Yes, in a way you did. You're arguing that the RIAA still has value, that recording companies still have value- when EVERYTHING they do can be done better by the individual.
You are the one saying money is outdated today.
For the music industry, it already is. For the rest of us- well, labor value has been going down for 40 years now and it's showing no sign of stopping.
You are the one discounting the value of skilled labor today.
If you can call any job done better by a robot "skilled labor", yes. If I can make a pattern of it and create it myself, that job is no longer skilled labor.
Read what I said. I never dismissed the raw material. I only challenged your notion of the (lack of) value inherent in the ability to transform that raw material into a finished product.
And read what I said- as jobs get automated away, there is NO value inherent in the ability to transform raw material into a finished product. It's only a matter of time before ALL such value, based in the ability to turn raw material into a finished product, is worthless.
"Given enough technology" being the operative phrase here. Your arguments might hold water at that point. They don't today.
Then why is the RIAA forced to fall back on law and lawsuits to support their outdated business model? If the ecconomic value of the skilled labor of copying music still had value, there wouldn't be any pirates.
You are describing how you wish human nature was today. It isn't. Economics is little more than the study of human behavior when put to the ultimate test. The test of making value judgments.
No. It isn't. Economics is the study of how well theories fit reality- and when the axioms change, our economics must also change. Value judgements are largely imaginary.
Unless you are claiming a vast (functional) conspiracy to control the world,
Which I am- the WTO is just the RIAA on a large scale.
what we are seeing in the freer countries is nothing more than human nature expressing itself.
A country with intelectual property laws to prop up outdated business models is NOT a free country- the human behavior in such a country is distorted by the law.
Capitalism has arisen, and persevered, in politically free countries because it is currently the closest approximation to human nature we (as a society) have worked out.
We have no politically free countries; a politically free country would be majority (and mob) rule, and capitalism cannot abide by mob rule, for the majority would simply vote to tax the minority rich and be lazy.
LOL. Now I know you don't understand business. What a joke. Take an economics course and stop embarrassing yourself. Try designing a chip without marketing it to your clients to see what features they want, sometime. Let me know too so I can short your company.
Exactly my point- marketing allows inferior products to beat superior products in the marketplace. The most marketing you should EVER have to do is give me a spec sheet- if you can't sell me your product based on a spec sheet alone, then you've got more work to do refining your product or I don't need your product at all. In NEITHER case should I buy your current product. That's the reason I stopped buying music several years ago- everything that has come out since 1990 has been pure crap, marketed heavily.
I can't even read through the rest of your post because I fell out of my chair laughing a 1/3 of the way down.
Idiots often laugh at wisdom because they don't understand it.
Why would they get more then 1 sale? After all, everyone can just fileshare the latest song like they do for RIAA music.
Eventually, it will get to that point; the inefficiency of current file sharing networks (for instance, grokster is not compatible with bittorrent) will keep this away for a while. But I strongly suspect, long after the RIAA is gone and stops controling the prices, that the price will once again rise- after all, the band still has to eat. It will balance out someplace between selling the song ONCE paying back some of the R&D- and the rest getting paid back by live show appearances and ticket prices.
Having said that- here's the good part: This puts pressure back on the artist to either earn money another way (do the music as a hobby) or continually put out new tracks and remixes; in either case society is better off than a one-hit wonder living off of the sales of a single for a hundred and fifty years.
It's hard to debate fairly against those who are not intellectually equal.
You clearly understand what you're talking about very well, and as such you should know that when people have been going on about money being real, they're talking about currency as a moderator of trade, not as in the coin of the realm. Its apples and oranges, and replying to apples with oranges is disingenuous debate.
Currency as a moderator of trade ceased to have any value the day the government started to counterfiet it; it just takes time for the myth to fall under it's own lies. Inflation and the effectively infinite supply of bits means that one day money's value will fall to zero- the law of supply and demand at work. Likewise, the value of art has fallen to zero for the same reason- it's effectively now in infinite supply. As time goes on and automation takes over, skilled labor is due for the same fate.
Money as the moderator of exchange is very real, and in that sense you are living proof, just by using it to live... unless you're accruing the means of survival through some other channels than buying them with your debit card.
Well, I can, it's not strictly neccessary. My ancestors got very fat living in this valley before white man came- they may not have had clothes or personal property, but they considered themselves VERY wealthy, as the land provided all that they needed. Fish, venison, birds, eggs, vegetables, fruit- they had it all back then, before the malaria.
Capitalism is, in fact, the dominant economic mode of the earth, and as such, communist notions of value assignment are somewhat meaningless.
Except, of course, in the music industry, where capitalism must be protected by lawsuits to still exist...
I.E. it really doesnt matter that the Dollar is no longer on the Gold standard, because capitalism decided that the market no longer needed fixed monetary values.
And one day soon capitalism will decide that the market no longer needs money. Unless you figure out what to do before then- you'll be as outdated as an RIAA executive.
You and i may think that such a shared hallucination is retarded, but that doesnt make it any less Things As They Are.
But it isn't how "things as they are"- inflation shows that, as the value of the dollar continues to errode towards zero. It is in fact just one big fraudulent con game- and those at the "top" deserve nothing more than jail and execution for the lie.
The Marxist conception of Value is actually his weakspot, imho. It basically ignores the reality of market processes in favor of the way things "should be." Which is fine for philosophy and Macro-processes, but not for monetary issues.
Doesn't matter- because the law of supply and demand makes *both* obsolete in a surplus economy. Marx's "value of labor" means NOTHING when everything can be done better by machine than man. (Guess you, like so many others, have been fooled by my handle- I hack marx, I hack economic systems- I'm not a slavish follower of anybody's axiom beyond that which I need to fit into the myth of the people around me- and even then, I found a niche where my "money" supply is guaranteed by law rather than dependant upon the ever-decreasing value of the dollar.) Eventually, we'll need no labor to live; at that point, money will be obsolete for far more than just cyberspace programs and patterns of bits.
Spoken like a man who hasn't worked a day of manual labor in his life.
Incorrect. Spoken like a man who knows that machines can work a far more efficient day's worth of manual labor than any human being can- and as time goes on, they WILL.
I'm not sure what "less economic" means, but I get the strong impression you don't believe in the concept of "skilled labor" and seem to think you can teach yourself to perform services (at equal quality) for less than you can buy them.
You can't. But there's nothing a human being can do that a machine can't do at a SUPERIOR quality- given enough technology there is no need for services or skills.
This again is the attitude of one who is playing with concepts such as value and skill and finance, not someone who is living them.
Or rather, I've been hurt by them- I consider all three to ultimately be fraudulent at best, and a method of controlling one's neighbor at worst. I've been unemployed due to my job being automated away from me- it's silly to depend on "skills" alone to survive when ANY skill can be replaced with sufficiently advanced expert software and the proper hardware.
Someday isn't today. Raw materials do not equal finished products, just as compressed grass clippings and epoxy do not equal a deck.
In the music industry they do- and actually, some of the newer decking materials you use to build a deck are little more than grass clippings and epoxy. It's extruded out of a machine at whatever length you like- and it's created out of nearly nothing and will last far longer than any wood deck you could build.
And when we're talking about the RECORDING industry- we are already to the point that anything that exists only in cyberspace is indeed the finished product. One copy or a million copies are worth EXACTLY the same.
On a long enough time scale all you predict might come true, until then money isn't outdated.
Given the present state of the art, I give it about 130 years at best. Until then, services will drop off the low end, as machines become more skilled. There isn't ANYTHING you can do that we can't create a machine to do- I can even frame a house by machine today. Anybody who thinks that "skilled labor" will be worth ANYTHING two centuries from now is fooling themselves.
Dollars are dollars. Yen are yen.
And both are imaginary constructs that only have value as long as people say they have value.
Just because the transactions are done in computers instead of at a cash register / teller window doesn't change anything. The accounting is exactly the same.
There's an infinite amount of both once you put them into a computer; and the law of supply and demand says that whenever you have an infinite amount of something it's price WILL descend to zero. Stuff in computers is imaginary- it has no more "reality" than a thought. When everything is in computers, nothing will have any value. The United States Dollar ceased to have any REAL value the day they disconnected it from the Gold Standard and started counterfieting it instead- and the same with the rest of the world's currencies. Inflation will continue to erode it's value until it is zero- that's the law of supply and demand at work.
People who write stuff like this don't understand the value of marketing in a company,
Or rather, we consider marketing to be an ecconomically negative activity that destroys efficiency and allows inferior products to outmarket superior products.
and don't understand business in general.
That statement I'll agree with. Why should I trade for something I can do myself?
If a programmer writes the most kick-ass game in the world, and nobody's heard of it, he's not going to sell any copies.
True- but that's where you hand out a lower quality version to friends and then charge for the high quality version. Why should I pay for marketing I can do myself?
A successful business requires a lot of cooperation between a lot of people.
A faith-based idea if I ever saw one. Why does a successfull business need to be any more than a single individual, if technology replaces everybody else?
This argument that only the musicians deserve to get paid is nonsense.
Then prove it's nonsense, instead of making faith-based assertions.
The internet may streamline this process, but in the end, people aren't going to search through thousands of band's websites to find music they like.
True- instead they're going to get it from the broadcasters, just like they always have. No need for a recording company there if you've got a friend who is a DJ with a listening audience, or better yet, ARE a podcaster with a listening audience.
That's what record labels do for them, for better or worse.
If that's all record labels do, then they need to get a new gig- perhaps actually CREATING something of VALUE instead of just faking it?
True enough. I think trade and money is a stage, not a natural part of all species and all societies. We're approaching the end of that stage now; the only real question left will be what comes first, polluting ourselves to death in search of profit, or using and rearranging that pollution to eliminate any possibility of making a profit on anything. The first way leads to extinction- what the RIAA is experiencing right now is just a virtual form of what we're doing to our own living space. The second way will make money and trade worthless- the only thing left with any value will be information and intellectual property, and even that won't be worth very much in a world where anybody can get anything they want if they can distill the correct atoms out of sewage or the smog in the air and assemble them in the proper way.
Of course, we'll evolve to fit the new way- we always do....
You missed my whole point. Money is also "artificially scarce". It's easy to print something that looks like a dollar.
No, I got that quite effectively- the problem with money is that it IS artificially scarce, and our government has been printing it like there is an infinite supply of it.
When you do this successfully, you steal from everyone who has real dollars by causing inflation.
Ah, but only if you think real dollars had any value to begin with- which they haven't since 1935 or so (when did the gold standard become illegal again)?
Same thing with music. When you circulate pirated music, it devalues the original music because you are giving it away for free.
That's because MUSIC has no real value either- the only real value is in the art of creating NEW works of art. Copies don't take any real labor to produce- thus in the Marxist Labor Value of pricing, they can't have a price.
As a marxist, you don't understand the value of private property, there's no point in arguing with you that creating music takes work,
Creating music the FIRST time takes work. Creating the same piece of music for the millionth time is done by robots and has virtually NO ecconomic value, because there was no labor that went into it. The Artist deserves to be paid. The RIAA is just a bunch of con artists who are ripping off the real artists and doing NO usefull work.
and the product may or may not have monetary value based on the number of people that like it, and the amount of money they are willing to pay for it (i.e. trade their own productive labor for it).
The only moral value of a product is the labor that goes into making it; that is, the original artist who wrote or interpreted the song. The rest has no ecconomic value- charging money for it is immoral.
The rest of your arguments about money are a red herring. Money isn't obsolete. It's a way to represent productive work and simplify trade, as it has been for thousands of years.
So what happens when there is NO productive work going into a service, and NO need for trade in a certain industry? That's what has happened in the music industry- the value of recording and copying music has become zero.
Whwther it's in the form of paper or bits in a computer, it's still the same thing. Everyone uses money every day, unlike a hand pump.
I don't use the paper form anymore- and I'm not stupid enough to buy into an immoral con artist's insistance on making information artificially scarce. I'm sorry that you are that stupid to believe in myths and legends such as MONEY instead of freeing your mind and soul from the material world. You must be awfully tied to all sorts of other superstitious rituals as well- I bet you even invest in the stock market, where you pay people to shuffle worthless paper all day.
money is a very efficient way for 2 people to exchange services. For example, I am a carpenter, and you are a programmer. Do we barter, our skills or are you going to give me chickens when I finish your deck?
Or I just download the deck plans off of the internet, use my desktop fabricator to make legos out of grass clippings and epoxy, and make the deck myself. Isn't that far more efficient than paying somebody else to do it?
The point is that it is becoming less and less economic to exchange services AT ALL as time goes on- and some services are going to drop off the bottom end. The RIAA is finding themselves at that point today- a hundred years from now it will be even the software engineers.
Or do you mean that physical money is outdated, and we need something like Federation Credits for intergalactic trade?
Physical money is outdated right now- and many people HAVE replaced it with something very much like Federation Credits- autodeposits and debit cards have pretty much replaced physical money for me. That is what I meant to begin with. But in the long term, even the bits and bytes I paid for my computer with will be outdated- eventually everything will be software, and hardware will be just what your desktop fabricator creates after you download whatever the heck you want off of the Internet. It's music and movies now- but I've already seen experiments where you can download a bicycle off the internet and have an epoxy-resin fabricator build the parts for assembly. Someday those fabricators will be able to rearrange atoms themselves- then where will your "exchange of services for money" be when nobody needs to exchange services anymore?
Money is an obsolete way of keeping track of wealth? Then why is it still in use? Did you pay for the computer you're typing on, and do you receive paychecks or student loan money? If money is obsolete, the answer to both questions would be no. But it's not, is it?
Just because something is obsolete doesn't mean it doesn't exist anymore. My parents still have a hand pump in their garden well- but it's rarely used. Likewise, my paychecks are direct deposited, and I spend with a debit card. I rarely even have any coin at all in my wallet anymore- my computer was paid for with bits and bytes, not dollar bills.
Worse yet though is that even those bits and bytes are too large to effectively cover low-ecconomic value activities like copying CDs and DVDs- the actual cost to produce is too small to be counted, which is what we're talking about. The only way the RIAA's business can be supported is with artificial scarcity.
What a load of goofy, leftist crap. Money isn't obsolete and never will be. The capitalist free market is how nature works.
Really? When was the last time you saw a baboon using money? When was the last time you saw a stock market in a beehive? So much for the free market being "the way nature works" LIE, just another "I want to use guns to oppress my neighbors and take their property" argument.
Your "outdated business model" argument is really a red herring to justify piracy so that you feel better about the ethical nature of your activities.
No, sorry- I'm FOR paying the artist and creating a better model to do so. It's really against the unethical nature of the RIAA's business model- charging money for something that can be done for free, that is, the copying and distribution of music.
The rest of your rant fails to take this into account, so I'm not even going to dignify it with an answer. But someday soon you're going to have to face it when a petabyte hard drive, a fast processor, a desktop fabricator, and a bunch of grass clippings will allow you to copy a steak dinner as easily as we copy a spreadsheet today. After all, it's just the ARRANGEMENT of the carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen that makes it a steak and not grass clippings. If you can scan the steak, and rearrange the atoms, you can make as many steaks as you have grass clippings.
The "outdated business model" response is just as tired and irrelevant as the perennial favorite, "free advertising." Neither has anything to do with the actual topic--the RIAA suing people who are infringing on its members' rights by distributing artistic works so that people don't get paid for them.
Uh, no. See other posts where I put forth a different business model that doesn't include advertising or copying CDs- which I consider to be low ecconomic value activities. The rest of your rant makes no sense given that- separation of ART from COPYING and making sure the ARTIST gets paid for CREATING NEW ART.
What exactly would you consider a modern business model, online sales?
Separating out from the rest of your rant- a modern business model separates the low economic value stuff out (like making copies of CDs) from the high ecconomic value stuff (writing new songs, live performances) and finds a way to make money on the high ecconomic value stuff while giving away the low ecconomic value stuff for free.
As for your rant about the GPL- well, yes. Agreed. Not a problem for me. I don't care to get paid by the copy or by the license- I want to be paid for my time being creative. Once I've finished writing the software, what do I care what happens to it?
Ok, so up it to $.50- more than 4x what the RIAA pays the artist. Good for society still because it encourages the artist to release more new tracks- in other words, actually do their ART instead of living off of copies of their art.
By your reasoning, money is an obsolete way of keeping track of wealth.
It is. Has been for some time now- ever since the US government decided to try to create one world currency only loosely linked to a commodity instead of strongly linked (the fiat petrodollar). Of course, the final thing that killed it is the number of banks that keep extra dollars around that only exist in cyberspace- there are far more "dollars" out there than can be accounted for by the government printing offices.
After all, if I counterfeit money, I'm not hurting anyone, right?
Given that the government has been counterfieting money since the 1930s, how could you?
People still want music and are willing to pay for it.
Now that is a separate issue. The broken business model is the one of artifical scarcity- the music isn't scarce anymore. NEW recordings are what is scarce. Therefore, I'd propose a whole new business model for the music industry- low bandwidth (8 bit, 22khz, mono) recordings for free, higher quality tracks (16 bit 44khz stereo) for $.25 (double what the bands get now from ASCAP/BMI), and all of the money going to the band. Forget the record labels- and if you want a CD, buy the tracks you want off the band's website and burn it yourself. No DRM or copyrights. This encourages the bands to continue to put out new stuff- as high quality bitrate recordings will get out into the wild on the filesharing networks, the sales will drop off for older tracks,so to keep making money bands will have to put out new stuff.
Copying it because it's easy is no more ethical than counterfeiting money.
Wrong end of the stick. Copying it because it's easy means that the copying itself has very low real ecconomic value- it's the creation that should have high ecconomic value. The RIAA is in an obsolete business model, because their business model depends upon getting money from COPYING other people's work. They need badly to become extinct as the buggy whip makers. The artists are who deserve the money, not the RIAA.
Most of the legal methods also depend upon the idea of artificial scarcity though- in this case scarece bandwidth. I'm surprised there hasn't been a group of artists yet to band together to form a new music licensing website and group that licenses digital recordings at $.25/track- double what ASCAP/BMI offers artists while still underselling ITunes.
Scare tactics. FUD. Call it what you will, but they hope to accomplish punishing/cowering a generation of kids so that they can continue their outdated business model.
I'd have to say, most of the best techies I've ever met ARE total introverts- their people skills are extremely limited, perhaps even to the level of text interfaces such as e-mail and IMs. I had to do a good deal of work on my people skills to survive my layoff- and even then, I'm still not great. Mediocre at best. It takes a special kind of brain to think in binary or in code at the level I work at; and that kind of brain is NOT compatible with having good people skills.
Aside from that, though- yes, government is the way to go. Everything I hate about private industry is utterly the reverse in government service. If you can handle getting the long term contracts in government, then that is certainly one way to go- but if you've got my person skills, then the contracts are only to show your skills enough so that when a permanent civil service position opens up, you can step right in. That was my escape from the feast-and-famine of contracting and VDSE jobs. And the government has GREAT benefits.
Maybe someday- when the stability exists in private industry- I'll go back; but it'll take unions and REALLY long term contracts to lure me back. Promises of short term high profit that never pan out because the company goes bankrupt out from under me are no longer the lure they once were.
You might resent it, but life ain't fair. You got dealt a hand that makes it harder and might require you to give up stuff, but then again, you also chose a lifestyle (parenting) that is a well-known resource drain. The "American Dream" is a marketing gimmick, not an inalienable right.
To be exact, it's a marketing gimick used to get people to buy into standard American society- and provide kids to continue that society. Little kids are told from age 1 that the "norm" is to work hard in school so that they can earn enough to achieve home ownership and parenthood. It's not THAT unreasonable to expect the other half of the equation to be there- but it's become unreasonable as of late. The fact that it has become unreasonable is a sign of the long term unsustainability of the whole concept of "tech jobs replacing manufacturing jobs"- which did provide enough security to achieve home ownership and parenthood. And to some extent, since we've hitched the stability of the United States to this horse- the end of the democratic experiment and the middle class.
For others with more responsibility, the chance of having a customer not pay can be ruinous- far bigger risk than they are willing to take with the lives of themselves and their family.
And for still others, of course- well, technical ability and sales/people skills never have been common in the same brain. Some will never have enough customers to make it through the lean times.
Those who left the tech sector entirely during this drought fit into one of those two categories. If you can't handle the risk of getting laid off, an S-corp doesn't help much either- you never know when you'll be undercut by one of the bigger guys on your fees.
What I'm trying to point out is that the stability of the industry simply isn't compatible with living the clasic "American Dream". If you're willing to give up on that, live lean enough to run your own S-Corp, and have the people skills to do so- well, you ALSO then have the people skills and ability to take pay cuts to stay employed when ever other job around you is getting outsourced or eliminated. If you don't have the ability to live lean and/or don't have the people skills, then you might be the absolute best coder in the world- but you'll still be better off driving trucks because quality doesn't count.
Careful! If you don't time this to the cycle correctly, you'll find yourself 3 cycles from now still flipping burgers trying to pay off the loans from a PhD degree....
It still has- you don't see any 30 year unionized contracts out there to lure back the guys who said fuck tech, I'm going for something stable, do you? We've lost all of the good coders with experience and replaced them with a bunch of 20 somethings whose only other option is flipping burgers. No good wages.
They're just desperate enough to pay anything to anyone.
I've yet to see a 30 year unionized contract for IT work- but the bank expects one for me to buy a house. When coders get the same respect that banks do in this economy, THEN you will be able to say that the industry is desparate enough to pay anything to anyone. Until then, it's just more "we don't want to pay what it will REALLY cost to get the workers we need".
Offer STABILITY- and a guaranteed unionized 30 year income with health benefits that will never go down and never have any fake "layoffs" to boost the stock price- and you'll lure good coders back to the industry.
Until then, the good coders are correct to assess that their talents are better used truck driving or flipping burgers during the day and volunteering on open source projects at night. The industry has done this to themselves- by proving that men are no more than resources to be thrown out when the going gets tough, nobody's ever going to trust them to provide REAL jobs ever again.
Then rent, it won't kill you to not "own" a house in your early 20s. If you're really desperate do what my parents did back in the "old country" and move back with your parents (yes they did this after getting married, the US has fucked up social values imho).
I'm in my 30s, I had a kid, and he's got CP. I need a steady job more than I need to be working in tech alone these days, and I resent the idea that we need to give up on the standard American Dream to do so. Oh yeah- and I was 28 before I bought that house (actually signed just after my birthday).
Having said that, you're right of course- those who rent, who are able to live at a very low standard of living, and are able to jump not only cities but countries at the whim of the customers have a HUGE advantage in an industry like this. But that's not what I spent 6 years in college for.
At the very least, there's always a demand for Windows VDSR- Virus Detection and Spyware Removal. I find it earns about $75/incident, or $150/incident if you want to compete with Geek Squad.:-) But that won't pay a mortgage...
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Did I suggest otherwise?
Yes, in a way you did. You're arguing that the RIAA still has value, that recording companies still have value- when EVERYTHING they do can be done better by the individual.
You are the one saying money is outdated today.
For the music industry, it already is. For the rest of us- well, labor value has been going down for 40 years now and it's showing no sign of stopping.
You are the one discounting the value of skilled labor today.
If you can call any job done better by a robot "skilled labor", yes. If I can make a pattern of it and create it myself, that job is no longer skilled labor.
Read what I said. I never dismissed the raw material. I only challenged your notion of the (lack of) value inherent in the ability to transform that raw material into a finished product.
And read what I said- as jobs get automated away, there is NO value inherent in the ability to transform raw material into a finished product. It's only a matter of time before ALL such value, based in the ability to turn raw material into a finished product, is worthless.
"Given enough technology" being the operative phrase here. Your arguments might hold water at that point. They don't today.
Then why is the RIAA forced to fall back on law and lawsuits to support their outdated business model? If the ecconomic value of the skilled labor of copying music still had value, there wouldn't be any pirates.
You are describing how you wish human nature was today. It isn't. Economics is little more than the study of human behavior when put to the ultimate test. The test of making value judgments.
No. It isn't. Economics is the study of how well theories fit reality- and when the axioms change, our economics must also change. Value judgements are largely imaginary.
Unless you are claiming a vast (functional) conspiracy to control the world,
Which I am- the WTO is just the RIAA on a large scale.
what we are seeing in the freer countries is nothing more than human nature expressing itself.
A country with intelectual property laws to prop up outdated business models is NOT a free country- the human behavior in such a country is distorted by the law.
Capitalism has arisen, and persevered, in politically free countries because it is currently the closest approximation to human nature we (as a society) have worked out.
We have no politically free countries; a politically free country would be majority (and mob) rule, and capitalism cannot abide by mob rule, for the majority would simply vote to tax the minority rich and be lazy.
LOL. Now I know you don't understand business. What a joke. Take an economics course and stop embarrassing yourself. Try designing a chip without marketing it to your clients to see what features they want, sometime. Let me know too so I can short your company.
Exactly my point- marketing allows inferior products to beat superior products in the marketplace. The most marketing you should EVER have to do is give me a spec sheet- if you can't sell me your product based on a spec sheet alone, then you've got more work to do refining your product or I don't need your product at all. In NEITHER case should I buy your current product. That's the reason I stopped buying music several years ago- everything that has come out since 1990 has been pure crap, marketed heavily.
I can't even read through the rest of your post because I fell out of my chair laughing a 1/3 of the way down.
Idiots often laugh at wisdom because they don't understand it.
Why would they get more then 1 sale? After all, everyone can just fileshare the latest song like they do for RIAA music.
Eventually, it will get to that point; the inefficiency of current file sharing networks (for instance, grokster is not compatible with bittorrent) will keep this away for a while. But I strongly suspect, long after the RIAA is gone and stops controling the prices, that the price will once again rise- after all, the band still has to eat. It will balance out someplace between selling the song ONCE paying back some of the R&D- and the rest getting paid back by live show appearances and ticket prices.
Having said that- here's the good part: This puts pressure back on the artist to either earn money another way (do the music as a hobby) or continually put out new tracks and remixes; in either case society is better off than a one-hit wonder living off of the sales of a single for a hundred and fifty years.
You're not really debating fairly here.
It's hard to debate fairly against those who are not intellectually equal.
You clearly understand what you're talking about very well, and as such you should know that when people have been going on about money being real, they're talking about currency as a moderator of trade, not as in the coin of the realm. Its apples and oranges, and replying to apples with oranges is disingenuous debate.
Currency as a moderator of trade ceased to have any value the day the government started to counterfiet it; it just takes time for the myth to fall under it's own lies. Inflation and the effectively infinite supply of bits means that one day money's value will fall to zero- the law of supply and demand at work. Likewise, the value of art has fallen to zero for the same reason- it's effectively now in infinite supply. As time goes on and automation takes over, skilled labor is due for the same fate.
Money as the moderator of exchange is very real, and in that sense you are living proof, just by using it to live... unless you're accruing the means of survival through some other channels than buying them with your debit card.
Well, I can, it's not strictly neccessary. My ancestors got very fat living in this valley before white man came- they may not have had clothes or personal property, but they considered themselves VERY wealthy, as the land provided all that they needed. Fish, venison, birds, eggs, vegetables, fruit- they had it all back then, before the malaria.
Capitalism is, in fact, the dominant economic mode of the earth, and as such, communist notions of value assignment are somewhat meaningless.
Except, of course, in the music industry, where capitalism must be protected by lawsuits to still exist...
I.E. it really doesnt matter that the Dollar is no longer on the Gold standard, because capitalism decided that the market no longer needed fixed monetary values.
And one day soon capitalism will decide that the market no longer needs money. Unless you figure out what to do before then- you'll be as outdated as an RIAA executive.
You and i may think that such a shared hallucination is retarded, but that doesnt make it any less Things As They Are.
But it isn't how "things as they are"- inflation shows that, as the value of the dollar continues to errode towards zero. It is in fact just one big fraudulent con game- and those at the "top" deserve nothing more than jail and execution for the lie.
The Marxist conception of Value is actually his weakspot, imho. It basically ignores the reality of market processes in favor of the way things "should be." Which is fine for philosophy and Macro-processes, but not for monetary issues.
Doesn't matter- because the law of supply and demand makes *both* obsolete in a surplus economy. Marx's "value of labor" means NOTHING when everything can be done better by machine than man. (Guess you, like so many others, have been fooled by my handle- I hack marx, I hack economic systems- I'm not a slavish follower of anybody's axiom beyond that which I need to fit into the myth of the people around me- and even then, I found a niche where my "money" supply is guaranteed by law rather than dependant upon the ever-decreasing value of the dollar.) Eventually, we'll need no labor to live; at that point, money will be obsolete for far more than just cyberspace programs and patterns of bits.
Spoken like a man who hasn't worked a day of manual labor in his life.
Incorrect. Spoken like a man who knows that machines can work a far more efficient day's worth of manual labor than any human being can- and as time goes on, they WILL.
I'm not sure what "less economic" means, but I get the strong impression you don't believe in the concept of "skilled labor" and seem to think you can teach yourself to perform services (at equal quality) for less than you can buy them.
You can't. But there's nothing a human being can do that a machine can't do at a SUPERIOR quality- given enough technology there is no need for services or skills.
This again is the attitude of one who is playing with concepts such as value and skill and finance, not someone who is living them.
Or rather, I've been hurt by them- I consider all three to ultimately be fraudulent at best, and a method of controlling one's neighbor at worst. I've been unemployed due to my job being automated away from me- it's silly to depend on "skills" alone to survive when ANY skill can be replaced with sufficiently advanced expert software and the proper hardware.
Someday isn't today. Raw materials do not equal finished products, just as compressed grass clippings and epoxy do not equal a deck.
In the music industry they do- and actually, some of the newer decking materials you use to build a deck are little more than grass clippings and epoxy. It's extruded out of a machine at whatever length you like- and it's created out of nearly nothing and will last far longer than any wood deck you could build.
And when we're talking about the RECORDING industry- we are already to the point that anything that exists only in cyberspace is indeed the finished product. One copy or a million copies are worth EXACTLY the same.
On a long enough time scale all you predict might come true, until then money isn't outdated.
Given the present state of the art, I give it about 130 years at best. Until then, services will drop off the low end, as machines become more skilled. There isn't ANYTHING you can do that we can't create a machine to do- I can even frame a house by machine today. Anybody who thinks that "skilled labor" will be worth ANYTHING two centuries from now is fooling themselves.
Dollars are dollars. Yen are yen.
And both are imaginary constructs that only have value as long as people say they have value.
Just because the transactions are done in computers instead of at a cash register / teller window doesn't change anything. The accounting is exactly the same.
There's an infinite amount of both once you put them into a computer; and the law of supply and demand says that whenever you have an infinite amount of something it's price WILL descend to zero. Stuff in computers is imaginary- it has no more "reality" than a thought. When everything is in computers, nothing will have any value. The United States Dollar ceased to have any REAL value the day they disconnected it from the Gold Standard and started counterfieting it instead- and the same with the rest of the world's currencies. Inflation will continue to erode it's value until it is zero- that's the law of supply and demand at work.
People who write stuff like this don't understand the value of marketing in a company,
Or rather, we consider marketing to be an ecconomically negative activity that destroys efficiency and allows inferior products to outmarket superior products.
and don't understand business in general.
That statement I'll agree with. Why should I trade for something I can do myself?
If a programmer writes the most kick-ass game in the world, and nobody's heard of it, he's not going to sell any copies.
True- but that's where you hand out a lower quality version to friends and then charge for the high quality version. Why should I pay for marketing I can do myself?
A successful business requires a lot of cooperation between a lot of people.
A faith-based idea if I ever saw one. Why does a successfull business need to be any more than a single individual, if technology replaces everybody else?
This argument that only the musicians deserve to get paid is nonsense.
Then prove it's nonsense, instead of making faith-based assertions.
The internet may streamline this process, but in the end, people aren't going to search through thousands of band's websites to find music they like.
True- instead they're going to get it from the broadcasters, just like they always have. No need for a recording company there if you've got a friend who is a DJ with a listening audience, or better yet, ARE a podcaster with a listening audience.
That's what record labels do for them, for better or worse.
If that's all record labels do, then they need to get a new gig- perhaps actually CREATING something of VALUE instead of just faking it?
True enough. I think trade and money is a stage, not a natural part of all species and all societies. We're approaching the end of that stage now; the only real question left will be what comes first, polluting ourselves to death in search of profit, or using and rearranging that pollution to eliminate any possibility of making a profit on anything. The first way leads to extinction- what the RIAA is experiencing right now is just a virtual form of what we're doing to our own living space. The second way will make money and trade worthless- the only thing left with any value will be information and intellectual property, and even that won't be worth very much in a world where anybody can get anything they want if they can distill the correct atoms out of sewage or the smog in the air and assemble them in the proper way.
Of course, we'll evolve to fit the new way- we always do....
You missed my whole point. Money is also "artificially scarce". It's easy to print something that looks like a dollar.
No, I got that quite effectively- the problem with money is that it IS artificially scarce, and our government has been printing it like there is an infinite supply of it.
When you do this successfully, you steal from everyone who has real dollars by causing inflation.
Ah, but only if you think real dollars had any value to begin with- which they haven't since 1935 or so (when did the gold standard become illegal again)?
Same thing with music. When you circulate pirated music, it devalues the original music because you are giving it away for free.
That's because MUSIC has no real value either- the only real value is in the art of creating NEW works of art. Copies don't take any real labor to produce- thus in the Marxist Labor Value of pricing, they can't have a price.
As a marxist, you don't understand the value of private property, there's no point in arguing with you that creating music takes work,
Creating music the FIRST time takes work. Creating the same piece of music for the millionth time is done by robots and has virtually NO ecconomic value, because there was no labor that went into it. The Artist deserves to be paid. The RIAA is just a bunch of con artists who are ripping off the real artists and doing NO usefull work.
and the product may or may not have monetary value based on the number of people that like it, and the amount of money they are willing to pay for it (i.e. trade their own productive labor for it).
The only moral value of a product is the labor that goes into making it; that is, the original artist who wrote or interpreted the song. The rest has no ecconomic value- charging money for it is immoral.
The rest of your arguments about money are a red herring. Money isn't obsolete. It's a way to represent productive work and simplify trade, as it has been for thousands of years.
So what happens when there is NO productive work going into a service, and NO need for trade in a certain industry? That's what has happened in the music industry- the value of recording and copying music has become zero.
Whwther it's in the form of paper or bits in a computer, it's still the same thing. Everyone uses money every day, unlike a hand pump.
I don't use the paper form anymore- and I'm not stupid enough to buy into an immoral con artist's insistance on making information artificially scarce. I'm sorry that you are that stupid to believe in myths and legends such as MONEY instead of freeing your mind and soul from the material world. You must be awfully tied to all sorts of other superstitious rituals as well- I bet you even invest in the stock market, where you pay people to shuffle worthless paper all day.
money is a very efficient way for 2 people to exchange services. For example, I am a carpenter, and you are a programmer. Do we barter, our skills or are you going to give me chickens when I finish your deck?
Or I just download the deck plans off of the internet, use my desktop fabricator to make legos out of grass clippings and epoxy, and make the deck myself. Isn't that far more efficient than paying somebody else to do it?
The point is that it is becoming less and less economic to exchange services AT ALL as time goes on- and some services are going to drop off the bottom end. The RIAA is finding themselves at that point today- a hundred years from now it will be even the software engineers.
Or do you mean that physical money is outdated, and we need something like Federation Credits for intergalactic trade?
Physical money is outdated right now- and many people HAVE replaced it with something very much like Federation Credits- autodeposits and debit cards have pretty much replaced physical money for me. That is what I meant to begin with. But in the long term, even the bits and bytes I paid for my computer with will be outdated- eventually everything will be software, and hardware will be just what your desktop fabricator creates after you download whatever the heck you want off of the Internet. It's music and movies now- but I've already seen experiments where you can download a bicycle off the internet and have an epoxy-resin fabricator build the parts for assembly. Someday those fabricators will be able to rearrange atoms themselves- then where will your "exchange of services for money" be when nobody needs to exchange services anymore?
Money is an obsolete way of keeping track of wealth? Then why is it still in use? Did you pay for the computer you're typing on, and do you receive paychecks or student loan money? If money is obsolete, the answer to both questions would be no. But it's not, is it?
Just because something is obsolete doesn't mean it doesn't exist anymore. My parents still have a hand pump in their garden well- but it's rarely used. Likewise, my paychecks are direct deposited, and I spend with a debit card. I rarely even have any coin at all in my wallet anymore- my computer was paid for with bits and bytes, not dollar bills.
Worse yet though is that even those bits and bytes are too large to effectively cover low-ecconomic value activities like copying CDs and DVDs- the actual cost to produce is too small to be counted, which is what we're talking about. The only way the RIAA's business can be supported is with artificial scarcity.
What a load of goofy, leftist crap. Money isn't obsolete and never will be. The capitalist free market is how nature works.
Really? When was the last time you saw a baboon using money? When was the last time you saw a stock market in a beehive? So much for the free market being "the way nature works" LIE, just another "I want to use guns to oppress my neighbors and take their property" argument.
Your "outdated business model" argument is really a red herring to justify piracy so that you feel better about the ethical nature of your activities.
No, sorry- I'm FOR paying the artist and creating a better model to do so. It's really against the unethical nature of the RIAA's business model- charging money for something that can be done for free, that is, the copying and distribution of music.
The rest of your rant fails to take this into account, so I'm not even going to dignify it with an answer. But someday soon you're going to have to face it when a petabyte hard drive, a fast processor, a desktop fabricator, and a bunch of grass clippings will allow you to copy a steak dinner as easily as we copy a spreadsheet today. After all, it's just the ARRANGEMENT of the carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen that makes it a steak and not grass clippings. If you can scan the steak, and rearrange the atoms, you can make as many steaks as you have grass clippings.
The "outdated business model" response is just as tired and irrelevant as the perennial favorite, "free advertising." Neither has anything to do with the actual topic--the RIAA suing people who are infringing on its members' rights by distributing artistic works so that people don't get paid for them.
Uh, no. See other posts where I put forth a different business model that doesn't include advertising or copying CDs- which I consider to be low ecconomic value activities. The rest of your rant makes no sense given that- separation of ART from COPYING and making sure the ARTIST gets paid for CREATING NEW ART.
What exactly would you consider a modern business model, online sales?
Separating out from the rest of your rant- a modern business model separates the low economic value stuff out (like making copies of CDs) from the high ecconomic value stuff (writing new songs, live performances) and finds a way to make money on the high ecconomic value stuff while giving away the low ecconomic value stuff for free.
As for your rant about the GPL- well, yes. Agreed. Not a problem for me. I don't care to get paid by the copy or by the license- I want to be paid for my time being creative. Once I've finished writing the software, what do I care what happens to it?
Ok, so up it to $.50- more than 4x what the RIAA pays the artist. Good for society still because it encourages the artist to release more new tracks- in other words, actually do their ART instead of living off of copies of their art.
By your reasoning, money is an obsolete way of keeping track of wealth.
It is. Has been for some time now- ever since the US government decided to try to create one world currency only loosely linked to a commodity instead of strongly linked (the fiat petrodollar). Of course, the final thing that killed it is the number of banks that keep extra dollars around that only exist in cyberspace- there are far more "dollars" out there than can be accounted for by the government printing offices.
After all, if I counterfeit money, I'm not hurting anyone, right?
Given that the government has been counterfieting money since the 1930s, how could you?
People still want music and are willing to pay for it.
Now that is a separate issue. The broken business model is the one of artifical scarcity- the music isn't scarce anymore. NEW recordings are what is scarce. Therefore, I'd propose a whole new business model for the music industry- low bandwidth (8 bit, 22khz, mono) recordings for free, higher quality tracks (16 bit 44khz stereo) for $.25 (double what the bands get now from ASCAP/BMI), and all of the money going to the band. Forget the record labels- and if you want a CD, buy the tracks you want off the band's website and burn it yourself. No DRM or copyrights. This encourages the bands to continue to put out new stuff- as high quality bitrate recordings will get out into the wild on the filesharing networks, the sales will drop off for older tracks,so to keep making money bands will have to put out new stuff.
Copying it because it's easy is no more ethical than counterfeiting money.
Wrong end of the stick. Copying it because it's easy means that the copying itself has very low real ecconomic value- it's the creation that should have high ecconomic value. The RIAA is in an obsolete business model, because their business model depends upon getting money from COPYING other people's work. They need badly to become extinct as the buggy whip makers. The artists are who deserve the money, not the RIAA.
Most of the legal methods also depend upon the idea of artificial scarcity though- in this case scarece bandwidth. I'm surprised there hasn't been a group of artists yet to band together to form a new music licensing website and group that licenses digital recordings at $.25/track- double what ASCAP/BMI offers artists while still underselling ITunes.
Scare tactics. FUD. Call it what you will, but they hope to accomplish punishing/cowering a generation of kids so that they can continue their outdated business model.
I'd have to say, most of the best techies I've ever met ARE total introverts- their people skills are extremely limited, perhaps even to the level of text interfaces such as e-mail and IMs. I had to do a good deal of work on my people skills to survive my layoff- and even then, I'm still not great. Mediocre at best. It takes a special kind of brain to think in binary or in code at the level I work at; and that kind of brain is NOT compatible with having good people skills. Aside from that, though- yes, government is the way to go. Everything I hate about private industry is utterly the reverse in government service. If you can handle getting the long term contracts in government, then that is certainly one way to go- but if you've got my person skills, then the contracts are only to show your skills enough so that when a permanent civil service position opens up, you can step right in. That was my escape from the feast-and-famine of contracting and VDSE jobs. And the government has GREAT benefits. Maybe someday- when the stability exists in private industry- I'll go back; but it'll take unions and REALLY long term contracts to lure me back. Promises of short term high profit that never pan out because the company goes bankrupt out from under me are no longer the lure they once were.
You might resent it, but life ain't fair. You got dealt a hand that makes it harder and might require you to give up stuff, but then again, you also chose a lifestyle (parenting) that is a well-known resource drain. The "American Dream" is a marketing gimmick, not an inalienable right.
To be exact, it's a marketing gimick used to get people to buy into standard American society- and provide kids to continue that society. Little kids are told from age 1 that the "norm" is to work hard in school so that they can earn enough to achieve home ownership and parenthood. It's not THAT unreasonable to expect the other half of the equation to be there- but it's become unreasonable as of late. The fact that it has become unreasonable is a sign of the long term unsustainability of the whole concept of "tech jobs replacing manufacturing jobs"- which did provide enough security to achieve home ownership and parenthood. And to some extent, since we've hitched the stability of the United States to this horse- the end of the democratic experiment and the middle class.
For some, those are only "slight chances".
For others with more responsibility, the chance of having a customer not pay can be ruinous- far bigger risk than they are willing to take with the lives of themselves and their family.
And for still others, of course- well, technical ability and sales/people skills never have been common in the same brain. Some will never have enough customers to make it through the lean times.
Those who left the tech sector entirely during this drought fit into one of those two categories. If you can't handle the risk of getting laid off, an S-corp doesn't help much either- you never know when you'll be undercut by one of the bigger guys on your fees.
What I'm trying to point out is that the stability of the industry simply isn't compatible with living the clasic "American Dream". If you're willing to give up on that, live lean enough to run your own S-Corp, and have the people skills to do so- well, you ALSO then have the people skills and ability to take pay cuts to stay employed when ever other job around you is getting outsourced or eliminated. If you don't have the ability to live lean and/or don't have the people skills, then you might be the absolute best coder in the world- but you'll still be better off driving trucks because quality doesn't count.
Careful! If you don't time this to the cycle correctly, you'll find yourself 3 cycles from now still flipping burgers trying to pay off the loans from a PhD degree....
It still has- you don't see any 30 year unionized contracts out there to lure back the guys who said fuck tech, I'm going for something stable, do you? We've lost all of the good coders with experience and replaced them with a bunch of 20 somethings whose only other option is flipping burgers. No good wages.
They're just desperate enough to pay anything to anyone.
I've yet to see a 30 year unionized contract for IT work- but the bank expects one for me to buy a house. When coders get the same respect that banks do in this economy, THEN you will be able to say that the industry is desparate enough to pay anything to anyone. Until then, it's just more "we don't want to pay what it will REALLY cost to get the workers we need".
Offer STABILITY- and a guaranteed unionized 30 year income with health benefits that will never go down and never have any fake "layoffs" to boost the stock price- and you'll lure good coders back to the industry.
Until then, the good coders are correct to assess that their talents are better used truck driving or flipping burgers during the day and volunteering on open source projects at night. The industry has done this to themselves- by proving that men are no more than resources to be thrown out when the going gets tough, nobody's ever going to trust them to provide REAL jobs ever again.
Then rent, it won't kill you to not "own" a house in your early 20s. If you're really desperate do what my parents did back in the "old country" and move back with your parents (yes they did this after getting married, the US has fucked up social values imho).
I'm in my 30s, I had a kid, and he's got CP. I need a steady job more than I need to be working in tech alone these days, and I resent the idea that we need to give up on the standard American Dream to do so. Oh yeah- and I was 28 before I bought that house (actually signed just after my birthday).
Having said that, you're right of course- those who rent, who are able to live at a very low standard of living, and are able to jump not only cities but countries at the whim of the customers have a HUGE advantage in an industry like this. But that's not what I spent 6 years in college for.
At the very least, there's always a demand for Windows VDSR- Virus Detection and Spyware Removal. I find it earns about $75/incident, or $150/incident if you want to compete with Geek Squad. :-) But that won't pay a mortgage...