While Ellsberg supports Assange and what they are trying to do, in actuality he redacted many names and even entire sections of diplomatic reports that assessed the allies of the US who were secretly supporting the Vietnam war, like Poland.
Assange (or whoever at his organization) also redacts names from the majority of Wikileaks releases, generally except where the names are of public figures.
The question is, is it worth it? To see how the bankers and the financiers and the heads of state control the world and the wealth in the world? Will it REALLY help democracy and display capitalism's flaws? Haven't we known that since Marx?
This is the most cynical, hopeless thing I have ever heard. It's essentially an admittance of defeat. You're saying, we may as well let the government and the corporations operate in secret, because we know that exposing their crimes won't do any good anyway. And the sad thing is, you might be right.
Perhaps it should be rephrased as "no misconduct that surprises anyone who's been paying attention for the last century or two"
And that's the part that really worries me - the people running the country can be engaged in criminal acts, and we don't care anymore. Either it's because we don't feel like we have the power to stop it from happening, or because we've decided it's all right for the people in charge to break the law. Either way, we're fucked.
Consider the MSNBC viewers; aren't they about the same in bias?
MSNBC isn't an institution with liberals like it is many for hardline conservatives, though. The very partisan left tends to resonate with certain trawls of the blogosphere rather than tie themselves to the radio or TV, I think. A lot of liberals like Olbermann and Maddow but seem most likely to watch them when someone links a clip of their shows on the HuffPo, rather than actually tuning in to watch those programs on a real television. That's also not counting some of the station's moderate conservatives, like Joe Scarborough.
If there's any show that really draws a constant audience of liberals to live broadcast, it's probably Stewart and Colbert.
The really, really sad thing is, the price, QOS and sustained throughput of the municipal wireless in Minneapolis beats Comcast, hands down. You take a small hit in latency, but that's about it.
I hear people say the same thing about WiMax service in Houston.
As advocates of Democracy and transparency, let's break the law and act in secret to take down big companies, which in turn hurts small businesses who use these payment services. Let's also inconvenience random shoppers. Let's create all kinds of random collateral damage to make a point about supporting transparency by supporting a completely secretive organization. Sorry, I'm not buying it.
Don't try to harm the major corporations, because only the little people will end up getting hurt! Wait, where have I heard that before...
I don't know mcuh about Virgin internet, but I can say that Spring / Clear have 4G-ish WiMax connections in Houston which run about $40-$60 for true unlimited data plans. I know a couple people that have disconnected their landline internet at home and switched over to wireless completely, and are satisfied with the decision.
Countries like Norway or Saudi Arabia proved that when used correctly (ie. through state-controlled companies, yes), oil brings wealth to the citizens.
You might also say the same about the American state of Alaska, to a limited extent.
As an older player (just about 30), I find that I have no taste anymore for blockbuster games. I don't want to play a $60 epic about some superhero rampaging around and killing every bad guy in sight. When I have a couple of nights free to mess around, I look at the inexpensive games on XBox Live (just bought Monkey Island: Special Edition for $5 on sale and need to try it), or even the XBox Indie section (just made legendary status in Carneyvale, enjoyed Soulcaster a while ago), or I want to download some small game off of Steam that my online friends recommend (Recettear was fun for the meta-conversations). I think some of that lost mojo might just be that we're tired of seeing the same old crap over and over again. It's a refreshing to just pick up something small and weave your way through it than to sit through some epic journey again.
(Then again, please don't ask me how many hours I've spent playing expert drums in Rock Band...)
I think there's a good reminder about monopolies in there. There's nothing inherently wrong with a monopoly that comes into power simply by being the favorite choice of customers. The danger is when it starts to use monopolistic practices, or maybe some other legal term. Right now, Steam is the big dog of online sales because they have an easy-to-use system with a number of beneficial perks that their customers enjoy. There's nothing wrong with that as long as Steam won those customers fair and square. If Valve starts using its power to coerce the publishers into only going to Steam, using bargaining power to push competitors like Direct2Drive out of the market, that's when there's a problem.
I'd like to have a little faith and say that Steam is going to continue to be strong just because it is what it is, but historically, power corrupts...
And that's the big danger that Steam really brings to the retail world - a digital copy of a game can't be sold back to Gamestop so that they can resell it as high profit margins.
Excuse my trolling for karma here, but there's a good comment below that article that's worth noting (which I only remembered because I saw this article when it was first posted a while ago).
Farhad, Allow me to make one clarification on the Sandvine report cited. While the growth of Netflix has certainly been dramatic, it does not (yet) account for 90% of Internet traffic on any of the networks included in our study. Rather, As you noted correctly, we did see Netflix accounting for approximately 20% of downstream traffic in North America.
The confusion on the 90% stat probably resulted from a misreading of one of the graphs featured in our “Spotlight On: Netflix” on page 15 of our Fall Global Internet Phenomena report. The graph was accompanied with the caption “An average day for Netflix on this network, peaking at 9:30pm” This particular graph (taken from a single network in Canada) shows Netflix traffic throughout the day as a relative percentage of the peak amount of Netflix traffic. In this case, the peak was reached at 9:30pm, so the curve at that point has a value of 100%. The rest of the curve shows how Netflix traffic varies: so we see that at midnight the level of Netflix is approximately 42% of what it was at 9:30pm. In hindsight, I think we probably could have explained this better in our report.
Our Network Analytics product produces these “Time of Day” graphs so that network operators can understand how subscriber usage of various applications, services, or categories of application vary throughout a typical day. Thanks again for the interesting article.
Yeah, but do you ever have to blow on your PSX CDs? Hell, I remember the magical day when I discovered that rubbing a damp cotton swab over the contact of the cartridge would grant a +50% bonus chance of game operation. And just what was up with that blinking reset-button light?
I don't think that's a bad deal, I just have had it with unpolished games.
Not to defend FF14, but it's worth remembering that a few months after WoW was released, Penny Arcade famously rescinded their game-of-the-year award as protest against the terrible lag and glitches, so it's not like you even had a smooth experience with the biggest MMO in the world.
How many leaders start out as truly noble freedom fighters, believing in democracy and the people; only to end up as oppressive, paranoid dictators after they finally achieve power?
There's a Soviet Russia joke coming on here... How many leaders start out as near dictators, making false promises to the commoners in order to raise an army while knowing full well that they don't plan to hand out aid once they achieve power, only to die and have the history books one hundred years later demagoguing them as good, honest men who only wanted the best for their country? After all, in order to start an army, you usually need the funding and training to do it, and you don't get a whole lot of noble orphans with that kind of experience.
I think you miss my point, though. Some articles just sort comments by time. As a result, the first ten comments you read will be terrible. Always. It will always be a war to have the latest comments so as to get the views for being on top of the list, which will mean plenty of flippant comments and worthless catchphrases, while you'll be forced to dig for pages to find the one guy who stopped to try to type a coherent response. Just adding in a simple reader rating system increases the value of the readers' comments substantially.
I consider Slashdot the worst comment system ever, except for all of the ones that have already been tried, to paraphrase Churchill. I understand its faults, but every little bit helps.
A little comment moderation does go a long way, though. Reading the comments on articles on New York Times' web site, the only real moderation is that readers can "like" certain comments. You can then open the "Readers' Recommendations" tag to read comments rated by order of the number liked. This tends to make the comments much faster to read, putting the more useful ones near the top. It's not as robust a system as you get on Slashdot, but it's far and away better than comments systems that just sort comments by time and leave reading to pick through scores of trolls looking for any sign of intelligent life.
I live in Houston in an apartment complex a bit outside of the downtown areas. My complex has an exclusive contract with a small cable provider, for which they are the only source of landline internet to the apartment. Their rates are about average, about $45 for 3 Mbps down / 0.3 Mbps up, discounts for cable bundling. I was a bit disappointed, though, that they didn't have an option to pay extra for a higher-speed package.
Houston already has access to WiMax 4G internet coverage from Spring/Clear. The speeds are about the same as what I'm getting for cable now, with a monthly cost of around $60, minus the price of the modem. I'm actually still considering trying it out so that I'm just paying a bit more to get mobile net, but...
A quick Google search on LTE speeds suggests that the download speed for Verizon's new network will be somewhere in the range of 6-12 Mbps down / 3-5 Mbps up. If they can sell an unlimited data package at around $60/month, then that is going to make their mobile speeds directly competitive with landline carriers. I know that downtown Houston and some of the other "nice" areas have access to AT&T's U-Verse and other providers that offer better speed packages, but even for them, you're still talking about a wireless mobile provider providing competitive speeds against landlines.
I'm not sure whether to be hopeful about the rate of new wireless development or to be sorrowful about the state of local monopolies and the effect that has on landline development. Either way, if I'm still stuck in this apartment by the time Verizon gets their new network rolled out, I might just end up as an early adopter.
[A] completely amateur operation is going to use shared virtual hosting because it is cheaper and the hosting company will be doing backups for them. And controlling passwords... I guess it is pretty obvious into which category Cryptome falls, right?
Being a non-profit organizatino, Cryptome's status as a professional organization or an amateur organization probably depends on the size of their donation base. For a website group trying to get by on a shoestring budget... well, maybe this little stunt will help them raise awareness to get the donations for a better server setup. (Not that I actually know the size of their donation base, and maybe they do have enough money for that sort of setup and they're just stingy/stupid.)
Fair words, really. I don't chalk this experiment up so much as a loss than as a learning experience. (And I actually managed to spark a halfway-intelligent conversation about something on Slashdot. How about that.)
I did note that ATVI seems to be mostly following the market. If you pull up their stock price at any given time and check its percentage averages against the NASDAQ for any given couple of weeks, there's a strong correlation between the two. The difference is that ATVI has had a couple of bad weeks where they dropped hard compared to the average but never bounced back. The stuff that you mentioned here is something that I've learned by watching a few stocks for a while, and I'm strongly considering selling out and going to bonds or index funds once the first dividend payment rolls around.
Their side of this is sinking games like no ones business. Think about how they dealt with modern warfare debacle and how guitar hero is now more like guitar zero. Their goal in the game business is to extract as much money from franchises as possible.
Last holiday season, the Activision side had the latest Call of Duty game, which is a fantastic, record-breaking hit. They also had DJ Hero and Tony Hawk's Ride, which were dismal failures. They also had Guitar Hero 5, which was decent. All-in-all, it was an okay Christmas season, and so I wasn't surprised that the stock price was stable through most of the season. But then they had Starcraft 2, a huge worldwide hit, in the middle of the summer where no one else was really releasing big games. And the stock dropped. And this was after they had instituted a stockholder dividend to make the stock more attractive.
How do you know how the stock is performing the way that it is? That's an honest question. Before I bought a couple of stocks and watched them over a long period of time, I thought I understood the directions that the market took. It turns out that it's a lot more dense than that, or maybe just more random. IANAE (where the 'e' is for 'economist'), but I get the sense that the market just isn't... I think the right word would be "smart." It looks at profit statements more than product releases. It reacts to success more than it predicts it. And it frequently does irrational things.
I recommend against saying that you know exactly why Activision stock is the way it is. And from this experience, I recommend that other people buy an individual stock on their own - or to be less risky, pick a couple stocks and just track them. Watch how the company performs, watch what products they put out, and see just how much your predictions match what actually occurs.
How can we believe anything thing you say, when your sig is such a blatant lie.
Well, my sig is somewhat related to the topic, after all.
I've explained my sig to someone before. Most libertarians believe that government regulation restricts and impedes business, that the free market is being strangled by market and employer regulations. The inevitable response to that is, what will you do when an employer is treating its workers unfairly, or if a business is harming consumers? Then, libertarians say, employees will refuse to work there, or consumers will refuse to buy the product. There will be boycotts and labor shortages. It's a situation in which we imagine that government will not be strong enough to stop a corporation's bad habits, but average people will.
The fallacy here is that people can be fooled. You can run PR to make people feel a certain pride in buying a product even if the product if inferior to others. You can run negative PR against union advocates or anyone else who tries to improve working conditions, leading people to believe that things get better if they just keep working under poor conditions. You can have skilled lawyers who know how to write up labor and business contracts in a way that people who sign them don't know exactly what they're getting into. Or you can just put out an inferior product and treat workers poorly, and when that becomes an industry standard as every other business in the industry copies you, then no one sees it as wrong. Again, there are people out there who are paid to convince average Americans to act or think in different ways.
On top of that, there's also an economy of scale. If you want to get a tea party nominee into Congress, or if you want to organize a boycott against a company, you have to rally people together, you have to select a candidate to get behind, you have to get your message out. You have to build an infrastructure - like a bus to take your campaign around to speak to people, and a website to keep your main talking points, and a process for keeping volunteer staff fed and motivated as they go out and do this for you. This takes a huge amount of time, effort, and money to do on a grassroots level. But when a corporation, political party, or other organization wants to counter you, what do they do? They just pick up the phone and call Steve, and Steve takes care of it, because Steve knows how PR works, and the company goes back to its usual business. A grassroots campaign against a large national target can succeed, but it is highly difficult under most situations because the corporation/party will already have the infrastructure and network to deal with the pushback. (The times that a grassroots effort does succeed, it often has large anonymous/semi-anonymous donors.)
Some people say, oh, we'd have a better government if people would just think critically about what government officials are saying. And we'd have more savings if we'd just not run out and buy so many useless things. And we'd have better wages if people just went to college and got better degrees and started their own businesses. And we wouldn't need business regulation if people would just stop buying products from those businesses that screw people over. You know, everything would be better if only the average person was better at everything. But not only would they have to be better at everything, but the PR people would have to not get better at dissuading people from those actions.
Slashdot Mirror
While Ellsberg supports Assange and what they are trying to do, in actuality he redacted many names and even entire sections of diplomatic reports that assessed the allies of the US who were secretly supporting the Vietnam war, like Poland.
Assange (or whoever at his organization) also redacts names from the majority of Wikileaks releases, generally except where the names are of public figures.
The question is, is it worth it? To see how the bankers and the financiers and the heads of state control the world and the wealth in the world? Will it REALLY help democracy and display capitalism's flaws? Haven't we known that since Marx?
This is the most cynical, hopeless thing I have ever heard. It's essentially an admittance of defeat. You're saying, we may as well let the government and the corporations operate in secret, because we know that exposing their crimes won't do any good anyway. And the sad thing is, you might be right.
Perhaps it should be rephrased as "no misconduct that surprises anyone who's been paying attention for the last century or two"
And that's the part that really worries me - the people running the country can be engaged in criminal acts, and we don't care anymore. Either it's because we don't feel like we have the power to stop it from happening, or because we've decided it's all right for the people in charge to break the law. Either way, we're fucked.
Consider the MSNBC viewers; aren't they about the same in bias?
MSNBC isn't an institution with liberals like it is many for hardline conservatives, though. The very partisan left tends to resonate with certain trawls of the blogosphere rather than tie themselves to the radio or TV, I think. A lot of liberals like Olbermann and Maddow but seem most likely to watch them when someone links a clip of their shows on the HuffPo, rather than actually tuning in to watch those programs on a real television. That's also not counting some of the station's moderate conservatives, like Joe Scarborough.
If there's any show that really draws a constant audience of liberals to live broadcast, it's probably Stewart and Colbert.
The really, really sad thing is, the price, QOS and sustained throughput of the municipal wireless in Minneapolis beats Comcast, hands down. You take a small hit in latency, but that's about it.
I hear people say the same thing about WiMax service in Houston.
As advocates of Democracy and transparency, let's break the law and act in secret to take down big companies, which in turn hurts small businesses who use these payment services. Let's also inconvenience random shoppers. Let's create all kinds of random collateral damage to make a point about supporting transparency by supporting a completely secretive organization. Sorry, I'm not buying it.
Don't try to harm the major corporations, because only the little people will end up getting hurt! Wait, where have I heard that before...
Because they had a ton of leftover trade-in value at Gamestop.
I don't know mcuh about Virgin internet, but I can say that Spring / Clear have 4G-ish WiMax connections in Houston which run about $40-$60 for true unlimited data plans. I know a couple people that have disconnected their landline internet at home and switched over to wireless completely, and are satisfied with the decision.
Countries like Norway or Saudi Arabia proved that when used correctly (ie. through state-controlled companies, yes), oil brings wealth to the citizens.
You might also say the same about the American state of Alaska, to a limited extent.
As an older player (just about 30), I find that I have no taste anymore for blockbuster games. I don't want to play a $60 epic about some superhero rampaging around and killing every bad guy in sight. When I have a couple of nights free to mess around, I look at the inexpensive games on XBox Live (just bought Monkey Island: Special Edition for $5 on sale and need to try it), or even the XBox Indie section (just made legendary status in Carneyvale, enjoyed Soulcaster a while ago), or I want to download some small game off of Steam that my online friends recommend (Recettear was fun for the meta-conversations). I think some of that lost mojo might just be that we're tired of seeing the same old crap over and over again. It's a refreshing to just pick up something small and weave your way through it than to sit through some epic journey again.
(Then again, please don't ask me how many hours I've spent playing expert drums in Rock Band...)
If only they'd learned from the negative examples provided by Europe and the USA's journeys through the Industrial Revolution.
When these sorts of things happened in the USA during the Industrial Revolution, the result was massive worker strikes.
I think there's a good reminder about monopolies in there. There's nothing inherently wrong with a monopoly that comes into power simply by being the favorite choice of customers. The danger is when it starts to use monopolistic practices, or maybe some other legal term. Right now, Steam is the big dog of online sales because they have an easy-to-use system with a number of beneficial perks that their customers enjoy. There's nothing wrong with that as long as Steam won those customers fair and square. If Valve starts using its power to coerce the publishers into only going to Steam, using bargaining power to push competitors like Direct2Drive out of the market, that's when there's a problem.
I'd like to have a little faith and say that Steam is going to continue to be strong just because it is what it is, but historically, power corrupts...
And that's the big danger that Steam really brings to the retail world - a digital copy of a game can't be sold back to Gamestop so that they can resell it as high profit margins.
Excuse my trolling for karma here, but there's a good comment below that article that's worth noting (which I only remembered because I saw this article when it was first posted a while ago).
Farhad, Allow me to make one clarification on the Sandvine report cited. While the growth of Netflix has certainly been dramatic, it does not (yet) account for 90% of Internet traffic on any of the networks included in our study. Rather, As you noted correctly, we did see Netflix accounting for approximately 20% of downstream traffic in North America.
The confusion on the 90% stat probably resulted from a misreading of one of the graphs featured in our “Spotlight On: Netflix” on page 15 of our Fall Global Internet Phenomena report. The graph was accompanied with the caption “An average day for Netflix on this network, peaking at 9:30pm” This particular graph (taken from a single network in Canada) shows Netflix traffic throughout the day as a relative percentage of the peak amount of Netflix traffic. In this case, the peak was reached at 9:30pm, so the curve at that point has a value of 100%. The rest of the curve shows how Netflix traffic varies: so we see that at midnight the level of Netflix is approximately 42% of what it was at 9:30pm. In hindsight, I think we probably could have explained this better in our report.
Our Network Analytics product produces these “Time of Day” graphs so that network operators can understand how subscriber usage of various applications, services, or categories of application vary throughout a typical day. Thanks again for the interesting article.
Sincerely, Tom Donnelly, EVP Marketing, Sandvine
And my original NES still works.
Yeah, but do you ever have to blow on your PSX CDs? Hell, I remember the magical day when I discovered that rubbing a damp cotton swab over the contact of the cartridge would grant a +50% bonus chance of game operation. And just what was up with that blinking reset-button light?
The massive square-jawed body-builder a la Zangief is actually their stereotype for gay.
Cho Aniki suddenly makes 1000% more sense.
I don't think that's a bad deal, I just have had it with unpolished games.
Not to defend FF14, but it's worth remembering that a few months after WoW was released, Penny Arcade famously rescinded their game-of-the-year award as protest against the terrible lag and glitches, so it's not like you even had a smooth experience with the biggest MMO in the world.
How many leaders start out as truly noble freedom fighters, believing in democracy and the people; only to end up as oppressive, paranoid dictators after they finally achieve power?
There's a Soviet Russia joke coming on here... How many leaders start out as near dictators, making false promises to the commoners in order to raise an army while knowing full well that they don't plan to hand out aid once they achieve power, only to die and have the history books one hundred years later demagoguing them as good, honest men who only wanted the best for their country? After all, in order to start an army, you usually need the funding and training to do it, and you don't get a whole lot of noble orphans with that kind of experience.
Slashdot's system has plenty of room for abuse...
I think you miss my point, though. Some articles just sort comments by time. As a result, the first ten comments you read will be terrible. Always. It will always be a war to have the latest comments so as to get the views for being on top of the list, which will mean plenty of flippant comments and worthless catchphrases, while you'll be forced to dig for pages to find the one guy who stopped to try to type a coherent response. Just adding in a simple reader rating system increases the value of the readers' comments substantially.
I consider Slashdot the worst comment system ever, except for all of the ones that have already been tried, to paraphrase Churchill. I understand its faults, but every little bit helps.
A little comment moderation does go a long way, though. Reading the comments on articles on New York Times' web site, the only real moderation is that readers can "like" certain comments. You can then open the "Readers' Recommendations" tag to read comments rated by order of the number liked. This tends to make the comments much faster to read, putting the more useful ones near the top. It's not as robust a system as you get on Slashdot, but it's far and away better than comments systems that just sort comments by time and leave reading to pick through scores of trolls looking for any sign of intelligent life.
I live in Houston in an apartment complex a bit outside of the downtown areas. My complex has an exclusive contract with a small cable provider, for which they are the only source of landline internet to the apartment. Their rates are about average, about $45 for 3 Mbps down / 0.3 Mbps up, discounts for cable bundling. I was a bit disappointed, though, that they didn't have an option to pay extra for a higher-speed package.
Houston already has access to WiMax 4G internet coverage from Spring/Clear. The speeds are about the same as what I'm getting for cable now, with a monthly cost of around $60, minus the price of the modem. I'm actually still considering trying it out so that I'm just paying a bit more to get mobile net, but...
A quick Google search on LTE speeds suggests that the download speed for Verizon's new network will be somewhere in the range of 6-12 Mbps down / 3-5 Mbps up. If they can sell an unlimited data package at around $60/month, then that is going to make their mobile speeds directly competitive with landline carriers. I know that downtown Houston and some of the other "nice" areas have access to AT&T's U-Verse and other providers that offer better speed packages, but even for them, you're still talking about a wireless mobile provider providing competitive speeds against landlines.
I'm not sure whether to be hopeful about the rate of new wireless development or to be sorrowful about the state of local monopolies and the effect that has on landline development. Either way, if I'm still stuck in this apartment by the time Verizon gets their new network rolled out, I might just end up as an early adopter.
[A] completely amateur operation is going to use shared virtual hosting because it is cheaper and the hosting company will be doing backups for them. And controlling passwords... I guess it is pretty obvious into which category Cryptome falls, right?
Being a non-profit organizatino, Cryptome's status as a professional organization or an amateur organization probably depends on the size of their donation base. For a website group trying to get by on a shoestring budget... well, maybe this little stunt will help them raise awareness to get the donations for a better server setup. (Not that I actually know the size of their donation base, and maybe they do have enough money for that sort of setup and they're just stingy/stupid.)
Fair words, really. I don't chalk this experiment up so much as a loss than as a learning experience. (And I actually managed to spark a halfway-intelligent conversation about something on Slashdot. How about that.)
I did note that ATVI seems to be mostly following the market. If you pull up their stock price at any given time and check its percentage averages against the NASDAQ for any given couple of weeks, there's a strong correlation between the two. The difference is that ATVI has had a couple of bad weeks where they dropped hard compared to the average but never bounced back. The stuff that you mentioned here is something that I've learned by watching a few stocks for a while, and I'm strongly considering selling out and going to bonds or index funds once the first dividend payment rolls around.
Their side of this is sinking games like no ones business. Think about how they dealt with modern warfare debacle and how guitar hero is now more like guitar zero. Their goal in the game business is to extract as much money from franchises as possible.
Last holiday season, the Activision side had the latest Call of Duty game, which is a fantastic, record-breaking hit. They also had DJ Hero and Tony Hawk's Ride, which were dismal failures. They also had Guitar Hero 5, which was decent. All-in-all, it was an okay Christmas season, and so I wasn't surprised that the stock price was stable through most of the season. But then they had Starcraft 2, a huge worldwide hit, in the middle of the summer where no one else was really releasing big games. And the stock dropped. And this was after they had instituted a stockholder dividend to make the stock more attractive.
How do you know how the stock is performing the way that it is? That's an honest question. Before I bought a couple of stocks and watched them over a long period of time, I thought I understood the directions that the market took. It turns out that it's a lot more dense than that, or maybe just more random. IANAE (where the 'e' is for 'economist'), but I get the sense that the market just isn't... I think the right word would be "smart." It looks at profit statements more than product releases. It reacts to success more than it predicts it. And it frequently does irrational things.
I recommend against saying that you know exactly why Activision stock is the way it is. And from this experience, I recommend that other people buy an individual stock on their own - or to be less risky, pick a couple stocks and just track them. Watch how the company performs, watch what products they put out, and see just how much your predictions match what actually occurs.
How can we believe anything thing you say, when your sig is such a blatant lie.
Well, my sig is somewhat related to the topic, after all.
I've explained my sig to someone before. Most libertarians believe that government regulation restricts and impedes business, that the free market is being strangled by market and employer regulations. The inevitable response to that is, what will you do when an employer is treating its workers unfairly, or if a business is harming consumers? Then, libertarians say, employees will refuse to work there, or consumers will refuse to buy the product. There will be boycotts and labor shortages. It's a situation in which we imagine that government will not be strong enough to stop a corporation's bad habits, but average people will.
The fallacy here is that people can be fooled. You can run PR to make people feel a certain pride in buying a product even if the product if inferior to others. You can run negative PR against union advocates or anyone else who tries to improve working conditions, leading people to believe that things get better if they just keep working under poor conditions. You can have skilled lawyers who know how to write up labor and business contracts in a way that people who sign them don't know exactly what they're getting into. Or you can just put out an inferior product and treat workers poorly, and when that becomes an industry standard as every other business in the industry copies you, then no one sees it as wrong. Again, there are people out there who are paid to convince average Americans to act or think in different ways.
On top of that, there's also an economy of scale. If you want to get a tea party nominee into Congress, or if you want to organize a boycott against a company, you have to rally people together, you have to select a candidate to get behind, you have to get your message out. You have to build an infrastructure - like a bus to take your campaign around to speak to people, and a website to keep your main talking points, and a process for keeping volunteer staff fed and motivated as they go out and do this for you. This takes a huge amount of time, effort, and money to do on a grassroots level. But when a corporation, political party, or other organization wants to counter you, what do they do? They just pick up the phone and call Steve, and Steve takes care of it, because Steve knows how PR works, and the company goes back to its usual business. A grassroots campaign against a large national target can succeed, but it is highly difficult under most situations because the corporation/party will already have the infrastructure and network to deal with the pushback. (The times that a grassroots effort does succeed, it often has large anonymous/semi-anonymous donors.)
Some people say, oh, we'd have a better government if people would just think critically about what government officials are saying. And we'd have more savings if we'd just not run out and buy so many useless things. And we'd have better wages if people just went to college and got better degrees and started their own businesses. And we wouldn't need business regulation if people would just stop buying products from those businesses that screw people over. You know, everything would be better if only the average person was better at everything. But not only would they have to be better at everything, but the PR people would have to not get better at dissuading people from those actions.