The problem then is not in creating simulations; it is figuring out how you create simulations that will not be abused and perverted by sick people who want to destroy the economy for their own ideological reasons and/or personal financial gain.
Actually, you WANT to create a simulated world where the players are allowed to do those very things. That's how to find problems with the proposed legislation.
I want a large scale social simulation to be used as a test bed for proposed legislation, to give an idea whether the bill might have the desired effect and to ferret out any unintended consequences. Legislation really ought to go through the whole engineering process, not simply thrown into production without any testing.
That would make it cumbersome to figure out how much postage to put on a letter to you.
Forty-four cents.
For larger items, just use the online postage calculator, type in the account ID of the recipient, and it gives you the price based on his or her physical address.
Another possible solution for added privacy would be to have the sender pay only the minimum possible price, and the recipient will pay the remainder.
A consumption-based tax practically balances itself. The heavier vehicles create more wear due to their greater mass and they pay more into the tax fund because they consume more fuel to move that mass around.
No, the fuel tax doesn't even come close to pay for road wear, because road wear is a function of the cube of the weight. This means a 6,000-lbs vehicle causes 8 times as much road wear as a 3,000-lbs vehicle, but of course it doesn't use 8 times as much gasoline per mile!
The fuel tax is even better at metering costs to those that chew up roads (heavy vehicles).
Road wear is a function of the cube of the weight. This means a 6,000-lbs vehicle causes 8 times as much road wear as a 3,000-lbs vehicle, but of course it doesn't use 8 times as much gasoline per mile. That means the fuel tax is still a very bad way to pay for road wear.
If cable has caps, then DSL providers would be throwing money away by not also instituting caps of their own, needed or not. Stuff is priced by the market, not by what it costs the business to provide the service. If business A raises prices, then B will follow. If a business can't afford to provide the service based on current market rates, then they won't provide the service at all--they can't simply raise prices above the market and expect to make a profit.
If you are provided a service (lets say 10 mb down / 5 mb up) and you consume said service and it degrades your neighbor's service, is that YOUR fault? No. It is entirely your service providers fault for providing service in such a way that a single customer affects another customer.
No, it's your own fault for not paying for business-class service that guarantees 10 down and 5 up.
With that said, the real issue is that the ISPs don't want to pony up and order additional capacity to their providers, peers, or even within their own network.
Because it would be very expensive, and force ALL customers to pay for the upgrades. Why not instead give your customers an opportunity to save themselves money?
Of course, the marginal price for a GB of data these days is near zero -- (one site pegged it at $.03). AT&T has a fine idea, they're just pricing it 150x too high. The fact that they're able to do so screams market failure/monopoly to me.
When your use of bandwidth deprives your neighbor of his use of bandwidth at the same time, you've imposed an external cost on your neighbor. Flat rate bandwidth caps are a clumsy way of making you pay for this type of market failure known as a "negative externality".
A better solution is time-of-use pricing/bandwidth caps, because when you use your bandwidth when nobody else is, you aren't imposing any cost on anyone, other than the $.03 wholesale cost per GB of bandwidth that you mentioned.
So if you're really concerned about market failures, you would be in favor of time-of-use pricing/bandwidth caps.
DVR will eventually just be a relic from the push model. The market appears to be moving towards a customer-centric model of streaming and delivery when and where we want it.
Unfortunately, Amazon VOD's subscription feature still has a ways to go before it catches up with TiVo season passes. With Amazon, I can't subscribe to a television show in the middle of a season without also purchasing all previous episodes of that season. And when a new season becomes available, do I have to keep track of it and log in and subscribe to the new season, or will I be subscribed automatically like with TiVo?
The other nice thing about TiVo is you can see all the new episodes of all shows in one view, sorted by air date.
Except that the concert hall can't expand easily to provide more seats... However, there's nothing preventing the telcos from improving their networks, save for their profit margins.
In both cases, it is somewhere between (but not including) free and impossible to provide more capacity. You can't just choose an arbitrary price point and say that usage-based billing inexplicably only works above that point.
The pipes may be full but still nothing is consumed.
That's like saying if I occupy a seat at a concert, nothing is consumed (because I can't take my seat with me) and so the concert should be free.
If everyone in your neighborhood was _under_ their cap and still got on at the same time, you'd have the same problem.
Unlimited wants, limited resources. Where have I heard this before? Oh yes, in economics class. I even remember hearing how the market eliminates the shortage: the price rises until demand falls to the level of supply, and later other suppliers come in to chip away at the profits.
So why would anyone want to prevent the market from eliminating the shortage and bringing in more competitors?
Also, usage based billing is just about preventing us from cutting our cable and using netflix instead.
You should consider the possibility that Netflix isn't a wise use of limited network resources, and that efficient usage-based pricing only makes you face that fact.
The fine video states (correctly as far as I'm concerned) that as bits are not a manufactured physical product, nor are they ever consumed, you shouldn't be charged for usage (i.e. consumption).
The bandwidth available to your neighborhood at any given time period is consumed. It isn't infinite. Scarcity is very real in broadband networks. Any time you have scarcity, price is a good way to prevent shortages.
this is a great video on why usage based billing is a scam.
I can't watch the video right now, but is it a scam due to a problem with a certain implementation of usage based billing or is it due to some insurmountable flaw in the basic concept?
Yes, well, what do you do when you hit your planned retirement age in 2009?
You put off retirement for a year to wait for the market to bounce back. Better yet, you sold in 2008 because you saw the bubble and were fearful when others were greedy.
Get $100 taken out of your paycheck every month for 40 or 50 years (480 months * 100 = $48,000)
If you add in the 8% annual long-term average stock market return, 480 months of investing 100 currency units per month comes to nearly 350k in today's currency units.
The issue is that metered internet doesn't encourage the ISPs to figure out how to decrease the cost of providing service or provide more bandwidth as they have a get out of jail free card for over promising their capacity.
Actually, metered internet encourages ISPs to provide more bandwidth so that their customers can use bandwidth-heavy applications more easily, thereby using more bandwidth and being charged more for it.
Tha's ridiculous. How far back do you want to go? Caves?
With the kind of subsidies you seem to prefer, there would be no innovation, because there would be no incentive to find cheaper sources of power, or to build more energy-efficient appliances and buildings.
Show me a landlord willing to make a major capital investment for his tenants and I'll show you a saint. Not going to happen.
You don't understand. He wouldn't put up solar panels for the benefit of his tenants, but for the extra income.
And in the U.S., at least, most rental properties don't include electric power as part of the rent anyway: that's billed separately to the tenant by the power company.
In the same way, the energy from the solar panels would also be billed separately, at market rates, by the landlord.
Your plan would only screw over poor people...you will have people living paycheck to paycheck burning newspapers in a trash barrel in their living room.
There are better ways to provide welfare than through artificially low energy prices. When people are insulated from their costs, they have no incentive or ability to economize. THAT is what screws poor people.
Also many people rent; they do not have the luxury of installing any fancy things like solar panels for their high rise, or even controlling their own thermostat. Landlords would either turn the thermostats to a very uncomfortable level or pass on the increased costs to the renters at the first opportunity.
When peak hour electricity prices rise high enough, why wouldn't those landlords install solar panels and charge their tenants for the electricity?
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Actually, you WANT to create a simulated world where the players are allowed to do those very things. That's how to find problems with the proposed legislation.
Don't forget minimum parking requirements and non-user fees (sales taxes, etc.) used to finance freeway construction!
I want a large scale social simulation to be used as a test bed for proposed legislation, to give an idea whether the bill might have the desired effect and to ferret out any unintended consequences. Legislation really ought to go through the whole engineering process, not simply thrown into production without any testing.
Forty-four cents.
For larger items, just use the online postage calculator, type in the account ID of the recipient, and it gives you the price based on his or her physical address.
Another possible solution for added privacy would be to have the sender pay only the minimum possible price, and the recipient will pay the remainder.
And replace it with what?
Go on, I'd love to hear what's going to replace the trucking industry.
No, fuel taxes don't even come close to accounting for road wear caused by larger vehicles. Road wear caused by vehicles is related to the 4th power of their axle weight.
No, the fuel tax doesn't even come close to pay for road wear, because road wear is a function of the cube of the weight. This means a 6,000-lbs vehicle causes 8 times as much road wear as a 3,000-lbs vehicle, but of course it doesn't use 8 times as much gasoline per mile!
Road wear is a function of the cube of the weight. This means a 6,000-lbs vehicle causes 8 times as much road wear as a 3,000-lbs vehicle, but of course it doesn't use 8 times as much gasoline per mile. That means the fuel tax is still a very bad way to pay for road wear.
Obviously, this was a carefully crafted strategy to obtain the set of titanium teeth all dogs dream about. He even knew he was irreplaceable.
Now which is the smarter dog?
If cable has caps, then DSL providers would be throwing money away by not also instituting caps of their own, needed or not. Stuff is priced by the market, not by what it costs the business to provide the service. If business A raises prices, then B will follow. If a business can't afford to provide the service based on current market rates, then they won't provide the service at all--they can't simply raise prices above the market and expect to make a profit.
No, it's your own fault for not paying for business-class service that guarantees 10 down and 5 up.
Because it would be very expensive, and force ALL customers to pay for the upgrades. Why not instead give your customers an opportunity to save themselves money?
When your use of bandwidth deprives your neighbor of his use of bandwidth at the same time, you've imposed an external cost on your neighbor. Flat rate bandwidth caps are a clumsy way of making you pay for this type of market failure known as a "negative externality".
A better solution is time-of-use pricing/bandwidth caps, because when you use your bandwidth when nobody else is, you aren't imposing any cost on anyone, other than the $.03 wholesale cost per GB of bandwidth that you mentioned.
So if you're really concerned about market failures, you would be in favor of time-of-use pricing/bandwidth caps.
How do you find the halfway point? Do you fold the board in half to make a crease?
Unfortunately, Amazon VOD's subscription feature still has a ways to go before it catches up with TiVo season passes. With Amazon, I can't subscribe to a television show in the middle of a season without also purchasing all previous episodes of that season. And when a new season becomes available, do I have to keep track of it and log in and subscribe to the new season, or will I be subscribed automatically like with TiVo?
The other nice thing about TiVo is you can see all the new episodes of all shows in one view, sorted by air date.
In both cases, it is somewhere between (but not including) free and impossible to provide more capacity. You can't just choose an arbitrary price point and say that usage-based billing inexplicably only works above that point.
That's like saying if I occupy a seat at a concert, nothing is consumed (because I can't take my seat with me) and so the concert should be free.
Unlimited wants, limited resources. Where have I heard this before? Oh yes, in economics class. I even remember hearing how the market eliminates the shortage: the price rises until demand falls to the level of supply, and later other suppliers come in to chip away at the profits.
So why would anyone want to prevent the market from eliminating the shortage and bringing in more competitors?
You should consider the possibility that Netflix isn't a wise use of limited network resources, and that efficient usage-based pricing only makes you face that fact.
The bandwidth available to your neighborhood at any given time period is consumed. It isn't infinite. Scarcity is very real in broadband networks. Any time you have scarcity, price is a good way to prevent shortages.
I can't watch the video right now, but is it a scam due to a problem with a certain implementation of usage based billing or is it due to some insurmountable flaw in the basic concept?
You put off retirement for a year to wait for the market to bounce back. Better yet, you sold in 2008 because you saw the bubble and were fearful when others were greedy.
If you add in the 8% annual long-term average stock market return, 480 months of investing 100 currency units per month comes to nearly 350k in today's currency units.
Actually, metered internet encourages ISPs to provide more bandwidth so that their customers can use bandwidth-heavy applications more easily, thereby using more bandwidth and being charged more for it.
With the kind of subsidies you seem to prefer, there would be no innovation, because there would be no incentive to find cheaper sources of power, or to build more energy-efficient appliances and buildings.
You don't understand. He wouldn't put up solar panels for the benefit of his tenants, but for the extra income.
In the same way, the energy from the solar panels would also be billed separately, at market rates, by the landlord.
There are better ways to provide welfare than through artificially low energy prices. When people are insulated from their costs, they have no incentive or ability to economize. THAT is what screws poor people.
When peak hour electricity prices rise high enough, why wouldn't those landlords install solar panels and charge their tenants for the electricity?