a rational action.
May I suggest Coase, Hayek, and Alchain to start?
In addition, you fail to take into account the ability to price discriminate based on buyer preferences - a perfectly acceptable way to set prices that doesn't involve illegal behavior on the price of the seller. Sellers certainly want to capture the consumer surplus if possible.
Finally, to my original point - marginal cost determines whether or not the n+1 item gets made; not the selling price a producer should charge. In a market where there is no differentiation within products from various sellers and all sellers are price takers then prices will drop as sellers ramp up production as long as the market price is above their marginal cost; as prices drop they will stop producing once prices fall below their marginal costs, since once MR exceeds MC there is no value in producing the nth unit. If MC is less than Average Total Cost I probably shouldn't be in business since I will lose money by producing and selling; though I might stay in the game if I can cover my variable and some part of the fixed costs and expect prices to rise once other marginal producers exit (the airlineâ(TM)s game).
So what does my marginal cost have to do with pricing? Nothing, since I am a price taker as an individual producer where the market has set the price based on the outputs of all the producers.
Now, the real question is does pricing above MC indicate illegal activities; as you claim? Not by itself, and one that provides a valuable signal as to the desirability of investing in a particular endeavor.
Profit maximization, as long as their isn't collusion, is not illegal.
And if all the carriers are raise their prices on the same service, to about same price, is just a coincidence?
No, but it's not collusion either. You often see that in industries - one seller raises prices hoping their competitors will do the same; if they don't prices typically drop again once the first seller realizes they are losing sales and not making enough from the price increase to make up for the lost profit. Airlines do that all the time.
Marketers are rewarded for increasing sales / revenue / market share and so would view anything that can do that as a good thing to do.
Privacy officers, OTOH, are trying to protect customer data and so have a different outlook and reward structure.
My point - this is why strategies (Financial / Customer / Process) need to be articulated at the C level and reviewed and outcomes monitored on a regular basis - so everyone is on the same page.
What really bothered me was this:
And in 2005, data broker Choicepoint sold more than 145,000 individuals' personal data to Nigerian scammers it believed were legitimate marketers.
In another ongoing case, Ponemon founder Larry Ponemon says he is consulting with a major financial institution currently being investigated by several states' attorneys general in a major data breach attributed to an e-mail marketing partner. The company, Ponemon says, gave data from six million customer accounts to a marketing firm in Southeast Asia, where it was eventually posted to a Central Asian site dealing in black-market credit card numbers.
As criminals grow in sophistication and are able to co-opt crocked government officials you'll probably see more off this - why phish when you can buy the data you need outright?
Setup a shell company, buy the data you want and go to town (and anywhere else you want) on somebody else's dime. Off course, as corporate losses mount from such fraud the corporations will push for tighter controls simply because it starts to hit them in the wallet.
I had someone charge airline tickets on my card - I had flight numbers, ticket numbers and names and could not get the airline to cancel the tickets; even after I told them it was fraud and the charges were disputed. Right now fraud is just a cost of doing business I guess.
Cell towers are installed for the sake of making voice calls... they happen to then make use of these for text messages. I'd hesitate to explain the price of text messages with the cost of installing towers, when that's already easily covered by our voice plans.
I agree, especially since the cost of towers is borne by the tower owners, not the cell phone company who just rents space on them.
Duh, of course there are different plans. I meant no competition in the sense that the reciever pays rule applies throughout the US.
So what? With unlimited text messaging it is irrelevant who pays. Considering unlimited texting is about $10/month (using Sprint as an example) it's not much of an addition to avoid unexpected txt charges.
But a market economy depends on competition. There is no alternative available to the consumer in this case.
Huh? There are three major, and several minor (Cricket / Metro PCS / Virgin to name a few) providers that offer a variety of rate plans at various prices. I can get unlimited local / LD / TXT in my local market for as little as $38/month with no contract; or if I want no roaming fees for $139 from another provider - pretty broad gap and I'd say a pretty competitive market given the range of services and prices available to me.
Goods and services in a free market are generally offered at a price somewhere between what they cost to produce and how much they're worth to the consumer. In which direction it leans more is a good indicator of the competitiveness of the market in question. I.e., if you have a limited number of suppliers and the price is near the costs, they're in heavily competition, which is usually good for the consumer. If the price is near what the typical consumer is willing to spend, the suppliers are engaging in (usually tacit) collusion, if not acting as an explicit cartel.
Actually, when priced near cost you generally have a commoditized product; where no company's output is sufficiently difeerent for the consumer to prefer it so they buy from teh lowest price seller which drives all prices down until you approach the cost of production. Why - if any seller lowers their price, all teh others follow suit lest they lose all their customers to a lower priced competitor; this drives prices down until only the most efficient producers remain.
The otehr case is where you can differentiate your product and charge a premium for it as a result; so you price at a profit maximizing output level. It does not imply collusion in price setting since each company will make it's own price / profit calculation and produce accordingly.
The so called free market isn't free. If customers had any idea about the true cost of things to the companies that they purchase from, they wouldn't buy at the prices that things are being sold at.
Free markets require perfect knowledge. And without that, the invisible hand doesn't work.
Not really - free markets, on the consumer side, require the ability for the consumer to decide what a product is worth to them and make their buying decision based on that. If enough people are willing to pay enough to make it profitable to make a product then in a free market economy, somebody generally will produce that product.
A free market signals where to invest resources based on demand and companies respond accordingly; helping to efficiently allocate resources based on consumer desires. Those desires may be irrational but none the less drive teh market better than a planned economy or state intervention in pricing to somehow fix "free market" problems.
Okay, now remember that you need a cell tower in every area you want coverage. Now remember that you need to wire up all of those cell towers. Comparing the cost of a single T1 to that is insane.
Not really - most of the towers are not owned by the cell company but by one of a couple of twoer companies who lease antenna space; so you'd need to add in lease costs.
I'd argue they are fixed costs rather than variable so they should not be considered when calculating the cost of sending the n+1 txt msg; and while the bandwidth cost is probably more of a fixed cost as well I'd say that since it limits carrying capacity more than the antenna (as far as I know)it's not a bad estimation of the marginal cost associated with a txt msg or other data transfer.
I was recently reading about the whole George Vaccaro fiasco and did some calculations on how much the cost of transfer is over a T1 line vs. what companies like Verizon charge for data transfer. Its astonishing that people put up with this:
Cost of a T1 line: $600 (Verizon's cost would be less and they probably have higher capacity lines in many places.)
Monthly bandwidth capacity of a T1: 40,687,488,000 Kilobytes (86,400 sec. * 30.41 avg days * 197 KB/sec)
Cost per KB over a T1 line: 60,000 cents / 40,687,488,000 KB = 0.0001159190 cents per KB = $0.000001159190 (for all those Verizon reps out there)
Verizon's charge per KB to the customer: $0.02
Verizon's markup on data transfer: x 17,253!!!!!
Screwing generation Y & Z: Priceless
Why do people put up with this? Some people might say I'm comparing apples to oranges, but Apples dont' cost 17,000 times more than oranges. There should be a class action suit over this.
Why? The cost to produce a product has no bearing on price; it only determines wether or not a product will be produced based on teh demand - driven price.
The carriers should set prices to maximize their profits; which they try to do through offering teired and fixed rate plans. Given the marginal cost of extra traffic is virtually nil, the higher rates plans and flat rate bundles are probably mostly profit; by offering low usage plans you get the people who wouldn't own a cell phone if the paid $99/month while the all - in $99 captures people who are willing to pay alittle more than the highest capped plan per month to eliminate the chane they will go over their plan usage and get hit with a large bill every now and then.
Profit maximization, as long as their isn't collusion, is not illegal.
I'm sorry, but that's a crap argument. In all of those cases, the licensing requirements are related to the actual job. In this case? Completely unrelated.
And Louisiana law is fairly different from Texas law. Louisiana is sort of the red haired bastard stepchild when it comes to the law because of the heavy French influence.
You mean like it is crap to condemn Louisiana's legal system and laws because they are based on the the traditions of Roman law and the Napoleonic Code rather than the Anglo Saxon legal tradition? You do realize that in the same breath you have condemned the legal systems a large portion of humanity as 'crap' since much of it is heavily influenced either by the Napoleonic code civil, Roman law or both. The Anglo Saxon legal tradition has it's own set of problems and is in no way vastly superior.
The OP did not condemn the Code Napoleon; but simply pointed out that LA has a different legal tradition and as a result you can't always extrapolate its legal results to the rest of the US.
The "sort of the red haired bastard stepchild" comment is appropriate in the sense that LA law (sounds like a TV show, eh?) is different from the rest of the "family" due to its heritage.
As for my personal opinion, I think that the vast majority of medical conditions can be dealt with by someone with significantly less training/licensing (eg. nurses, online/telephone professionals, etc) than is currently demanded; heart surgeries are much less common than colds, as dreamy as McDreamy is.
Yes, and the US healthcare system is moving towards such a model - you are seeing more Nurse practitioners and Physician's assistants providing primary care under a Dr's supervision; including the creation of clinics staffed by healthcare professionals other than Drs.
I think this is a good idea as it will help to reduce costs without hurting the quality of care. Primary care is really about treating symptoms - you identify the most likely causes and prescribe a treatment to eliminate them. Once the symptoms go away you've cured the problem (almost all of the time); when the symptoms don't or indicate a more serious condition you bring in a specialist and run tests. Nurse practitioners are trained to do just that; allowing them greater leeway in treating patients would help ease the demand for Drs. and the workload and control costs by replacing expensive Drs with less expensive (but just as capable) professionals. A Dr could never see as many patients as could several NP's and PA's whose diagnosis they review and approve.
Proper record coding would allow computers do do a first review and highlight any potential areas that may have been missed, and the reviewing Dr need not be physically located in the same place as the clinic.
We require licenses of many different professions, doctors, medical professionals, accountants even. Sorry, but unfortunately, saying "I have plenty of happy customers that are willing to have me repair their computers" doesn't justify this anymore than a doctor practicing medicine without a license can say "but they're totally accepting of my care, even though I'm unlicensed."
Licensing is a way to reduce competition by creating barriers to entry. While setting standards for practice has merit in some cases; in many it's simply a way to reduce the supply of available practitioners.
Doctors? Sure, because the cost of failure is high and the ability to determine competency is difficult for a layman so setting minimum standards for practice is a way to provide some assurance to patients. Even so, capabilities very widely and a Doctor can practice without passing specialty boards (though it would be difficult).
Barbers and stylists? No one ever died from a bad haircut (at least not that I am aware of); and if you get a bad one you simply let your hair grow and don't return.
Cabs? Limiting the number of medallions simply allows the licensed to sustain higher fares; and results in gypsy cabs taking up some of the demand. Look at the value of NYC cab medallions - the city could issue 50% more and still keep demand high; but the owners of the current medallions would scream bloody murder when their value dropped as a result.
I've always contended engineers made a big mistake when they let people use the title Engineer without being a PE.
Now, the question is - what happens when large companies spend money to get PI licenses for their staff - I doubt they can raise prices and those workers now have a credential that could be more valuable to another employer; who didn't pay for the license and training. My guess is the BB, Microcenters, Fry's et. al. will work to get this law changed once they realize what it will cost them.
I think the biggest issue here, is that police and other criminology people are concerned that if a computer tech stumbles across illegal information on a computer, that since they are not a licensed private investigator, the evidence cannot in any way be used. Even if say, it's for a child-pornography case. "Your evidence was siezed improperly, sorry, but it's excluded, next time do things the right way!"
I doubt that computer repair companies will put in place the procedures necessary to maintain evidence - the cost to do that for every machine they repair would be prohibitive; and they certainly don't want to get dragged into court cases nor risk getting sued by a customer when tehy fail to meet accepted standards for PI's handling of evidence.
With the computer system market, a lot of people buying a system need or want OS X and Apple is the only vendor that sells OS X, so people buy their hardware from Apple, when what they really want is the OS. This is the result of the desktop OS market being monopolized
No, it is result of Apple creating a product that people want. having a product that is in demand is not monopilizing a market. there are plenty of other choices in teh PC market besides Apple.
It seems most people don't have any conception of how a monopoly affect markets, nor on how drastic and wide ranging those affects are. Nor do they seem to understand how detrimental those monopolies are to them.
And I believe you are one of them. A monolplist is able to exert market power to extract rents and limit competition. While Apple can harge more, they do not have the ability to stop others from selling (or giving away, for that matter) an OS and associated hardware. Apple has virtually no market power - their prices are not that far out of line, overall, with the broader market; even if the upgrade price is higher in soem instances. If they really were a monopoly Macs would be selling for a lot more since Apple could raise prices without worrying about competition. In fact, you can get Apple - compatible memory for a lot less; further indicating Apple has no monolpoly power in the PC market.
Apple simply has avoided the commodization that has occured in the rest of the PC market; hence the ability to maintain higher prices..
Ultimately, the test of wether a monopoly is bad is - is the consumer hurt? Certainly not in the PC market place where we have seen as steady drop in price / capabilities ratios of each new generation of machine and OS.
Yes 90% of the customers buy 10% of the goods, but what is the breakdown for each customer? Personally MOST of the time I buy in that 10%, but I also go to amazon for that other 90% (even if it only makes up 10% of my buying)... if amazon can't deliver that they then not only loose that 10% of my buying but the other 90% because I will just move to a store that handles my full needs better.
I guess the question is - will any store chose to handle the full range? You might find a specialty store that deals in the 10%, but can they compete with Amazon for the other 90%? Buy.com comes to mind as one that might do that, any else?
It's the Wal-Mart model - we carry what sells; and are tough to compete with on price, if you want you can sell the other stuff since its sales are too small to be worth it to us.
"Jeff HATES taxes. The reason that Amazon has made as much money as it has is because Jeff carefully played the game to avoid paying as many taxes as possible. Lab 126 is a wholly owned subsidiary, because if it wasn't, every California resident would have to pay sales tax on Amazon.com."
That's the key - there is no reason not to use existing laws to minimize the amount you or a corporation owes in taxes. It is up to the government to write a tax code that generates enough revenue to provide services while not pissing voters off too much.
People always look at the law to see how to minimize what they owe in taxes; which is why I find the whole "Fair Tax" argument that "it will be simpler and we can abolish the IRS," naive. People will structure deals to avoid taxes, Congress will pass laws to stop them, people will find creative new ways to avoid taxes, Congress will pass new laws and the endless cycle will continue.
If we're talking about a brick and mortar store, the carrying cost of the truly obscure could well be too high to justify itself. With online stores, there's no excuse not to carry the obscure.
Except that it still costs Amazon to buy and store the obscure title.
I call bullshit on this. You mean to tell me that Amazon.com and iTunes Store would be more successful if they only carried the most popular 1% of their stock? How about *ANY* bookstore, not even just the online ones.
From a quick read, that's not what I get out of it; and I think that the impact would be different for say Amazon than iTunes due to the marginal costs. For Amazon, Netflix, et.al. there is a cost to maintaining, buying, and storing a large catalog of obscure titles; iTunes and other all electronic distributions have minimal costs for carrying the n+1 title, so that even 1 sale could cover them plus the ability to say we have thousands of songs / movies for download is good for attracting customers.
For Amazon, dumping those that never sell cuts their costs without losing customers (since you still might buy something else anyway); for subscription based electronic distribution or just electronic distribution the ability to attract subscriber is worth more than the small cost of uploading / cataloging / storing the file.
It might be more than 1%; but at some point there is a profit maximizing level of stock. It's somewhat counter - intuitive but sometimes it's more profitable to not have something to sell than to keep a full stock; especially when you can't predict the sales volume.
Considering your sources listed other cars closer to 300 Wh use (and much less for more experimental types); I'm not sure a "more than doubl(ing)" of demand is a realistic estimate. At 300 Wh it's more like 8000kWh, somewhere around about an 12 - 20 amp load or so; depending on losses.
Improvements in battery technology would no doubt come once millions of cars were sold; as well as the supporting charging technology.
I agree it will add to the need to build more power plants as we are already nearing the capacity of current plants.
You have to maintain a LOT more electrical lines to supply millions of cars with recharging (and you can bet the local utilities will bitch about their voltage drops, peak drain, etc) than it is to maintain lines along a rail right-of-way, especially since that right-of-way usually doesn't have trees falling on lines due to storms, or outages caused by drunk drivers hitting utility poles.
Also, railroads DO use electric where it's available, because it IS cheaper. We'll be re-introducing electric trams over the next decade, again because it's cheaper - even cheaper than running diesel buses over the long term.
Most of the infrastructure is already there for home charging of electrical vehicles using 110 or 220 volts.
As for load, if most of the charging can be accomplished overnight and start after the PM a/c or heat spike it simply means more of a base load (which is good for baseloading plants as they don't have to load follow as much.
While I realize electricity is often cheaper, if the infrastructure costs (in this case running overhead lines over thousands of miles of track and replacing diesel electric engines with electric ones )are too high compared to the savings then the initial investment will not b emade because the return is too small.
... and I beat that when I carry 3 passengers in my car. Big fucking deal. Rail is still more energy-efficient at moving people, and it's a lot easier to switch rail to green power (electric from hydro dams, for example), than it is to switch millions of cars.
Just because it is easier to do one thing than another doesn't mean either is easy. Running and maintaining thousands of miles of overhead lines, and then getting the electricity to power the trains is not cheap; if it were more cost effective and reliable you'd see railroads dumping their diesel electrics for electric freight engines.
As for hydro power being green, I guess it is unless you are a spawning fish.
Slashdot Mirror
Why? The cost to produce a product has no bearing on price; it only determines wether or not a product will be produced based on teh demand - driven price.
Who modded this idiot insightful? Only on Slashdot ...
Look. If we were to assume that a perfectly free market economy were at work here (which it definitely isn't because of illegal practices by the phone companies), price is set by SUPPLY and demand. And guess what decides the slope of the supply curve? The marginal cost for providing the extra unit!
The cost to produce a product does have a bearing on price. Absent illegal market manipulation (such as the one that all phone companies are guilty of), if someone sets their price too high, someone else will be willing to sell it for lower price because they still make profit at lower price, and price ought to eventually reflect what it costs to produce them. If the price does not reflect the cost, it's a good indication (as it is the case here) that illegal market manipulation is at hand.
Go take some economics class before you spew B.S. on Slashdot again.
It would appear that your grasp of economics is either tenuous or minimal.
You fail to consider the information value of pricing above marginal cost - pricing at marginal cost would result in an under investment of capital in items such as cell phone infrastructure or software whose marginal costs of production are near zero; it is neither efficient nor desirable and pricing above marginal cost is a rational action.
May I suggest Coase, Hayek, and Alchain to start?
In addition, you fail to take into account the ability to price discriminate based on buyer preferences - a perfectly acceptable way to set prices that doesn't involve illegal behavior on the price of the seller. Sellers certainly want to capture the consumer surplus if possible.
Finally, to my original point - marginal cost determines whether or not the n+1 item gets made; not the selling price a producer should charge. In a market where there is no differentiation within products from various sellers and all sellers are price takers then prices will drop as sellers ramp up production as long as the market price is above their marginal cost; as prices drop they will stop producing once prices fall below their marginal costs, since once MR exceeds MC there is no value in producing the nth unit. If MC is less than Average Total Cost I probably shouldn't be in business since I will lose money by producing and selling; though I might stay in the game if I can cover my variable and some part of the fixed costs and expect prices to rise once other marginal producers exit (the airlineâ(TM)s game).
So what does my marginal cost have to do with pricing? Nothing, since I am a price taker as an individual producer where the market has set the price based on the outputs of all the producers.
Now, the real question is does pricing above MC indicate illegal activities; as you claim? Not by itself, and one that provides a valuable signal as to the desirability of investing in a particular endeavor.
Profit maximization, as long as their isn't collusion, is not illegal.
And if all the carriers are raise their prices on the same service, to about same price, is just a coincidence?
No, but it's not collusion either. You often see that in industries - one seller raises prices hoping their competitors will do the same; if they don't prices typically drop again once the first seller realizes they are losing sales and not making enough from the price increase to make up for the lost profit. Airlines do that all the time.
Marketers are rewarded for increasing sales / revenue / market share and so would view anything that can do that as a good thing to do.
Privacy officers, OTOH, are trying to protect customer data and so have a different outlook and reward structure.
My point - this is why strategies (Financial / Customer / Process) need to be articulated at the C level and reviewed and outcomes monitored on a regular basis - so everyone is on the same page.
What really bothered me was this:
And in 2005, data broker Choicepoint sold more than 145,000 individuals' personal data to Nigerian scammers it believed were legitimate marketers.
In another ongoing case, Ponemon founder Larry Ponemon says he is consulting with a major financial institution currently being investigated by several states' attorneys general in a major data breach attributed to an e-mail marketing partner. The company, Ponemon says, gave data from six million customer accounts to a marketing firm in Southeast Asia, where it was eventually posted to a Central Asian site dealing in black-market credit card numbers.
As criminals grow in sophistication and are able to co-opt crocked government officials you'll probably see more off this - why phish when you can buy the data you need outright?
Setup a shell company, buy the data you want and go to town (and anywhere else you want) on somebody else's dime. Off course, as corporate losses mount from such fraud the corporations will push for tighter controls simply because it starts to hit them in the wallet.
I had someone charge airline tickets on my card - I had flight numbers, ticket numbers and names and could not get the airline to cancel the tickets; even after I told them it was fraud and the charges were disputed. Right now fraud is just a cost of doing business I guess.
Cell towers are installed for the sake of making voice calls... they happen to then make use of these for text messages. I'd hesitate to explain the price of text messages with the cost of installing towers, when that's already easily covered by our voice plans.
I agree, especially since the cost of towers is borne by the tower owners, not the cell phone company who just rents space on them.
Duh, of course there are different plans. I meant no competition in the sense that the reciever pays rule applies throughout the US.
So what? With unlimited text messaging it is irrelevant who pays. Considering unlimited texting is about $10/month (using Sprint as an example) it's not much of an addition to avoid unexpected txt charges.
May I recommend you swap the 'h' and 'e' keys on your keyboard.
Is tehre something wrong?.
But a market economy depends on competition. There is no alternative available to the consumer in this case.
Huh? There are three major, and several minor (Cricket / Metro PCS / Virgin to name a few) providers that offer a variety of rate plans at various prices. I can get unlimited local / LD / TXT in my local market for as little as $38/month with no contract; or if I want no roaming fees for $139 from another provider - pretty broad gap and I'd say a pretty competitive market given the range of services and prices available to me.
Goods and services in a free market are generally offered at a price somewhere between what they cost to produce and how much they're worth to the consumer. In which direction it leans more is a good indicator of the competitiveness of the market in question. I.e., if you have a limited number of suppliers and the price is near the costs, they're in heavily competition, which is usually good for the consumer. If the price is near what the typical consumer is willing to spend, the suppliers are engaging in (usually tacit) collusion, if not acting as an explicit cartel.
Actually, when priced near cost you generally have a commoditized product; where no company's output is sufficiently difeerent for the consumer to prefer it so they buy from teh lowest price seller which drives all prices down until you approach the cost of production. Why - if any seller lowers their price, all teh others follow suit lest they lose all their customers to a lower priced competitor; this drives prices down until only the most efficient producers remain.
The otehr case is where you can differentiate your product and charge a premium for it as a result; so you price at a profit maximizing output level. It does not imply collusion in price setting since each company will make it's own price / profit calculation and produce accordingly.
The so called free market isn't free.
If customers had any idea about the true cost of things to the companies that they purchase from, they wouldn't buy at the prices that things are being sold at.
Free markets require perfect knowledge. And without that, the invisible hand doesn't work.
Not really - free markets, on the consumer side, require the ability for the consumer to decide what a product is worth to them and make their buying decision based on that. If enough people are willing to pay enough to make it profitable to make a product then in a free market economy, somebody generally will produce that product.
A free market signals where to invest resources based on demand and companies respond accordingly; helping to efficiently allocate resources based on consumer desires. Those desires may be irrational but none the less drive teh market better than a planned economy or state intervention in pricing to somehow fix "free market" problems.
Okay, now remember that you need a cell tower in every area you want coverage. Now remember that you need to wire up all of those cell towers. Comparing the cost of a single T1 to that is insane.
Not really - most of the towers are not owned by the cell company but by one of a couple of twoer companies who lease antenna space; so you'd need to add in lease costs.
I'd argue they are fixed costs rather than variable so they should not be considered when calculating the cost of sending the n+1 txt msg; and while the bandwidth cost is probably more of a fixed cost as well I'd say that since it limits carrying capacity more than the antenna (as far as I know)it's not a bad estimation of the marginal cost associated with a txt msg or other data transfer.
I was recently reading about the whole George Vaccaro fiasco and did some calculations on how much the cost of transfer is over a T1 line vs. what companies like Verizon charge for data transfer. Its astonishing that people put up with this:
Why do people put up with this? Some people might say I'm comparing apples to oranges, but Apples dont' cost 17,000 times more than oranges. There should be a class action suit over this.
Why? The cost to produce a product has no bearing on price; it only determines wether or not a product will be produced based on teh demand - driven price.
The carriers should set prices to maximize their profits; which they try to do through offering teired and fixed rate plans. Given the marginal cost of extra traffic is virtually nil, the higher rates plans and flat rate bundles are probably mostly profit; by offering low usage plans you get the people who wouldn't own a cell phone if the paid $99/month while the all - in $99 captures people who are willing to pay alittle more than the highest capped plan per month to eliminate the chane they will go over their plan usage and get hit with a large bill every now and then.
Profit maximization, as long as their isn't collusion, is not illegal.
I'm sorry, but that's a crap argument. In all of those cases, the licensing requirements are related to the actual job. In this case? Completely unrelated.
And Louisiana law is fairly different from Texas law. Louisiana is sort of the red haired bastard stepchild when it comes to the law because of the heavy French influence.
You mean like it is crap to condemn Louisiana's legal system and laws because they are based on the the traditions of Roman law and the Napoleonic Code rather than the Anglo Saxon legal tradition? You do realize that in the same breath you have condemned the legal systems a large portion of humanity as 'crap' since much of it is heavily influenced either by the Napoleonic code civil, Roman law or both. The Anglo Saxon legal tradition has it's own set of problems and is in no way vastly superior.
The OP did not condemn the Code Napoleon; but simply pointed out that LA has a different legal tradition and as a result you can't always extrapolate its legal results to the rest of the US.
The "sort of the red haired bastard stepchild" comment is appropriate in the sense that LA law (sounds like a TV show, eh?) is different from the rest of the "family" due to its heritage.
As for my personal opinion, I think that the vast majority of medical conditions can be dealt with by someone with significantly less training/licensing (eg. nurses, online/telephone professionals, etc) than is currently demanded; heart surgeries are much less common than colds, as dreamy as McDreamy is.
Yes, and the US healthcare system is moving towards such a model - you are seeing more Nurse practitioners and Physician's assistants providing primary care under a Dr's supervision; including the creation of clinics staffed by healthcare professionals other than Drs.
I think this is a good idea as it will help to reduce costs without hurting the quality of care. Primary care is really about treating symptoms - you identify the most likely causes and prescribe a treatment to eliminate them. Once the symptoms go away you've cured the problem (almost all of the time); when the symptoms don't or indicate a more serious condition you bring in a specialist and run tests. Nurse practitioners are trained to do just that; allowing them greater leeway in treating patients would help ease the demand for Drs. and the workload and control costs by replacing expensive Drs with less expensive (but just as capable) professionals. A Dr could never see as many patients as could several NP's and PA's whose diagnosis they review and approve.
Proper record coding would allow computers do do a first review and highlight any potential areas that may have been missed, and the reviewing Dr need not be physically located in the same place as the clinic.
We require licenses of many different professions, doctors, medical professionals, accountants even. Sorry, but unfortunately, saying "I have plenty of happy customers that are willing to have me repair their computers" doesn't justify this anymore than a doctor practicing medicine without a license can say "but they're totally accepting of my care, even though I'm unlicensed."
Licensing is a way to reduce competition by creating barriers to entry. While setting standards for practice has merit in some cases; in many it's simply a way to reduce the supply of available practitioners.
Doctors? Sure, because the cost of failure is high and the ability to determine competency is difficult for a layman so setting minimum standards for practice is a way to provide some assurance to patients. Even so, capabilities very widely and a Doctor can practice without passing specialty boards (though it would be difficult).
Barbers and stylists? No one ever died from a bad haircut (at least not that I am aware of); and if you get a bad one you simply let your hair grow and don't return.
Cabs? Limiting the number of medallions simply allows the licensed to sustain higher fares; and results in gypsy cabs taking up some of the demand. Look at the value of NYC cab medallions - the city could issue 50% more and still keep demand high; but the owners of the current medallions would scream bloody murder when their value dropped as a result.
I've always contended engineers made a big mistake when they let people use the title Engineer without being a PE.
Now, the question is - what happens when large companies spend money to get PI licenses for their staff - I doubt they can raise prices and those workers now have a credential that could be more valuable to another employer; who didn't pay for the license and training. My guess is the BB, Microcenters, Fry's et. al. will work to get this law changed once they realize what it will cost them.
I think the biggest issue here, is that police and other criminology people are concerned that if a computer tech stumbles across illegal information on a computer, that since they are not a licensed private investigator, the evidence cannot in any way be used. Even if say, it's for a child-pornography case. "Your evidence was siezed improperly, sorry, but it's excluded, next time do things the right way!"
I doubt that computer repair companies will put in place the procedures necessary to maintain evidence - the cost to do that for every machine they repair would be prohibitive; and they certainly don't want to get dragged into court cases nor risk getting sued by a customer when tehy fail to meet accepted standards for PI's handling of evidence.
With the computer system market, a lot of people buying a system need or want OS X and Apple is the only vendor that sells OS X, so people buy their hardware from Apple, when what they really want is the OS. This is the result of the desktop OS market being monopolized
No, it is result of Apple creating a product that people want. having a product that is in demand is not monopilizing a market. there are plenty of other choices in teh PC market besides Apple.
It seems most people don't have any conception of how a monopoly affect markets, nor on how drastic and wide ranging those affects are. Nor do they seem to understand how detrimental those monopolies are to them.
And I believe you are one of them. A monolplist is able to exert market power to extract rents and limit competition. While Apple can harge more, they do not have the ability to stop others from selling (or giving away, for that matter) an OS and associated hardware. Apple has virtually no market power - their prices are not that far out of line, overall, with the broader market; even if the upgrade price is higher in soem instances. If they really were a monopoly Macs would be selling for a lot more since Apple could raise prices without worrying about competition. In fact, you can get Apple - compatible memory for a lot less; further indicating Apple has no monolpoly power in the PC market.
Apple simply has avoided the commodization that has occured in the rest of the PC market; hence the ability to maintain higher prices..
Ultimately, the test of wether a monopoly is bad is - is the consumer hurt? Certainly not in the PC market place where we have seen as steady drop in price / capabilities ratios of each new generation of machine and OS.
One thing I am curoius how or if they tracked...
Yes 90% of the customers buy 10% of the goods, but what is the breakdown for each customer? Personally MOST of the time I buy in that 10%, but I also go to amazon for that other 90% (even if it only makes up 10% of my buying)... if amazon can't deliver that they then not only loose that 10% of my buying but the other 90% because I will just move to a store that handles my full needs better.
I guess the question is - will any store chose to handle the full range? You might find a specialty store that deals in the 10%, but can they compete with Amazon for the other 90%? Buy.com comes to mind as one that might do that, any else?
It's the Wal-Mart model - we carry what sells; and are tough to compete with on price, if you want you can sell the other stuff since its sales are too small to be worth it to us.
"Jeff HATES taxes. The reason that Amazon has made as much money as it has is because Jeff carefully played the game to avoid paying as many taxes as possible. Lab 126 is a wholly owned subsidiary, because if it wasn't, every California resident would have to pay sales tax on Amazon.com."
That's the key - there is no reason not to use existing laws to minimize the amount you or a corporation owes in taxes. It is up to the government to write a tax code that generates enough revenue to provide services while not pissing voters off too much.
People always look at the law to see how to minimize what they owe in taxes; which is why I find the whole "Fair Tax" argument that "it will be simpler and we can abolish the IRS," naive. People will structure deals to avoid taxes, Congress will pass laws to stop them, people will find creative new ways to avoid taxes, Congress will pass new laws and the endless cycle will continue.
It's actually progressive, since necessities are usually excluded from the sales tax. Thus people with more expended disposable income are taxed more.
That is true only for some locations. My state charges sales tax on everything I buy at retail.
If we're talking about a brick and mortar store, the carrying cost of the truly obscure could well be too high to justify itself. With online stores, there's no excuse not to carry the obscure.
Except that it still costs Amazon to buy and store the obscure title.
I call bullshit on this. You mean to tell me that Amazon.com and iTunes Store would be more successful if they only carried the most popular 1% of their stock? How about *ANY* bookstore, not even just the online ones.
From a quick read, that's not what I get out of it; and I think that the impact would be different for say Amazon than iTunes due to the marginal costs. For Amazon, Netflix, et.al. there is a cost to maintaining, buying, and storing a large catalog of
obscure titles; iTunes and other all electronic distributions have minimal costs for carrying the n+1 title, so that even 1 sale could cover them plus the ability to say we have thousands of songs / movies for download is good for attracting customers.
For Amazon, dumping those that never sell cuts their costs without losing customers (since you still might buy something else anyway); for subscription based electronic distribution or just electronic distribution the ability to attract subscriber is worth more than the small cost of uploading / cataloging / storing the file.
It might be more than 1%; but at some point there is a profit maximizing level of stock. It's somewhat counter - intuitive but sometimes it's more profitable to not have something to sell than to keep a full stock; especially when you can't predict the sales volume.
I'm sure you could find something offensive in many vanity plates, imagine the DMV trying to sort through all the complaints?
Can you email them in? I wonder how many complaints it takes to get a tag pulled.
WTF-O
Considering your sources listed other cars closer to 300 Wh use (and much less for more experimental types); I'm not sure a "more than doubl(ing)" of demand is a realistic estimate. At 300 Wh it's more like 8000kWh, somewhere around about an 12 - 20 amp load or so; depending on losses.
Improvements in battery technology would no doubt come once millions of cars were sold; as well as the supporting charging technology.
I agree it will add to the need to build more power plants as we are already nearing the capacity of current plants.
You have to maintain a LOT more electrical lines to supply millions of cars with recharging (and you can bet the local utilities will bitch about their voltage drops, peak drain, etc) than it is to maintain lines along a rail right-of-way, especially since that right-of-way usually doesn't have trees falling on lines due to storms, or outages caused by drunk drivers hitting utility poles.
Most of the infrastructure is already there for home charging of electrical vehicles using 110 or 220 volts.Also, railroads DO use electric where it's available, because it IS cheaper. We'll be re-introducing electric trams over the next decade, again because it's cheaper - even cheaper than running diesel buses over the long term.
As for load, if most of the charging can be accomplished overnight and start after the PM a/c or heat spike it simply means more of a base load (which is good for baseloading plants as they don't have to load follow as much.
While I realize electricity is often cheaper, if the infrastructure costs (in this case running overhead lines over thousands of miles of track and replacing diesel electric engines with electric ones )are too high compared to the savings then the initial investment will not b emade because the return is too small.
... and I beat that when I carry 3 passengers in my car. Big fucking deal. Rail is still more energy-efficient at moving people, and it's a lot easier to switch rail to green power (electric from hydro dams, for example), than it is to switch millions of cars.
Just because it is easier to do one thing than another doesn't mean either is easy. Running and maintaining thousands of miles of overhead lines, and then getting the electricity to power the trains is not cheap; if it were more cost effective and reliable you'd see railroads dumping their diesel electrics for electric freight engines.As for hydro power being green, I guess it is unless you are a spawning fish.