I don't know of any "essential supply" with which that could happen, can you give an example?
You're saying that you can't see that happening with (e.g.) water, electricity, gas, various forms of staple food (depending upon where one lives) in an entirely unregulated free market?
Furthermore, if there were such an "essential supply", politics would immediately kill a free market and you would end up with some form of dictatorship
Does "some form of dictatorship" automatically include any regime that would impose controls or split up a monopoly in such a situation?
However, if politics wouldn't hijack economics and free markets would continue to operate, then there would be a cost with enforcing the property rights that are associated with that monopoly, and those costs become so large that the monopoly would collapse immediately.
I'm really *not* sure what you're trying to suggest here? That the company would be responsible for enforcing its own property rights?
Why do you think the costs would rise disproportionately if one company had a monopoly?
What you are advocating is more oligarchy, not more democracy.
I don't think I've strongly advocated any particular form of democracy here. You seem to be making assumptions.
At the local level, I want government that operates more like an HOA than state and local government do now.
I was under the impression that HOAs in the US were frequently petty enforcers of superficial rules. Of course, if people want to freely subject themselves to that, that's one thing, but I can't see the appeal in a local government behaving the same way for someone that appears to dislike anything more than minimal governance.
Sorry, I don't have a login for the New York Times, but in answer to your quote
There’s new kids with new ideas all over the world. They’ll make their own places—it doesn’t matter whether it’s here or wherever it is.
Of course... but *we* were talking about NYC as a "city for humans", not those other places. And there's not a chance in hell of anything akin to the original CBGB's springing up in (at least) Manhattan these days.
Don't get me wrong. I'm sure that by the time it closed CBGB's was more about its past than its present, if only because that's the way these things always pan out- much like how the Cavern Club will always be about the Beatles. So I'm not claiming that the closure was a tragedy in itself- its legacy will always be there.
But my original point actually *was* that even as the famed birthplace of much of the early punk and new wave scene- somewhere one would expect to be doing well (if only because of its past reputation and cachet) as a mecca for punk fans- or more likely, tourists who'd like to think of themselves as such- and culturally important (to the extent of being posthumously added to the US National Register of Historic Places)- despite all this, it still wasn't able to pay the amount of rent the building owners could squeeze out of a bland designer boutique in the same location.
Ironically, although the cultural impact of its closure in 2006 was probably far less important than if it had closed in (e.g.) 1976, it probably *says* a lot more. If it had closed in 1976 it would have been seen as another club falling victim to big, bad greedy landlord- well-known to the people who knew it and within the scene, but not famous. In 2006, everyone knew its past importance, it was probably famous enough to trade off that... and it *still* wasn't enough.
Essentially I'm using this as an example for what it says about cultural and financial priorities and the economy of New York City in the 21st century. If your reason for wanting to live there is that it's the sort of place that throws up individualistic venues like that- it isn't, it doesn't even sustain the ones that were there.
But it *is* probably a great place if you're into shopping for John Varvatos' clothes. Bet they're not cheap!:-)
A "free market" is, by definition, one in which all transactions are voluntary and according to terms that the participants in each transaction choose.
And if the market ends up in a position where one party dominates to an extent that it is able to dictate terms for an essential supply that the other party has no choice but to accept, does that still count as a "free market"?
Or will you claim that a truly "free" market can never end up in that position because...?
I have no idea what it means to "meet supply and demand freely".
Let me clarify that to "the *laws* of supply and demand are met freely" (i.e. without restriction by government, as a result of (e.g.) a monopoly or by any other means).
No, it is neither "probable" nor even "possible" for that to happen.
Why?
Yes, they will. And there is only one remedy to that: to reduce the size and power of government; that is the only policy we, as voters, can possibly ever hope to achieve. You, instead, imply that the solution is more regulation and more government power, which is absurd; you are proposing throwing gasoline on the fire.
No, the "gasoline on the fire" is the self-reinforcing corrupting influence of money on the democratic process. If government is permitted to become little more than a tool of big business, then of course that is a problem- the problem which we wish to prevent in the first place.
BTW, just to clarify, are you in favour of getting rid of government altogether? If not, why?
Obviously, a lot of people get hurt by free markets; they just happen to be the people who ought to get hurt
This- it has to be said- comes across as dogma.
like inefficient businesses
When a company is large or influential enough to squash competition, it doesn't need to be efficient. When a company is large enough that it can leverage its financial might to use the legal system as a weapon of attrition against competitors or ordinary people, and use that same threat of attrition to defend itself against legal attacks then the market is no longer "free".
This is particularly the case in the US where even the winning side can be wiped out by costs in many cases- and large companies can exploit this to dissuade such action.
But when you try to achieve economic equality through government intervention, the outcomes are rent seeking, crony capitalism, and economic stagnation.
Are you seriously telling me you don't believe that rent seeking and crony capitalism *aren't* the likely outcome when income inequality grows to the extent that those few at the top can afford to skew things in their favour?
Regardless of what they claim, in practice businesses are not- and never have been- in favour of a level playing field if it's not in their advantage. Given enough power- in this case, financial- they *will* seek to skew things in their favour and this *will* result in influence on government and the democratic process to achieve that.
This inevitably increases the likelihood of the rent seeking and crony capitalism that you describe, blurring the edges between government and business to the point of meaninglessness. I suspect that you'll blame this on government being involved in the first place and that it wouldn't be a problem if businesses were competing in a purely "free" market, but I don't believe that for a second. The free market can- and does- tend towards monopoly on occasion, and when (as I mentioned) their influence grows beyond a certain point, it can be leveraged to ensure that the market effectively isn't "free".
Rent seeking isn't something that happens in a free market
Do you mean a market "free" from government interference or one in which supply and demand are "freely" met? I appreciate that some people would say that they're effectively the same and- again- I'd say that was dogma. It's quite possible- if not probable- for markets free from regulation (the former) to end up in a position where the dominant party is able to abusively engage in what is effectively rent-seeking behaviour (contrary to the latter).
Conservative economic voodoo policies have created the greatest wealth disparity this country has seen in it's entire history.
Good: it means more and more people are getting richer. And economics is not a zero-sum game; the fact that more people are getting richer and inequality is increasing doesn't hurt people at the bottom of the income scale.
Increasing wealth disparity in itself (emphasis intentional (#)) doesn't necessarily indicate mean that "more and more people are getting richer".
Basic logic suggests that it's quite possible for a relatively small number of super rich people to have an increasing percentage of the same amount of money while everyone else gets poorer.
You say that economics is not a zero-sum game, which is quite true; this implies that everyone benefits, which seems to be the exact opposite of the fact that you think increasing wealth disparity is a good thing and synonymous with economic prosperity.
Finally, the assumption that people at the bottom of the income scale aren't hurt by this is dubious. When those at the top have an increasingly large advantage, this is invariably going to be used to magnify and skew society and how it's run towards those same people. And it's quite likely that price increases driven by those who *can* afford certain goods with no difficulty are going to affect those at the bottom.
That's before we get to the social implications of what it would be like to live in such a society. (Hint; I would *not* like to live in Brazil with its high levels of crime massively exacerbated by income inequality).
(#) I'm replying to this in the same context that you stated it- i.e. without any qualifying context- so if what you meant was more nuanced, that's not what you actually said.
The whole article reads like a package dropped from a PR firm with the sole purpose of rehabbing this guys rep.
And yet still the article failed to convince me at any point (#)- in fact, failed to even sound like it was *trying* to convince me- that he was actually doing any of this out of any real sincerity and concern (even if such empathy had only been provoked as a result of being hauled over the coals or having to rethink his position) rather than simply as a personal, egocentric response to the damage to his reputation.
(#) Well, okay. I'll admit that I eventually got to a "tl;dr" point somewhere after halfway through, when I realised it was boring us with narcissistic details about what he was doing without ever giving us a reason why we should care about that in the first place. That was probably more than this excessively longwinded article deserved.
Really? Last I heard, NYC was becoming- like London- exorbitantly expensive for ordinary people, with the likes of Manhattan now effectively out of bounds to all but the super rich (#) who can buy property as an investment and don't actually need to bother living there, and anyone close to an average worker being driven to the outskirts with an extended commute time.
That doesn't sound much like a "city for humans" to me.
I don't think anyone needs to romanticise the state NYC was in during the 1970s when CBGB's rose to prominence, but when New York has become so gentrified that one of its most iconic and world-famous venues was driven out of business by rent increases to be replaced by a f*****g designer clothing outlet, then I think one can happily say that it's jumped the shark culturally. And even *that* was ten years ago; safe to say that it's probably more so now.
But then, if one isn't super-rich, why would you want to pay through the nose to live there anyway? Old, established New York establishments replaced with blandness like banks and branches of Subway- FFS, I live in a relatively unremarkable mid-sized Scottish city and we have several Subway outlets here where I can experience the same identikit overpriced mediocrity. In a city where you need to be very well-off to even consider buying a modest dwelling, it's fair to assume that the surroundings, culture and cost of living will increasingly revolve around the lifestyles of such people.
Maybe I'm wrong. NYC still looks great on postcards, and yeah, lots of impressive tall buildings, but beyond that? Comes across as very hollowed-out and one-dimensional.
Correct me if I'm mistaken, but that's my impression of NYC life these days anyway.
(#) The average apartment price in Manhatten being now almost $2m. The *average* price. For a poxy little *apartment*.
You know the old saying that starts with "when you assume..."?
Yes, I'm aware of every smug teacher's favourite cliche.
(You know what Voltaire said about witty sayings?)
Fact of the matter is that we assume things all the time- mostly without even thinking about it. We'd never get things done if we didn't. Can you imagine how totally unreadable Slashdot would be if it wasn't able to make even the most basic assumptions about what its audience did and didn't know?
As I said, the Chumby was one of the hot devices du jour several years back, and the Slashdot audience is generally quite an established one these days. It was a reasonable assumption to make that most people would have known roughly what it was back then (and still vaguely remember enough about it to know where I was coming from).
The Sony device, OTOH, probably not. The name itself doesn't even ring any bells with me- let alone bring up the memory of what it was- and that's probably because (from what I'd discovered) it was little more than a me-too device following in the wake of the Chumby.
Sorry, I guess I'd assumed that most people here would have heard of the Chumby.
It's an Internet appliance glued to a cushion that was to be the next big thing several years back. (Er... okay, so that probably sounds even more confusing than before. Just click the Wikipedia article link...!)
Summary mentions something about a "dashboard", so I'm guessing it's a solution to that problem some Sony Walkmans had with the buttons, and the Dolby NR switch in particular.
No wonder you can't download that over the air, I never saw a Sony cassette player with networking built in! (cough)
In all seriousness, it looks like this is a follow-up to an earlier story in which owners of devices based around DASH (Sony's me-too competitor to Chumby) had problems caused by Sony's servers. I was actually surprised that Sony were still bothering to keep the servers turned on at all given that the devices had to be several years old- i.e. dating back to a time when Chumby would have been worth competing with, let alone caring about- and there was probably no more money to be made from supporting customers who'd already forked over their cash. (Well, not directly, but they might have kept them on to promote goodwill towards the brand...... ha ha ha, no, I didn't seriously expect that!)
Anyway, according to Wikipedia they mostly didn't and the majority of the functionality was turned off in 2015, but people were still able to use them like an alarm clock. Yeah, you know, like those things with glowy red digits you used to get in the 80s and can still buy in shops.
So even the remaining functionality appears to have stopped working and some guy- who was using his Chumby-a-like as an alarm clock- was late for work. Maybe he'd like to buy my clock radio; you can set it to go off via the typical shrill beep-beep alarm or your local FM pop radio station, giving you the choice of waking up to some unpleasant electronic screeching or to the alarm noise.
While the article mentions 180 and 360 degree *videos* (which we can assume are strictly linear), it blurs the edges by quoting Pornhub's press release that seems to be building it up to be fully-interactive VR:-
“Now, our users are not only able to view our content, but be protagonists in the experience and interact with their favorite porn stars.”
Really? "Interact" would suggest that one can partake in some form of activity with them (think we can figure out which) and that they'll respond accordingly. I'd hardly count being able to view different parts of an otherwise fixed video- by moving my head- as "interactive" with the performers in any meaningful sense. There's nothing there to indicate that anything like this is on the cards, however.
Unless you can at least move around within the interactive world, it's still just a jumped-up method of watching videos. Any initial popularity will quickly tail off once the novelty fades and is outweighed by the hassle of donning a f****** VR headset just to be able to look around while you jerk off.
So, an Internet connection will be required? And once I have that, explain to me why I would ever buy a Blu-Ray (or any other) disc when I can stream content.
Because streaming 4K content (or at least 4K content that isn't compressed so much it negates any benefit from the higher resolution) is likely to require a significant amount of bandwidth that not everyone will have, and many of those that do will still have bandwidth caps they won't appreciate being rapidly eaten away by it.
That said, it doesn't change the fact that requiring a connection for the keys at all is still crap and cancels out much of the benefit of "owing" the content in the first place. Couldn't give a toss myself, I don't even have a Blu-Ray player/drive because I'm not enough into films to be bothered about it.
I was just waiting for some right wing idiot to bring in Twitter's non-existent attacks on right wingers.
As was commented elsewhere, the guy's one of those f***wits that feels the neat to bleat about the First Amendement while showing that they don't even understand the most basic aspects of it, viz. it applies to the US government, not to private entities like Twitter.
I guess that technically you could say Kim Jong-Un's hair appears "homosexual" to me, but only in the sense that it always reminded me of a lesbian hairstyle more than anything...!
What exactly this says about a *man* wearing such a hairstyle, I have absolutely no bloody idea.
As I already commented, it's about "supply and demand" insofar as Musk knows there is more demand than cars he's likely to be able to manufacture, so he can get away with dismissing customers like that. But I don't think that was the reason for the cancellation itself.
I'm not sure what the remainder or your paragraph has to do with "supply and demand" though, unless you're saying that you can dictate to your customers because there's more demand from them than you produce? I'm not in your industry, I wouldn't know.
No-one's claiming that Musk doesn't have right of refusal. However, if he does do that for what some may consider personal or petty reasons- which he's entitled to do- others are still free to point out or criticise that. Also, we're talking about cars here- pretty expensive ones outside the price range of anyone who isn't at least moderately "rich" by US standards, but still just cars and not stupidly-rich-Saudi-Price-only-five-were-ever-made-price-level ones either.
Musk could have played along with this sort of ruse, or just flipped him off. So he flipped him off. Brinksmanship is a game the rich can play.
That was kind of my point, though. I just see another rich and powerful guy who took some not-entirely-unwarranted criticism very personally (#) and being in a rich and powerful enough position, took his petty revenge against another sort-of-but-nowhere-near-as-rich guy. I appreciate that it's sometimes nice to see the stereotypical "arrogant BMW driving tosser" get their comeuppance and that Musk's fan following might be inclined to see it that way, but I'm pretty sceptical.
On the contrary, it sounds like he knew he had more than enough fawning customers to fill his order books such that he could get away with this- and I suspect the endless adulation may have made him less tolerant to any form of criticism. But that in itself doesn't make Alsop the entitled-customer-from-hell as some seem to think.
(#) If the criticism was taken as personal, it was as much because Musk presents himself as the "face"- as well as the owner- of the company. I don't see that the criticism was excessively personal beyond that.
So if Musk has any reason to believe based on this guy's behavior that this guy will be harassing his employees, he actually has a legal obligation to kick this guy to the curb.
Yeah... no. I don't honestly see anything so far to indicate it was coming anywhere near that, let alone approaching the point where it would become a legal issue.
Can't predict what the guy would be like in the future, but a bit of slightly (at most) and not entirely unwarranted entitled-rich-guy criticism doesn't suggest that so far.
Let's be honest; Musk responded that way because he could get away with it, but it doesn't mean he was doing it for legal (or noble) reasons, just that he was in a position where he could afford to do that in response to something that obviously got under his skin.
Stewart lead with an "overly harsh personal response" and was met with a prompt ending of a business relationship.
I'd be inclined to agree with Racemaniac that it didn't come across as overly harsh. Nor did I consider it overly personal.
Was this the whining of an entitled rich guy? Perhaps a little- I won't entirely dismiss the possibility, but I'm not entirely convinced; it was undeniably critical, but he still obviously had enthusiasm for the product.
But regardless- and correct me if I've misunderstood your intent here- your response comes over as a variant of the "people exercising their rights in a free market == no right to criticism".
Musk is- of course- entitled to cancel this guy's order (i.e. end the business "relationship") for pretty much any reason not prohibited by law, but that doesn't excuse him from being criticised for doing so, especially if it appears petty to some.
In all honesty, Musk comes across as no better than, (and just as entitled as), the guy making the complaint. He knows he can afford to be dismissive of a few of his rich customers for somewhat petty reasons if they say something that stings him personally, even if it's somewhat justified. He's got a product with a lot of buzz surrounding it, for which there's likely to be more demand than availability in the foreseeable future.
The fact that Musk can get away with being dismissive and petty doesn't change the fact he's being dismissive and petty, though!
He doesn't strike me as "one of us but with more power" telling a spoilt rich customer where to go (to the cheering of the crowds enjoying their vicarious revenge.) Rather, he comes across as someone stung by (not entirely warranted) criticism, prickly enough to take it even more personally than it was and in a position where he didn't have to take that sort of crap from some uppity customer, then dismiss it with mild contempt not-really-masquerading as feigned disinterest.
(Disclaimer; if anyone is going to take this as a defence of entitled rich tossers, you don't know me very well. I'm just not buying that the customer was quite as bad as he's made out nor that Musk is any better.)
Just let users, especially Windows Pro users on older hardware, have a reprieve. Make it a year. Make it two. I don't care. But YOUR CUSTOMERS need the option to permanently stop the incessant nagging. You owe them THAT MUCH RESPECT for their business.
It says a lot about how far Microsoft's relentless and utterly shameless attempts to pressurise and browbeat Windows users into upgrading has distorted the debate when it seems like the reasonable thing to do on their part would be to "give" legitimate, paid Windows 7 users a "reprieve". From an update they explicitly don't want (and which might damage their computers' performance) and as if MS were the ones who had the right to force that onto people but can choose- out of the goodness of their hearts- to give these Windows 7 users a *temporary* reprieve of a year or two before they're once again forced onto Windows 10 on *their own* computers- which might not then support their hardware or programs.
Or they might simply not *want* to use Windows 10. *That* in itself is perfectly reasonable, even if expecting MS to support it forever wouldn't be.
Not intending this as an attack on the OP so much as on how MS's behaviour- and the increasingly ludicrous means required to get round MS's brazen attempts to spy on users and bully them into upgrading on *their own damn machines*- has become normalised in a way that would have been unacceptable even five years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know of any "essential supply" with which that could happen, can you give an example?
You're saying that you can't see that happening with (e.g.) water, electricity, gas, various forms of staple food (depending upon where one lives) in an entirely unregulated free market?
Furthermore, if there were such an "essential supply", politics would immediately kill a free market and you would end up with some form of dictatorship
Does "some form of dictatorship" automatically include any regime that would impose controls or split up a monopoly in such a situation?
However, if politics wouldn't hijack economics and free markets would continue to operate, then there would be a cost with enforcing the property rights that are associated with that monopoly, and those costs become so large that the monopoly would collapse immediately.
I'm really *not* sure what you're trying to suggest here? That the company would be responsible for enforcing its own property rights?
Why do you think the costs would rise disproportionately if one company had a monopoly?
What you are advocating is more oligarchy, not more democracy.
I don't think I've strongly advocated any particular form of democracy here. You seem to be making assumptions.
At the local level, I want government that operates more like an HOA than state and local government do now.
I was under the impression that HOAs in the US were frequently petty enforcers of superficial rules. Of course, if people want to freely subject themselves to that, that's one thing, but I can't see the appeal in a local government behaving the same way for someone that appears to dislike anything more than minimal governance.
There’s new kids with new ideas all over the world. They’ll make their own places—it doesn’t matter whether it’s here or wherever it is.
Of course... but *we* were talking about NYC as a "city for humans", not those other places. And there's not a chance in hell of anything akin to the original CBGB's springing up in (at least) Manhattan these days.
:-)
Don't get me wrong. I'm sure that by the time it closed CBGB's was more about its past than its present, if only because that's the way these things always pan out- much like how the Cavern Club will always be about the Beatles. So I'm not claiming that the closure was a tragedy in itself- its legacy will always be there.
But my original point actually *was* that even as the famed birthplace of much of the early punk and new wave scene- somewhere one would expect to be doing well (if only because of its past reputation and cachet) as a mecca for punk fans- or more likely, tourists who'd like to think of themselves as such- and culturally important (to the extent of being posthumously added to the US National Register of Historic Places)- despite all this, it still wasn't able to pay the amount of rent the building owners could squeeze out of a bland designer boutique in the same location.
Ironically, although the cultural impact of its closure in 2006 was probably far less important than if it had closed in (e.g.) 1976, it probably *says* a lot more. If it had closed in 1976 it would have been seen as another club falling victim to big, bad greedy landlord- well-known to the people who knew it and within the scene, but not famous. In 2006, everyone knew its past importance, it was probably famous enough to trade off that... and it *still* wasn't enough.
Essentially I'm using this as an example for what it says about cultural and financial priorities and the economy of New York City in the 21st century. If your reason for wanting to live there is that it's the sort of place that throws up individualistic venues like that- it isn't, it doesn't even sustain the ones that were there.
But it *is* probably a great place if you're into shopping for John Varvatos' clothes. Bet they're not cheap!
A "free market" is, by definition, one in which all transactions are voluntary and according to terms that the participants in each transaction choose.
And if the market ends up in a position where one party dominates to an extent that it is able to dictate terms for an essential supply that the other party has no choice but to accept, does that still count as a "free market"?
Or will you claim that a truly "free" market can never end up in that position because...?
I have no idea what it means to "meet supply and demand freely".
Let me clarify that to "the *laws* of supply and demand are met freely" (i.e. without restriction by government, as a result of (e.g.) a monopoly or by any other means).
No, it is neither "probable" nor even "possible" for that to happen.
Why?
Yes, they will. And there is only one remedy to that: to reduce the size and power of government; that is the only policy we, as voters, can possibly ever hope to achieve. You, instead, imply that the solution is more regulation and more government power, which is absurd; you are proposing throwing gasoline on the fire.
No, the "gasoline on the fire" is the self-reinforcing corrupting influence of money on the democratic process. If government is permitted to become little more than a tool of big business, then of course that is a problem- the problem which we wish to prevent in the first place.
BTW, just to clarify, are you in favour of getting rid of government altogether? If not, why?
Obviously, a lot of people get hurt by free markets; they just happen to be the people who ought to get hurt
This- it has to be said- comes across as dogma.
like inefficient businesses
When a company is large or influential enough to squash competition, it doesn't need to be efficient. When a company is large enough that it can leverage its financial might to use the legal system as a weapon of attrition against competitors or ordinary people, and use that same threat of attrition to defend itself against legal attacks then the market is no longer "free".
This is particularly the case in the US where even the winning side can be wiped out by costs in many cases- and large companies can exploit this to dissuade such action.
But when you try to achieve economic equality through government intervention, the outcomes are rent seeking, crony capitalism, and economic stagnation.
Are you seriously telling me you don't believe that rent seeking and crony capitalism *aren't* the likely outcome when income inequality grows to the extent that those few at the top can afford to skew things in their favour?
Regardless of what they claim, in practice businesses are not- and never have been- in favour of a level playing field if it's not in their advantage. Given enough power- in this case, financial- they *will* seek to skew things in their favour and this *will* result in influence on government and the democratic process to achieve that.
This inevitably increases the likelihood of the rent seeking and crony capitalism that you describe, blurring the edges between government and business to the point of meaninglessness. I suspect that you'll blame this on government being involved in the first place and that it wouldn't be a problem if businesses were competing in a purely "free" market, but I don't believe that for a second. The free market can- and does- tend towards monopoly on occasion, and when (as I mentioned) their influence grows beyond a certain point, it can be leveraged to ensure that the market effectively isn't "free".
Rent seeking isn't something that happens in a free market
Do you mean a market "free" from government interference or one in which supply and demand are "freely" met? I appreciate that some people would say that they're effectively the same and- again- I'd say that was dogma. It's quite possible- if not probable- for markets free from regulation (the former) to end up in a position where the dominant party is able to abusively engage in what is effectively rent-seeking behaviour (contrary to the latter).
Conservative economic voodoo policies have created the greatest wealth disparity this country has seen in it's entire history.
Good: it means more and more people are getting richer. And economics is not a zero-sum game; the fact that more people are getting richer and inequality is increasing doesn't hurt people at the bottom of the income scale.
Increasing wealth disparity in itself (emphasis intentional (#)) doesn't necessarily indicate mean that "more and more people are getting richer".
Basic logic suggests that it's quite possible for a relatively small number of super rich people to have an increasing percentage of the same amount of money while everyone else gets poorer.
You say that economics is not a zero-sum game, which is quite true; this implies that everyone benefits, which seems to be the exact opposite of the fact that you think increasing wealth disparity is a good thing and synonymous with economic prosperity.
Finally, the assumption that people at the bottom of the income scale aren't hurt by this is dubious. When those at the top have an increasingly large advantage, this is invariably going to be used to magnify and skew society and how it's run towards those same people. And it's quite likely that price increases driven by those who *can* afford certain goods with no difficulty are going to affect those at the bottom.
That's before we get to the social implications of what it would be like to live in such a society. (Hint; I would *not* like to live in Brazil with its high levels of crime massively exacerbated by income inequality).
(#) I'm replying to this in the same context that you stated it- i.e. without any qualifying context- so if what you meant was more nuanced, that's not what you actually said.
The whole article reads like a package dropped from a PR firm with the sole purpose of rehabbing this guys rep.
And yet still the article failed to convince me at any point (#)- in fact, failed to even sound like it was *trying* to convince me- that he was actually doing any of this out of any real sincerity and concern (even if such empathy had only been provoked as a result of being hauled over the coals or having to rethink his position) rather than simply as a personal, egocentric response to the damage to his reputation.
(#) Well, okay. I'll admit that I eventually got to a "tl;dr" point somewhere after halfway through, when I realised it was boring us with narcissistic details about what he was doing without ever giving us a reason why we should care about that in the first place. That was probably more than this excessively longwinded article deserved.
Come to NYC! [..] NYC is the city for humans.
Really? Last I heard, NYC was becoming- like London- exorbitantly expensive for ordinary people, with the likes of Manhattan now effectively out of bounds to all but the super rich (#) who can buy property as an investment and don't actually need to bother living there, and anyone close to an average worker being driven to the outskirts with an extended commute time.
That doesn't sound much like a "city for humans" to me.
I don't think anyone needs to romanticise the state NYC was in during the 1970s when CBGB's rose to prominence, but when New York has become so gentrified that one of its most iconic and world-famous venues was driven out of business by rent increases to be replaced by a f*****g designer clothing outlet, then I think one can happily say that it's jumped the shark culturally. And even *that* was ten years ago; safe to say that it's probably more so now.
But then, if one isn't super-rich, why would you want to pay through the nose to live there anyway? Old, established New York establishments replaced with blandness like banks and branches of Subway- FFS, I live in a relatively unremarkable mid-sized Scottish city and we have several Subway outlets here where I can experience the same identikit overpriced mediocrity. In a city where you need to be very well-off to even consider buying a modest dwelling, it's fair to assume that the surroundings, culture and cost of living will increasingly revolve around the lifestyles of such people.
Maybe I'm wrong. NYC still looks great on postcards, and yeah, lots of impressive tall buildings, but beyond that? Comes across as very hollowed-out and one-dimensional.
Correct me if I'm mistaken, but that's my impression of NYC life these days anyway.
(#) The average apartment price in Manhatten being now almost $2m. The *average* price. For a poxy little *apartment*.
So they put the win10 equivalent of linux on windows 10?
Yo dawg.
If by pure chance he hits the right keys, he hits them in the wrong order.
Obligatory Grieg's Piano Concerto?
You know the old saying that starts with "when you assume..."?
Yes, I'm aware of every smug teacher's favourite cliche.
(You know what Voltaire said about witty sayings?)
Fact of the matter is that we assume things all the time- mostly without even thinking about it. We'd never get things done if we didn't. Can you imagine how totally unreadable Slashdot would be if it wasn't able to make even the most basic assumptions about what its audience did and didn't know?
As I said, the Chumby was one of the hot devices du jour several years back, and the Slashdot audience is generally quite an established one these days. It was a reasonable assumption to make that most people would have known roughly what it was back then (and still vaguely remember enough about it to know where I was coming from).
The Sony device, OTOH, probably not. The name itself doesn't even ring any bells with me- let alone bring up the memory of what it was- and that's probably because (from what I'd discovered) it was little more than a me-too device following in the wake of the Chumby.
Sorry, I guess I'd assumed that most people here would have heard of the Chumby.
It's an Internet appliance glued to a cushion that was to be the next big thing several years back. (Er... okay, so that probably sounds even more confusing than before. Just click the Wikipedia article link...!)
Summary mentions something about a "dashboard", so I'm guessing it's a solution to that problem some Sony Walkmans had with the buttons, and the Dolby NR switch in particular.
No wonder you can't download that over the air, I never saw a Sony cassette player with networking built in! (cough)
In all seriousness, it looks like this is a follow-up to an earlier story in which owners of devices based around DASH (Sony's me-too competitor to Chumby) had problems caused by Sony's servers. I was actually surprised that Sony were still bothering to keep the servers turned on at all given that the devices had to be several years old- i.e. dating back to a time when Chumby would have been worth competing with, let alone caring about- and there was probably no more money to be made from supporting customers who'd already forked over their cash. (Well, not directly, but they might have kept them on to promote goodwill towards the brand...... ha ha ha, no, I didn't seriously expect that!)
Anyway, according to Wikipedia they mostly didn't and the majority of the functionality was turned off in 2015, but people were still able to use them like an alarm clock. Yeah, you know, like those things with glowy red digits you used to get in the 80s and can still buy in shops.
So even the remaining functionality appears to have stopped working and some guy- who was using his Chumby-a-like as an alarm clock- was late for work. Maybe he'd like to buy my clock radio; you can set it to go off via the typical shrill beep-beep alarm or your local FM pop radio station, giving you the choice of waking up to some unpleasant electronic screeching or to the alarm noise.
Time to slap stickers on random people's cars in parking lots.
s/cops/fbi agents/.
“Now, our users are not only able to view our content, but be protagonists in the experience and interact with their favorite porn stars.”
Really? "Interact" would suggest that one can partake in some form of activity with them (think we can figure out which) and that they'll respond accordingly. I'd hardly count being able to view different parts of an otherwise fixed video- by moving my head- as "interactive" with the performers in any meaningful sense. There's nothing there to indicate that anything like this is on the cards, however.
Unless you can at least move around within the interactive world, it's still just a jumped-up method of watching videos. Any initial popularity will quickly tail off once the novelty fades and is outweighed by the hassle of donning a f****** VR headset just to be able to look around while you jerk off.
78 billion miles is nothing when it comes to the universe.
You're saying that it's still in the same ballpark as a trip down the road to the chemist, then?
So, an Internet connection will be required? And once I have that, explain to me why I would ever buy a Blu-Ray (or any other) disc when I can stream content.
Because streaming 4K content (or at least 4K content that isn't compressed so much it negates any benefit from the higher resolution) is likely to require a significant amount of bandwidth that not everyone will have, and many of those that do will still have bandwidth caps they won't appreciate being rapidly eaten away by it.
That said, it doesn't change the fact that requiring a connection for the keys at all is still crap and cancels out much of the benefit of "owing" the content in the first place. Couldn't give a toss myself, I don't even have a Blu-Ray player/drive because I'm not enough into films to be bothered about it.
I was just waiting for some right wing idiot to bring in Twitter's non-existent attacks on right wingers.
As was commented elsewhere, the guy's one of those f***wits that feels the neat to bleat about the First Amendement while showing that they don't even understand the most basic aspects of it, viz. it applies to the US government, not to private entities like Twitter.
(Sorry for getting quotes in wrong order, BTW).
Err... Why? Who gives a shit who else uses your OS? It's not a lifestyle choice, it's a fucking operating system.
True, but it's been marketed (and bought) as if it *were* a lifestyle product, so it's not entirely surprising.
Also, was "his personal preference is Mac" in the summary actually meant to be a Penny Arcade reference or was it just me that thought of that...?!
Have you seen his hair?
I had no idea he was gay.
Depends what one means by "gay" or "gay hair".
I guess that technically you could say Kim Jong-Un's hair appears "homosexual" to me, but only in the sense that it always reminded me of a lesbian hairstyle more than anything...!
What exactly this says about a *man* wearing such a hairstyle, I have absolutely no bloody idea.
As I already commented, it's about "supply and demand" insofar as Musk knows there is more demand than cars he's likely to be able to manufacture, so he can get away with dismissing customers like that. But I don't think that was the reason for the cancellation itself.
I'm not sure what the remainder or your paragraph has to do with "supply and demand" though, unless you're saying that you can dictate to your customers because there's more demand from them than you produce? I'm not in your industry, I wouldn't know.
No-one's claiming that Musk doesn't have right of refusal. However, if he does do that for what some may consider personal or petty reasons- which he's entitled to do- others are still free to point out or criticise that. Also, we're talking about cars here- pretty expensive ones outside the price range of anyone who isn't at least moderately "rich" by US standards, but still just cars and not stupidly-rich-Saudi-Price-only-five-were-ever-made-price-level ones either.
Musk could have played along with this sort of ruse, or just flipped him off. So he flipped him off. Brinksmanship is a game the rich can play.
That was kind of my point, though. I just see another rich and powerful guy who took some not-entirely-unwarranted criticism very personally (#) and being in a rich and powerful enough position, took his petty revenge against another sort-of-but-nowhere-near-as-rich guy. I appreciate that it's sometimes nice to see the stereotypical "arrogant BMW driving tosser" get their comeuppance and that Musk's fan following might be inclined to see it that way, but I'm pretty sceptical.
There's nothing to indicate that he was doing it for the reasons you gave nor protecting his employees from the customer from hell as others suggested.
On the contrary, it sounds like he knew he had more than enough fawning customers to fill his order books such that he could get away with this- and I suspect the endless adulation may have made him less tolerant to any form of criticism. But that in itself doesn't make Alsop the entitled-customer-from-hell as some seem to think.
(#) If the criticism was taken as personal, it was as much because Musk presents himself as the "face"- as well as the owner- of the company. I don't see that the criticism was excessively personal beyond that.
So if Musk has any reason to believe based on this guy's behavior that this guy will be harassing his employees, he actually has a legal obligation to kick this guy to the curb.
Yeah... no. I don't honestly see anything so far to indicate it was coming anywhere near that, let alone approaching the point where it would become a legal issue.
Can't predict what the guy would be like in the future, but a bit of slightly (at most) and not entirely unwarranted entitled-rich-guy criticism doesn't suggest that so far.
Let's be honest; Musk responded that way because he could get away with it, but it doesn't mean he was doing it for legal (or noble) reasons, just that he was in a position where he could afford to do that in response to something that obviously got under his skin.
Stewart lead with an "overly harsh personal response" and was met with a prompt ending of a business relationship.
I'd be inclined to agree with Racemaniac that it didn't come across as overly harsh. Nor did I consider it overly personal.
Was this the whining of an entitled rich guy? Perhaps a little- I won't entirely dismiss the possibility, but I'm not entirely convinced; it was undeniably critical, but he still obviously had enthusiasm for the product.
But regardless- and correct me if I've misunderstood your intent here- your response comes over as a variant of the "people exercising their rights in a free market == no right to criticism".
Musk is- of course- entitled to cancel this guy's order (i.e. end the business "relationship") for pretty much any reason not prohibited by law, but that doesn't excuse him from being criticised for doing so, especially if it appears petty to some.
In all honesty, Musk comes across as no better than, (and just as entitled as), the guy making the complaint. He knows he can afford to be dismissive of a few of his rich customers for somewhat petty reasons if they say something that stings him personally, even if it's somewhat justified. He's got a product with a lot of buzz surrounding it, for which there's likely to be more demand than availability in the foreseeable future.
The fact that Musk can get away with being dismissive and petty doesn't change the fact he's being dismissive and petty, though!
He doesn't strike me as "one of us but with more power" telling a spoilt rich customer where to go (to the cheering of the crowds enjoying their vicarious revenge.) Rather, he comes across as someone stung by (not entirely warranted) criticism, prickly enough to take it even more personally than it was and in a position where he didn't have to take that sort of crap from some uppity customer, then dismiss it with mild contempt not-really-masquerading as feigned disinterest.
(Disclaimer; if anyone is going to take this as a defence of entitled rich tossers, you don't know me very well. I'm just not buying that the customer was quite as bad as he's made out nor that Musk is any better.)
Just let users, especially Windows Pro users on older hardware, have a reprieve. Make it a year. Make it two. I don't care. But YOUR CUSTOMERS need the option to permanently stop the incessant nagging. You owe them THAT MUCH RESPECT for their business.
It says a lot about how far Microsoft's relentless and utterly shameless attempts to pressurise and browbeat Windows users into upgrading has distorted the debate when it seems like the reasonable thing to do on their part would be to "give" legitimate, paid Windows 7 users a "reprieve". From an update they explicitly don't want (and which might damage their computers' performance) and as if MS were the ones who had the right to force that onto people but can choose- out of the goodness of their hearts- to give these Windows 7 users a *temporary* reprieve of a year or two before they're once again forced onto Windows 10 on *their own* computers- which might not then support their hardware or programs.
Or they might simply not *want* to use Windows 10. *That* in itself is perfectly reasonable, even if expecting MS to support it forever wouldn't be.
Not intending this as an attack on the OP so much as on how MS's behaviour- and the increasingly ludicrous means required to get round MS's brazen attempts to spy on users and bully them into upgrading on *their own damn machines*- has become normalised in a way that would have been unacceptable even five years ago.