Hate crimes are partly terrorism. If I shoot you because I don't like you, or you killed my cat, or you're inconvenient to my business, that's not a reason that generalizes, and there's no extra reason for any non-cat-killer to worry about being killed. If I shoot you because of certain group status, it's an implicit threat to everyone in that group.
Murder already comes with intention tests. Did I intend to kill you? Did I intend to do it before I did it? These can have large differences in the severity of punishment. Why is it reasonable to give me a longer sentence because I intended to kill you earlier than if I accidentally killed you on the spot, and not because I intended to send a message to all people of a certain group?
There are a reasonable number of AAA games, and it generally doesn't make much sense to treat each individual one as a monopoly, since there are other AAA games. (The Madden football game might be an exception.) If most AAA games are only playable on Windows, that is a monopoly.
I just don't see some of your assumptions as being valid. Luxury buyers are price-conscious just like anyone else, they just have a different demand curve. There may be a drive to have better luxuries than someone else, but that's still price competition. Luxury items charge what the market will bear, just like every other item sold, whether absolute necessity or frivolous luxury. The difference is different supply-demand curves.
Why should we care if luxury goods are a monopoly? Partly because almost all of us in developed countries buy luxury goods. By your definition, a luxury good might cost very little; for example, an AAA game is usually under $70 or so, and plenty of people are interested in those prices.
You also seem to be putting a very high value on not using Windows, apparently to excuse it being a monopoly. You seem to think someone who plays AAA Windows games is beneath notice, despite the loss in personal satisfaction such a player would suffer from changing OSes. You seem to think that Windows doesn't count as a monopoly because companies can go to extra lengths to avoid running it much.
I'm not saying that men or women are better. I'm not saying that leaders can lead without learning to deal with all sorts of insults.
What I'm saying is that people tend to perceive leadership behavior differently in men and women, and what will get a woman called "bossy" will get a man called "firm" or "decisive" or something like that, and that this is wrong and can hurt women in indirect ways, such as affecting her chance of a raise or further promotion.
Therefore, your last two paragraphs are completely about things I never said or intended to imply.
It's possible to have a program to induce people to be good to each other in specific ways. I don't know anything about "Ban Bossy" (except that I suspect it'll be blocked by my work filter), and could be wrong about it, but it sounds to me like a good step to take in a long campaign.
You're talking about what is essentially an entrance fee for the auction, so that winning an auction by paying more than you want can be better than losing. That's capped.
Suppose I paid $100K to set up a bid for something that's worth $10M to me. In that case, paying $10,100,000 is break-even, and $10,100,001 is worse than just walking away. so if the bidding does reach $10,100,000 and I'm not winning I should walk away and eat the $100K rather than bid and lose even more. You don't get rational actors bidding obscene amounts.
A check of Wikipedia yields penny auctions, in which bidders do pay money to bid, and lose the money even if they lose the auction. Apparently, these have been held, but they seem to have trouble attracting bidders.
Some states have laws that your employer can't have stuff you did outside work hours, outside the work place, and not using employer-provided tools. No state has laws that your employer doesn't own what you did while at work. If ShanghaiBill's former employer ever does realize what was going on, he's in trouble.
When millennials try to get their first jobs, they haven't been significant in the economy, so accusing them of favoring stuff made outside the US is pointless. Moreover, greater international trade doesn't really affect employment prospects much, but rather allows people to be more productive.
The biggest reason there will never again be large numbers of relatively unskilled jobs that pay well is automation. To be paid well, you have to be able to do something significantly better than the alternatives.
College tuition has gone up far more than inflation since I was young, and less skilled jobs don't pay well if they exist at all. Then boomers accuse millennials of being lazy or improvident.
The election of Trump was due to Republicans (in the primaries, and in the general election). It might be fair to say the Republicans didn't know what to do with President Trump, but the US doesn't really have plans to elect specific people, or to handle particular people winning an election.
The Brexit vote was not part of the UK constitution. It was a deliberate political action. Not planning for an unexpected result is stupid.
They didn't get a clear majority, in the sense of anything reliable. They got a narrow majority, so that another vote could easily have reversed the result. That's not much of a mandate..
Back when I used Macs almost exclusively, I'd normally upgrade the RAM about midway through the life of the computer. (I'm sufficiently old that I found it hard to believe that a megabyte wasn't really useful for anything except weird jewelry.)
The best equipment is equipment that you can repair, so that you're not stuck buying a whole new computer if something goes wrong and you've got work to do.
No way. If I'm doing something significant, and something goes wrong, it's faster to get a new computer now to just keep working. It may be worthwhile to repair the old one, but if time is important that's a losing game.
We're talking about monopoly or near-monopoly services. What would happen if there was one company that wanted your services, and they would only sign the contract they made for you, without changing a single word? How about if there were four, all of which insisted on their own unaltered contracts?
Except that the conditions aren't like that. At the very minimum, the government works on dollars. I have to do my accounting in dollars, and when I have to pay the government anything it's in dollars. If I get involved in the court system, I will receive or be ordered to deliver dollars. If I go to a store, the store has to do its accounting in dollars to remit sales taxes. It's possible to do accounting in bitcoins as well as dollars, but that's extra work.
Most people don't care if their actions are tracked, and currency controls don't control significant legal activity. (They do present problems in cases where someone might want $9K dollars in cash, for example, but those circumstances are rare.) These are not serious bitcoin advantages.
Transferring dollars can be done easily, immediately, and locally, without need for transaction fees. This is not true of bitcoin.
We can normally recognize bubbles before they pop. Figuring when the pop comes is more difficult, as is convincing people involved. Now, previous bubbles have involved actual things. The tulip bubble popped, but tulips were still worth something. Real estate was still valuable after the crash. The Chinese economy will continue to be there, even if it stops growing. Bitcoin, after a crash, may well be worth nothing.
In the case of bitcoin, that's obviously currently greater than zero.
FTFY.
Also, paying for tangible objects or services is simple. You hand over the money and get the object or service. Bitcoin is more involved, and a transfer involving two people only is pretty much limited to transferring ownership of a wallet.
People tend to consider gold to be valuable in itself. As long as people in general believe that, it will be valuable in itself. Paper money might or might not have value after the apocalypse. Bitcoin won't. It would be a pretty unimpressive apocalypse that left the Internet running well, so transactions could reliably get into the blockchain.
The key is that even with a crash, the losers are not left with nothing, the bitcoins they are holding might be worth much less but they are still worth something and it costs nothing to hold onto them and wait for better days.
Currencies have crashed in the past, for various reasons, and bitcoin isn't even worth anything to a collector (unlike, say, Confederate currency). A bitcoin is worth only what you can get for it, and a bitcoin transfer is a lot more complicated than handing over a piece of paper. If nobody's maintaining the blockchain any more, bitcoin are worthless.
Where do you find auctions where you need to pay money but you get nothing? How do you get money out of the runner-up? When the bidding is nearing its close, wouldn't it make more sense for the runner-up to put on a fake mustache, move fast in the direction of the rest room, and pretend not to speak English?
I have literally never heard or read of such an auction before.
As examples, you named iOS devices and a bunch of gaming devices. Most people buy their game consoles for the purpose of running games that are released for that console. If they also want a computer, they typically buy a computer.
iOS works because there's so many and so varied apps in the App Store that it isn't a practical problem for the most part.
RT may have failed partly because Microsoft had no idea how to market it. Calling something Windows RT suggests that it will run Windows programs. It may also have failed because there weren't enough apps, and because it was something of a latecomer. The Surfaces that run real Windows are at least moderate successes.
Of course, Microsoft doesn't know right now of existing malware that exploits an Edge vulnerability and works as ransomware, so they're correct in saying no known ransomware works.
I'd be worried about unknown ransomware, but that's me.
Slashdot Mirror
Hate crimes are partly terrorism. If I shoot you because I don't like you, or you killed my cat, or you're inconvenient to my business, that's not a reason that generalizes, and there's no extra reason for any non-cat-killer to worry about being killed. If I shoot you because of certain group status, it's an implicit threat to everyone in that group.
Murder already comes with intention tests. Did I intend to kill you? Did I intend to do it before I did it? These can have large differences in the severity of punishment. Why is it reasonable to give me a longer sentence because I intended to kill you earlier than if I accidentally killed you on the spot, and not because I intended to send a message to all people of a certain group?
There are a reasonable number of AAA games, and it generally doesn't make much sense to treat each individual one as a monopoly, since there are other AAA games. (The Madden football game might be an exception.) If most AAA games are only playable on Windows, that is a monopoly.
I just don't see some of your assumptions as being valid. Luxury buyers are price-conscious just like anyone else, they just have a different demand curve. There may be a drive to have better luxuries than someone else, but that's still price competition. Luxury items charge what the market will bear, just like every other item sold, whether absolute necessity or frivolous luxury. The difference is different supply-demand curves.
Why should we care if luxury goods are a monopoly? Partly because almost all of us in developed countries buy luxury goods. By your definition, a luxury good might cost very little; for example, an AAA game is usually under $70 or so, and plenty of people are interested in those prices.
You also seem to be putting a very high value on not using Windows, apparently to excuse it being a monopoly. You seem to think someone who plays AAA Windows games is beneath notice, despite the loss in personal satisfaction such a player would suffer from changing OSes. You seem to think that Windows doesn't count as a monopoly because companies can go to extra lengths to avoid running it much.
I'm not saying that men or women are better. I'm not saying that leaders can lead without learning to deal with all sorts of insults.
What I'm saying is that people tend to perceive leadership behavior differently in men and women, and what will get a woman called "bossy" will get a man called "firm" or "decisive" or something like that, and that this is wrong and can hurt women in indirect ways, such as affecting her chance of a raise or further promotion.
Therefore, your last two paragraphs are completely about things I never said or intended to imply.
It's possible to have a program to induce people to be good to each other in specific ways. I don't know anything about "Ban Bossy" (except that I suspect it'll be blocked by my work filter), and could be wrong about it, but it sounds to me like a good step to take in a long campaign.
Assuming that Microsoft is perfect in keeping malware out of their store,and there's no other way to get executable code in, this is true.
You're talking about what is essentially an entrance fee for the auction, so that winning an auction by paying more than you want can be better than losing. That's capped.
Suppose I paid $100K to set up a bid for something that's worth $10M to me. In that case, paying $10,100,000 is break-even, and $10,100,001 is worse than just walking away. so if the bidding does reach $10,100,000 and I'm not winning I should walk away and eat the $100K rather than bid and lose even more. You don't get rational actors bidding obscene amounts.
A check of Wikipedia yields penny auctions, in which bidders do pay money to bid, and lose the money even if they lose the auction. Apparently, these have been held, but they seem to have trouble attracting bidders.
Some states have laws that your employer can't have stuff you did outside work hours, outside the work place, and not using employer-provided tools. No state has laws that your employer doesn't own what you did while at work. If ShanghaiBill's former employer ever does realize what was going on, he's in trouble.
When millennials try to get their first jobs, they haven't been significant in the economy, so accusing them of favoring stuff made outside the US is pointless. Moreover, greater international trade doesn't really affect employment prospects much, but rather allows people to be more productive.
The biggest reason there will never again be large numbers of relatively unskilled jobs that pay well is automation. To be paid well, you have to be able to do something significantly better than the alternatives.
College tuition has gone up far more than inflation since I was young, and less skilled jobs don't pay well if they exist at all. Then boomers accuse millennials of being lazy or improvident.
There's a lot more libertarians on Slashdot than in real life, which at least gives us greater diversity of opinion. They aren't the vast majority.
Who's interested in invading any powerful country nowadays?
The election of Trump was due to Republicans (in the primaries, and in the general election). It might be fair to say the Republicans didn't know what to do with President Trump, but the US doesn't really have plans to elect specific people, or to handle particular people winning an election.
The Brexit vote was not part of the UK constitution. It was a deliberate political action. Not planning for an unexpected result is stupid.
They didn't get a clear majority, in the sense of anything reliable. They got a narrow majority, so that another vote could easily have reversed the result. That's not much of a mandate..
The important thing about a computer is the applications available and, to a lesser extent, the OS. The hardware is only important to support that.
You obviously haven't tried putting computers together with my fingers.
Back when I used Macs almost exclusively, I'd normally upgrade the RAM about midway through the life of the computer. (I'm sufficiently old that I found it hard to believe that a megabyte wasn't really useful for anything except weird jewelry.)
No way. If I'm doing something significant, and something goes wrong, it's faster to get a new computer now to just keep working. It may be worthwhile to repair the old one, but if time is important that's a losing game.
We're talking about monopoly or near-monopoly services. What would happen if there was one company that wanted your services, and they would only sign the contract they made for you, without changing a single word? How about if there were four, all of which insisted on their own unaltered contracts?
Except that the conditions aren't like that. At the very minimum, the government works on dollars. I have to do my accounting in dollars, and when I have to pay the government anything it's in dollars. If I get involved in the court system, I will receive or be ordered to deliver dollars. If I go to a store, the store has to do its accounting in dollars to remit sales taxes. It's possible to do accounting in bitcoins as well as dollars, but that's extra work.
Most people don't care if their actions are tracked, and currency controls don't control significant legal activity. (They do present problems in cases where someone might want $9K dollars in cash, for example, but those circumstances are rare.) These are not serious bitcoin advantages.
Transferring dollars can be done easily, immediately, and locally, without need for transaction fees. This is not true of bitcoin.
We can normally recognize bubbles before they pop. Figuring when the pop comes is more difficult, as is convincing people involved. Now, previous bubbles have involved actual things. The tulip bubble popped, but tulips were still worth something. Real estate was still valuable after the crash. The Chinese economy will continue to be there, even if it stops growing. Bitcoin, after a crash, may well be worth nothing.
FTFY.
Also, paying for tangible objects or services is simple. You hand over the money and get the object or service. Bitcoin is more involved, and a transfer involving two people only is pretty much limited to transferring ownership of a wallet.
People tend to consider gold to be valuable in itself. As long as people in general believe that, it will be valuable in itself. Paper money might or might not have value after the apocalypse. Bitcoin won't. It would be a pretty unimpressive apocalypse that left the Internet running well, so transactions could reliably get into the blockchain.
Currencies have crashed in the past, for various reasons, and bitcoin isn't even worth anything to a collector (unlike, say, Confederate currency). A bitcoin is worth only what you can get for it, and a bitcoin transfer is a lot more complicated than handing over a piece of paper. If nobody's maintaining the blockchain any more, bitcoin are worthless.
Where do you find auctions where you need to pay money but you get nothing? How do you get money out of the runner-up? When the bidding is nearing its close, wouldn't it make more sense for the runner-up to put on a fake mustache, move fast in the direction of the rest room, and pretend not to speak English?
I have literally never heard or read of such an auction before.
As examples, you named iOS devices and a bunch of gaming devices. Most people buy their game consoles for the purpose of running games that are released for that console. If they also want a computer, they typically buy a computer.
iOS works because there's so many and so varied apps in the App Store that it isn't a practical problem for the most part.
RT may have failed partly because Microsoft had no idea how to market it. Calling something Windows RT suggests that it will run Windows programs. It may also have failed because there weren't enough apps, and because it was something of a latecomer. The Surfaces that run real Windows are at least moderate successes.
Consumers will care when they can't run the same programs their friends are running.
Of course, Microsoft doesn't know right now of existing malware that exploits an Edge vulnerability and works as ransomware, so they're correct in saying no known ransomware works.
I'd be worried about unknown ransomware, but that's me.