Why do I have to use iTunes? Why do I have to jump through hoops to sync a damned mp3 player with a new computer? Why can't I sync it with more than one computer? I'm pretty sure there are work-arounds, however I thought Macs and Apple products were just supposed to work?
That's the rub... there is a real engineering tradeoff between "choice" and "just works". Apple is not magic, but they are pretty good at making a limited set of choices do a respectable job for a large number of people. The tradeoff is that it gets frustrating when you stop drinking the kool-aid.
Windows is the other side... almost infinitely configurable and the ecosystem is damned cheap - but you pay for it by being the family IT guy. All that choice comes at the expense of complexity.
I just didn't like syncing my phone all of the time. If apple allowed wireless sync, perhaps then it would be more convenient.
I agree, and I have to wonder why they don't allow this. The only thing that I can fathom is security, or maybe speed. Come to think of it, it is probably speed - even a 16GB iPhone would take something on the order of 4 hours to do a complete sync. That much use of the wireless radio would probably destroy the battery time:)
I suppose I could chalk up the wretched, twisted policies to the Music Industry, who really want us to buy multiple digital copies of the same song to play on multiple devices.
Eh... the corporation has other assets rather than just shares.
I understand - it's just that book value of a corporation is almost universally significantly lower than it's market value. Add to this the loss of leverage that they would experience without non-employee ownership and you have a very low opportunity for growing a company using debt.
I'm not saying this is bad in the long term... reducing debt throughout the economy actually sounds pretty good - but it's hard to deny the short-term effect it would have. In fact, the crash of 2008 and resulting debt crisis is a good example of what would happen.
But I'm less interested in developing wealth expansion techniques than developing strong restrictions on corporations against exploitation of their employees.
I'm not sure that making corporations employee-owned would do this... I'm thinking United Airlines at the moment. On the other hand, you have Publix. On the whole, at least employees would be the only ones to blame if they got screwed over!
For my part, I only want corporations for pragmatic reasons... if you want a bridge built, you either need to do it with government employees or you need to give someone a profit motive. At the same time, you don't want a really big bridge to remain incomplete just because a sole proprietor died midway through... thus the concept of an entity that doesn't "die". You let people chase profit and retain a structure such that it can survive the death of its leader.
Somehow, we slowly went from there to the point we're at now, where any damn fool can start a Nevada corporation for about $1600 - and for almost any reason.
There really is a large amount of room for creativity here
Indeed... you can literally do anything you want. You just have to convince half of congress first:)
The co-op corporations still have corporate assets, and thus a set of capital, so individual shares are not worthless once the employee is gone. It's just that only the corporation could buy them back.
The main problem I see is determining the value of the shares. What would the corporation pay? There is no free market for the shares, so some alternate valuation would need to be applied. I suppose you could do a flat 10:1 value on earnings per share or something like that. But you'd constantly have cries of unfairness.
No more bubbles from people speculating on the price of speculation on the price of speculation about the value of the corporation 5 milliseconds from now.
Ha! People speculated on tulips! You'll never get rid of speculation - but I agree it is in serious need of regulation.
The problem is that sometimes speculation is necessary. My dad works for a government authority, and they need to buy fuel. He needs to have a predictable budget, and so he buys fuel for a set price on a contract one year in advance. It is an "option", and is a form of speculation. The trick is allowing this kind of necessary contract without allowing blind betting. I think one way is to forbid selling contracts on something that you don't possess.
I personally am able to borrow more than the value of my assets, and corporations would naturally be granted the same rights to obtain unsecured debt.
Yes, but that debt typically costs something like 20%. A solid corporation wouldn't be that bad of a risk, but still without being able to acquire an interest in the company in Chapter 11, all bonds would probably be priced like current "junk" bonds. Again, not the end of the world, but something to keep in mind.
This of course produces less chances of people making fortunes by getting in early, but rather should produce a more stable market.
Yes, it reduces the return on investment for entrepreneurs. Don't worry about rich folks - they'll always figure out a way to make $$$:)
I have a friend who was maligned by an ex-coworker. He has been told he has to pay money to post a redaction.
You have always been able to post a free rebuttal. The fee is if you want to use an arbitrator to determine what parts of a complaint are untrue and then update the post with this information. The fee is high ($2000) IMHO, but then again you are paying for an actual arbitrator to review the facts... certainly one wouldn't expect the website to absorb the cost, but you'd think the fee would be time-based rather than flat.
The ex-coworker has already publicly admitted their post was... "incorrect" (knowingly not factual, ligitatable, etc). My friend still has to pay if he wants to post a rebuttal, and the ex-coworker's post will remain there forever.
If the ex-coworker is being cooperative now, why not have them go over and update the report? It will show up in red at the top of the report that the post has been updated. See an example here.
It's a difficult problem with no simply solution.:(
I agree it is a difficult problem, but I still advocate tweaking and tuning. After all, it took hundreds of years for us to get where we are now with individuals through the English Common Law system... maybe it will take another hundred to get corporations right... the modern corporation is only maybe 100 years old.
I don't think that your idea of having them be only non-profit or employee co-ops is a terrible idea, but I think there needs to be some form of capital investment as well. For instance, what happens to an employee's shares when they are laid off? Without a capital market, those shares would become worthless. Which is fine if you are willing to accept that as a trade-off. A corporation's borrowing power would also be limited, since they wouldn't be able to borrow more than the value of their assets... again, maybe you'd view that as a good thing.
There's no "wrong" answer, though, since a corporation is just a convenient abstraction and not fundamental to the human condition.
Attached to each of them is an extremely detailed account of the case, complete with links to relevant court documents and an explanation of their actions. Far, far more information is provided than any NY Times redaction that I've ever seen.
See the problem now?
What I'm seeing is a system that is working. Ripoffreports has a blatant lie on their site, are reluctant to edit it, get dragged into court and as a result of all of this the page gets updated with the full story. That's a win for the disparaged party.
By the way, the original posts are so hilariously bad that it's amazing anyone even cared to sue. They are almost incoherent.
Once one has done it for corporations, what is to stop one from doing it for any disliked or hated group?
LOL, we're meandering towards the recent Supreme Court decision...
I think the answer is that you recognize that a corporation is a specifically economic entity and don't grant it any natural rights... just as the government can regulate commercial "speech" such as advertising and product labeling.
Where I split with the Supreme Court is that I can't imagine how they projected the right to free political speech to something that cannot think, much less speak. If the board of a corporation wants to say something, by all means say it - but as a group of individual people, not a legal abstraction that was meant to be an economic tool.
Basically I'm saying that giving a corporation the right to free speech is just as silly as giving it the right to bear arms. Or perhaps a more hilarious mental image would be a right to a trial by a jury of peers. A jury box full of incorporation papers?
I'm not suggesting that we go back to the way that corporations were 100 years ago - I think that they are an essential part of our modern economy. But I think some of the limitations that corporations operated under in earlier days were prudent.
Here we strongly disagree. As a point of law, it may be convenient to treat a corporation as a person in many cases. That is pragmatic and I agree with that. But just because we made a convenient and pragmatic choice when creating corporations does not mean we need to blindly follow that choice. Corporations are just legal entities and should not have any inherent or natural rights. The only rights that a corporation should have are those explicitly conferred by law or their government charter.
No, a corporation doesn't really. A corporation is still just as liable for their actions as anyone else.
Right, but a corporation is not a person, and they don't seem to behave like one.
If we widely allowed for "piercing of the veil"
I'm not advocating that. I rather like the concept of the corporation, and I am not anti-corporate in general. I'm just pointing out the absurdity in being anti-regulation for the sake of the "free market" when the very existence of the corporation is a government interference in the "free market", if such a thing can even be said to exist.
People will collect in to groups of aligned agents of a collective will, and treating them as individuals is a practice in blind idiocy.
Yup - I'm all for pragmatism, and I think corporations are a great concept... but they are a form of regulation in and of themselves. I'm not for regulation on principle and I'm not anti-regulation on principle. I think we need to adjust regulation as needed to achieve a desired result. Tinkering has a cost in terms of efficiency, but often the cost is tolerable and worth it. Hell, regulation can even improve efficiency... the corporation itself is an obvious example, and then you have things like federal standards on paperwork and accounting which give a huge boost to productivity.
So anyway, other than in the chaotic environment of a Slashdot forum, I think we broadly agree:)
You're going to tell me that they'll produce happy employee and customer loving groups rather than exploitive and abusive gangs?
???
I think you have me confused with someone else. Adam Smith did this little thought experiment a long time ago, and I'm not going to claim to be smarter than him. He thought that the "free market" would inevitably lead to monopoly.
This idea that corporations would be better off without government interference is sheer lunacy.
We agree. My entire point was that a corporation can only exist because a government is there to grant them a charter. They get a special, government-granted status which limits liability of the investors. Right off the bat, a corporation is playing by a different set of rules than a non-corporation. To argue that they shouldn't be regulated because of "interference in the free market" is just plain absurd, since the free market was tampered with simply by allowing corporations in the first place.
You mean as opposed to the black-market non-government-authorized gangs and crime syndicates?
The government is still interfering by forcing those groups underground. The black market is generally not very efficient. For one thing, the seller has more knowledge of the product than the buyer. For another, you can't really set up much of a black-market clearinghouse... any operation that gets too big and efficient would attract the eye of the authorities.
Yeah, I think you are right - the closest to a free market is when things are kind of in a state of anarchy. Even then, the "black market" is influenced by the government if it is also an "illegal market". Or it at least isn't an efficient market.
Everyone who uses this term seems to mean a different thing. What is a free market? Is it the total lack of government? Or is it just when everyone plays by the same rules? Or is it just a sliding scale between the two? Is there even such a thing, or is it an unattainable ideal to strive for like "freedom" or "liberty"?
The reason I ask, is because pragmatism is sometimes at odds with a "free market". It simply makes no sense to have utility pole competition, for instance. We've been there and done that... it resulted in an unholy mess. The "free market" may have provided the cheapest power, but it sure didn't optimize for the aesthetic beauty of the neighborhood.
A government-run system, history tells us, would probably bounce between expensive and reliable and inexpensive and unreliable as the political winds change from alternate blackouts and outrage at prices. We have many decades of experience with monopoly, which has yielded something that you can build a society around, but is perhaps not very efficient. In recent years, deregulation has left us with some mixed results... in California it was a disaster, but in other places where they have been more cautious it seems to be working.
I think power distribution is one of those many, many examples in life where trying to cram it into your ideology is going to lead to frustration.
They don't care if a developer has a "pay me" button or "donate" button where the money is intended for the developer. They don't want a button where the money goes to someone other than the developer. The gist is that they don't have the accounting set up so they'd have to trust the developer, which would naturally lead to fraud.
It's a cheesy cop-out, because they should be able to set up an official way to donate - but there it is.
Where in TFA does it mention the app soliciting donations?
First, let me just say that I am obviously speculating - so my opinion is as good as yours... that is, probably worthless:)
But my understanding is that if the author wants to take his earnings and donate them, that is his business - unless he makes it part of the price... which is what he did. I think they are trying to avoid fraud. It would be impossible to follow up on every single author who makes such a claim to make sure that they donate as promised.
Of course, Apple could just have a way to support donations... oh, well.
Well, I'm sure Safari would be pulled next because it makes the same information accessible.
Actually, Safari is the way that Apple sanctions donations, along with special SMS messages. You can't solicit donations from inside an app. I suspect this app would not have been pulled if it were free.
Slashdot Mirror
My bad...
Noooooo.... the "hundred dollar consumer device" was dependent upon servers that failed.
Why do I have to use iTunes? Why do I have to jump through hoops to sync a damned mp3 player with a new computer? Why can't I sync it with more than one computer? I'm pretty sure there are work-arounds, however I thought Macs and Apple products were just supposed to work?
That's the rub... there is a real engineering tradeoff between "choice" and "just works". Apple is not magic, but they are pretty good at making a limited set of choices do a respectable job for a large number of people. The tradeoff is that it gets frustrating when you stop drinking the kool-aid.
Windows is the other side... almost infinitely configurable and the ecosystem is damned cheap - but you pay for it by being the family IT guy. All that choice comes at the expense of complexity.
I just didn't like syncing my phone all of the time. If apple allowed wireless sync, perhaps then it would be more convenient.
I agree, and I have to wonder why they don't allow this. The only thing that I can fathom is security, or maybe speed. Come to think of it, it is probably speed - even a 16GB iPhone would take something on the order of 4 hours to do a complete sync. That much use of the wireless radio would probably destroy the battery time :)
I suppose I could chalk up the wretched, twisted policies to the Music Industry, who really want us to buy multiple digital copies of the same song to play on multiple devices.
They're all in it together :)
Eh... the corporation has other assets rather than just shares.
I understand - it's just that book value of a corporation is almost universally significantly lower than it's market value. Add to this the loss of leverage that they would experience without non-employee ownership and you have a very low opportunity for growing a company using debt.
I'm not saying this is bad in the long term... reducing debt throughout the economy actually sounds pretty good - but it's hard to deny the short-term effect it would have. In fact, the crash of 2008 and resulting debt crisis is a good example of what would happen.
But I'm less interested in developing wealth expansion techniques than developing strong restrictions on corporations against exploitation of their employees.
I'm not sure that making corporations employee-owned would do this... I'm thinking United Airlines at the moment. On the other hand, you have Publix. On the whole, at least employees would be the only ones to blame if they got screwed over!
For my part, I only want corporations for pragmatic reasons... if you want a bridge built, you either need to do it with government employees or you need to give someone a profit motive. At the same time, you don't want a really big bridge to remain incomplete just because a sole proprietor died midway through... thus the concept of an entity that doesn't "die". You let people chase profit and retain a structure such that it can survive the death of its leader.
Somehow, we slowly went from there to the point we're at now, where any damn fool can start a Nevada corporation for about $1600 - and for almost any reason.
Perhaps we need to be more discerning?
There really is a large amount of room for creativity here
Indeed... you can literally do anything you want. You just have to convince half of congress first :)
The co-op corporations still have corporate assets, and thus a set of capital, so individual shares are not worthless once the employee is gone. It's just that only the corporation could buy them back.
The main problem I see is determining the value of the shares. What would the corporation pay? There is no free market for the shares, so some alternate valuation would need to be applied. I suppose you could do a flat 10:1 value on earnings per share or something like that. But you'd constantly have cries of unfairness.
No more bubbles from people speculating on the price of speculation on the price of speculation about the value of the corporation 5 milliseconds from now.
Ha! People speculated on tulips! You'll never get rid of speculation - but I agree it is in serious need of regulation.
The problem is that sometimes speculation is necessary. My dad works for a government authority, and they need to buy fuel. He needs to have a predictable budget, and so he buys fuel for a set price on a contract one year in advance. It is an "option", and is a form of speculation. The trick is allowing this kind of necessary contract without allowing blind betting. I think one way is to forbid selling contracts on something that you don't possess.
I personally am able to borrow more than the value of my assets, and corporations would naturally be granted the same rights to obtain unsecured debt.
Yes, but that debt typically costs something like 20%. A solid corporation wouldn't be that bad of a risk, but still without being able to acquire an interest in the company in Chapter 11, all bonds would probably be priced like current "junk" bonds. Again, not the end of the world, but something to keep in mind.
This of course produces less chances of people making fortunes by getting in early, but rather should produce a more stable market.
Yes, it reduces the return on investment for entrepreneurs. Don't worry about rich folks - they'll always figure out a way to make $$$ :)
I'm just amazed that a slashdot reader isn't savvy enough to backup their music to something more reliable than a mobile phone.
I have a friend who was maligned by an ex-coworker. He has been told he has to pay money to post a redaction.
You have always been able to post a free rebuttal. The fee is if you want to use an arbitrator to determine what parts of a complaint are untrue and then update the post with this information. The fee is high ($2000) IMHO, but then again you are paying for an actual arbitrator to review the facts... certainly one wouldn't expect the website to absorb the cost, but you'd think the fee would be time-based rather than flat.
The ex-coworker has already publicly admitted their post was... "incorrect" (knowingly not factual, ligitatable, etc). My friend still has to pay if he wants to post a rebuttal, and the ex-coworker's post will remain there forever.
If the ex-coworker is being cooperative now, why not have them go over and update the report? It will show up in red at the top of the report that the post has been updated. See an example here.
Or yes, as you indicate, you could sue them.
It's a difficult problem with no simply solution. :(
I agree it is a difficult problem, but I still advocate tweaking and tuning. After all, it took hundreds of years for us to get where we are now with individuals through the English Common Law system... maybe it will take another hundred to get corporations right... the modern corporation is only maybe 100 years old.
I don't think that your idea of having them be only non-profit or employee co-ops is a terrible idea, but I think there needs to be some form of capital investment as well. For instance, what happens to an employee's shares when they are laid off? Without a capital market, those shares would become worthless. Which is fine if you are willing to accept that as a trade-off. A corporation's borrowing power would also be limited, since they wouldn't be able to borrow more than the value of their assets... again, maybe you'd view that as a good thing.
There's no "wrong" answer, though, since a corporation is just a convenient abstraction and not fundamental to the human condition.
Ah yes... the correction ripoffreports WONT post?
I think you need to visit the original reports.
Attached to each of them is an extremely detailed account of the case, complete with links to relevant court documents and an explanation of their actions. Far, far more information is provided than any NY Times redaction that I've ever seen.
See the problem now?
What I'm seeing is a system that is working. Ripoffreports has a blatant lie on their site, are reluctant to edit it, get dragged into court and as a result of all of this the page gets updated with the full story. That's a win for the disparaged party.
By the way, the original posts are so hilariously bad that it's amazing anyone even cared to sue. They are almost incoherent.
Once one has done it for corporations, what is to stop one from doing it for any disliked or hated group?
LOL, we're meandering towards the recent Supreme Court decision...
I think the answer is that you recognize that a corporation is a specifically economic entity and don't grant it any natural rights... just as the government can regulate commercial "speech" such as advertising and product labeling.
Where I split with the Supreme Court is that I can't imagine how they projected the right to free political speech to something that cannot think, much less speak. If the board of a corporation wants to say something, by all means say it - but as a group of individual people, not a legal abstraction that was meant to be an economic tool.
Basically I'm saying that giving a corporation the right to free speech is just as silly as giving it the right to bear arms. Or perhaps a more hilarious mental image would be a right to a trial by a jury of peers. A jury box full of incorporation papers?
I'm not suggesting that we go back to the way that corporations were 100 years ago - I think that they are an essential part of our modern economy. But I think some of the limitations that corporations operated under in earlier days were prudent.
Does the New York Times go back and redact the microfilm version of their paper? Or do they print a correction?
Why jump to erase history? Just because it is easier to do than in the past?
But a corporation is a person
Here we strongly disagree. As a point of law, it may be convenient to treat a corporation as a person in many cases. That is pragmatic and I agree with that. But just because we made a convenient and pragmatic choice when creating corporations does not mean we need to blindly follow that choice. Corporations are just legal entities and should not have any inherent or natural rights. The only rights that a corporation should have are those explicitly conferred by law or their government charter.
No, a corporation doesn't really. A corporation is still just as liable for their actions as anyone else.
Right, but a corporation is not a person, and they don't seem to behave like one.
If we widely allowed for "piercing of the veil"
I'm not advocating that. I rather like the concept of the corporation, and I am not anti-corporate in general. I'm just pointing out the absurdity in being anti-regulation for the sake of the "free market" when the very existence of the corporation is a government interference in the "free market", if such a thing can even be said to exist.
People will collect in to groups of aligned agents of a collective will, and treating them as individuals is a practice in blind idiocy.
Yup - I'm all for pragmatism, and I think corporations are a great concept... but they are a form of regulation in and of themselves. I'm not for regulation on principle and I'm not anti-regulation on principle. I think we need to adjust regulation as needed to achieve a desired result. Tinkering has a cost in terms of efficiency, but often the cost is tolerable and worth it. Hell, regulation can even improve efficiency... the corporation itself is an obvious example, and then you have things like federal standards on paperwork and accounting which give a huge boost to productivity.
So anyway, other than in the chaotic environment of a Slashdot forum, I think we broadly agree :)
You're going to tell me that they'll produce happy employee and customer loving groups rather than exploitive and abusive gangs?
???
I think you have me confused with someone else. Adam Smith did this little thought experiment a long time ago, and I'm not going to claim to be smarter than him. He thought that the "free market" would inevitably lead to monopoly.
This idea that corporations would be better off without government interference is sheer lunacy.
We agree. My entire point was that a corporation can only exist because a government is there to grant them a charter. They get a special, government-granted status which limits liability of the investors. Right off the bat, a corporation is playing by a different set of rules than a non-corporation. To argue that they shouldn't be regulated because of "interference in the free market" is just plain absurd, since the free market was tampered with simply by allowing corporations in the first place.
You mean as opposed to the black-market non-government-authorized gangs and crime syndicates?
The government is still interfering by forcing those groups underground. The black market is generally not very efficient. For one thing, the seller has more knowledge of the product than the buyer. For another, you can't really set up much of a black-market clearinghouse... any operation that gets too big and efficient would attract the eye of the authorities.
Yeah, I think you are right - the closest to a free market is when things are kind of in a state of anarchy. Even then, the "black market" is influenced by the government if it is also an "illegal market". Or it at least isn't an efficient market.
Ah - in the future, we call hands "trolls".
Everyone applying to college is using Linux, majoring in tech fields, and fucking trolls... holy shit, it's a post from the future!
companies are FREE to tack on whatever fees they want.
Companies? You mean, like, government-chartered corporations? A free market wouldn't have these artificial liability-limiting entities :)
The free market is an imaginary ideal - not something that ever really existed.
the real free market
Everyone who uses this term seems to mean a different thing. What is a free market? Is it the total lack of government? Or is it just when everyone plays by the same rules? Or is it just a sliding scale between the two? Is there even such a thing, or is it an unattainable ideal to strive for like "freedom" or "liberty"?
The reason I ask, is because pragmatism is sometimes at odds with a "free market". It simply makes no sense to have utility pole competition, for instance. We've been there and done that... it resulted in an unholy mess. The "free market" may have provided the cheapest power, but it sure didn't optimize for the aesthetic beauty of the neighborhood.
A government-run system, history tells us, would probably bounce between expensive and reliable and inexpensive and unreliable as the political winds change from alternate blackouts and outrage at prices. We have many decades of experience with monopoly, which has yielded something that you can build a society around, but is perhaps not very efficient. In recent years, deregulation has left us with some mixed results... in California it was a disaster, but in other places where they have been more cautious it seems to be working.
I think power distribution is one of those many, many examples in life where trying to cram it into your ideology is going to lead to frustration.
His typing teacher was British.
I should have left a link explaining the policy.
They don't care if a developer has a "pay me" button or "donate" button where the money is intended for the developer. They don't want a button where the money goes to someone other than the developer. The gist is that they don't have the accounting set up so they'd have to trust the developer, which would naturally lead to fraud.
It's a cheesy cop-out, because they should be able to set up an official way to donate - but there it is.
Where in TFA does it mention the app soliciting donations?
First, let me just say that I am obviously speculating - so my opinion is as good as yours... that is, probably worthless :)
But my understanding is that if the author wants to take his earnings and donate them, that is his business - unless he makes it part of the price... which is what he did. I think they are trying to avoid fraud. It would be impossible to follow up on every single author who makes such a claim to make sure that they donate as promised.
Of course, Apple could just have a way to support donations... oh, well.
Well, I'm sure Safari would be pulled next because it makes the same information accessible.
Actually, Safari is the way that Apple sanctions donations, along with special SMS messages. You can't solicit donations from inside an app. I suspect this app would not have been pulled if it were free.