Let's extend your example a bit. Let's say that Dropbox develops an unnatural power over hard drive manufacturers and demands lower and lower prices to the point where no one could afford to make hard drives for their service anymore. Everything seems to work fine for a while, but eventually hardware failures occur without backup hardware for recovery and you lose whatever data you had stored with them. Would you care then?
The original statement is flawed. Sure, some people prefer the new UI, but they are statistically a minority. It's not a good idea to grow/develop a brand in a way that *shrinks* your user-base. If they were aiming for the uber-rich, that's one thing, but I get the feeling that they were aiming for mass appeal.
In the "Capitalism makes everything better"-model, there is nothing that could be lower cost than the multiple choice tests. It's not about creating a metric that's better for students. It's about creating a metric that's cheaper to produce and execute.
There's actually no transparency to what the costs of publication actually are. I've accumulated some anecdotal evidence that many peer-reviewers are often volunteers that work for free. I have no doubt that the majority of the cost of this publication is absorbed by the PI and his institution.
a. If the freeloaders leave, a contributing member of society will replace them locally.
b. A valid point, but this is just restating the original problem. The solution requires these people to be replaced.
c. Tax cheats are a minority. With extra resources, the IRS could hire investigators and justice department could hire more prosecutors to curb this problem.
It's not as though this is a new problem, wealth concentrated in few hands. It can be solved the same way it was in the past. Increase the income tax at the highest levels to 75% for incomes over $1 million and use the revenue gains for public works projects. Make University level education free. Invest in research like the human genome project. Rebuild all the countries bridges and highways. Demolish ruined buildings and create public parks. The money is there and the manpower is here.
It's not revisionist history if there are primary sources and first hand accounts stating the pro-corporate anti-fact checking was the goal of Fox News founder Roger Ailes. It's not an accident that the average Fox News fan is less informed than people that don't watch any news at all, it is on purpose.
Fox news may be the worst, but most media outlets have the pro-corporate bias, since that is who owns them and pays the bills.
Re:A natural reaction to Faux News i think
on
The Rise of Hoax News
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Fox News was established to give the Conservative (actually pro-corporate) point of view without fact checking. It's not an accident that this shift started 30 years ago, when the media was deregulated by the Reagan administration. It used to be that TV and radio companies (being totally dependent on the government regulation of their bandwidth via the FCC) would be obligated to provide the news as a public service even if it ran at a loss. It was allowed to become corporatized to turn a profit, at the expense of credibility.
That can be true for the guns themselves, but by providing cheap reliable guns, it opened up the opportunity for limited resources to be diverted from arms into other items such as food, shelter, or education.
Because we colonists have evolved *beyond* grammar. You understood what OP was saying, so he wins. You should join the winning team, and move on with your life.
Do you only eat corn? If not, I think your metrics are incorrect. You can't measure food simply acreage of farms. There are specialty crops that aren't being grown on a large scale that could benefit from free land.
...on 3D printers than guns. The 3D printing industry is still new, and this will compete with the gun manufacturing industry (NRA). In the end, it's all about the money.
You are right that there are other options, but Oracle has enough income that they can undercut all these offerings when they see a potential client using a competitor. If they can sell your product at a loss to cannibalize the competitor's profits, it is functionally a monopoly.
Sorry to reply to my post, but I neglected to mention that the company *could* give out a dividend to investors instead of doing the buybacks, so there is a real penalty to them for having the CEO salary based on stock options only.
With his company in a near monopoly position, he has incentive to funnel company profits into stock buybacks rather than investing in real growth. The options he has will increase in price, and the shares the company buys from the open market can be set aside to replenish his options that he cashes in. This is only a problem for companies that have grown so large they have no real competition to challenge their profits.
In our current system, a third party will only tilt the favor against the mainstream party that is the exact opposite politically. A liberal third party would split the vote with the Democrats and put a Republican in power. The modern tea party has the better successful model. You don't enter the general election, you have to work through an existing party and come up in the primary.
The money goes to the owner of the business who invested in that machine, to the engineers who spent their time designing and building it and to the shareholders in the form of profits. Alternatively this allows a lower cost of product in which case it goes nowhere, except not out of the consumers pocket. This is why in real terms the cost products can fall.
The profit in developing, buying, and maintaining these machines is factored in to the 4 Luddite cost of the machine in this example. Let's also recognize that this remaining Luddite doesn't have the skills of the previous 10, and is probably only being paid at a fraction of the rate.
In order for capitalism to succeed, you do need multiple robot masters to compete in a market to keep prices and profits low. In our current situation, profits are increasing (record high GDP) cost of goods are increasing (inflation). This would show that the market is not functioning correctly because the owners are taking an extra profit are not lowering prices as you argue. Capitalism doesn't work in monopoly conditions which the economic models suggest we are experiencing.
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Let's extend your example a bit. Let's say that Dropbox develops an unnatural power over hard drive manufacturers and demands lower and lower prices to the point where no one could afford to make hard drives for their service anymore. Everything seems to work fine for a while, but eventually hardware failures occur without backup hardware for recovery and you lose whatever data you had stored with them. Would you care then?
The original statement is flawed. Sure, some people prefer the new UI, but they are statistically a minority. It's not a good idea to grow/develop a brand in a way that *shrinks* your user-base. If they were aiming for the uber-rich, that's one thing, but I get the feeling that they were aiming for mass appeal.
In the "Capitalism makes everything better"-model, there is nothing that could be lower cost than the multiple choice tests. It's not about creating a metric that's better for students. It's about creating a metric that's cheaper to produce and execute.
There's actually no transparency to what the costs of publication actually are. I've accumulated some anecdotal evidence that many peer-reviewers are often volunteers that work for free. I have no doubt that the majority of the cost of this publication is absorbed by the PI and his institution.
So the article costs $32 to read. It begs the question, what are they hiding?
a. If the freeloaders leave, a contributing member of society will replace them locally.
b. A valid point, but this is just restating the original problem. The solution requires these people to be replaced.
c. Tax cheats are a minority. With extra resources, the IRS could hire investigators and justice department could hire more prosecutors to curb this problem.
It's not as though this is a new problem, wealth concentrated in few hands. It can be solved the same way it was in the past. Increase the income tax at the highest levels to 75% for incomes over $1 million and use the revenue gains for public works projects. Make University level education free. Invest in research like the human genome project. Rebuild all the countries bridges and highways. Demolish ruined buildings and create public parks. The money is there and the manpower is here.
These freetards are not going to the theaters or buying DVDs or whatever, and therefore it is not a lost sale.
Actually, there is evidence that people that share files buy more than the average public.
It's not revisionist history if there are primary sources and first hand accounts stating the pro-corporate anti-fact checking was the goal of Fox News founder Roger Ailes. It's not an accident that the average Fox News fan is less informed than people that don't watch any news at all, it is on purpose. Fox news may be the worst, but most media outlets have the pro-corporate bias, since that is who owns them and pays the bills.
Fox News was established to give the Conservative (actually pro-corporate) point of view without fact checking. It's not an accident that this shift started 30 years ago, when the media was deregulated by the Reagan administration. It used to be that TV and radio companies (being totally dependent on the government regulation of their bandwidth via the FCC) would be obligated to provide the news as a public service even if it ran at a loss. It was allowed to become corporatized to turn a profit, at the expense of credibility.
That can be true for the guns themselves, but by providing cheap reliable guns, it opened up the opportunity for limited resources to be diverted from arms into other items such as food, shelter, or education.
Because we colonists have evolved *beyond* grammar. You understood what OP was saying, so he wins. You should join the winning team, and move on with your life.
It might be distasteful to think so, but most technological developments are created by and for the war machine.
Do you only eat corn? If not, I think your metrics are incorrect. You can't measure food simply acreage of farms. There are specialty crops that aren't being grown on a large scale that could benefit from free land.
Didn't the War in Iraq start in 2003? How many of these nations were in the coalition of the willing? This could be war weariness.
They may get their funding from members and donations, but their policy and leadership is set by the minority that side with gun manufacturers. Example: most NRA members (75%) support sensible gun control whereas the lobbying arm will score against legislators that propose and vote for them (http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/01/28/strong-majority-of-americans-nra-members-back-gun-control)
...on 3D printers than guns. The 3D printing industry is still new, and this will compete with the gun manufacturing industry (NRA). In the end, it's all about the money.
You are right that there are other options, but Oracle has enough income that they can undercut all these offerings when they see a potential client using a competitor. If they can sell your product at a loss to cannibalize the competitor's profits, it is functionally a monopoly.
Sorry to reply to my post, but I neglected to mention that the company *could* give out a dividend to investors instead of doing the buybacks, so there is a real penalty to them for having the CEO salary based on stock options only.
With his company in a near monopoly position, he has incentive to funnel company profits into stock buybacks rather than investing in real growth. The options he has will increase in price, and the shares the company buys from the open market can be set aside to replenish his options that he cashes in. This is only a problem for companies that have grown so large they have no real competition to challenge their profits.
I hear that school is brutal over there. It's not unheard of for a student that has done poorly on one exam to kill themselves.
It's ok to be ignorant, but you shouldn't be so proud about it to make posts like these.
In our current system, a third party will only tilt the favor against the mainstream party that is the exact opposite politically. A liberal third party would split the vote with the Democrats and put a Republican in power. The modern tea party has the better successful model. You don't enter the general election, you have to work through an existing party and come up in the primary.
The money goes to the owner of the business who invested in that machine, to the engineers who spent their time designing and building it and to the shareholders in the form of profits. Alternatively this allows a lower cost of product in which case it goes nowhere, except not out of the consumers pocket. This is why in real terms the cost products can fall.
The profit in developing, buying, and maintaining these machines is factored in to the 4 Luddite cost of the machine in this example. Let's also recognize that this remaining Luddite doesn't have the skills of the previous 10, and is probably only being paid at a fraction of the rate.
In order for capitalism to succeed, you do need multiple robot masters to compete in a market to keep prices and profits low. In our current situation, profits are increasing (record high GDP) cost of goods are increasing (inflation). This would show that the market is not functioning correctly because the owners are taking an extra profit are not lowering prices as you argue. Capitalism doesn't work in monopoly conditions which the economic models suggest we are experiencing.