It'd probably be in the best interest of consumers to find a good middle ground.
Perhaps, but an arms race really would be much more fun. Do the advertisers really believe that they will defeat the nerds at their own game on their home field (i.e. technology and network protocols)? The advertisers would do better to not publicize the fact that such tools exist by engaging in open warfare with Firefox extension authors and open source software. The general public is still largely unaware that these tools exist (and they will never exist on Internet Explorer) so it makes no sense for the advertisers to give AdBlock and NoScript the spotlight and their 15 minutes on the national news. They would just be shooting themselves in their collective feet.
I would, however, have to agree that if I put up a website and I depended on advertising revenue, I'd be a bit pissed off if all of my visitors started using adblock, especially if I chose non-intrusive adverts like google ads.
So charge for access to the site and find how much your content is *really* worth. The best content sites are the ones that have quality original content and can charge for subscriptions (Wall Street Journal comes to mind). Failing that you might try to convince your readers that you will not barrage them with flashing banners, dancing always on top flash, or video ads and maybe, just maybe, they will be nice and unblock your banners (I use both the AdBlock and ScriptBlocker and Slashdot is one of my few trusted sites). If you want ad revenue then earn the trust of users with good quality content. They may block you initially, but if the content is good and the presentation (no 1 page article divided into 10 narrow short column pages to squeeze in more ads) is fair then people will be fair in return.
A lot of people really do believe we should be ruled by our corporate overlords even though they think it'd be horrible to be under the thumb of a monarch.
It really is so easy to blame the corporations and the Man for our problems, but if they really are in control then whose fault is that? People don't want to admit that they didn't vote because they were "too busy" or that they voted for the guy with the most expensive haircut and the best campaign slogans. They complain and whine and moan about how the corporations control everything and that individuals have no power or control over their own lives while at the same time either not voting or if they do vote voting for more government control over their lives in the form of higher taxes, hoping in vain that this will somehow redress the gap which they perceive between themselves and those from whom they hope to "punish" with higher taxes, more laws, and more regulations. Is it any wonder that people feel like slaves to the man? What they don't realize is that their own actions have led them to their present situation. They are uneducated, unsophisticated, and generally unable to think for themselves and thus instead of taking responsibility for their own lives and voting for a free thinking and independent government they vote for the nanny state and advertising and campaign contribution fueled corporate and government control. We have seen the enemy in the mirror and he is ourselves.
If you go to Ireland with your brand new Nokia E70 or Treo 650, and leave it on, charging, and set to automatically check email periodically, you're going to have the same fucking problem.
True, but there should be a setting for "only enable this feature while on AT&T network" so that the user would have to explicitly go into the options and enable certain features for roaming (knowing full well that it may incur extra charges...the menu should have a footnote or warning dialog to confirm when this setting is set). The iPhone could even come on with a dialog box when it is on roaming saying something to the effect of:
"The phone is scheduled to check e-mail but it cannot because the phone is currently roaming. What would you like to do?"
Then there could be a number of options ranging from "No, and don't ask me again (i.e. always no until I go into the options to turn it back on" to "Sure, go ahead and don't ask me again (i.e. I am a billionaire and I don't care how much they charge per megabyte here in Ireland...turn on everything for roaming)". It needs to be like firewall software, guiding the user through the options as situations come up and offering advice in a context relevant way. The problem with RTFM is that you are reading everything out of context and then trying to remember what to do when certain situations come up. Most people, engineers excluded, do not work or think that way.
It is not as easy as you might think. Advertisers have been doing the same thing in print magazines for some time now. They try to mimic the layout, font, and look of an actual magazine article with pseudo-content related to some impartial product comparison or industry problem and how their product (the one being advertised) was proven "superior" in a battery of tests or in "interviews" with experts or some such bull. The entire goal of this "stealth" advertising is to trick the unsuspecting reader into believing that the five (5) pages or so are part of the regular magazine articles and content. This is why many magazine publishers require the advertisers to print in block lettering at the top of each page "advertising section" or some such so that they, the magazine publishers, are not held accountable for claims or statements made in the "advertising section" which appears to be part of the regular magazine content and not an advertisement. This whole trend, of embedding advertising in the television show or using dancing characters in the bottom right corner of your screen or faking a real magazine article to cloak your add, is part of a new and even more pernicious invasion of advertisers into our lives and they complain about AdBlock or ScriptBlocker while at the same time never hesitating to employ the most underhanded tactics in their quest for eyeballs. They declared war on the public's senses a long time ago so any sort of DVR, AdBlock, or ScriptBlocker is fair play on the part of the consumer.
It is true that IP agreements to the original Macross (aka Robotech here in the United States) storyline, characters, technologies, etc is just about as badly tangled as the IP agreements surrounding the licensing of Unix system V kernel source. However, just as George Lucas was not able to prevent Battlestar Galactica from premiering simply because they used "lasers in space" so also would the IP owners for macross/robotech, whoever they might be, be unable to stop someone from filming a space opera style storyline with aliens and transforming fighters (heck, the whole 'transforming robot' concept has been used so often now that it too is basically generic). They might not be able to use specific character names (no Lynn Minmay...darn) or technology names, veritech for example, but who cares? Frankly macross/robotech brings with it a lot of undesirable baggage and while the concept is good in theory the series is badly in need of a reboot and this new film proposal could be just the thing.
Imagine if they brought onboard the producers and writers of Stargate SG-1 combined with these technology and story concepts... Macross needs to be redone and re-imagined, just like Battlestar Galactica was, so that the concept can finally reach its full potential on screen without any of the campy baggage coming along for the ride. Now that production technologies have advanced to the point where it is possible to do the story its full justice it really should be redone.
The only problem is that rebates become less and less attractive to consumers, as even the dimmest ones begin to realize the futility of the exercise, to the point where they are worthless because everyone assumes that they will get jerked around and never get their rebate in any case. I never let rebates influence a purchasing decision and even if there is a rebate on an item that I would have bought anyway I do not send it in. How much is your privacy worth? Even if you do get the rebate your info will be sold and resold ad infinitum to every scumbag marketing / call center boiler room on the face of the plant. Is that really worth $10-50 to you? Perhaps, but not to me.
PICK has some very serious disadvantages over the relational databases, not the least of which is the rather annoying property that queries often do not return *ALL* of the related records unless the person writing the query has a very intimate knowledge of the data cubes and how the database is connected and even then there are no guarantees. The brilliance of atomicity defined by Codd and the query guarantees that one is able to make when the "one value per cell" rule is enforced are not of trivial benefit. PICK and multidimensional can be convenient in some circumstances, but the marketplace has basically decided that those niches are not worth the hassle of giving up the query benefits of the relational model for more general cases, especially when absolute speed of the query is less important than completeness of the information returned. It has also not helped that multivalue database vendors, the few that are left anyway, have generally lagged behind the relational database vendors in terms of tool support and integration with other systems.
Note: I may be somewhat biased because of my long use of relational databases and a really bad experience updating a jBase solution that really was "long in the tooth". You might argue that I just saw a bad example of multivalue database application, but I think that it goes deeper than that or else we would all be using PICK today and not some flavor of SQL.
We need a tax because they have been gouging us and holding technology back?
Gouging is not the issue here, but rather the removal of an unwanted and perverse economic incentive for the government to be *against* fuel efficient vehicles (at least theoretically) because of potentially reduced gas tax revenues. I have merely suggested an alternative scheme which allows the government to receive income from leasing publicly owned roads to private operators, who would then charge tolls for their use, in an attempt to outline a scheme that would still allow everyone: drivers, toll road operators, and the government to get what they want *without* the unintended consequence of a bias against fuel efficient or alternative fuel vehicles due to the quirkiness of the present gas tax arrangement.
Richard Branson was interviewed by Neil Cavuto on Fox and he asked him that question and Richard said that 40,000 people have paid something down towards a deposit (could be as little as a few hundred dollars or maybe a few thousand...he didn't say) and that there were several hundred fully paid reservations already ($200,000 paid in full that is). Richard also said that his parents are going with him on the inaugural flight (he may have said that his mother wasn't going to go, but I don't remember).
The government could auction off the rights to run the toll roads to private companies who would under contract to maintain the road up to standards required by the government under penalty of fines and loss of lease. This would still entail some enforcement, but it would be better than the government directly running the day to day details of toll road operations.
Alternative fuel vehicles and alcohol burners don't pay as much, if any, fuel tax.
Simple answer to all of your points: Toll Roads
The advent of cheap electronic transponders, obviating the need for traffic clogging toll collection stops, makes this the obvious choice. It is also eminently fair...pay per use and pay as you go and the people paying the most are using the most. The gas tax was a gross oversimplification of the actual road use situation that was convenient back when technology was limited and not able to overcome some of the classic disadvantages of alternative collection methods such as toll roads or turnpikes,. but the situation now has changed and the tax laws need to change along it to reflect the realities of cheap transponders and efficient and alternative fuel vehicles.
But how does letting other people buy the same kind of car in other states hurt their investment?
If the State of California wishes to lower prices by subsidizing these vehicles then it is not difficult to see why limiting the program to California is desirable from a budgetary standpoint. The issue here is the subsidy which lowers the price and thereby increases demand. The increased demand means more sales of clean vehicles with a greater amount of subsidy supporting those sales as ever more vehicles are sold. How does this occur you ask? It goes like this:
1. I buy the ultra clean version of the vehicle at the subsidy price and or collect my subsidy from the government (whether I collect the subsidy at the point of sale or at some point in the future doesn't really matter much...it just brings the time value of money equation into the picture).
2. Knowing that demand is high in states outside of California, I turn around and resell or "flip" the vehicle to a buyer outside of California for a higher price (higher than the subsidized price but less than the market price of the vehicle without the subsidy) and pocket the difference.
3. I do this multiple times as long as I can continue to collect the subsidy and make a profit, perhaps enlisting the help of other people to serve as "buyers" so that I can get around limited number of cars per buyer restrictions.
The more times this happens the greater the drain on the treasury of the State of California (and the last thing we Californians need is another drain on the treasury...we are hurting as it is with all of this voter approved bond indebtedness). Practically speaking there is a limit to how much this could occur in the aggregate, demand is not infinite after all even at the subsidized price, but it could still potentially cost the State of California a lot of money.
Now you could try and police this with rules and regulations (i.e. cannot resell your car for a couple of years etc...), but as the experience with subsidized "affordable housing" in California proves (a complete buearacratic boondoggle btw), people will find ways around the restrictions when there is money to be made.
Bottom Line: subsidies don't make sense...just let the car be sold everywhere at the same market price...it creates less hard feelings all around and why should the government be subsidizing people's car purchases anyway? Driving is a privilege not a right.
The smog test based plan combined with mileage would be one way to determine how much polluting rights would need to be purchased to offset the externalities caused by the pollution, at least for individuals or small scale producers. However I was thinking more along the lines of the government certifying how much pollution rights need to be purchased, via testing, and then having a private market, similar to a stock or commodities trading market, where the government periodically sells large blocks of polluting rights at auction for resale by brokers into the marketplace. The government would determine, via its scientists how much pollution will be allowed per year, and then the "shares" of that total amount would be sold in the marketplace through auctions and subsequent trading. This would be similar to how the government currently sells treasury bills which are then sold and resold in the marketplace. It would also be necessary for the government to conduct enforcement to ensure that everyone who wishes to engage in polluting activity (breathing doesn't count) is buying enough credits to cover their desired level of pollution.
Regulation of externalities is a proper role of government and it would be necessary to compel people to pay for the full and true cost of their externalities under the no subsidy system. I agree that billing each and every smog producer for their proportional contribution would be difficult, but it could be done and it is worth doing.
If these vehicles were produced without subsidies, they'd be so expensive that no one would buy them.
That is how they should be produced, without subsidies and the same should apply to all other cars and other forms of energy...no subsidies. Let each technology and energy source compete on the merits in the open marketplace. It may be necessary to bust cartels and other anti-market behaviors by vested interests, but the marketplace can and should decide what type of energy is produced and used without distorting government subsidies.
Appeals cost money and where is the money coming from? Investors are not irrational people...they know when to cut their loses and retire from the field.
Probably not although nothing is absolutely certain with copyright law, which is part of the problem. The law is purposely ambiguous and thus each individual case is different or could be...think of it as a random variable which is factored into the outcome of copyright lawsuits depending upon the circumstances of the case and whether or not the judge agrees with yours or the other person's interpretation of the details in each case.
IANAL...but I think that including the *entire* original work in your derivative work (i.e. original + commentary) would strongly prejudice the case for "fair use" or "fair dealing" against you and in favor of the original copyright holder.
encourage them to take action to try to shape their future.
And just what exactly would they do? While the Chinese government does not generally intrude itself into local matters (people can actually vote for the mayor of their village) and penny ante politics they do control the money and the guns and they are not above using violence to enforce the status quo, as the students at Tiananmen discovered. Remember it was Mao who said, "political power flows from the barrel of the gun" and they take that quite literally in China.
You should not be surprised that the San Francisco WiFi idea ended up going nowhere. The problem with left leaning idealists, and there are plenty of those in San Francisco, is that they do no generally understand how money works and thus they are surprised when their "good ideas" collapse like a house of cards. The idea was doomed to fail from the start in the United States for the following reasons:
1) The fiber backbone networks in the United States that carry most of the traffic traversing the Internet through the United States are privately owned and the owners of those networks want...you guessed it...MONEY yeah! in exchange for your access to their network. So, given that all of you public WiFi must eventually connect to their network somewhere in order to leave the San Francisco area somebody is going to have to pay them and where is that money going to come from? There is no free lunch.
2) The good long range EM spectrum frequencies are licensed to private entities by the government in exchange for...here it comes again...MONEY yeah! So, these frequencies are consequently not available for your nation wide public WiFi network. The government takes this money that they have collected and hopefully (a big question with government of all kinds these days) spends the money in the best interest of the citizens (which is to enforce lawful and civil society and protect us from hordes of foreigners who might want to invade armed with sharp and pointy things and take your laptop by force).
3) The hardware to build your free public WiFi network costs...are your ready? MONEY yeah! Now I know that Google and Earthlink have pledged a certain amount of funds to cover the initial outlays of such a project (because they believe that higher WiFi penetration in San Francisco will increase their ad revenues resulting in more...MONEY yeah! for their pockets or did you believe that Google was doing it out of the goodness of their heart?), but it is difficult to believe that their investors will allow them to move quickly with such a potentially large outlay without some reassurance that this investment will pay off.
There really is nothing wrong with letting the private sector provide WiFi access, if there is a demand for higher speed and people are willing to pay for it then somebody will provide it. It really doesn't matter who provides the access, you will pay one way or another, but most people, myself included, have greater confidence in private business rather than government when it comes to providing cheap, fast, and ubiquitous Internet access.
so the "floor" is going to be lower, and workers in the U.S. are going to be in for some long term pain.
Perhaps, but consider also the effect that such rapid growth is having on the Chinese population. The air is full of pollutants, up to twenty times worse than Los Angeles during the 1970s before the Clean Air Act (they are trying to get the smog down for the olympics by shutting down factories, banning cars, etc but it is still going to be a mess in 2008 because Beijing is such a dirty city). Their water is full of benzene, heavy metals, and agricultural chemical runoff. They operate lead smelters next to their rural schools and the people are being worked to death in the factories. At this rate the average life expectancy in China is going to be somewhere in the mid 50s for most of the population and they are poisoning their children with lead and mercury from so much dirty coal burning, so it may only take about 25 or 30 years for the "too many workers" thing to work itself out and not 50 or 100 as some other people are saying.
A more accurate estimate might be achieved by taking the average estimated income of the demographics which are represented in the study, including the percentage of those incomes which are spent on entertainment products broken down by type (i.e. music, eating out, movies, vacations, gambling, and everything else that people spend on for entertainment), multiplying to determine what share of their income is available for music purchases and then summing those amounts for each of the demographics by weight (teens and twenty somethings consume more popular music than the 50+ crowd for example). One could then divide this sum by the number of "pirated" tracks or albums (assuming that all albums and tracks are roughly equal in price and value which is rough but gets us in the ballpark) to figure out the average price that *could* have been paid (key here is actually could have been paid...by what people can actually afford) for the tracks or albums had they *not* been "pirated".
The best way to weed out candidates for a program is to admit as many as possible and let some (maybe even the majority) fail and drop out.
That is essentially what they were doing in the CS major at my university. They used the GPA and SAT scores in a similar manner to employers looking at resumes. They have to eliminate a certain number at each stage so those who cannot pass the GPA/SAT score check or resume check get chucked into the reject bin. The first lower division course (introduction to programming) had a 20% pass rate each quarter out of a class of about 250 per quarter.
especially methods like selecting candidates on the basis of high school GPA is basically the same - except you randomly eliminate some of the best candidates beforehand.
This is unavoidable to a certain extent, no matter what method is used, when selecting a limited number of candidates from among a larger pool of applicants. It is possible that an occasional "diamond in the rough" is passed over, but for the most part those candidates who did make it through the course of study were worthy students and the graduating class of seniors, ~50 or so each year, was full. Remember also that anyone who scored a 4.0 average in the lower division course of study, which was open to all students at the university as a minor, was guaranteed a transfer into the major so even if that "diamond in the rough" was passed over for entry level admission into the major he or she could still take the lower division courses and transfer into the major (I was not aware of anyone who scored 4.0 for the entire lower division who was not already in the major, but it is theoretically possible I suppose for someone to come out of nowhere and do it). The system was actually pretty fair, all things considered.
The auction & the monopoly keep prices high which I am against.
If you don't like the price then do not purchase the product. High end wireless services are not a necessity of life. The auction ensures that only the serious bidders, who in theory are best able to implement and roll out the new technologies, are given serious consideration for purchasing the spectrum. Would you want to entrust the spectrum to some low rent mom and pop shop in Peoria or one of the big corporations like Google? How would you decide who gets to use the spectrum, given that we cannot allow everyone to use it simultaneously, if not by price? Political favors? Who is cool and who is not? Please.
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It'd probably be in the best interest of consumers to find a good middle ground.
Perhaps, but an arms race really would be much more fun. Do the advertisers really believe that they will defeat the nerds at their own game on their home field (i.e. technology and network protocols)? The advertisers would do better to not publicize the fact that such tools exist by engaging in open warfare with Firefox extension authors and open source software. The general public is still largely unaware that these tools exist (and they will never exist on Internet Explorer) so it makes no sense for the advertisers to give AdBlock and NoScript the spotlight and their 15 minutes on the national news. They would just be shooting themselves in their collective feet.
I would, however, have to agree that if I put up a website and I depended on advertising revenue, I'd be a bit pissed off if all of my visitors started using adblock, especially if I chose non-intrusive adverts like google ads.
So charge for access to the site and find how much your content is *really* worth. The best content sites are the ones that have quality original content and can charge for subscriptions (Wall Street Journal comes to mind). Failing that you might try to convince your readers that you will not barrage them with flashing banners, dancing always on top flash, or video ads and maybe, just maybe, they will be nice and unblock your banners (I use both the AdBlock and ScriptBlocker and Slashdot is one of my few trusted sites). If you want ad revenue then earn the trust of users with good quality content. They may block you initially, but if the content is good and the presentation (no 1 page article divided into 10 narrow short column pages to squeeze in more ads) is fair then people will be fair in return.
A lot of people really do believe we should be ruled by our corporate overlords even though they think it'd be horrible to be under the thumb of a monarch.
It really is so easy to blame the corporations and the Man for our problems, but if they really are in control then whose fault is that? People don't want to admit that they didn't vote because they were "too busy" or that they voted for the guy with the most expensive haircut and the best campaign slogans. They complain and whine and moan about how the corporations control everything and that individuals have no power or control over their own lives while at the same time either not voting or if they do vote voting for more government control over their lives in the form of higher taxes, hoping in vain that this will somehow redress the gap which they perceive between themselves and those from whom they hope to "punish" with higher taxes, more laws, and more regulations. Is it any wonder that people feel like slaves to the man? What they don't realize is that their own actions have led them to their present situation. They are uneducated, unsophisticated, and generally unable to think for themselves and thus instead of taking responsibility for their own lives and voting for a free thinking and independent government they vote for the nanny state and advertising and campaign contribution fueled corporate and government control. We have seen the enemy in the mirror and he is ourselves.
If you go to Ireland with your brand new Nokia E70 or Treo 650, and leave it on, charging, and set to automatically check email periodically, you're going to have the same fucking problem.
True, but there should be a setting for "only enable this feature while on AT&T network" so that the user would have to explicitly go into the options and enable certain features for roaming (knowing full well that it may incur extra charges...the menu should have a footnote or warning dialog to confirm when this setting is set). The iPhone could even come on with a dialog box when it is on roaming saying something to the effect of:
"The phone is scheduled to check e-mail but it cannot because the phone is currently roaming. What would you like to do?"
Then there could be a number of options ranging from "No, and don't ask me again (i.e. always no until I go into the options to turn it back on" to "Sure, go ahead and don't ask me again (i.e. I am a billionaire and I don't care how much they charge per megabyte here in Ireland...turn on everything for roaming)". It needs to be like firewall software, guiding the user through the options as situations come up and offering advice in a context relevant way. The problem with RTFM is that you are reading everything out of context and then trying to remember what to do when certain situations come up. Most people, engineers excluded, do not work or think that way.
It is not as easy as you might think. Advertisers have been doing the same thing in print magazines for some time now. They try to mimic the layout, font, and look of an actual magazine article with pseudo-content related to some impartial product comparison or industry problem and how their product (the one being advertised) was proven "superior" in a battery of tests or in "interviews" with experts or some such bull. The entire goal of this "stealth" advertising is to trick the unsuspecting reader into believing that the five (5) pages or so are part of the regular magazine articles and content. This is why many magazine publishers require the advertisers to print in block lettering at the top of each page "advertising section" or some such so that they, the magazine publishers, are not held accountable for claims or statements made in the "advertising section" which appears to be part of the regular magazine content and not an advertisement. This whole trend, of embedding advertising in the television show or using dancing characters in the bottom right corner of your screen or faking a real magazine article to cloak your add, is part of a new and even more pernicious invasion of advertisers into our lives and they complain about AdBlock or ScriptBlocker while at the same time never hesitating to employ the most underhanded tactics in their quest for eyeballs. They declared war on the public's senses a long time ago so any sort of DVR, AdBlock, or ScriptBlocker is fair play on the part of the consumer.
It is true that IP agreements to the original Macross (aka Robotech here in the United States) storyline, characters, technologies, etc is just about as badly tangled as the IP agreements surrounding the licensing of Unix system V kernel source. However, just as George Lucas was not able to prevent Battlestar Galactica from premiering simply because they used "lasers in space" so also would the IP owners for macross/robotech, whoever they might be, be unable to stop someone from filming a space opera style storyline with aliens and transforming fighters (heck, the whole 'transforming robot' concept has been used so often now that it too is basically generic). They might not be able to use specific character names (no Lynn Minmay...darn) or technology names, veritech for example, but who cares? Frankly macross/robotech brings with it a lot of undesirable baggage and while the concept is good in theory the series is badly in need of a reboot and this new film proposal could be just the thing.
Imagine if they brought onboard the producers and writers of Stargate SG-1 combined with these technology and story concepts... Macross needs to be redone and re-imagined, just like Battlestar Galactica was, so that the concept can finally reach its full potential on screen without any of the campy baggage coming along for the ride. Now that production technologies have advanced to the point where it is possible to do the story its full justice it really should be redone.
The only problem is that rebates become less and less attractive to consumers, as even the dimmest ones begin to realize the futility of the exercise, to the point where they are worthless because everyone assumes that they will get jerked around and never get their rebate in any case. I never let rebates influence a purchasing decision and even if there is a rebate on an item that I would have bought anyway I do not send it in. How much is your privacy worth? Even if you do get the rebate your info will be sold and resold ad infinitum to every scumbag marketing / call center boiler room on the face of the plant. Is that really worth $10-50 to you? Perhaps, but not to me.
PICK has some very serious disadvantages over the relational databases, not the least of which is the rather annoying property that queries often do not return *ALL* of the related records unless the person writing the query has a very intimate knowledge of the data cubes and how the database is connected and even then there are no guarantees. The brilliance of atomicity defined by Codd and the query guarantees that one is able to make when the "one value per cell" rule is enforced are not of trivial benefit. PICK and multidimensional can be convenient in some circumstances, but the marketplace has basically decided that those niches are not worth the hassle of giving up the query benefits of the relational model for more general cases, especially when absolute speed of the query is less important than completeness of the information returned. It has also not helped that multivalue database vendors, the few that are left anyway, have generally lagged behind the relational database vendors in terms of tool support and integration with other systems.
Note: I may be somewhat biased because of my long use of relational databases and a really bad experience updating a jBase solution that really was "long in the tooth". You might argue that I just saw a bad example of multivalue database application, but I think that it goes deeper than that or else we would all be using PICK today and not some flavor of SQL.
We need a tax because they have been gouging us and holding technology back?
Gouging is not the issue here, but rather the removal of an unwanted and perverse economic incentive for the government to be *against* fuel efficient vehicles (at least theoretically) because of potentially reduced gas tax revenues. I have merely suggested an alternative scheme which allows the government to receive income from leasing publicly owned roads to private operators, who would then charge tolls for their use, in an attempt to outline a scheme that would still allow everyone: drivers, toll road operators, and the government to get what they want *without* the unintended consequence of a bias against fuel efficient or alternative fuel vehicles due to the quirkiness of the present gas tax arrangement.
Richard Branson was interviewed by Neil Cavuto on Fox and he asked him that question and Richard said that 40,000 people have paid something down towards a deposit (could be as little as a few hundred dollars or maybe a few thousand...he didn't say) and that there were several hundred fully paid reservations already ($200,000 paid in full that is). Richard also said that his parents are going with him on the inaugural flight (he may have said that his mother wasn't going to go, but I don't remember).
The government could auction off the rights to run the toll roads to private companies who would under contract to maintain the road up to standards required by the government under penalty of fines and loss of lease. This would still entail some enforcement, but it would be better than the government directly running the day to day details of toll road operations.
Alternative fuel vehicles and alcohol burners don't pay as much, if any, fuel tax.
Simple answer to all of your points: Toll Roads
The advent of cheap electronic transponders, obviating the need for traffic clogging toll collection stops, makes this the obvious choice. It is also eminently fair...pay per use and pay as you go and the people paying the most are using the most. The gas tax was a gross oversimplification of the actual road use situation that was convenient back when technology was limited and not able to overcome some of the classic disadvantages of alternative collection methods such as toll roads or turnpikes,. but the situation now has changed and the tax laws need to change along it to reflect the realities of cheap transponders and efficient and alternative fuel vehicles.
But how does letting other people buy the same kind of car in other states hurt their investment?
If the State of California wishes to lower prices by subsidizing these vehicles then it is not difficult to see why limiting the program to California is desirable from a budgetary standpoint. The issue here is the subsidy which lowers the price and thereby increases demand. The increased demand means more sales of clean vehicles with a greater amount of subsidy supporting those sales as ever more vehicles are sold. How does this occur you ask? It goes like this:
1. I buy the ultra clean version of the vehicle at the subsidy price and or collect my subsidy from the government (whether I collect the subsidy at the point of sale or at some point in the future doesn't really matter much...it just brings the time value of money equation into the picture).
2. Knowing that demand is high in states outside of California, I turn around and resell or "flip" the vehicle to a buyer outside of California for a higher price (higher than the subsidized price but less than the market price of the vehicle without the subsidy) and pocket the difference.
3. I do this multiple times as long as I can continue to collect the subsidy and make a profit, perhaps enlisting the help of other people to serve as "buyers" so that I can get around limited number of cars per buyer restrictions.
The more times this happens the greater the drain on the treasury of the State of California (and the last thing we Californians need is another drain on the treasury...we are hurting as it is with all of this voter approved bond indebtedness). Practically speaking there is a limit to how much this could occur in the aggregate, demand is not infinite after all even at the subsidized price, but it could still potentially cost the State of California a lot of money.
Now you could try and police this with rules and regulations (i.e. cannot resell your car for a couple of years etc...), but as the experience with subsidized "affordable housing" in California proves (a complete buearacratic boondoggle btw), people will find ways around the restrictions when there is money to be made.
Bottom Line: subsidies don't make sense...just let the car be sold everywhere at the same market price...it creates less hard feelings all around and why should the government be subsidizing people's car purchases anyway? Driving is a privilege not a right.
The smog test based plan combined with mileage would be one way to determine how much polluting rights would need to be purchased to offset the externalities caused by the pollution, at least for individuals or small scale producers. However I was thinking more along the lines of the government certifying how much pollution rights need to be purchased, via testing, and then having a private market, similar to a stock or commodities trading market, where the government periodically sells large blocks of polluting rights at auction for resale by brokers into the marketplace. The government would determine, via its scientists how much pollution will be allowed per year, and then the "shares" of that total amount would be sold in the marketplace through auctions and subsequent trading. This would be similar to how the government currently sells treasury bills which are then sold and resold in the marketplace. It would also be necessary for the government to conduct enforcement to ensure that everyone who wishes to engage in polluting activity (breathing doesn't count) is buying enough credits to cover their desired level of pollution.
Regulation of externalities is a proper role of government and it would be necessary to compel people to pay for the full and true cost of their externalities under the no subsidy system. I agree that billing each and every smog producer for their proportional contribution would be difficult, but it could be done and it is worth doing.
If these vehicles were produced without subsidies, they'd be so expensive that no one would buy them.
That is how they should be produced, without subsidies and the same should apply to all other cars and other forms of energy...no subsidies. Let each technology and energy source compete on the merits in the open marketplace. It may be necessary to bust cartels and other anti-market behaviors by vested interests, but the marketplace can and should decide what type of energy is produced and used without distorting government subsidies.
Appeals cost money and where is the money coming from? Investors are not irrational people...they know when to cut their loses and retire from the field.
Probably not although nothing is absolutely certain with copyright law, which is part of the problem. The law is purposely ambiguous and thus each individual case is different or could be...think of it as a random variable which is factored into the outcome of copyright lawsuits depending upon the circumstances of the case and whether or not the judge agrees with yours or the other person's interpretation of the details in each case.
IANAL...but I think that including the *entire* original work in your derivative work (i.e. original + commentary) would strongly prejudice the case for "fair use" or "fair dealing" against you and in favor of the original copyright holder.
encourage them to take action to try to shape their future.
And just what exactly would they do? While the Chinese government does not generally intrude itself into local matters (people can actually vote for the mayor of their village) and penny ante politics they do control the money and the guns and they are not above using violence to enforce the status quo, as the students at Tiananmen discovered. Remember it was Mao who said, "political power flows from the barrel of the gun" and they take that quite literally in China.
Cancel or Allow?
You should not be surprised that the San Francisco WiFi idea ended up going nowhere. The problem with left leaning idealists, and there are plenty of those in San Francisco, is that they do no generally understand how money works and thus they are surprised when their "good ideas" collapse like a house of cards. The idea was doomed to fail from the start in the United States for the following reasons:
1) The fiber backbone networks in the United States that carry most of the traffic traversing the Internet through the United States are privately owned and the owners of those networks want...you guessed it...MONEY yeah! in exchange for your access to their network. So, given that all of you public WiFi must eventually connect to their network somewhere in order to leave the San Francisco area somebody is going to have to pay them and where is that money going to come from? There is no free lunch.
2) The good long range EM spectrum frequencies are licensed to private entities by the government in exchange for...here it comes again...MONEY yeah! So, these frequencies are consequently not available for your nation wide public WiFi network. The government takes this money that they have collected and hopefully (a big question with government of all kinds these days) spends the money in the best interest of the citizens (which is to enforce lawful and civil society and protect us from hordes of foreigners who might want to invade armed with sharp and pointy things and take your laptop by force).
3) The hardware to build your free public WiFi network costs...are your ready? MONEY yeah! Now I know that Google and Earthlink have pledged a certain amount of funds to cover the initial outlays of such a project (because they believe that higher WiFi penetration in San Francisco will increase their ad revenues resulting in more...MONEY yeah! for their pockets or did you believe that Google was doing it out of the goodness of their heart?), but it is difficult to believe that their investors will allow them to move quickly with such a potentially large outlay without some reassurance that this investment will pay off.
There really is nothing wrong with letting the private sector provide WiFi access, if there is a demand for higher speed and people are willing to pay for it then somebody will provide it. It really doesn't matter who provides the access, you will pay one way or another, but most people, myself included, have greater confidence in private business rather than government when it comes to providing cheap, fast, and ubiquitous Internet access.
so the "floor" is going to be lower, and workers in the U.S. are going to be in for some long term pain.
Perhaps, but consider also the effect that such rapid growth is having on the Chinese population. The air is full of pollutants, up to twenty times worse than Los Angeles during the 1970s before the Clean Air Act (they are trying to get the smog down for the olympics by shutting down factories, banning cars, etc but it is still going to be a mess in 2008 because Beijing is such a dirty city). Their water is full of benzene, heavy metals, and agricultural chemical runoff. They operate lead smelters next to their rural schools and the people are being worked to death in the factories. At this rate the average life expectancy in China is going to be somewhere in the mid 50s for most of the population and they are poisoning their children with lead and mercury from so much dirty coal burning, so it may only take about 25 or 30 years for the "too many workers" thing to work itself out and not 50 or 100 as some other people are saying.
A more accurate estimate might be achieved by taking the average estimated income of the demographics which are represented in the study, including the percentage of those incomes which are spent on entertainment products broken down by type (i.e. music, eating out, movies, vacations, gambling, and everything else that people spend on for entertainment), multiplying to determine what share of their income is available for music purchases and then summing those amounts for each of the demographics by weight (teens and twenty somethings consume more popular music than the 50+ crowd for example). One could then divide this sum by the number of "pirated" tracks or albums (assuming that all albums and tracks are roughly equal in price and value which is rough but gets us in the ballpark) to figure out the average price that *could* have been paid (key here is actually could have been paid...by what people can actually afford) for the tracks or albums had they *not* been "pirated".
The best way to weed out candidates for a program is to admit as many as possible and let some (maybe even the majority) fail and drop out.
That is essentially what they were doing in the CS major at my university. They used the GPA and SAT scores in a similar manner to employers looking at resumes. They have to eliminate a certain number at each stage so those who cannot pass the GPA/SAT score check or resume check get chucked into the reject bin. The first lower division course (introduction to programming) had a 20% pass rate each quarter out of a class of about 250 per quarter.
especially methods like selecting candidates on the basis of high school GPA is basically the same - except you randomly eliminate some of the best candidates beforehand.
This is unavoidable to a certain extent, no matter what method is used, when selecting a limited number of candidates from among a larger pool of applicants. It is possible that an occasional "diamond in the rough" is passed over, but for the most part those candidates who did make it through the course of study were worthy students and the graduating class of seniors, ~50 or so each year, was full. Remember also that anyone who scored a 4.0 average in the lower division course of study, which was open to all students at the university as a minor, was guaranteed a transfer into the major so even if that "diamond in the rough" was passed over for entry level admission into the major he or she could still take the lower division courses and transfer into the major (I was not aware of anyone who scored 4.0 for the entire lower division who was not already in the major, but it is theoretically possible I suppose for someone to come out of nowhere and do it). The system was actually pretty fair, all things considered.
The auction & the monopoly keep prices high which I am against.
If you don't like the price then do not purchase the product. High end wireless services are not a necessity of life. The auction ensures that only the serious bidders, who in theory are best able to implement and roll out the new technologies, are given serious consideration for purchasing the spectrum. Would you want to entrust the spectrum to some low rent mom and pop shop in Peoria or one of the big corporations like Google? How would you decide who gets to use the spectrum, given that we cannot allow everyone to use it simultaneously, if not by price? Political favors? Who is cool and who is not? Please.