Cellular. We have the most competitive cellular market in the world. Most countries have at best three competitors. The US has 3.5 (TMobile is national but really only in cities) national (and several large regional players).
Very few monoplies can survive the next innovation to hit their industry (AT&T was offered the whole internet from the NSF for a token fee and turned it down). IBM was nearly bankrupt by the PC (even after beating the Justice Department). Microsoft is losing to Google without anything more than normal market competition.
It makes a tremendous amount of difference how a company becames the monopolist. Everyone benefits from a monopoly that is able to out compete the previous competitive market. Take the memory market as an example. Let's say Micron builds an 36" wafer while other manufacturers are still using 12". Because of the costs of semiconductor printing, Micron can earn monopoly profits from their vastly lower cost of production while still pricing them below the previously competitive solution. Of course if all competitors had 36" wafers prices would be even lower (and deadweight losses would be eliminated) but even before then both Micron and memory buyers are better with the monopoly+innovation than they had been before with perfect competition and no innovaiton.
That's effectively what Standard Oil did to the rest of the industry and how they became the monopolist.
Of course, it was all paid for by the manipulations that Enron was creating in California. Grant County sits on one side of the Columbia River which has more hydro dams than any other river. Most of the dams are owned by non-profit co-ops, that have sold power to California for years. When power prices went nuts in the summer of 2001, the co-op was minting money. So they had to plow that money into something, so they started stringing up fiber everywhere in the county. Sweet deal for the residents of Grant County though.
Since the measurement was taken as subscriptions per 100 people, I am curious if there are differences in household size between the US and other nations that could skew the results.
I'm not so sure, I passed his test (on the 5 page amazon summary) having never read the question nor All Quiet on the Western Front before. A whole lot of the commenting/.ers I've encountered are the people the Prussians found who are the 1 in 200 or 1 in 10 who either naturally process and refine information as they encounter it or can be taught to do that. Also, many were the less structured people who didn't stop work when the bells rang, and in many ways didn't fit in with school (until college when they could engage at their own speed). I'm in more or less full agreement with his theories, but realize that there are lots of people here who sort of bypassed the lessens they were "supposed" to learn in standardized school.
Sometimes you have to sacrifice for the craft. In case I wasn't super clear, my post was a joke, bus trips are a last resort to be used only when needed, but you definitely see some interesting sights along the way!
I've had pretty good experiences in the trains in the i-95 corridor. I think it's funny that the trains are much faster than planes with the congestion at airports. Nothing beats a Western US bus trip, it's not just a ride, it's an adventure. A modern bard could build a lifetime of tales from two regional bus trips.
These days most people in first class are very polite fliers for rather than being their by virtue of mad cash they are mostly there on frequent flier upgrades so they have a pretty good understanding of what bugs people about flying. Of course it never hurts that they usually had the champane over the oj when they sat down.
They could just raise their wholesale prices if they wanted to keep their product prices artificially high. This case isn't about the manufacturer making more money directly, it's about preserving a high maintenance sales channel that one distributor was trying to undercut (for their own gain). There are tons of makeup companies, and last time I checked it didn't require much more than a few chemists, a hot chick (for modeling), and some sales reps to start another one. There are make up companies that distribute in a zillion different ways from Revlon and Maybelline at Wal-Mart to Dior and MAC at department stores to boutiques like this.
Every manufacturer has a vertical monopoly when they develop a product, it's their choice what they want to do with it.
The whole key to this is that a salon must be supplying the eBay seller (or the flea market seller) with goods sold below the retail price. That's where the contract is being violated. The company wouldn't have a problem with eBay sales if they were at the same price as a salon or low volume (because the seller was eating a loss).
The agreement between the manufacturer and the retailer is implicitly this: The manufacturer agrees to sell the product at a lower price than would be normal for makeup in exchange for the studio spending some of the difference on consultants. Once a studio starts pocketing some of the consutant dollars and selling in volume to the eBay seller who also nips a portion of the consultant dollars and sells at a discount to the consumer who saves a portion of the consultant dollars, it makes the ability to retain consultants more difficult for all the other stores in the network.
Get rid of the rule that lets them keep the retailers from doing this and the manufacturer will either become the retailer or they will raise their wholesale prices and sell through more normal channels.
These rules are designed to protect retailers who have good sales people (who surprisingly have better opportunities than a big box store) from missing out on sales from people who take advantage of the knowledge of the boutique and then purchase from the big box store. The big box is welcome to compete with a different line of products sold by idiots if they choose.
They are designed to keep retail margins up (if all either company cared about was keeping the price up they would simply raise their wholesale prices--remember no one else makes Merle Norman makeup). Both companies want their retailers to have high margins so they can sell the product in the manner intended by the manufacturer. Perhaps they want friendly interesting sales staff or the product to be sold in an expensive location rather than a picture on an auction website. The picture sells the product to people who already know about the product but it's much less likely to sell to someone who doesn't know anything about the product.
My examples were odd business models, (frequently high service retailing is done by the manufacturer). That doesn't make them any less valid. The key is if you have a product that requires lots of service to sell effectively (there are many but not all), there is plenty of incentive for independant resellers to undercut the others, and when undercutting takes place it will be worse for all participants (including the customer, eventually). The fully legal alternative is for the manufacturer to sell the product via their company owned stores. That requires huge amounts of capital and results in far more limited availabilty of the product than putting a price floor on the product and selling it to more diverse distributors. Leegin v. PSKS is the result of good economic theory. Price floors should be reviewed for anti-trust actions rather than banned in every case.
It only works if the salon is selling the product at a discount to the retail price to the eBay seller. If the eBay seller is simply paying retail, there would be little advantage (outside of very remote customers) to buying on eBay vs buying in the store.
Basically this decision protects the salons that aren't undercutting their agreement. Here's an example. Let's say that this firm develops make up that women prefer, but that requires a few hours of training to learn how to properly apply, and that hour of training is essentially bundled into the MSRP of the makeup and sold at 1000 salons nationwide. 999 salons hire the extra sales consultants to teach customers and potential customers how to apply the make up correctly. However, one salon also realizes that they can sell lots of make up (perhaps 30x normal sales) to Dora the Ebay power seller at 1/5 the usual mark up. So they do (while they miss out on 4/5 of the usual mark up they are selling 30x as much product so their profit is many times what it would have been if they had followed the agreement.
While perhaps no salon goes out of business initially (the sales are spread to all of them) a few other salons realize what the first salon is doing and repeat. Eventually you will reach an equilibrium that reaches far fewer total customers (because all the salons are selling less product to their ebay rep but since all of them are doing it most customers are dissatisfied with the product (an ebay sale provides no training).
This is pretty classic industrial organization theory and I don't think there's a whole lot of contention that reselling agreements are usually pretty efficient (meaning that you can't make a change that makes someone better off without impacting another person in with a larger loss). This isn't too far from an enforced prisoners dilemna game, nor is it far from Apple's practice of cutting volume to price choppers. Which is one of the major reasons Macs hold their value so well.
Another example of why companies might want to restrict undercutting is Warhammer minis. Most gamers would like to find a store that had regular gaming days and tournaments and taught potential new gamers how to play the game, unfortunately those events are expensive (and supporting them is part of the reason for the likely 40-50% mark up on the minis). So once established many gamers would probably switch their purchases to single online store that sold them for 30% off. When everyone switches to the online store, there will be no place to locally game (and as a result less benefit from remaining in the hobby--making all gamers worse off).
The checking depends on the State, in Virginia all cars must pass a safety inspection lights, brakes, tires, etc must all be in working and usable condition. In the heartland the only ispection is old Man Winter. And yeah, sleepers are hella fun!
The exception is of course when with competition no one would offer the service. Some services are not worth offering. ie under perfect competition dense urban communities would have multiple cable companies offering very cheap cable services, but their more spread out neighbors would have 1 or no choices. The only winners there are the construction workers who lay the stuff and content producers (who would effectively recieve split of the profits of the cable system).
The electoral college was created for a reason and that reason wasn't low bandwith communication. It was created specifically to prevent the populous North from imposing its will on the rural South. It was couched in "regionalism" but most of our nations structure was designed to keep NY, Philly, and Boston from ruling over Richmond and Atlanta.
The stock markets are all about where you are going. If a company can't sell a story or concept to investors it typically trades at a fairly low multiple of earnings (these are classified as value companies). When they can they trade at a much higher multiple of earnings. As examples Apple is trading at 38x it's earnings. Dell trades at about 20 times it's earnings this year. Investors believe that Apple is more likely to grow its earnings faster than Dell will so they pay a higher price now.
The other factor that impacts market value is the total size of your profitablity. It's likely that Sony's other businesses earn less money (per dollar of sales) than consoles (in good times), so Sony's other businesses don't add as much as you might expect to its market value.
It took a much more patient teacher to teach us that the derivative of x2 was x/2 and the integral of x was 1/2x^2+C than the lesson that the integral of sin(x) was cos(x) even though the latter is generally a more advanced concept.
Since you've admitted to reading the manual, there will need to be a review of whether you can continue to hold (and benefit from all the rights and privledges) of your geek card and secret decoder ring.
I've seen the original US penitentiary, it was very much a Quaker creation. It was built for the sinner to relfect against their sins against God, there are lots of long lone sky lights (implying the eye of the Lord peering down on you). Absolute silence was enforced pretty brutally. When prisoners were moved they were hooded etc.
It was abandoned in 1913, but when built it became the basis for most American and European prisons of the 19th century.
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Cellular. We have the most competitive cellular market in the world. Most countries have at best three competitors. The US has 3.5 (TMobile is national but really only in cities) national (and several large regional players).
Very few monoplies can survive the next innovation to hit their industry (AT&T was offered the whole internet from the NSF for a token fee and turned it down). IBM was nearly bankrupt by the PC (even after beating the Justice Department). Microsoft is losing to Google without anything more than normal market competition.
It makes a tremendous amount of difference how a company becames the monopolist. Everyone benefits from a monopoly that is able to out compete the previous competitive market. Take the memory market as an example. Let's say Micron builds an 36" wafer while other manufacturers are still using 12". Because of the costs of semiconductor printing, Micron can earn monopoly profits from their vastly lower cost of production while still pricing them below the previously competitive solution. Of course if all competitors had 36" wafers prices would be even lower (and deadweight losses would be eliminated) but even before then both Micron and memory buyers are better with the monopoly+innovation than they had been before with perfect competition and no innovaiton. That's effectively what Standard Oil did to the rest of the industry and how they became the monopolist.
Of course, it was all paid for by the manipulations that Enron was creating in California. Grant County sits on one side of the Columbia River which has more hydro dams than any other river. Most of the dams are owned by non-profit co-ops, that have sold power to California for years. When power prices went nuts in the summer of 2001, the co-op was minting money. So they had to plow that money into something, so they started stringing up fiber everywhere in the county. Sweet deal for the residents of Grant County though.
Since the measurement was taken as subscriptions per 100 people, I am curious if there are differences in household size between the US and other nations that could skew the results.
I'm not so sure, I passed his test (on the 5 page amazon summary) having never read the question nor All Quiet on the Western Front before. A whole lot of the commenting /.ers I've encountered are the people the Prussians found who are the 1 in 200 or 1 in 10 who either naturally process and refine information as they encounter it or can be taught to do that. Also, many were the less structured people who didn't stop work when the bells rang, and in many ways didn't fit in with school (until college when they could engage at their own speed). I'm in more or less full agreement with his theories, but realize that there are lots of people here who sort of bypassed the lessens they were "supposed" to learn in standardized school.
Sometimes you have to sacrifice for the craft. In case I wasn't super clear, my post was a joke, bus trips are a last resort to be used only when needed, but you definitely see some interesting sights along the way!
I've had pretty good experiences in the trains in the i-95 corridor. I think it's funny that the trains are much faster than planes with the congestion at airports. Nothing beats a Western US bus trip, it's not just a ride, it's an adventure. A modern bard could build a lifetime of tales from two regional bus trips.
These days most people in first class are very polite fliers for rather than being their by virtue of mad cash they are mostly there on frequent flier upgrades so they have a pretty good understanding of what bugs people about flying. Of course it never hurts that they usually had the champane over the oj when they sat down.
They could just raise their wholesale prices if they wanted to keep their product prices artificially high. This case isn't about the manufacturer making more money directly, it's about preserving a high maintenance sales channel that one distributor was trying to undercut (for their own gain). There are tons of makeup companies, and last time I checked it didn't require much more than a few chemists, a hot chick (for modeling), and some sales reps to start another one. There are make up companies that distribute in a zillion different ways from Revlon and Maybelline at Wal-Mart to Dior and MAC at department stores to boutiques like this. Every manufacturer has a vertical monopoly when they develop a product, it's their choice what they want to do with it.
They don't have an online sales presence. They refer you to the studios.
The whole key to this is that a salon must be supplying the eBay seller (or the flea market seller) with goods sold below the retail price. That's where the contract is being violated. The company wouldn't have a problem with eBay sales if they were at the same price as a salon or low volume (because the seller was eating a loss).
The agreement between the manufacturer and the retailer is implicitly this: The manufacturer agrees to sell the product at a lower price than would be normal for makeup in exchange for the studio spending some of the difference on consultants. Once a studio starts pocketing some of the consutant dollars and selling in volume to the eBay seller who also nips a portion of the consultant dollars and sells at a discount to the consumer who saves a portion of the consultant dollars, it makes the ability to retain consultants more difficult for all the other stores in the network. Get rid of the rule that lets them keep the retailers from doing this and the manufacturer will either become the retailer or they will raise their wholesale prices and sell through more normal channels.
These rules are designed to protect retailers who have good sales people (who surprisingly have better opportunities than a big box store) from missing out on sales from people who take advantage of the knowledge of the boutique and then purchase from the big box store. The big box is welcome to compete with a different line of products sold by idiots if they choose.
They are designed to keep retail margins up (if all either company cared about was keeping the price up they would simply raise their wholesale prices--remember no one else makes Merle Norman makeup). Both companies want their retailers to have high margins so they can sell the product in the manner intended by the manufacturer. Perhaps they want friendly interesting sales staff or the product to be sold in an expensive location rather than a picture on an auction website. The picture sells the product to people who already know about the product but it's much less likely to sell to someone who doesn't know anything about the product.
My examples were odd business models, (frequently high service retailing is done by the manufacturer). That doesn't make them any less valid. The key is if you have a product that requires lots of service to sell effectively (there are many but not all), there is plenty of incentive for independant resellers to undercut the others, and when undercutting takes place it will be worse for all participants (including the customer, eventually). The fully legal alternative is for the manufacturer to sell the product via their company owned stores. That requires huge amounts of capital and results in far more limited availabilty of the product than putting a price floor on the product and selling it to more diverse distributors. Leegin v. PSKS is the result of good economic theory. Price floors should be reviewed for anti-trust actions rather than banned in every case.
It only works if the salon is selling the product at a discount to the retail price to the eBay seller. If the eBay seller is simply paying retail, there would be little advantage (outside of very remote customers) to buying on eBay vs buying in the store. Basically this decision protects the salons that aren't undercutting their agreement. Here's an example. Let's say that this firm develops make up that women prefer, but that requires a few hours of training to learn how to properly apply, and that hour of training is essentially bundled into the MSRP of the makeup and sold at 1000 salons nationwide. 999 salons hire the extra sales consultants to teach customers and potential customers how to apply the make up correctly. However, one salon also realizes that they can sell lots of make up (perhaps 30x normal sales) to Dora the Ebay power seller at 1/5 the usual mark up. So they do (while they miss out on 4/5 of the usual mark up they are selling 30x as much product so their profit is many times what it would have been if they had followed the agreement.
While perhaps no salon goes out of business initially (the sales are spread to all of them) a few other salons realize what the first salon is doing and repeat. Eventually you will reach an equilibrium that reaches far fewer total customers (because all the salons are selling less product to their ebay rep but since all of them are doing it most customers are dissatisfied with the product (an ebay sale provides no training).
This is pretty classic industrial organization theory and I don't think there's a whole lot of contention that reselling agreements are usually pretty efficient (meaning that you can't make a change that makes someone better off without impacting another person in with a larger loss). This isn't too far from an enforced prisoners dilemna game, nor is it far from Apple's practice of cutting volume to price choppers. Which is one of the major reasons Macs hold their value so well.
Another example of why companies might want to restrict undercutting is Warhammer minis. Most gamers would like to find a store that had regular gaming days and tournaments and taught potential new gamers how to play the game, unfortunately those events are expensive (and supporting them is part of the reason for the likely 40-50% mark up on the minis). So once established many gamers would probably switch their purchases to single online store that sold them for 30% off. When everyone switches to the online store, there will be no place to locally game (and as a result less benefit from remaining in the hobby--making all gamers worse off).
The checking depends on the State, in Virginia all cars must pass a safety inspection lights, brakes, tires, etc must all be in working and usable condition. In the heartland the only ispection is old Man Winter. And yeah, sleepers are hella fun!
The exception is of course when with competition no one would offer the service. Some services are not worth offering. ie under perfect competition dense urban communities would have multiple cable companies offering very cheap cable services, but their more spread out neighbors would have 1 or no choices. The only winners there are the construction workers who lay the stuff and content producers (who would effectively recieve split of the profits of the cable system).
The electoral college was created for a reason and that reason wasn't low bandwith communication. It was created specifically to prevent the populous North from imposing its will on the rural South. It was couched in "regionalism" but most of our nations structure was designed to keep NY, Philly, and Boston from ruling over Richmond and Atlanta.
This can only end in the worlds longest samba line, party on dudes!
The stock markets are all about where you are going. If a company can't sell a story or concept to investors it typically trades at a fairly low multiple of earnings (these are classified as value companies). When they can they trade at a much higher multiple of earnings. As examples Apple is trading at 38x it's earnings. Dell trades at about 20 times it's earnings this year. Investors believe that Apple is more likely to grow its earnings faster than Dell will so they pay a higher price now.
The other factor that impacts market value is the total size of your profitablity. It's likely that Sony's other businesses earn less money (per dollar of sales) than consoles (in good times), so Sony's other businesses don't add as much as you might expect to its market value.
You can all see how little stuck after several years of non-use. I'm going to go hide in the corner now.
It took a much more patient teacher to teach us that the derivative of x2 was x/2 and the integral of x was 1/2x^2+C than the lesson that the integral of sin(x) was cos(x) even though the latter is generally a more advanced concept.
I, for one, welcome our kingdom hopping virus overlords.
Since you've admitted to reading the manual, there will need to be a review of whether you can continue to hold (and benefit from all the rights and privledges) of your geek card and secret decoder ring.
I've seen the original US penitentiary, it was very much a Quaker creation. It was built for the sinner to relfect against their sins against God, there are lots of long lone sky lights (implying the eye of the Lord peering down on you). Absolute silence was enforced pretty brutally. When prisoners were moved they were hooded etc. It was abandoned in 1913, but when built it became the basis for most American and European prisons of the 19th century.