This isn't so much about google as it is about TV. The value of most internet traffic ($40/month for a 3 mbps unique connection) is nearly an order of magnitude below the value of TV ($60/mo for shared access to stream equivalent to ~27 mbps) and at least an order of magnitude lower than telephone ($35/mo for a 64kbps line that even with a teenage daughter might hit 20% utilization). Net neutrality makes it possible for the high value packets (your TV shows and phone calls) to be intermingled in with the low value internet packets. Google would like to be able to do this someday, while the pipe owners would like to continue to differentiate between the two.
At a minimum they are the cream of the crop in terms of employee turnover (meaning that they actually want to be there rather than are just doing this until something they really want comes along).
And these brains they grow on trees, unfortunatly for the zombies they will have to cultivate food crops to feed their brainys just as a huge portion of human agriculure fees poultry, pigs, and cattle.
There are two problems with thinking about the long term (especially CL, less so Costco). First, in the long run you are all dead. Second, it's highly likely that your corporate entity will be dead far sooner than imagined. If there had been an ethical bullwhip company and an evil profit maximizing one the first left a lot more on the table than the second for pretty limited long term benefits. This does make a huge assumption that the ethical companie is more likely to attract talent who would allow them to move into throttle design or something similar, if that's true than your ethical company is behaving more like Costco. Which is to say, they compete (in the labor market) by recruiting talented folks who are far more productive than their minimum wage peers. It's a gamble but one that has paid off so far for Costco. A huge portion of discounters labor cost is eaten by training and new employee productivity costs. At the core Costco is able to compete because they can attract the top few % of retail employees and compensates them in kind (my bet is that most of them would be making the same at other retailers because they would have moved into management positions). Wal-Mart also pays for talent but their compensation is higher for store managers and logistical desing folks. Neither is "right" or "wrong" in a legal/competitive sense as at both stores about the same portion of a dollar spent goes to employee costs (SG&A is within a quarter percent at Costco and Walmart).
In addition I've always found it odd that people will wait in far longer lines at a Warehouse type store than they ever would at Wal-Mart (whose lines are also longer than most stores). Without that tolerance Costco wouldn't be able to compete as effectivly with their high cost/high productivity labor model.
It's possible, Wal-Mart is pretty lacking in the I-95 corridor from NYC to Boston (I think they have all of 1 supercenter in that whole region. Keep in mind that as a corporation Wal-Mart did 2 things
expand spacially
Check out this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGzHBtoVvpc (flash)
and focus on rural areas over urban. Its interesting if you split wal-mart into two pieces you have one that looks exactly like Target with about 1300 stores and one that has 600 or so stores that are unlike almost all national retailers in terms of demographics and a host of other issues. It's these stores that result in most of the reason Wal-Mart gets blasted because they skew the national averages for the company (rural markets are very, very different than urban).
Both of those strategies minimized their presence in the most dense region in the US from Boston to NY along the east coast.
Funny, back when there was so much lather over outsourcing everything but the CEO to India, a few folk mentioned that this might happen and were replied to that with 2 billion people it won't happen in our lifetimes. Hope you are all doing ok!
I'm a realistic libertarian. In an ideal society (with zero transaction costs) you don't need any government aside from perhaps (and this is arguable) a contract enforcement judicial system. However, as transaction costs are very non-zero there are market failures. I think Sweden is a fine example on the left end of acceptability, the problem I have with progressives is that most aren't as reasoned as you and Sweden is more of a toe in the door to head further left rather than soemthing good in the middle.
I'm a bank regulator, so I don't disagree that some government intevention is necessary. I just like a society that thinks hard (and is willing to change) how much government intervention is needed in the market. It seems like once a bureaucracy is created it only grows. Take my field, bank regulation has been an amazing sucess story (especially the last 15 years of it, but what are the unitended consequences? By removing risk from depositors have we created moral hazards that push bank managers to ever risky loans to compete for deposits, there are many very complex questions that can't well be answered until history has cooled and solidified. Markets aren't perfect, but they offer a surprisingly good insight into what a huge number of people believe about something (and more often than not they are right).
Civil defense is a well known market failure (it's a non-exclusive, non-rival good) and as such it's about the most perfect market failure out there. They certainly exist, but aren't as numerous as market detractors will sometimes make the case for their being.
My thoughts are 19 out of 180 or so is pretty darn good. If you want to fiddle on the margins with a desired tax policy or state ownership of businesses/resources, what I was refering to are very strong property rights (so politically connected can't up an take your property), open attitudes toward staring a business (it needs to be easy for both locals and outsiders), and limited restrictions to trading are all good for society.
Besides on Sweeden, the libertarians would say it's not that they can't do well with a more socialistic model, but how much better could they do in a fully competitive one.;)
My point was simply that the economic freedom and strong property rights are highly correllated with per capita income. Say R^2 of 80% or better if we linearize it. There are other factors which is where I'd put Sweeden's tax structure and state ownership of businesses, but I think you would agree that the main correlation holds?
I'd catagorize Sweeden as pretty high on the government stays out of the way of the economy. Granted they tax a bit higher than other countries, and they ahve some higher regulation, but it's not terribly difficult to start up a new business, they don't tax international trade, keep inflation in check, and allow foreign investment. Even the scary libertarians at the heritage foundation like em. http://www.heritage.org/research/features/index/co untry.cfm?id=Sweden
I'm sure you can see that the countries at the top of the list are pretty highly correlated with high per capita incomes and those at the bottom are low per captia incomes.
http://www.heritage.org/research/features/index/co untries.cfm
If our goal is to cut global emissions by say 20%, why not focus on the least productive 20% of global emissions. Certainly 1/3 of the cost of global cuts should be shouldered by the US, but most of the West produces a whole lot more output per unit of energy. If you mandate that each country must cut their emission by 20% you will remove more total output than if you let all countries trade to reduce the least productive output. Let's say there are 100 factories that each emit 100 units of carbon dioxide per year (both the factory and the workers cars to get to the factory). Simply throttling back all the factories by 20% is a very inefficient method of cutting our industry's emissions. What if one factory produces outputs worth $1 billion and another can only produce outputs of $100 million. It would be most effective for the rich factory to pay for the changes necessary to enhance the effiency of the less productive factory.
Had we started this prior to the massive building boom that is going on in so much of the developing world the developed world could have financed far more energy efficient cities there (better mass transit and city designs), which is far cheaper than trying to rebuild, say Los Angeles to function more like Amsterdam.
That's what I get for speaking before looking. You are both very correct. Via the most recent EIA review transportion accounts for about 27% of total US energy consumption. Fossil fuels provide about 85% of our energy consumed, and transportation is about 31% of our fossil fuel consumption as measured by BTUs.
I was incorrectly recalling that transportation was about half of our petroleum use or a similar statistic.
The problem I have with Kyoto is that if we assume the worst case senario (that humans are the primary cause of global warming and the result is destruction of our way of life etc), that it still is a pretty inneffective way of reducing CO2 emissions. It would be far cheaper to give developing nations some of our pollution reduction technology and pay them to build their societies to function with less energy requirements (far cheaper to build a new building with efficiency in mind than retrofit existing buildings) yet the only nations required to cut emissions were the developed countries. I wish there had been some thought about cutting emissions in a more efficient manner globally.
$0.30/dollar is pretty cheap, I'd put my bottom dollar that opertaing margins for iTunes are under 5% (meaning of that $0.30 Apple is earning less than a penny and a half. The real rant here should be the cc companies who are probably nicking a good 20-25 depending how many you buy at once of that 30c per song.
The problem is people on average won't pay for a dedicated high speed pipe they will pay for TV and telephone. Verizon doesn't want to sink all the capital into a pipe if they can't be assured of being the sole provider of TV or telephone (preferably both) on that pipe. If Disney/Google/whoever can undercut on both items them no one will pay Verizon two diddlies for their pipe.
My Qwest DSL worked the day it got turned on til (June 2001) the day I moved with the lone exeption of when a nasty thunderstorm killed power for about an hour or so. Something to be said for blowing a couple of billion investor dollars on stupid wasteful infastructure products:)
Net neutrality is about TV broadcasting and oddly cable bundling. In the end consumers place high value on TV and phone, I think we can generally take this as a given. They place a much smaller value on internet (per packet or transaction). As a small example of the economics involved let's say that a user pays $0.05/minute ($30/month and 3 hrs of calls per month) to use the phone $0.02 per minute ($70/mo and 60 hours of televison) for television service and $0.003 per minute of broadband internet service. Net neutrality would allow phone and television content providers (for now call them Disney and Vonage) to charge say $0.03 and $0.01 per minute of transmission time and use the transmission company's internet line (effectivly hosing them out of the majority of their network's value. Obviously the network owner want's to get paid more (rather than see all the value move to content producers). The fight isn't about saving you money (or likely even about killing off access to blogs) it's about who how phone and TV revenues are divied up.
I assumed it was more basic than that. While an MMORPG is a "target rich environment" for women looking for a certain type of guy, the basics of human mating are that guys are pretty much always up for a date, while women are far choosier about potential mates. The results of an online signaling contest would be more important to a women than a man in determining who to accept for further encounter isn't much of a surprise.
I couldn't remember where I'd heard UNATCO before. I think by the end of that game I could reliably guess the passwords for most terminals. Really fun game though, especially once you get the dragon's tooth sword. Was playing in the dark when I ran in to that Croc in HK, nearly jumped out of the chair on that one.
Slashdot Mirror
This isn't so much about google as it is about TV. The value of most internet traffic ($40/month for a 3 mbps unique connection) is nearly an order of magnitude below the value of TV ($60/mo for shared access to stream equivalent to ~27 mbps) and at least an order of magnitude lower than telephone ($35/mo for a 64kbps line that even with a teenage daughter might hit 20% utilization). Net neutrality makes it possible for the high value packets (your TV shows and phone calls) to be intermingled in with the low value internet packets. Google would like to be able to do this someday, while the pipe owners would like to continue to differentiate between the two.
Read the whole comment this one deserves most of the mod points on this threadlet. Well played.
With schools you can open as many as you want but without professors it's just going to be babysitting for college students.
At a minimum they are the cream of the crop in terms of employee turnover (meaning that they actually want to be there rather than are just doing this until something they really want comes along).
And these brains they grow on trees, unfortunatly for the zombies they will have to cultivate food crops to feed their brainys just as a huge portion of human agriculure fees poultry, pigs, and cattle.
Our family was firm believers in the maxim, "if mold won't grow on it neither will you"
That sounds a whole lot like AdSense which has in my opinion not crashed and burned yet.
There are two problems with thinking about the long term (especially CL, less so Costco). First, in the long run you are all dead. Second, it's highly likely that your corporate entity will be dead far sooner than imagined. If there had been an ethical bullwhip company and an evil profit maximizing one the first left a lot more on the table than the second for pretty limited long term benefits. This does make a huge assumption that the ethical companie is more likely to attract talent who would allow them to move into throttle design or something similar, if that's true than your ethical company is behaving more like Costco.
Which is to say, they compete (in the labor market) by recruiting talented folks who are far more productive than their minimum wage peers. It's a gamble but one that has paid off so far for Costco. A huge portion of discounters labor cost is eaten by training and new employee productivity costs. At the core Costco is able to compete because they can attract the top few % of retail employees and compensates them in kind (my bet is that most of them would be making the same at other retailers because they would have moved into management positions). Wal-Mart also pays for talent but their compensation is higher for store managers and logistical desing folks. Neither is "right" or "wrong" in a legal/competitive sense as at both stores about the same portion of a dollar spent goes to employee costs (SG&A is within a quarter percent at Costco and Walmart).
In addition I've always found it odd that people will wait in far longer lines at a Warehouse type store than they ever would at Wal-Mart (whose lines are also longer than most stores). Without that tolerance Costco wouldn't be able to compete as effectivly with their high cost/high productivity labor model.
Isn't that where those huge diamonds are? Make sure your lady astronaught is up to snuff before heading through the mantle.
It's possible, Wal-Mart is pretty lacking in the I-95 corridor from NYC to Boston (I think they have all of 1 supercenter in that whole region. Keep in mind that as a corporation Wal-Mart did 2 things
expand spacially
Check out this video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGzHBtoVvpc (flash)
and focus on rural areas over urban. Its interesting if you split wal-mart into two pieces you have one that looks exactly like Target with about 1300 stores and one that has 600 or so stores that are unlike almost all national retailers in terms of demographics and a host of other issues. It's these stores that result in most of the reason Wal-Mart gets blasted because they skew the national averages for the company (rural markets are very, very different than urban). Both of those strategies minimized their presence in the most dense region in the US from Boston to NY along the east coast.
Talk about gems I'm pretty sure I got metropolis on a 3 movie collection for around $5.
Funny, back when there was so much lather over outsourcing everything but the CEO to India, a few folk mentioned that this might happen and were replied to that with 2 billion people it won't happen in our lifetimes. Hope you are all doing ok!
I'm a realistic libertarian. In an ideal society (with zero transaction costs) you don't need any government aside from perhaps (and this is arguable) a contract enforcement judicial system. However, as transaction costs are very non-zero there are market failures. I think Sweden is a fine example on the left end of acceptability, the problem I have with progressives is that most aren't as reasoned as you and Sweden is more of a toe in the door to head further left rather than soemthing good in the middle.
I'm a bank regulator, so I don't disagree that some government intevention is necessary. I just like a society that thinks hard (and is willing to change) how much government intervention is needed in the market. It seems like once a bureaucracy is created it only grows. Take my field, bank regulation has been an amazing sucess story (especially the last 15 years of it, but what are the unitended consequences? By removing risk from depositors have we created moral hazards that push bank managers to ever risky loans to compete for deposits, there are many very complex questions that can't well be answered until history has cooled and solidified. Markets aren't perfect, but they offer a surprisingly good insight into what a huge number of people believe about something (and more often than not they are right).
Civil defense is a well known market failure (it's a non-exclusive, non-rival good) and as such it's about the most perfect market failure out there. They certainly exist, but aren't as numerous as market detractors will sometimes make the case for their being.
My thoughts are 19 out of 180 or so is pretty darn good. If you want to fiddle on the margins with a desired tax policy or state ownership of businesses/resources, what I was refering to are very strong property rights (so politically connected can't up an take your property), open attitudes toward staring a business (it needs to be easy for both locals and outsiders), and limited restrictions to trading are all good for society. ;)
Besides on Sweeden, the libertarians would say it's not that they can't do well with a more socialistic model, but how much better could they do in a fully competitive one.
My point was simply that the economic freedom and strong property rights are highly correllated with per capita income. Say R^2 of 80% or better if we linearize it. There are other factors which is where I'd put Sweeden's tax structure and state ownership of businesses, but I think you would agree that the main correlation holds?
I'd catagorize Sweeden as pretty high on the government stays out of the way of the economy. Granted they tax a bit higher than other countries, and they ahve some higher regulation, but it's not terribly difficult to start up a new business, they don't tax international trade, keep inflation in check, and allow foreign investment. Even the scary libertarians at the heritage foundation like em. http://www.heritage.org/research/features/index/co untry.cfm?id=Sweden
I'm sure you can see that the countries at the top of the list are pretty highly correlated with high per capita incomes and those at the bottom are low per captia incomes.
http://www.heritage.org/research/features/index/co untries.cfm
If our goal is to cut global emissions by say 20%, why not focus on the least productive 20% of global emissions. Certainly 1/3 of the cost of global cuts should be shouldered by the US, but most of the West produces a whole lot more output per unit of energy. If you mandate that each country must cut their emission by 20% you will remove more total output than if you let all countries trade to reduce the least productive output. Let's say there are 100 factories that each emit 100 units of carbon dioxide per year (both the factory and the workers cars to get to the factory).
Simply throttling back all the factories by 20% is a very inefficient method of cutting our industry's emissions. What if one factory produces outputs worth $1 billion and another can only produce outputs of $100 million. It would be most effective for the rich factory to pay for the changes necessary to enhance the effiency of the less productive factory.
Had we started this prior to the massive building boom that is going on in so much of the developing world the developed world could have financed far more energy efficient cities there (better mass transit and city designs), which is far cheaper than trying to rebuild, say Los Angeles to function more like Amsterdam.
That's what I get for speaking before looking. You are both very correct. Via the most recent EIA review transportion accounts for about 27% of total US energy consumption. Fossil fuels provide about 85% of our energy consumed, and transportation is about 31% of our fossil fuel consumption as measured by BTUs.
I was incorrectly recalling that transportation was about half of our petroleum use or a similar statistic.
The problem I have with Kyoto is that if we assume the worst case senario (that humans are the primary cause of global warming and the result is destruction of our way of life etc), that it still is a pretty inneffective way of reducing CO2 emissions. It would be far cheaper to give developing nations some of our pollution reduction technology and pay them to build their societies to function with less energy requirements (far cheaper to build a new building with efficiency in mind than retrofit existing buildings) yet the only nations required to cut emissions were the developed countries. I wish there had been some thought about cutting emissions in a more efficient manner globally.
I dunno about global trends but in the US transportation is about half of fossil fuel usage.
$0.30/dollar is pretty cheap, I'd put my bottom dollar that opertaing margins for iTunes are under 5% (meaning of that $0.30 Apple is earning less than a penny and a half. The real rant here should be the cc companies who are probably nicking a good 20-25 depending how many you buy at once of that 30c per song.
The problem is people on average won't pay for a dedicated high speed pipe they will pay for TV and telephone. Verizon doesn't want to sink all the capital into a pipe if they can't be assured of being the sole provider of TV or telephone (preferably both) on that pipe. If Disney/Google/whoever can undercut on both items them no one will pay Verizon two diddlies for their pipe.
My Qwest DSL worked the day it got turned on til (June 2001) the day I moved with the lone exeption of when a nasty thunderstorm killed power for about an hour or so. Something to be said for blowing a couple of billion investor dollars on stupid wasteful infastructure products :)
Net neutrality is about TV broadcasting and oddly cable bundling. In the end consumers place high value on TV and phone, I think we can generally take this as a given. They place a much smaller value on internet (per packet or transaction). As a small example of the economics involved let's say that a user pays $0.05/minute ($30/month and 3 hrs of calls per month) to use the phone $0.02 per minute ($70/mo and 60 hours of televison) for television service and $0.003 per minute of broadband internet service. Net neutrality would allow phone and television content providers (for now call them Disney and Vonage) to charge say $0.03 and $0.01 per minute of transmission time and use the transmission company's internet line (effectivly hosing them out of the majority of their network's value. Obviously the network owner want's to get paid more (rather than see all the value move to content producers). The fight isn't about saving you money (or likely even about killing off access to blogs) it's about who how phone and TV revenues are divied up.
I assumed it was more basic than that. While an MMORPG is a "target rich environment" for women looking for a certain type of guy, the basics of human mating are that guys are pretty much always up for a date, while women are far choosier about potential mates. The results of an online signaling contest would be more important to a women than a man in determining who to accept for further encounter isn't much of a surprise.
I couldn't remember where I'd heard UNATCO before. I think by the end of that game I could reliably guess the passwords for most terminals. Really fun game though, especially once you get the dragon's tooth sword. Was playing in the dark when I ran in to that Croc in HK, nearly jumped out of the chair on that one.