Why would the entire auto industry collapse just because GM collapsed?
There were MANY perfectly solvent suppliers that would have also gone out of business. [...] Economists were estimating the unemployment rate would have been around 15%-20% if the entire auto industry was allowed to fail.
If we assume that suppliers are dedicated, then the ones who supply GM would collapse. But Ford and Toyota have dedicated suppliers too, and they would be unaffected.
Let's assume that suppliers are partially reliant on GM, and the reliance is enough that without GM they would have to shut down. In fact let's say all suppliers are like that. The first one, which had a 40% reliance on GM, shuts down. Well now the remaining 60% of what they produced needs to be produced by someone else. That takes care of the next guy who had a 40% reliance on GM, plus another guy who had a 20% reliance. So obviously in this scenario some people will go out of business but most will not. Hard to say if it even would qualify as "many" since a lot of suppliers aren't even based here but overseas.
What did you envision where "the entire auto industry" goes out of business because GM does?
GM wasn't bailed out, exactly - it went bankrupt. The shareholders and bondholders of GM lost pretty much everything. The unions and other employees (including executives) are the ones who were bailed out. We just gave them a bunch of money and called it a day.
I guess it depends who you think GM "is". Is it the employees (including executives), or is it the owners?
Just look how many times guns were used against tyranny that produced enduring democracies instead of next set of tyrants?
Well at least a few times.
How many times freedom of expression against oppressors liberated people and created enduring democracies?
Zero? What are you talking about?
That is when warrior wannabes like you strut around claiming to be the cause. You are the effect, not the cause, of the first amendment.
Calling it an issue of cause and effect doesn't really make sense. But there's no doubt that warriors enabled both the 1st and 2nd amendment. You do know what was going on in this land before the Constitution was signed back in 1787? It involved warriors strutting around and shooting British soldiers. And one of them, a guy named George Washington, even became the first president.
Trying your "second amendment solutions" against a lawfully elected government of the USA is rebellion
You're claiming free speech can be used to overthrow governments as well. Guess what? That's still rebellion and it's also illegal. Or did you think America has unlimited free speech?
Definitely not because of your puny little glocks, brownings or bushmasters. Our army had been battling AK-47s and IEDs for ages now buddy, you don't stand a chance against our army.
Think about what you just said. Our army has been battling against AK-47s and IEDS (the "I" stands for improvised btw)... FOR AGES. Ages. That means "a long time." And you think, as a result, that people with small weapons "don't stand a chance?" Even though they've been battling for ages?
All that said, I agree with you that the right to bear arms does not cause our society to work well. But neither does the right to free speech. BOTH are effects of a good society. A good society is made up of good people who believe in the social contract. Free speech and the right to bear arms are marks of respect we have for each other because we believe our compatriots are as good as we are. The reason we let Joe Sixpack have a gun is that we trust Joe Sixpack to use that gun to defend himself, just like we want to defend ourselves. The reason we let Joe Sixpack have free speech is that we trust he has good intentions when he says something we disagree with. We even acknowledge that he may be right when we disagree so it's valuable to allow him to keep talking, even if in the short term it embarrasses us or hurts our feelings.
Privatising mines makes sense. The wealth of the land belongs to the people, not just one individual.
I'm assuming you meant nationalizing.
The problem with that line of thought is that "the people" aren't really "the people". They're "the people right now." What about the next generation? What about when an invading army kicks them all out and resettles the land? Where are their resources? What about the descendants of the people who were displaced by the current group?
When you think about it, the people who nationalize and exploit a resource are just the winners of a lottery and they don't have any moral claim to it. If someone else can win the lottery, they deserve it just as much (or little).
And? Mandela could have been Satan incarnate. That doesn't justify vetoing anti-apartheid sanctions.
Yes it does. You aren't very smart if you help overthrow a bad government knowing that a worse government is waiting in the wings.
You see, as much as you can potentially condemn Mandela for what he did or might have been, you overlook that Mandela wasn't *the* guaranteed new leader of South Africa.
[...]
But even that doesn't justify vetoing sanctions or refusal to enforce them. It only explains why they wouldn't have supported Mandela.
I don't understand.. in both paragraphs it's like you are trying to say that Mandela was the sole source of all that was bad. Surely you see that Mandela was just a leader, and that leaders of such large movements are selected and shaped by that movement. In other words, it's not just Mandela that could be condemned and not supported, it's what he stood for and the people around him.
I don't think it's useful to compare karma to criminal charges. Karma is helped by good actions, but that doesn't really affect your standing as a criminal (past a certain point). I mean if you routinely save peoples' lives you may have some immunity to things like parking tickets issued by the local cops, but I'm guessing it's not going to save you from criminal charges about cheating on your taxes every year. But in the karmic equivalent I suspect you'd be in positive territory.
I don't think karma requires a guilty mind. I'm no expert but the definition on Google is
* (in Hinduism and Buddhism) the sum of a person's actions in this and previous states of existence, viewed as deciding their fate in future existences. informal * destiny or fate, following as effect from cause.
Cause and effect doesn't require you to do something on purpose or know the consequences in advance, neither does the sum of a person's actions (not thoughts).
Medical testing is not required to work consistently. That's why there's a notion of false positives and false negatives to begin with. We KNOW that the tests will have some number of errors when applied to a large population.
And even if you were correct, the logical action would be to go after the suppliers of the sequencing equipment that 23andme is using, since they are the ones making claims that their equipment properly analyzes dna. Or do you think 23andme markets equipment that they developed and certified all by their lonesome? Or on the contrary, do you think every pharmacy in the country has to independently verify the medical claims of every single drug they sell? Obviously not, that would be idiotic.
Also I don't know what you mean by the results being "good" for something. I can go in and persuade my doctor to order any number of unnecessary medical tests for me.
Are you talking about the false positive rate of the *actual test* as in, the test shows you have some xyz-gene but x% of the time that is incorrect? Or are you talking about false positive rate as in assuming you definitely have xyz-gene which is a marker for such and such disease, x% of the time that does not actually lead to such and such disease?
If the former, yeah sure. I'd be surprised if they didn't have that information available, at least for the FDA.
If the latter, then obviously that's an impossible standard to meet and you're actually calling for the ban of affordable genetic testing, while hiding behind nice sounding statements like "They also need to be clearer" and "They need to explain." Oh yeah, just be clearer and explain a bit! And with one company independently doing it all, it will only take a hundred years and resources equivalent to the entire US medical R&D industry, which is where these hypotheses about genetic markers for disease come from and are a current and hotly researched area.
I've started comparing prices for each component at both sites.
Also check out camelcamelcamel.com and camelegg.com. Now we just need a site where you enter your build and it puts together order lists from newegg and amazon to optimize for price. Ideally it would also search for near substitutes (different brands of value ram for instance) and build your shopping cart for you.
How did Saunders win the debate? I read the linked article and didn't get any sense that she triumphed in a debate sense. In fact her conclusion is stupid and illogical:
Me, I don't want to live in a world where one group of people decides when another group should die. For that, Adams wants me to die a horrible death. Once death becomes the solution for one condition, it becomes a remedy for others.
Apparently she wants to kill herself (without assistance though!) because we DO live in a world where one group of people (e.g. juries, government, soldiers, terrorists, etc) decides when another group should die (e.g. criminals, enemy combatants, terrorists, etc). I'm sure she didn't mean to state her principle so broadly and put her life at stake for it, but she did, and she sounds like an idiot for doing so.
The more serious error is that the assisted suicide movement is to allow people to choose for themselves when to die. That's why it's called.. wait for it.. assisted SUICIDE. Making an argument about "one group" killing "another group" doesn't apply.
What is hard to argue with is that a change in the environment will destabilize the existing geopolitical conditions, which are relatively constrained at the moment.
That's an easy one. If you want peace, prepare for war. Been true for a long time now.
If we have $1 trillion to spend, and we spend it trying to "fight climate change" or some crap, that's not going to accomplish anything worthwhile. It would be much better spending the $1 trillion on some split of weapons and adapting to inevitable climate change.
If you believe in the free market and capitalism, you know that change in market conditions is mostly bad for the vast majority of people.
Wait, I believe in free market and capitalism and I disagree with what you said. What's wrong with me?
To take an example, can you explain how a very disruptive change in market conditions like the banning of slavery in the US resulted in things being mostly bad for the vast majority of people?
This is the weird thing about climate changers. It's like they're terrified of change. They want the climate the stop changing, which is of course impossible. They want markets to stop changing, apparently, which is also impossible.
You're replying to something that wasn't stated. What exactly do you think the film is about? Science? Just science?
From TFA:
The hourlong movie looks at the impact of sea-level rise in New Jersey and North Carolina, as well as various political responses to dealing with the threat.
Clearly "various political responses to dealing with the threat" is not science unless you hold a far higher opinion of politics than most people.
It would definitely be disruptive but we wouldn't know how catastrophic it would be (economically) until it happened. Long term it might do a lot of good to rebuild cities and infrastructure with a modern eye.
Outside of economics I don't think it would be catastrophic at all. I mean not many lives would be lost except in occasional freak storms.
Yeah, it would cut out those layers from the process of buying and using a cheap non-invasive test. It wouldn't cut them out of the medical system entirely. So when you surmise that he would saw his own dick off because he doesn't want doctors to exist, that is not at all supported by the evidence right?
There were 775 (about 912 raw count... the data was adjusted down by 15% on the presumption of overcounting) in the US alone through November 19 according to GP's link. Wikipedia says Europe has about 700 tornadoes per year. What is your 903 referring to? You're implying it's from "the globe" but that's impossible.
Yes. If you're not a preschooler you would understand that two wrongs don't make a right. Revenge is evil you twit.
Wait, so you think WISHING a painful death on someone is a form of revenge? Are you really superstitious or something? Is calling someone a twit also evil/revenge?
The day's name originated in Philadelphia, where it originally was used to describe the heavy and disruptive pedestrian and vehicle traffic which would occur on the day after Thanksgiving. Use of the term started before 1961 and began to see broader use outside Philadelphia around 1975. Later an alternative explanation was made: that retailers traditionally operated at a financial loss from January through November, and "Black Friday" indicates the point at which retailers begin to turn a profit, or "in the black". For large retail chains like Walmart, their net income is positive starting from January 1, and Black Friday can boost their year to date net profit from $14 billion to $19 billion.
I don't understand this religious devotion to economic growth. Yes, we all like nice things, and economic growth has been responsible for most nice things we have today. However, people seem to have forgotten that economic growth is only desirable as long as it provides us nice things. Economic growth is the means, not the ends.
I agree with that but we're pretty far away from diminishing returns on economic growth. I also think that new technologies will eventually lessen the impact on the environment while providing even more energy for economic activity so it probably will never become an issue.
I mean really nuclear is already there, we just aren't using it as much as we could.
This is already happening today in China, where the truly absurd levels of air pollution have become undeniable. They're no longer building new coal plants (in developed areas)
Yeah... they're building plenty of new coal plants, just not near their biggest cities. That's more an issue of local human comfort than the global environment.
However, this is still a good example of rational concerns causing rational people to "halt economic growth" because of environmental issues
That's not true. Switching to natural gas does not halt economic growth. Natural gas has become so plentiful it's cheaper than coal, plus the plants are cheaper to build. Power production diversity is also an important economic goal. China wants to reduce their dependence on coal (they're currently importing coal at great cost, despite also being the world's biggest producer of coal)... not by shutting down coal but by building other stuff.
This isn't speculation. China already excluded themselves from Kyoto on the grounds it would hinder economic growth.
I think the big mystery isn't why Blockbuster didn't *beat* Netflix to online and/or cheap rental, it's why they couldn't catch up. I guess it's because Blockbuster has a corporate habit of being greedy to the point of shortsightedness.
Blockbuster started their own DVD by mail service to compete with Netflix with the added benefit of being able to trade in the movies at retail locations for faster turnaround time. It was brilliant. I know people (high volume users, the kind who were trying to build their personal collection by copying Netflix DVDs) who cancelled Netflix and switched to Blockbuster. But of course very quickly Blockbuster thought they had won and Netflix was beaten, and started turning the screws. They started putting limits on the program. You couldn't trade in a movie the same day you got it. Then it was a limit per week. Then there was a coupon system where you'd get some coupons in the mail and use one for every trade. Prices went up. Soon because of the limits it was both slower than Netflix and more expensive. My high volume friends switched back to Netflix.
I mean from a business perspective Blockbuster was just too stupid for words. They have this huge advantage. They have a way to recapture the audience that had left them with a superior service that capitalized on their big advantages (inventory, Hollywood deals, walk-in locations, etc). My friends were not renting movies at Blockbuster after signing up for Netflix. That was lost business. If 2% of their customers wanted to turn in movies on the same day they got them and rent another because they were copying them onto their hard drive... so what?! That's still a monthly subscription fee in place of $0 revenue prior to that.
Blockbuster never needed a crystal ball, they needed a board and upper level management that was slightly less idiotic.
Slashdot Mirror
Why would the entire auto industry collapse just because GM collapsed?
There were MANY perfectly solvent suppliers that would have also gone out of business.
[...]
Economists were estimating the unemployment rate would have been around 15%-20% if the entire auto industry was allowed to fail.
If we assume that suppliers are dedicated, then the ones who supply GM would collapse. But Ford and Toyota have dedicated suppliers too, and they would be unaffected.
Let's assume that suppliers are partially reliant on GM, and the reliance is enough that without GM they would have to shut down. In fact let's say all suppliers are like that. The first one, which had a 40% reliance on GM, shuts down. Well now the remaining 60% of what they produced needs to be produced by someone else. That takes care of the next guy who had a 40% reliance on GM, plus another guy who had a 20% reliance. So obviously in this scenario some people will go out of business but most will not. Hard to say if it even would qualify as "many" since a lot of suppliers aren't even based here but overseas.
What did you envision where "the entire auto industry" goes out of business because GM does?
GM wasn't bailed out, exactly - it went bankrupt. The shareholders and bondholders of GM lost pretty much everything. The unions and other employees (including executives) are the ones who were bailed out. We just gave them a bunch of money and called it a day.
I guess it depends who you think GM "is". Is it the employees (including executives), or is it the owners?
Just look how many times guns were used against tyranny that produced enduring democracies instead of next set of tyrants?
Well at least a few times.
How many times freedom of expression against oppressors liberated people and created enduring democracies?
Zero? What are you talking about?
That is when warrior wannabes like you strut around claiming to be the cause. You are the effect, not the cause, of the first amendment.
Calling it an issue of cause and effect doesn't really make sense. But there's no doubt that warriors enabled both the 1st and 2nd amendment. You do know what was going on in this land before the Constitution was signed back in 1787? It involved warriors strutting around and shooting British soldiers. And one of them, a guy named George Washington, even became the first president.
Trying your "second amendment solutions" against a lawfully elected government of the USA is rebellion
You're claiming free speech can be used to overthrow governments as well. Guess what? That's still rebellion and it's also illegal. Or did you think America has unlimited free speech?
Definitely not because of your puny little glocks, brownings or bushmasters. Our army had been battling AK-47s and IEDs for ages now buddy, you don't stand a chance against our army.
Think about what you just said. Our army has been battling against AK-47s and IEDS (the "I" stands for improvised btw)... FOR AGES. Ages. That means "a long time." And you think, as a result, that people with small weapons "don't stand a chance?" Even though they've been battling for ages?
All that said, I agree with you that the right to bear arms does not cause our society to work well. But neither does the right to free speech. BOTH are effects of a good society. A good society is made up of good people who believe in the social contract. Free speech and the right to bear arms are marks of respect we have for each other because we believe our compatriots are as good as we are. The reason we let Joe Sixpack have a gun is that we trust Joe Sixpack to use that gun to defend himself, just like we want to defend ourselves. The reason we let Joe Sixpack have free speech is that we trust he has good intentions when he says something we disagree with. We even acknowledge that he may be right when we disagree so it's valuable to allow him to keep talking, even if in the short term it embarrasses us or hurts our feelings.
Privatising mines makes sense. The wealth of the land belongs to the people, not just one individual.
I'm assuming you meant nationalizing.
The problem with that line of thought is that "the people" aren't really "the people". They're "the people right now." What about the next generation? What about when an invading army kicks them all out and resettles the land? Where are their resources? What about the descendants of the people who were displaced by the current group?
When you think about it, the people who nationalize and exploit a resource are just the winners of a lottery and they don't have any moral claim to it. If someone else can win the lottery, they deserve it just as much (or little).
And? Mandela could have been Satan incarnate. That doesn't justify vetoing anti-apartheid sanctions.
Yes it does. You aren't very smart if you help overthrow a bad government knowing that a worse government is waiting in the wings.
You see, as much as you can potentially condemn Mandela for what he did or might have been, you overlook that Mandela wasn't *the* guaranteed new leader of South Africa.
[...]
But even that doesn't justify vetoing sanctions or refusal to enforce them. It only explains why they wouldn't have supported Mandela.
I don't understand.. in both paragraphs it's like you are trying to say that Mandela was the sole source of all that was bad. Surely you see that Mandela was just a leader, and that leaders of such large movements are selected and shaped by that movement. In other words, it's not just Mandela that could be condemned and not supported, it's what he stood for and the people around him.
I don't think it's useful to compare karma to criminal charges. Karma is helped by good actions, but that doesn't really affect your standing as a criminal (past a certain point). I mean if you routinely save peoples' lives you may have some immunity to things like parking tickets issued by the local cops, but I'm guessing it's not going to save you from criminal charges about cheating on your taxes every year. But in the karmic equivalent I suspect you'd be in positive territory.
I don't think karma requires a guilty mind. I'm no expert but the definition on Google is
* (in Hinduism and Buddhism) the sum of a person's actions in this and previous states of existence, viewed as deciding their fate in future existences.
informal
* destiny or fate, following as effect from cause.
Cause and effect doesn't require you to do something on purpose or know the consequences in advance, neither does the sum of a person's actions (not thoughts).
I'm not sure what you mean by top vs bottom students, but for instance "special education" students get much more money than any other group.
Medical testing is not required to work consistently. That's why there's a notion of false positives and false negatives to begin with. We KNOW that the tests will have some number of errors when applied to a large population.
And even if you were correct, the logical action would be to go after the suppliers of the sequencing equipment that 23andme is using, since they are the ones making claims that their equipment properly analyzes dna. Or do you think 23andme markets equipment that they developed and certified all by their lonesome? Or on the contrary, do you think every pharmacy in the country has to independently verify the medical claims of every single drug they sell? Obviously not, that would be idiotic.
Also I don't know what you mean by the results being "good" for something. I can go in and persuade my doctor to order any number of unnecessary medical tests for me.
Are you talking about the false positive rate of the *actual test* as in, the test shows you have some xyz-gene but x% of the time that is incorrect? Or are you talking about false positive rate as in assuming you definitely have xyz-gene which is a marker for such and such disease, x% of the time that does not actually lead to such and such disease?
If the former, yeah sure. I'd be surprised if they didn't have that information available, at least for the FDA.
If the latter, then obviously that's an impossible standard to meet and you're actually calling for the ban of affordable genetic testing, while hiding behind nice sounding statements like "They also need to be clearer" and "They need to explain." Oh yeah, just be clearer and explain a bit! And with one company independently doing it all, it will only take a hundred years and resources equivalent to the entire US medical R&D industry, which is where these hypotheses about genetic markers for disease come from and are a current and hotly researched area.
I've started comparing prices for each component at both sites.
Also check out camelcamelcamel.com and camelegg.com. Now we just need a site where you enter your build and it puts together order lists from newegg and amazon to optimize for price. Ideally it would also search for near substitutes (different brands of value ram for instance) and build your shopping cart for you.
How did Saunders win the debate? I read the linked article and didn't get any sense that she triumphed in a debate sense. In fact her conclusion is stupid and illogical:
Me, I don't want to live in a world where one group of people decides when another group should die. For that, Adams wants me to die a horrible death. Once death becomes the solution for one condition, it becomes a remedy for others.
Apparently she wants to kill herself (without assistance though!) because we DO live in a world where one group of people (e.g. juries, government, soldiers, terrorists, etc) decides when another group should die (e.g. criminals, enemy combatants, terrorists, etc). I'm sure she didn't mean to state her principle so broadly and put her life at stake for it, but she did, and she sounds like an idiot for doing so.
The more serious error is that the assisted suicide movement is to allow people to choose for themselves when to die. That's why it's called.. wait for it.. assisted SUICIDE. Making an argument about "one group" killing "another group" doesn't apply.
GP said "before I get to that point."
You said "when you're at that point."
It's often the case that a person knows they are on the decline.
What is hard to argue with is that a change in the environment will destabilize the existing geopolitical conditions, which are relatively constrained at the moment.
That's an easy one. If you want peace, prepare for war. Been true for a long time now.
If we have $1 trillion to spend, and we spend it trying to "fight climate change" or some crap, that's not going to accomplish anything worthwhile. It would be much better spending the $1 trillion on some split of weapons and adapting to inevitable climate change.
If you believe in the free market and capitalism, you know that change in market conditions is mostly bad for the vast majority of people.
Wait, I believe in free market and capitalism and I disagree with what you said. What's wrong with me?
To take an example, can you explain how a very disruptive change in market conditions like the banning of slavery in the US resulted in things being mostly bad for the vast majority of people?
This is the weird thing about climate changers. It's like they're terrified of change. They want the climate the stop changing, which is of course impossible. They want markets to stop changing, apparently, which is also impossible.
You're replying to something that wasn't stated. What exactly do you think the film is about? Science? Just science?
From TFA:
The hourlong movie looks at the impact of sea-level rise in New Jersey and North Carolina, as well as various political responses to dealing with the threat.
Clearly "various political responses to dealing with the threat" is not science unless you hold a far higher opinion of politics than most people.
It would definitely be disruptive but we wouldn't know how catastrophic it would be (economically) until it happened. Long term it might do a lot of good to rebuild cities and infrastructure with a modern eye.
Outside of economics I don't think it would be catastrophic at all. I mean not many lives would be lost except in occasional freak storms.
Yeah, it would cut out those layers from the process of buying and using a cheap non-invasive test. It wouldn't cut them out of the medical system entirely. So when you surmise that he would saw his own dick off because he doesn't want doctors to exist, that is not at all supported by the evidence right?
There were 775 (about 912 raw count... the data was adjusted down by 15% on the presumption of overcounting) in the US alone through November 19 according to GP's link. Wikipedia says Europe has about 700 tornadoes per year. What is your 903 referring to? You're implying it's from "the globe" but that's impossible.
What state hasn't earned derision? Singling out NC is just stupid.. perhaps you're not singling them out, but it sounds like it.
Yes. If you're not a preschooler you would understand that two wrongs don't make a right. Revenge is evil you twit.
Wait, so you think WISHING a painful death on someone is a form of revenge? Are you really superstitious or something? Is calling someone a twit also evil/revenge?
How did you deduce that, considering OP said "It is not like 23 and me are going to destroy traditional medicine?"
From the Wiki:
The day's name originated in Philadelphia, where it originally was used to describe the heavy and disruptive pedestrian and vehicle traffic which would occur on the day after Thanksgiving. Use of the term started before 1961 and began to see broader use outside Philadelphia around 1975. Later an alternative explanation was made: that retailers traditionally operated at a financial loss from January through November, and "Black Friday" indicates the point at which retailers begin to turn a profit, or "in the black". For large retail chains like Walmart, their net income is positive starting from January 1, and Black Friday can boost their year to date net profit from $14 billion to $19 billion.
4k resolution is about 8.3MP so you're closer than you think.
I don't understand this religious devotion to economic growth. Yes, we all like nice things, and economic growth has been responsible for most nice things we have today. However, people seem to have forgotten that economic growth is only desirable as long as it provides us nice things. Economic growth is the means, not the ends.
I agree with that but we're pretty far away from diminishing returns on economic growth. I also think that new technologies will eventually lessen the impact on the environment while providing even more energy for economic activity so it probably will never become an issue.
I mean really nuclear is already there, we just aren't using it as much as we could.
This is already happening today in China, where the truly absurd levels of air pollution have become undeniable. They're no longer building new coal plants (in developed areas)
Yeah... they're building plenty of new coal plants, just not near their biggest cities. That's more an issue of local human comfort than the global environment.
However, this is still a good example of rational concerns causing rational people to "halt economic growth" because of environmental issues
That's not true. Switching to natural gas does not halt economic growth. Natural gas has become so plentiful it's cheaper than coal, plus the plants are cheaper to build. Power production diversity is also an important economic goal. China wants to reduce their dependence on coal (they're currently importing coal at great cost, despite also being the world's biggest producer of coal)... not by shutting down coal but by building other stuff.
This isn't speculation. China already excluded themselves from Kyoto on the grounds it would hinder economic growth.
I think the big mystery isn't why Blockbuster didn't *beat* Netflix to online and/or cheap rental, it's why they couldn't catch up. I guess it's because Blockbuster has a corporate habit of being greedy to the point of shortsightedness.
Blockbuster started their own DVD by mail service to compete with Netflix with the added benefit of being able to trade in the movies at retail locations for faster turnaround time. It was brilliant. I know people (high volume users, the kind who were trying to build their personal collection by copying Netflix DVDs) who cancelled Netflix and switched to Blockbuster. But of course very quickly Blockbuster thought they had won and Netflix was beaten, and started turning the screws. They started putting limits on the program. You couldn't trade in a movie the same day you got it. Then it was a limit per week. Then there was a coupon system where you'd get some coupons in the mail and use one for every trade. Prices went up. Soon because of the limits it was both slower than Netflix and more expensive. My high volume friends switched back to Netflix.
I mean from a business perspective Blockbuster was just too stupid for words. They have this huge advantage. They have a way to recapture the audience that had left them with a superior service that capitalized on their big advantages (inventory, Hollywood deals, walk-in locations, etc). My friends were not renting movies at Blockbuster after signing up for Netflix. That was lost business. If 2% of their customers wanted to turn in movies on the same day they got them and rent another because they were copying them onto their hard drive... so what?! That's still a monthly subscription fee in place of $0 revenue prior to that.
Blockbuster never needed a crystal ball, they needed a board and upper level management that was slightly less idiotic.