Ok, let's read Article II, Section 2 of the US Constitution:
He [the president] shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur;
If you're good at math you have access to lots of fields that pay really well (engineering, science, and even applied stuff like accounting). Those who go into teaching are probably those who really love teaching. Since there are so few, the good ones tend to end up at the secondary level. Plus, at the primary levels teachers tend to be generalists anyway.
There is also seems to be a correlation between skills in math/science/etc and personality, which probably also leads many in these fields to avoid teaching.
Mix in kids who don't really want to be there, and you have very little incentive for anybody to go into this field.
If you do moderately well in the sciences in college and take the right courses you could probably get secondary certification in chemistry, biology, and physics. I suspect you could easily have guaranteed employment for life that way - assuming that you're willing to live with a mediocre paycheck.
Sounds like programmers should take accounting then.:)
Accounting isn't about the math - it is about incredibly anal-retentive levels of consistency and detail. This is what allows a bunch of accountants working for a 100k employee firm to cascade up their figures from every level of the business and get final results that actually mean something.
I agree with the parent - it really depends on what you're doing. I've found that 100% of what you learn in college is applicable somewhere, and about 10% of it is applicable in any particular job, and maybe 30% of it is generally useful. If the almighty BS weren't used as a filtering tool for candidates, I'd suggest that people just take a few useful courses in a semester or two and then get out in the real world - going back to take odd courses as they are needed.
Nor are math skills and medical skills. Should all programmers be doctors in case they need to work on an EMRS?
You could spend 50 years of your life in college, and you could probably learn useful skills every one of those years. However, college is a means to an end, and not an end in itself unless you're financially independent.
The question is, given a finite amount of money and time, where am I best off spending it to maximize my return given that I want to do software development?
Don't forget that you're on a quest to literally save the universe. You have a custom-built starship that probably cost half a city to build, with technology better than anything that can be found anywhere. You've already saved the universe once.
However, the organization backing you puts you on a strict budget that barely pays for your ammo, and to get deals on better guns you end up hawking product endorsements to every shop on the Citadel. And of course you can just about double that income by robbing every bank terminal you see.
How is it exactly that there is a store anywhere that sells something that you don't already have? That's like sending the special forces paratrooping into Iraq and having them stop by the local gun shop on the way to their objective since the only thing they have are Tommy Guns from WWI. "Hey, Fred, take a look at this! Apparently somebody came up with a way to build a gun that doesn't jam every 25 rounds! Hmm, maybe we should get a job at the marketplace across the street for a few weeks so that we can afford one of these RPGs also..."
Oh, and since you obviously have nothing more urgent to be doing, you occasionally need to put your state-of-the-art, stealthy, and highly armed warship into orbit around some barren wasteland and start pretending that you are a mining operation. After all, there is no way that the powers that be could have hired an actual crew of engineers and given them a ship actually designed for mining operations to supply your missions, right?
Better still is the hero that has some kind of official backing from a kingdom, or government, or whatever who starts out with a knife and a T-shirt, and has to start out exterminating rats or whatever.
Then he has to steal or earn money doing menial tasks to buy equipment.
If this guy is the hope of the world or whatever, you'd think that the king who sent him out could at least equip him as well as the castle guards...
Why not? They monitor every aircraft that is flying anyway (civilian or military) - since the purpose of the flight has no bearing on whether or not the planes turn into twisted wreckage when they collide.
Obviously civilian traffic control would not coordinate a response to military traffic.
Now, in a war zone I'm sure the military just runs everything directly, since they're 99% of the air traffic anyway.
If the military did monitor US airspace 24x7 in a serious manner they'd need to coordinate with civilian traffic control anyway - a 747 cruising in from Asia and a bomber cruising in from Asia probably look the same on radar.
To replace radars on the ground for tracking aircraft, you need something in addition to the GPS (what is that, it's not mentioned in the summary?)
That is correct - the aircraft reports its location via radio to a ground receiver. One of the benefits is that you could have full ATC coverage in the middle of the Atlantic, for example, where there are no radar transmitters (assuming that it could operate on a wavelength with sufficient range to reach a ground station - I suspect that trans-atlantic flights probably still use quite a bit of HF or satellite communications, and my general understanding is that right now the only separation is based on getting reservations for routes, altitudes, speeds, and time-on-station - just like railroads in the old days).
Yes, but the transponder does greatly aid radar reception - it doesn't broadcast its location but the fact that it transmits a signal anytime it receives one greatly simplifies the job of the radar system. If it didn't broadcast its altitude it would probably be just as effective from a position standpoint.
The distance at which a radar can locate an aircraft with a functioning transponder is much greater than the distance it can detect an aircraft that is not broadcasting.
So, without transponders you'd need much denser radar coverage. I've heard that primary radar coverage is one of those things they don't talk about much since 9/11, but it wouldn't surprise me if they've beefed it up quite a bit or supplemented it with military data.
I'm guessing that they will not throw out radar entirely for primary surveillance. They'll need it to track things that don't transmit their position, like aircraft with failed electronics.
Or drug smugglers, or hijackers, or an incoming air raid, or anybody else who doesn't want to intentionally broadcast their location... Granted, civilian primary radar is not going to help much with an incoming military air raid.
Overall, however, I think that it is a good way to cut down quite a bit of the cost (potentially) and provide better service.
I know a guy who got pneumonia in the UK, and it took him a week or two to be prescribed an X-Ray, and a week after that to have it read. He was out of work for a month. In the US he'd have been medicated and sent home same-day. Granted, in the US all kinds of people have unnecessary tests done as well.
Also - when looking at European taxes, be sure to look at VAT as well. In some countries income taxes aren't that high, but they might have a VAT of 15-25% or so.
My impression is that in the US the way you tell if somebody REALLY needs something done is to charge them $500 and see if they come up with the money. In the EU the approach is to have them sit in line for four hours, or wait in line for a few weeks. Obviously when care is free to you need to have some way to get people to not consume too much of it. I think that one's personal preference for time vs money tends to depend on which of those two one is most easily able to dispose of.
I tend to agree with you that sometimes it is cheaper to provide care to everybody than to try to figure out who does or doesn't deserve it.
The problem is that this assumes that the number of people who would try to freeload remains constant.
In reality, if you lower the barriers to freeloading, more people will do it, and that is the moral hazard here.
Consider the illustrative example of crime enforcement. If I were running law enforcement in a small town, I'd give serious consideration to spending $20k to apprehend and punish somebody who stole a $100 stereo. The $20k doesn't just recover a $100 stereo - it also deters thousands of others who might contemplate committing similar crimes.
That said, as society becomes more specialized we do need better ways to cope with people who can't get good-paying jobs or who end up between jobs. The trick is to avoid giving people incentive to stay in those conditions when they could be working productively.
Well, the learning experience benefits others more than it does the person on his deathbed.
I think that socialism tends to be necessary due to the nature of our society. We have become a society of specialists, which means we get paid good money when we're working, and we end up with extended periods of time where we don't make money. Some people never end up working (for a decent wage) because they lack the necessary skills.
The challenge is to preserve the incentive to work so that we don't have one big tragedy of the commons.
Uh, by midterm elections we'll still be trying to read this 2000-page bill to figure out what it says... Most of the provisions - good or bad (depending on your opinion) - don't go into effect for a few years.
My main objection to the think was the closed door process. Sure, I don't approve of the Republican's approach to the whole thing, but the Democrats could have at least let C-Span televise the working sessions.
I still don't know why the list of reforms needs a 2000-page bill. I think most of the reforms are actually good ones, although I'd have preferred to see at least a few things go further. On the other hand, sometimes when you have a long journey you need to start out with the first step...
If you think the download size is bad on windows, try downloading the source sometime.
It is as if Google has never heard of the concept of dynamic linking, which makes it a real pleasure to build. Hmm, security update needs to change 3 lines of code, I guess I'm rebuilding qt again...
First - my figures were illustrative - I do no work in the recording industry so I do not know what their typical offers are. For some reason LOTS of artists sign on, so they must be offering (or at least promising) something decent.
If the records do sell really well you do get royalties beyond the advance, although the terms are pretty one-sided.
You say that 90,000 albums were sold online via one particular outlet. That sounds impressive, but what is the distribution? Is that 20,000 bands selling four albums each? Is that 10 bands selling 8,000 albums each and 1000 bands selling 10 each? Neither looks all that good to a new artist - sure if you're one of those 10 you could make as much per year as your advance (and you'd make more from other outlets as well), but if you're one of the 20,000 or one of the 8,000 that isn't much.
I know a couple of guys who are playing in small venues for fun and selling tracks on amazon and itunes. They do it because it is fun, and I'm sure they make enough money to pay for their guitar strings. However, I don't think they're under any illusions that they'll be quitting their day jobs, which are considerably better-paying.
The problem with selling CDs is that ANYBODY can do it, and most bands are one-hit wonders. A record company can milk that for all its worth and get teenagers to buy five follow-up albums for some reason I can't fathom, but most independent artists actually have to make VERY high quality music to accomplish this. Most people can't do this, and if they do it is still hard to get discovered.
Don't get me wrong - if I were going into music I'd be more inclined to be independent, but most recording artists sign these contracts when they're 20 years old, and they don't have any business sense. Maybe for them it is the right way to go - it takes some work to create a brand and I'm not sure the average singer or guitar player has the right skills.
Yup, the problem we have as a society is that nobody wants to accept substandard quality to save money. Sure, we all choose to spend less money, but then we turn around and sue the people who sold it to us because we were too cheap to buy a better item.
If you want the SawStop(TM) system, buy it! Just don't complain that you can't get it for $150.
Health care is in the same mess. If a rich person can get some treatment, then everybody wants the homeless to be able to have it as well. Well, that's nice in theory until somebody has to pay for it...
Well bands do have the ability to do that - it's just that an unknown band has to decide - do it myself or go with a label that may turn me into a hit? Most decide the later.
I don't think it is just whether the label turns the band into a hit. There is also what I'd call risk equalization.
If you strike out on your own the business model is simple. Either you lose a fair amount of money (whatever you spent on promotion/production/etc), or you strike it enormously rich (probably slowly since you won't have much capital). 99.99999% of the time you lose the fair amount of money.
If you sign with a record label the business model is also simple. You will not lose any money under any circumstances. You will definitely get to keep your advance, which for a 20-year-old artist is a fair chunk of cash. Most likely that will be the end of it, but there is a modest chance that you could make a little more money, and a very very small change that you'll be a mega hit and outlast your contract and be able to be super-rich.
Essentially record labels take money from the people who are hits and spread it out among those who don't become hits (while keeping 90% of the money for themselves). They also take all the risk - they're the only ones putting out hard cash.
For a new band they have the choice of making taking a $100k advance RIGHT NOW, or seeing how many CDs they can sell on their own - without serious promotion. Making even $100k selling CDs on your own is EXTREMELY difficult - especially without any capital investments. Sure, signing the deal means that you could end up getting $120k instead of $25M, but most likely it means you'll get $100k instead of ending up with a crate full of CDs and T-Shirts that you can't sell while you work at the pizza place down the street.
Don't get me wrong - the whole industry needs a major overhaul. However, most people critical of the RIAA miss the fact that it does provide one valuable service to the new artist, and that is the key to their success.
Couldn't agree more - but the same argument applies to almost any action the federal government might take on healthcare.
Hopefully any court that strikes down the insurance mandate will be smart enough to strike down the ban on not covering pre-existing conditions, or pretty soon none of us will have insurance...:)
Isn't that the reason we have one person who is the head of the entire executive branch?
If the CIA wants one thing, and the DoD wants something else, why don't they just ask the president to make a call?
Or is the idea of cutting through bureaucracy so repugnant to government workers that the concept of just having somebody make a decision is completely alien?
There's a big difference between soldiers dying because they are accomplishing a dangerous mission, and soldiers dying because they are being ambushed.
There's a difference between merchant ships being sunk because they're accomplishing the dangerous mission of ferrying cargo across the North Atlantic during WWII, and ships being sunk because they are being ambushed by U-Boats.
Under your rationale, the allies should have made use of Enigma/Ultra intelligence to defend any target of any value, without regard to preserving the secrecy of the Ultra project.
In reality, many sailors went to the bottom whose lives could have been saved if the intelligence source were sacrificed. However, I don't know ANYBODY who would argue that the allies would have been better off if they saved a few ships in 1943 at the cost of the Germans switching to an unbreakable encryption system.
Soldiers dying in ambush are no different from soldiers dying taking out a fixed objective where the enemy positions are known. In the end, they are sons and brothers and husbands and fathers, whose loss is a terrible cost which should only be incurred for the greatest need.
However, it is a betrayal to save the lives of a few now at the cost of many more later, or at the cost of the mission. If the lives of a few soldiers is more important than the mission, then we shouldn't be putting them in harm's way in the first place.
This is hardly something new to war. There has been countless debate over things like the decision after the Normandy breakout in WWII France to allow the Germans to retreat instead of cutting them off at a likely cost of many deaths from friendly fire. It is easier to let the war go on an extra six months or whatever and grind through an extra few hundred thousand people than to deal with accusations that your actions killed a few thousand of your own soldiers.
Sometimes in war playing it safe costs more lives than it saves.
I'm actually a fan of having lots of smaller reforms.
As far as tort reform not saving more than a few percent goes - I'm not sure that any single change will save us more than a few percent. Everybody likes to demonize one entity or another, but from what I can see there are a lot of things that each boost cost, often in a synergistic manner, but there are no silver bullets in this puzzle.
We have a system that has created some perverse incentives, and then everybody is just doing the greedy thing to make the most of a messed up situation. That is everybody from doctors to lawyers to insurers to vendors to patients (what patient WOULDN'T want one more test/procedure when the risk is lower than the benefits and the cost is paid by somebody else?).
We wanted to get away from the private insurance companies, or at the very least force competition and have them lower their ridiculous rates which generate them massive amounts of profit every year.
Don't get me wrong - there are a lot of scummy insurance practices out there, and I'm all for banning them. Post-claim underwriting is my biggest pet peeve. Pre-existing conditions is actually fair IF IT IS NOT ABUSED (but it is). Mandating insurance is a reasonable way to fairly require coverage for pre-existing conditions - if you didn't mandate the purchase of insurance then people would just wait until they're sick to buy insurance.
No doubt the insurance companies make profit, and maybe they make too much. However, I don't really think that they're responsible for a bulk of the costs. If anything they have incentive to keep the costs down to keep their profits up. Nevertheless, costs are STILL way up.
Everybody loves to pick on their favorite demon, and any big company making a profit is easy to point the finger at. However, the medical profession is FULL of people making profits, from the GP who charges $80 for a 15 minute visit to the guy who charges him $1000 for a "medical" scale to the lawyer who sues the GP when you fall off of a scale after it turns out that he tried to save money by buying a $50 model at Walmart.
There are a LOT of places in the health care system that require reform, and the insurance companies are just the tip of the iceberg. If you got rid of them today and went with a public option unless that public option had the ability to make some tough calls you're not going to lower costs much.
Now, a public option does allow costs to be socialized so that costs APPEAR to be lower for some people, but that isn't the same thing. You can actually do that with private insurance too by having the government pay some or all of the premiums. Socialism and healthcare reform are actually two different issues but they tend to get muddled.
My biggest grip with the current legislation is that it is a lot of effort to placate EVERYBODY without a whole lot of real reform. I'm fine with starting out simple, but this legislation is purported to be a big fix, and if all we wanted to do was stop a few insurance industry practices that could be done in a much simpler way.
Re:A false choice, of course...
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Forcing an insurance company to pay for a pre-existing condition is simple theft, regardless of how hard that makes your situation.
The problem with this is that pre-existing conditions can become very hard to prove, and insurance companies often use them as excuses for denying claims, or even doing post-claim underwriting and retroactively cancelling policies.
I actually support requiring coverage for pre-existing conditions, when combined with a significant fine for anybody that doesn't buy minimal insurance coverage (with socialized plans available for the poor). By forcing universal coverage you eliminate the issue of pre-existing conditions entirely. Also, universal coverage means that people don't have a financial incentive to neglect preventative care.
And post-claim underwriting should be banned in all respects. If you want to underwrite a policy, do so before issuing it. Don't let somebody pay in for years, thinking that they are covered, and then pull the rug out after the fact. That's just the same thing as pre-existing conditions but in reverse.
Agreed, although if this became standard and built into racks then maybe each server would just have a button next to it that pumped out the coolant quickly. Hot-swaps probably wouldn't work inside the case itself, since you'd have to remove the coolant to perform this task.
Alternatively, you could perform a hot swap immersed in oil if you did it quickly - the oil probably couldn't be circulated with the case open but it would at least be there. I'm not sure that this would actually buy you much though, as oil has low heat capacity. Without pumps running the cooling might not be better than air cooling without fans. So, maybe hot-swaps would be totally out of the question unless the case could be designed to allow oil to flow without being under pressure.
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Ok, let's read Article II, Section 2 of the US Constitution:
So, how is a trade agreement not a treaty?
I think the issue is one of supply and demand.
If you're good at math you have access to lots of fields that pay really well (engineering, science, and even applied stuff like accounting). Those who go into teaching are probably those who really love teaching. Since there are so few, the good ones tend to end up at the secondary level. Plus, at the primary levels teachers tend to be generalists anyway.
There is also seems to be a correlation between skills in math/science/etc and personality, which probably also leads many in these fields to avoid teaching.
Mix in kids who don't really want to be there, and you have very little incentive for anybody to go into this field.
If you do moderately well in the sciences in college and take the right courses you could probably get secondary certification in chemistry, biology, and physics. I suspect you could easily have guaranteed employment for life that way - assuming that you're willing to live with a mediocre paycheck.
Sounds like programmers should take accounting then. :)
Accounting isn't about the math - it is about incredibly anal-retentive levels of consistency and detail. This is what allows a bunch of accountants working for a 100k employee firm to cascade up their figures from every level of the business and get final results that actually mean something.
I agree with the parent - it really depends on what you're doing. I've found that 100% of what you learn in college is applicable somewhere, and about 10% of it is applicable in any particular job, and maybe 30% of it is generally useful. If the almighty BS weren't used as a filtering tool for candidates, I'd suggest that people just take a few useful courses in a semester or two and then get out in the real world - going back to take odd courses as they are needed.
They aren't.
Nor are math skills and medical skills. Should all programmers be doctors in case they need to work on an EMRS?
You could spend 50 years of your life in college, and you could probably learn useful skills every one of those years. However, college is a means to an end, and not an end in itself unless you're financially independent.
The question is, given a finite amount of money and time, where am I best off spending it to maximize my return given that I want to do software development?
Don't forget that you're on a quest to literally save the universe. You have a custom-built starship that probably cost half a city to build, with technology better than anything that can be found anywhere. You've already saved the universe once.
However, the organization backing you puts you on a strict budget that barely pays for your ammo, and to get deals on better guns you end up hawking product endorsements to every shop on the Citadel. And of course you can just about double that income by robbing every bank terminal you see.
How is it exactly that there is a store anywhere that sells something that you don't already have? That's like sending the special forces paratrooping into Iraq and having them stop by the local gun shop on the way to their objective since the only thing they have are Tommy Guns from WWI. "Hey, Fred, take a look at this! Apparently somebody came up with a way to build a gun that doesn't jam every 25 rounds! Hmm, maybe we should get a job at the marketplace across the street for a few weeks so that we can afford one of these RPGs also..."
Oh, and since you obviously have nothing more urgent to be doing, you occasionally need to put your state-of-the-art, stealthy, and highly armed warship into orbit around some barren wasteland and start pretending that you are a mining operation. After all, there is no way that the powers that be could have hired an actual crew of engineers and given them a ship actually designed for mining operations to supply your missions, right?
Better still is the hero that has some kind of official backing from a kingdom, or government, or whatever who starts out with a knife and a T-shirt, and has to start out exterminating rats or whatever.
Then he has to steal or earn money doing menial tasks to buy equipment.
If this guy is the hope of the world or whatever, you'd think that the king who sent him out could at least equip him as well as the castle guards...
Why not? They monitor every aircraft that is flying anyway (civilian or military) - since the purpose of the flight has no bearing on whether or not the planes turn into twisted wreckage when they collide.
Obviously civilian traffic control would not coordinate a response to military traffic.
Now, in a war zone I'm sure the military just runs everything directly, since they're 99% of the air traffic anyway.
If the military did monitor US airspace 24x7 in a serious manner they'd need to coordinate with civilian traffic control anyway - a 747 cruising in from Asia and a bomber cruising in from Asia probably look the same on radar.
To replace radars on the ground for tracking aircraft, you need something in addition to the GPS (what is that, it's not mentioned in the summary?)
That is correct - the aircraft reports its location via radio to a ground receiver. One of the benefits is that you could have full ATC coverage in the middle of the Atlantic, for example, where there are no radar transmitters (assuming that it could operate on a wavelength with sufficient range to reach a ground station - I suspect that trans-atlantic flights probably still use quite a bit of HF or satellite communications, and my general understanding is that right now the only separation is based on getting reservations for routes, altitudes, speeds, and time-on-station - just like railroads in the old days).
Yes, but the transponder does greatly aid radar reception - it doesn't broadcast its location but the fact that it transmits a signal anytime it receives one greatly simplifies the job of the radar system. If it didn't broadcast its altitude it would probably be just as effective from a position standpoint.
The distance at which a radar can locate an aircraft with a functioning transponder is much greater than the distance it can detect an aircraft that is not broadcasting.
So, without transponders you'd need much denser radar coverage. I've heard that primary radar coverage is one of those things they don't talk about much since 9/11, but it wouldn't surprise me if they've beefed it up quite a bit or supplemented it with military data.
I'm guessing that they will not throw out radar entirely for primary surveillance. They'll need it to track things that don't transmit their position, like aircraft with failed electronics.
Or drug smugglers, or hijackers, or an incoming air raid, or anybody else who doesn't want to intentionally broadcast their location... Granted, civilian primary radar is not going to help much with an incoming military air raid.
Overall, however, I think that it is a good way to cut down quite a bit of the cost (potentially) and provide better service.
I know a guy who got pneumonia in the UK, and it took him a week or two to be prescribed an X-Ray, and a week after that to have it read. He was out of work for a month. In the US he'd have been medicated and sent home same-day. Granted, in the US all kinds of people have unnecessary tests done as well.
Also - when looking at European taxes, be sure to look at VAT as well. In some countries income taxes aren't that high, but they might have a VAT of 15-25% or so.
My impression is that in the US the way you tell if somebody REALLY needs something done is to charge them $500 and see if they come up with the money. In the EU the approach is to have them sit in line for four hours, or wait in line for a few weeks. Obviously when care is free to you need to have some way to get people to not consume too much of it. I think that one's personal preference for time vs money tends to depend on which of those two one is most easily able to dispose of.
I tend to agree with you that sometimes it is cheaper to provide care to everybody than to try to figure out who does or doesn't deserve it.
The problem is that this assumes that the number of people who would try to freeload remains constant.
In reality, if you lower the barriers to freeloading, more people will do it, and that is the moral hazard here.
Consider the illustrative example of crime enforcement. If I were running law enforcement in a small town, I'd give serious consideration to spending $20k to apprehend and punish somebody who stole a $100 stereo. The $20k doesn't just recover a $100 stereo - it also deters thousands of others who might contemplate committing similar crimes.
That said, as society becomes more specialized we do need better ways to cope with people who can't get good-paying jobs or who end up between jobs. The trick is to avoid giving people incentive to stay in those conditions when they could be working productively.
Well, the learning experience benefits others more than it does the person on his deathbed.
I think that socialism tends to be necessary due to the nature of our society. We have become a society of specialists, which means we get paid good money when we're working, and we end up with extended periods of time where we don't make money. Some people never end up working (for a decent wage) because they lack the necessary skills.
The challenge is to preserve the incentive to work so that we don't have one big tragedy of the commons.
Uh, by midterm elections we'll still be trying to read this 2000-page bill to figure out what it says... Most of the provisions - good or bad (depending on your opinion) - don't go into effect for a few years.
My main objection to the think was the closed door process. Sure, I don't approve of the Republican's approach to the whole thing, but the Democrats could have at least let C-Span televise the working sessions.
I still don't know why the list of reforms needs a 2000-page bill. I think most of the reforms are actually good ones, although I'd have preferred to see at least a few things go further. On the other hand, sometimes when you have a long journey you need to start out with the first step...
If you think the download size is bad on windows, try downloading the source sometime.
It is as if Google has never heard of the concept of dynamic linking, which makes it a real pleasure to build. Hmm, security update needs to change 3 lines of code, I guess I'm rebuilding qt again...
First - my figures were illustrative - I do no work in the recording industry so I do not know what their typical offers are. For some reason LOTS of artists sign on, so they must be offering (or at least promising) something decent.
If the records do sell really well you do get royalties beyond the advance, although the terms are pretty one-sided.
You say that 90,000 albums were sold online via one particular outlet. That sounds impressive, but what is the distribution? Is that 20,000 bands selling four albums each? Is that 10 bands selling 8,000 albums each and 1000 bands selling 10 each? Neither looks all that good to a new artist - sure if you're one of those 10 you could make as much per year as your advance (and you'd make more from other outlets as well), but if you're one of the 20,000 or one of the 8,000 that isn't much.
I know a couple of guys who are playing in small venues for fun and selling tracks on amazon and itunes. They do it because it is fun, and I'm sure they make enough money to pay for their guitar strings. However, I don't think they're under any illusions that they'll be quitting their day jobs, which are considerably better-paying.
The problem with selling CDs is that ANYBODY can do it, and most bands are one-hit wonders. A record company can milk that for all its worth and get teenagers to buy five follow-up albums for some reason I can't fathom, but most independent artists actually have to make VERY high quality music to accomplish this. Most people can't do this, and if they do it is still hard to get discovered.
Don't get me wrong - if I were going into music I'd be more inclined to be independent, but most recording artists sign these contracts when they're 20 years old, and they don't have any business sense. Maybe for them it is the right way to go - it takes some work to create a brand and I'm not sure the average singer or guitar player has the right skills.
Yup, the problem we have as a society is that nobody wants to accept substandard quality to save money. Sure, we all choose to spend less money, but then we turn around and sue the people who sold it to us because we were too cheap to buy a better item.
If you want the SawStop(TM) system, buy it! Just don't complain that you can't get it for $150.
Health care is in the same mess. If a rich person can get some treatment, then everybody wants the homeless to be able to have it as well. Well, that's nice in theory until somebody has to pay for it...
Well bands do have the ability to do that - it's just that an unknown band has to decide - do it myself or go with a label that may turn me into a hit? Most decide the later.
I don't think it is just whether the label turns the band into a hit. There is also what I'd call risk equalization.
If you strike out on your own the business model is simple. Either you lose a fair amount of money (whatever you spent on promotion/production/etc), or you strike it enormously rich (probably slowly since you won't have much capital). 99.99999% of the time you lose the fair amount of money.
If you sign with a record label the business model is also simple. You will not lose any money under any circumstances. You will definitely get to keep your advance, which for a 20-year-old artist is a fair chunk of cash. Most likely that will be the end of it, but there is a modest chance that you could make a little more money, and a very very small change that you'll be a mega hit and outlast your contract and be able to be super-rich.
Essentially record labels take money from the people who are hits and spread it out among those who don't become hits (while keeping 90% of the money for themselves). They also take all the risk - they're the only ones putting out hard cash.
For a new band they have the choice of making taking a $100k advance RIGHT NOW, or seeing how many CDs they can sell on their own - without serious promotion. Making even $100k selling CDs on your own is EXTREMELY difficult - especially without any capital investments. Sure, signing the deal means that you could end up getting $120k instead of $25M, but most likely it means you'll get $100k instead of ending up with a crate full of CDs and T-Shirts that you can't sell while you work at the pizza place down the street.
Don't get me wrong - the whole industry needs a major overhaul. However, most people critical of the RIAA miss the fact that it does provide one valuable service to the new artist, and that is the key to their success.
Couldn't agree more - but the same argument applies to almost any action the federal government might take on healthcare.
Hopefully any court that strikes down the insurance mandate will be smart enough to strike down the ban on not covering pre-existing conditions, or pretty soon none of us will have insurance... :)
Isn't that the reason we have one person who is the head of the entire executive branch?
If the CIA wants one thing, and the DoD wants something else, why don't they just ask the president to make a call?
Or is the idea of cutting through bureaucracy so repugnant to government workers that the concept of just having somebody make a decision is completely alien?
There's a big difference between soldiers dying because they are accomplishing a dangerous mission, and soldiers dying because they are being ambushed.
There's a difference between merchant ships being sunk because they're accomplishing the dangerous mission of ferrying cargo across the North Atlantic during WWII, and ships being sunk because they are being ambushed by U-Boats.
Under your rationale, the allies should have made use of Enigma/Ultra intelligence to defend any target of any value, without regard to preserving the secrecy of the Ultra project.
In reality, many sailors went to the bottom whose lives could have been saved if the intelligence source were sacrificed. However, I don't know ANYBODY who would argue that the allies would have been better off if they saved a few ships in 1943 at the cost of the Germans switching to an unbreakable encryption system.
Soldiers dying in ambush are no different from soldiers dying taking out a fixed objective where the enemy positions are known. In the end, they are sons and brothers and husbands and fathers, whose loss is a terrible cost which should only be incurred for the greatest need.
However, it is a betrayal to save the lives of a few now at the cost of many more later, or at the cost of the mission. If the lives of a few soldiers is more important than the mission, then we shouldn't be putting them in harm's way in the first place.
This is hardly something new to war. There has been countless debate over things like the decision after the Normandy breakout in WWII France to allow the Germans to retreat instead of cutting them off at a likely cost of many deaths from friendly fire. It is easier to let the war go on an extra six months or whatever and grind through an extra few hundred thousand people than to deal with accusations that your actions killed a few thousand of your own soldiers.
Sometimes in war playing it safe costs more lives than it saves.
I'm actually a fan of having lots of smaller reforms.
As far as tort reform not saving more than a few percent goes - I'm not sure that any single change will save us more than a few percent. Everybody likes to demonize one entity or another, but from what I can see there are a lot of things that each boost cost, often in a synergistic manner, but there are no silver bullets in this puzzle.
We have a system that has created some perverse incentives, and then everybody is just doing the greedy thing to make the most of a messed up situation. That is everybody from doctors to lawyers to insurers to vendors to patients (what patient WOULDN'T want one more test/procedure when the risk is lower than the benefits and the cost is paid by somebody else?).
We wanted to get away from the private insurance companies, or at the very least force competition and have them lower their ridiculous rates which generate them massive amounts of profit every year.
Don't get me wrong - there are a lot of scummy insurance practices out there, and I'm all for banning them. Post-claim underwriting is my biggest pet peeve. Pre-existing conditions is actually fair IF IT IS NOT ABUSED (but it is). Mandating insurance is a reasonable way to fairly require coverage for pre-existing conditions - if you didn't mandate the purchase of insurance then people would just wait until they're sick to buy insurance.
No doubt the insurance companies make profit, and maybe they make too much. However, I don't really think that they're responsible for a bulk of the costs. If anything they have incentive to keep the costs down to keep their profits up. Nevertheless, costs are STILL way up.
Everybody loves to pick on their favorite demon, and any big company making a profit is easy to point the finger at. However, the medical profession is FULL of people making profits, from the GP who charges $80 for a 15 minute visit to the guy who charges him $1000 for a "medical" scale to the lawyer who sues the GP when you fall off of a scale after it turns out that he tried to save money by buying a $50 model at Walmart.
There are a LOT of places in the health care system that require reform, and the insurance companies are just the tip of the iceberg. If you got rid of them today and went with a public option unless that public option had the ability to make some tough calls you're not going to lower costs much.
Now, a public option does allow costs to be socialized so that costs APPEAR to be lower for some people, but that isn't the same thing. You can actually do that with private insurance too by having the government pay some or all of the premiums. Socialism and healthcare reform are actually two different issues but they tend to get muddled.
My biggest grip with the current legislation is that it is a lot of effort to placate EVERYBODY without a whole lot of real reform. I'm fine with starting out simple, but this legislation is purported to be a big fix, and if all we wanted to do was stop a few insurance industry practices that could be done in a much simpler way.
Forcing an insurance company to pay for a pre-existing condition is simple theft, regardless of how hard that makes your situation.
The problem with this is that pre-existing conditions can become very hard to prove, and insurance companies often use them as excuses for denying claims, or even doing post-claim underwriting and retroactively cancelling policies.
I actually support requiring coverage for pre-existing conditions, when combined with a significant fine for anybody that doesn't buy minimal insurance coverage (with socialized plans available for the poor). By forcing universal coverage you eliminate the issue of pre-existing conditions entirely. Also, universal coverage means that people don't have a financial incentive to neglect preventative care.
And post-claim underwriting should be banned in all respects. If you want to underwrite a policy, do so before issuing it. Don't let somebody pay in for years, thinking that they are covered, and then pull the rug out after the fact. That's just the same thing as pre-existing conditions but in reverse.
Agreed, although if this became standard and built into racks then maybe each server would just have a button next to it that pumped out the coolant quickly. Hot-swaps probably wouldn't work inside the case itself, since you'd have to remove the coolant to perform this task.
Alternatively, you could perform a hot swap immersed in oil if you did it quickly - the oil probably couldn't be circulated with the case open but it would at least be there. I'm not sure that this would actually buy you much though, as oil has low heat capacity. Without pumps running the cooling might not be better than air cooling without fans. So, maybe hot-swaps would be totally out of the question unless the case could be designed to allow oil to flow without being under pressure.