Well, in general this guy sounds intelligent and obviously knows a lot about politics, but I noticed some amusing things in his post... for starters, it really begins with an antagonistic tone, that the average person is an idiot and quick to conclude bad things about politics, that politicians are all being bought and sold. Yet in the very next couple of paragraphs he blatantly admits that groups and corporations donate money to try to get their perspectives heard. Maybe the clue this guy needs is: most people are not a member of a group or a corpoation. They feel they AREN'T being represtented, and a politician saying they're just looking out for their constituents... well, ask most constituents and they'll say the politicians are listening to money. So, there's an obvious disconnect here and frankly, his tone is proof of it.
Second I'd say, it's really sad to hear his tale about interns getting paid next to nothing, and working on the hill, still getting paid next to nothing. Where is all this money, that's being donated by the corporations and groups, going? Right into the pockets of Mr. Representative? I just find it ridiculous that a lobbyist who in the first paragraphs, DEFENDS the politicians, and then later on, admits that starting out working on the hill, you get paid jack and his wife had to go back to school!
All in all, an interesting post and I don't think I'm alone in saying there's a real disconnect between public and government, perhaps explaining many of the problems on both sides of the fence.
Okay, so in v2 there's supposed to be one physical copy for every digital one. I wonder how this would work in practice, in the sense that the most popular songs would invetably run into problems with being not available, and the less popular songs having too many cds required to purchase for too few plays. So the company would have to spend a huge amount of money keeping the most popular songs in stock, and waste money keeping less popular songs around just to satisfy the eclectic folks... which sounds like... record store. As soon as you get into record store type inventory a lot of the advantages of digital media go away. I think at the rate Cringley is going, he'll realize the best way for this to work is to do what NetFlix is already doing, except with cds. That way you have physical media, you have borrowing that's limited to one user per cd, and hey... if anybody's ripping those cds thats the customers problem not the company.
I think you're overestimating the merit of Salon, which is underestandable. Well, I hate to break it to you, but if Salon didn't exist, I'm quite sure there would be no lack of interesting articles that get posted here on Slashdot from OTHER sources, most likely, free ones. A link to your story from slashdot, if anything, is a vote that you have something interesting today but in no way is a vote for your "survival". In fact I'd be willing to bet money that in a fey years salon will no longer exist but Slashdot will. I make that bet every day by giving Slashdot a TON of hits and Salon not a one, let alone a subscription for you, a click on your ad, or a purchase of your stock.
Well, I don't have much respect for Salon... just another arrogant.com, that I wouldn't care one whit for if / when it goes under. I applaud people posting articles from there because I don't visit the site, and wouldn't read the articles otherwise...
I wonder about the effectivity of Spam because I just chuck it all. I can't remember a single time I clicked on a spam email. Nobody I know gets any spam that's worthwhile in any regard.
I just read James Cramer's bio and he talks about how TheStreet.com did a bulk mailing that they paid $500,000 for it. End result? 5 subscribers. $100,000 per subscriber. That's a terrible conversion rate for junk mail. Now I know that was junk mail, not spam email, but I simply can't imagine the rates being all that much better for Spam.
I'd say one way to fight spam is have a "do not spam" registry... like what's being done with telemarketers.
And I mean that literally. When Windows first came out it was a piece of crap. But they have so much money that they can afford for a technology to do terribly for years until a market is built up, the technology gets better (like to version 3), and all the competitors burn through cash and fall by the wayside.
We laugh at stuff like Tablet PC, Microsoft Reader, XBox or WebTV, but look at some of the "sucesses" of Microsoft and you can realize they had several years of an early period where they sucked, too. Namely, Windows, Pocket PC, Internet Explorer. Just a few years ago, it was thought a foregone conclusion Netscape and Palm owned the market and Microsoft lost.
Here's my tip for you: it's really important you learn how to work efficiently in college, because when you graduate, life will only get harder. Exponentially harder.
It's not the difficulty of the work that makes life outside of school hard. It's the time management. First off, in school, all you really have to worry about is studying and good grades. In the real world, you have to get a job, make rent, pay bills monthly (not just once a semester when your tuition is due, worry about your credit, where your next meal is coming from.
And that's just you. Add on, getting a girlfriend, making sure your apt. is condusive to a relationship, then you get married, have kids, your expenses double, triple, quadruple.
Then add on worrying about not only yourself, but your family, your career, your retirement, etc.
I'll just say this. When you're trying to juggle ten things at once, maybe that will be enough motivation for you to get your work done. I look at it this way: If I don't do the work that needs to be done during the time allocated, I'm fucked. Because then I'll be worrying about it all evening when I'm doing everything else I'm supposed to be doing. And there simply isn't enough time int he day to everything. And you'd be surprised how quickly life catches up to you. For most people, to have eight hours to concentrate on ONE assigment is a freaking luxury! That's a goddamned vacation.
So, I say to you, enjoy your time while you're in school, and figure out how to work efficiently and quickly, and multitask. Because, when you get out of school, that skill will be invaluable, and life sure as hell doesn't get any easier when you graduate. In my (and I would say most Americans' experience) it only gets harder. You'll know that when you have a 2 year old to feed at 2 am, an impending layoff at work, and your car just broke down... etc.
For example, here in the US, there are differences in income and cost of living even between states, yet not many people are so into moving to South Dakota, even though the cost of living is way cheaper. If it were simply a matter of cost of living being attractive, the population of states like South Dakota would be exploding, but they're not.
One big reason for this I think is mobility. Once you choose to move to a cheaper area and earn less, you better be set on living there for a good long time, because you'll likely never be able to save up enough money to relocate to a more expensive area. You're basically limiting yourself. A person who earns a crapload in America can literally pick and choose any nation to relocate to. But someone who's "doing quite well" in India will have a harder time relocating anywhere, unless said contry has an even lower cost of living than theirs.
Earning power is where it's at, not cheap cost of living. By and large we still see thousands of immigrants from less affluent nations sneaking across the border to earn more money here, and send it back home! And conversely, we see retireees (who don't care about mobility anymore) from US moving to cheaper countries like Mexico (or, to the country like South Dakota) to live out the rest of their lives cheaply.
But for us working stiffs, I think we inevitably look for the highest wages wherever they are.
Let me just say that, as far as my experience was concerned, telecommuting wasn't that great. I was offered to telecommute one day out of the week, and after a couple weeks of that, I actually found myself going into the office on my telecommute days... to sum up:
1. Technical issues. The VPN was butt slow. Even over DSL the whole process of logging in and getting simple stuff to happen was a pain in the ass. They gave me a laptop that was nowhere near as fast as my work computer, plus, because of the VPN and paranoia, I had to do all work on the laptop, not my home box. Then, some days I couldn't log in for hours. I would actually prefer working on the work box since everything would get done twice as fast.
Totally distracting. Had the TV going, music playing, couldn't resist the urge to do household chores, etc. I'm honest when I say my productivity was likely reduced by 25% just from stupid distractions and the basic "hey, the boss ain't here, I'll post on slashdot again..." etc.
Lonely. I was surprised, but it sucked not being around other co-workers, even just for one day. If you want a quick answer on something you can't just walk to their cube. Have to call them up, inevitably leave a voice mail, or email, etc. The back and forth probably wasted an hour every day I telecommuted.
Team gets fragmented. Our telecomute schedule was like a rotation, so every day of the week one or two people would be out of the office. It made it harder to schedule meetings, also, I seriously think workflow would be slowed, because someone would be "working from home" and people would figure, well, I'll just ask this question tomorrow when I can speak to them face to face (procrastination).
So, on the surface telecommuting sounds like a sweet deal, but I found it problematic. And if I were to take a pay cut for telecommuting? No way. I'd go to the office anyday. Your mileage may vary but I urge anyone to actually TRY telecommuting for a while before assuming "working from home" is such a holy grail.
For example, you go to old navy and buy a ten dollar t-shirt that was sewn up in China. I can vouch for the fact that the quality is crappy and this shirt will get a hole, tear, break within a year or two. But who cares? It was ten bucks, and these things still sell like hotcakes. Heck they are so cheap when the shirt tears, you throw it in the trash and buy another one, and you're still spending less money than if you bought some cashmere T-shirt from Versace.
You may think this comparison is apples and oranges, and I kinda do to, but I bet the CEOs and execs outsoursing the tech jobs don't.
Telecommuting from my experience, is when one employee basically works from home. Outsourcing is quite different, in the sense that US countries are not hiring a bunch of individual Indians to work at their homes remotely. They have their own offices in India, employees commute to work just like everyone else, and there's surely a management team there overseeing the office.
So to make the original analogy more appropriate, commpare this to when Intel has a sattellite office in another state. Now, instead of Oregon, the satellite office is overseas. And it has everything to do with money.
Recently read a book saying that any sort of repair-related career does fine during a recession. Reason should be obvious: people can't afford to buy a "new" whatever, or are scared to put out that kind of money, so they spend money keeping up to speed whatever they already have.
Also, think about the huge demographic of baby-boomers retiring or about to retire. All those parents, grandmas and grandpas about to have a huge chunk of free time on their hands. Maybe they're not so mobile anymore and hanging out at home a great deat. Most likely they're going to be buying a computer and getting on-line, for email, to do their amateur photography, etc. A huge target market. Plus they may be sitting on a nice pile of retirement money.
So I'd propose starting a up a consultant type business where you repair people's computers, do tech support, maybe even help people pick out computers to purchase, and target older retirees. Focus on house calls, and of course, super friendly customer support (say "yes sir, no ma'am"). Oldsters eat that stuff up.
Just as long as I'm the boss and you do all the house calls...
It seems to me, apathetic people like you are a dime a dozen. I'm hardly saying the world is ending. Maybe you're just too young to remember how much better things were going only a decade ago, or maybe you're just too old and jaded to give a hoot anymore. Either way, I'm sure if you look at recent polls, there's a great number of people who think this country is going in the wrong direction, be it the economy, who's in office... otherwise why the hell is the governor of california getting his hat handed to him? It just shocks me to think people just don't give a crap anymore, to the point they don't even see any point in doing anything.
You seem to think I'm a pessimist, wondering why people aren't more active, when I think your view of life is even more fatalistic. Basically, the world is screwed up, it always will be, why bother doing anything with any purpose or conviction?
I just think right now, we're living in a really pivotal time. There's a lot of turmoil going on and things very well will get worse before they get better unless people get off their bums and wake up to the stuff that's going down. People these days just seem so uninterested in politics, apathetic about their fate, obvlivious to the fact corporations are reaming us up the ass on a daily basis.
The ability to organize over the web spontaneously is a great, great thing. Maybe these folks can think of some ways this activity can be used to improve things. That's all I wonder about.
After the economy turns around, everyone can go back to bar hopping, song singing and screen saver watching... okay... ?
There are plenty of things worth protesting these days. Besides the war in Iraq, what about globalization, outsourcing, mass layoffs, health care, the states' budget deficit, the federal budget deficit, the disparity between rich and poor, the "walmartization" of america, the obesity epidemic, heck, the crappy Matrix sequel, the scourge of reality television, etc. etc. etc.
I'm just thinking, people who have nothing better to do than organize and stand around and admit theres no point? That's just embarassing. Do none of these people believe in anything that might be worth gathering for? Do they have nothing going on in their lives that they'd get together with a bunch of random strangers and do nothing? This country is totally going down the crapper, when there's all this ridiculous, unfair, unjust stuff going on and people are organizing these pointless stand ins.
No, execs do set up pointless gatherings, but they're called "off-site strategy meetings" and usually involve Vegas, bar tabs and strip clubs. Hardly the same thing as these flash mobs.
Well, for starters, when people rent a movie, they only want to watch it once and return it. They sit and watch it all the way through, get the full experience, and usually don't feel the need to experience it again, ever. With music, people tend to experience it non-lineraly. They listen to a song or two, turn it off, turn it on days later, listen to one fave song over and over, etc. I can't name many people that go home with their new cd, sit in a chair in front of the stereo and listen to the whole thing in one sitting, and then don't feel the need to listen to it. Hence, I don't think people would be into renting CDs to experience like how they experience movies. People tend to want to own their music so they can listen to it in various environments, at different times, etc. This is why cd rental businesses, imho, haven't happened in the past.
but now that we can copy cds easily, I actually think a CD rental service would do quite well...
Why not just copy the netflix model but have it be for CDs. Charge something like 10 bucks a month subscription. Of course it's a fair bet people, once they get their cd mailed to them, *might* be ripping 'em, but hey that's the customers deal not the company.
am I breaking the law when I borrow a cd from the library, rip it to my computer and then return the cd?
If so, my bad, I better stop doing that right away (wink).
While on the surface it seems amusing enough there's some things I don't totally get, maybe someone else can explain where I'm wrong...
First off, owning company stock is not necesarially the same thing as wanting to own the company's product. I might want to own the product but not take on any of the risk of owningthe stock. Likewise, there are plenty of companies I'd own the stock for only for the point of making money, not because I want to personally want to use their products (stock in a pharmecutical company comes to mind)
related to this is the idea that there will be tons of people who want to own tons of stock for the point of being rich, namely the insiders or the investment bankers that want to make money off the IPO. Typically a large amount of shares of any company is held by institutions, not individuals. This idea sounds like he wants stock to be held by all the customers which totally goes against the way investments are usually held. I don't think the institutions would like this idea one bit.
Then, what happens to people who own shares of the stock via a mutual fund? People who own the stock that don't even know about the service? Or people who want to download the music but don't have any means of getting shares of stock because they can't open a brokerage for whatever reason (bad credit)?
Lastly, what happens at the shareholder meeting?
Maybe I just don't get this idea, but to sum up, the product / service a company provides is (and should be) totally separate from its stock.
My mp3 collection is proudly offline. Never got into the Kazaa thing. However, pretty much everyone I know who has a CD collection, I've been ripping and adding to mine. So, instead of sharing stuff online, I suggest everyone start sharing with people you know off-line. Meaning, bring your HD over to their house, copy the contents, merge your collections. I don't see any way the RIAA will be able to stop THIS kind of sharing, unless they start busting down people's doors and seizing your HD because they saw you carrying a HD into someone else's home... if they start doing that, then we've got much bigger problems to worry about...
Management... well, those jobs won't be outsourced because it's the managers who are making the decisions to do all the outsourcing / layoffs. Hell if they are going to move their own jobs to India. Instead, they'll just slap each other on the backs saying "Great idea to outsource! It'll save us money!" while giving themselves a hefty bonus.
Ah, yeah, but just ask someone in upper management why their jobs are safe and they'll give you some BS about "meeting face to face with people" and "understanding the market"... yeah.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, in general this guy sounds intelligent and obviously knows a lot about politics, but I noticed some amusing things in his post ... for starters, it really begins with an antagonistic tone, that the average person is an idiot and quick to conclude bad things about politics, that politicians are all being bought and sold. Yet in the very next couple of paragraphs he blatantly admits that groups and corporations donate money to try to get their perspectives heard. Maybe the clue this guy needs is: most people are not a member of a group or a corpoation. They feel they AREN'T being represtented, and a politician saying they're just looking out for their constituents... well, ask most constituents and they'll say the politicians are listening to money. So, there's an obvious disconnect here and frankly, his tone is proof of it.
Second I'd say, it's really sad to hear his tale about interns getting paid next to nothing, and working on the hill, still getting paid next to nothing. Where is all this money, that's being donated by the corporations and groups, going? Right into the pockets of Mr. Representative? I just find it ridiculous that a lobbyist who in the first paragraphs, DEFENDS the politicians, and then later on, admits that starting out working on the hill, you get paid jack and his wife had to go back to school!
All in all, an interesting post and I don't think I'm alone in saying there's a real disconnect between public and government, perhaps explaining many of the problems on both sides of the fence.
Okay, so in v2 there's supposed to be one physical copy for every digital one. I wonder how this would work in practice, in the sense that the most popular songs would invetably run into problems with being not available, and the less popular songs having too many cds required to purchase for too few plays. So the company would have to spend a huge amount of money keeping the most popular songs in stock, and waste money keeping less popular songs around just to satisfy the eclectic folks ... which sounds like ... record store. As soon as you get into record store type inventory a lot of the advantages of digital media go away. I think at the rate Cringley is going, he'll realize the best way for this to work is to do what NetFlix is already doing, except with cds. That way you have physical media, you have borrowing that's limited to one user per cd, and hey ... if anybody's ripping those cds thats the customers problem not the company.
I think you're overestimating the merit of Salon, which is underestandable. Well, I hate to break it to you, but if Salon didn't exist, I'm quite sure there would be no lack of interesting articles that get posted here on Slashdot from OTHER sources, most likely, free ones. A link to your story from slashdot, if anything, is a vote that you have something interesting today but in no way is a vote for your "survival". In fact I'd be willing to bet money that in a fey years salon will no longer exist but Slashdot will. I make that bet every day by giving Slashdot a TON of hits and Salon not a one, let alone a subscription for you, a click on your ad, or a purchase of your stock.
Well, I don't have much respect for Salon ... just another arrogant .com, that I wouldn't care one whit for if / when it goes under. I applaud people posting articles from there because I don't visit the site, and wouldn't read the articles otherwise...
I wonder about the effectivity of Spam because I just chuck it all. I can't remember a single time I clicked on a spam email. Nobody I know gets any spam that's worthwhile in any regard.
I just read James Cramer's bio and he talks about how TheStreet.com did a bulk mailing that they paid $500,000 for it. End result? 5 subscribers. $100,000 per subscriber. That's a terrible conversion rate for junk mail. Now I know that was junk mail, not spam email, but I simply can't imagine the rates being all that much better for Spam.
I'd say one way to fight spam is have a "do not spam" registry ... like what's being done with telemarketers.
And I mean that literally. When Windows first came out it was a piece of crap. But they have so much money that they can afford for a technology to do terribly for years until a market is built up, the technology gets better (like to version 3), and all the competitors burn through cash and fall by the wayside.
We laugh at stuff like Tablet PC, Microsoft Reader, XBox or WebTV, but look at some of the "sucesses" of Microsoft and you can realize they had several years of an early period where they sucked, too. Namely, Windows, Pocket PC, Internet Explorer. Just a few years ago, it was thought a foregone conclusion Netscape and Palm owned the market and Microsoft lost.
Here's my tip for you: it's really important you learn how to work efficiently in college, because when you graduate, life will only get harder. Exponentially harder.
It's not the difficulty of the work that makes life outside of school hard. It's the time management. First off, in school, all you really have to worry about is studying and good grades. In the real world, you have to get a job, make rent, pay bills monthly (not just once a semester when your tuition is due, worry about your credit, where your next meal is coming from.
And that's just you. Add on, getting a girlfriend, making sure your apt. is condusive to a relationship, then you get married, have kids, your expenses double, triple, quadruple.
Then add on worrying about not only yourself, but your family, your career, your retirement, etc.
I'll just say this. When you're trying to juggle ten things at once, maybe that will be enough motivation for you to get your work done. I look at it this way: If I don't do the work that needs to be done during the time allocated, I'm fucked. Because then I'll be worrying about it all evening when I'm doing everything else I'm supposed to be doing. And there simply isn't enough time int he day to everything. And you'd be surprised how quickly life catches up to you. For most people, to have eight hours to concentrate on ONE assigment is a freaking luxury! That's a goddamned vacation.
So, I say to you, enjoy your time while you're in school, and figure out how to work efficiently and quickly, and multitask. Because, when you get out of school, that skill will be invaluable, and life sure as hell doesn't get any easier when you graduate. In my (and I would say most Americans' experience) it only gets harder. You'll know that when you have a 2 year old to feed at 2 am, an impending layoff at work, and your car just broke down ... etc.
For example, here in the US, there are differences in income and cost of living even between states, yet not many people are so into moving to South Dakota, even though the cost of living is way cheaper. If it were simply a matter of cost of living being attractive, the population of states like South Dakota would be exploding, but they're not.
One big reason for this I think is mobility. Once you choose to move to a cheaper area and earn less, you better be set on living there for a good long time, because you'll likely never be able to save up enough money to relocate to a more expensive area. You're basically limiting yourself. A person who earns a crapload in America can literally pick and choose any nation to relocate to. But someone who's "doing quite well" in India will have a harder time relocating anywhere, unless said contry has an even lower cost of living than theirs.
Earning power is where it's at, not cheap cost of living. By and large we still see thousands of immigrants from less affluent nations sneaking across the border to earn more money here, and send it back home! And conversely, we see retireees (who don't care about mobility anymore) from US moving to cheaper countries like Mexico (or, to the country like South Dakota) to live out the rest of their lives cheaply.
But for us working stiffs, I think we inevitably look for the highest wages wherever they are.
Let me just say that, as far as my experience was concerned, telecommuting wasn't that great. I was offered to telecommute one day out of the week, and after a couple weeks of that, I actually found myself going into the office on my telecommute days... to sum up:
1. Technical issues. The VPN was butt slow. Even over DSL the whole process of logging in and getting simple stuff to happen was a pain in the ass. They gave me a laptop that was nowhere near as fast as my work computer, plus, because of the VPN and paranoia, I had to do all work on the laptop, not my home box. Then, some days I couldn't log in for hours. I would actually prefer working on the work box since everything would get done twice as fast.
Totally distracting. Had the TV going, music playing, couldn't resist the urge to do household chores, etc. I'm honest when I say my productivity was likely reduced by 25% just from stupid distractions and the basic "hey, the boss ain't here, I'll post on slashdot again..." etc.
Lonely. I was surprised, but it sucked not being around other co-workers, even just for one day. If you want a quick answer on something you can't just walk to their cube. Have to call them up, inevitably leave a voice mail, or email, etc. The back and forth probably wasted an hour every day I telecommuted.
Team gets fragmented. Our telecomute schedule was like a rotation, so every day of the week one or two people would be out of the office. It made it harder to schedule meetings, also, I seriously think workflow would be slowed, because someone would be "working from home" and people would figure, well, I'll just ask this question tomorrow when I can speak to them face to face (procrastination).
So, on the surface telecommuting sounds like a sweet deal, but I found it problematic. And if I were to take a pay cut for telecommuting? No way. I'd go to the office anyday. Your mileage may vary but I urge anyone to actually TRY telecommuting for a while before assuming "working from home" is such a holy grail.
For example, you go to old navy and buy a ten dollar t-shirt that was sewn up in China. I can vouch for the fact that the quality is crappy and this shirt will get a hole, tear, break within a year or two. But who cares? It was ten bucks, and these things still sell like hotcakes. Heck they are so cheap when the shirt tears, you throw it in the trash and buy another one, and you're still spending less money than if you bought some cashmere T-shirt from Versace.
You may think this comparison is apples and oranges, and I kinda do to, but I bet the CEOs and execs outsoursing the tech jobs don't.
Telecommuting from my experience, is when one employee basically works from home. Outsourcing is quite different, in the sense that US countries are not hiring a bunch of individual Indians to work at their homes remotely. They have their own offices in India, employees commute to work just like everyone else, and there's surely a management team there overseeing the office.
So to make the original analogy more appropriate, commpare this to when Intel has a sattellite office in another state. Now, instead of Oregon, the satellite office is overseas. And it has everything to do with money.
Recently read a book saying that any sort of repair-related career does fine during a recession. Reason should be obvious: people can't afford to buy a "new" whatever, or are scared to put out that kind of money, so they spend money keeping up to speed whatever they already have.
Also, think about the huge demographic of baby-boomers retiring or about to retire. All those parents, grandmas and grandpas about to have a huge chunk of free time on their hands. Maybe they're not so mobile anymore and hanging out at home a great deat. Most likely they're going to be buying a computer and getting on-line, for email, to do their amateur photography, etc. A huge target market. Plus they may be sitting on a nice pile of retirement money.
So I'd propose starting a up a consultant type business where you repair people's computers, do tech support, maybe even help people pick out computers to purchase, and target older retirees. Focus on house calls, and of course, super friendly customer support (say "yes sir, no ma'am"). Oldsters eat that stuff up.
Just as long as I'm the boss and you do all the house calls...
It seems to me, apathetic people like you are a dime a dozen. I'm hardly saying the world is ending. Maybe you're just too young to remember how much better things were going only a decade ago, or maybe you're just too old and jaded to give a hoot anymore. Either way, I'm sure if you look at recent polls, there's a great number of people who think this country is going in the wrong direction, be it the economy, who's in office ... otherwise why the hell is the governor of california getting his hat handed to him? It just shocks me to think people just don't give a crap anymore, to the point they don't even see any point in doing anything.
You seem to think I'm a pessimist, wondering why people aren't more active, when I think your view of life is even more fatalistic. Basically, the world is screwed up, it always will be, why bother doing anything with any purpose or conviction?
I repeat, argh.
I just think right now, we're living in a really pivotal time. There's a lot of turmoil going on and things very well will get worse before they get better unless people get off their bums and wake up to the stuff that's going down. People these days just seem so uninterested in politics, apathetic about their fate, obvlivious to the fact corporations are reaming us up the ass on a daily basis.
The ability to organize over the web spontaneously is a great, great thing. Maybe these folks can think of some ways this activity can be used to improve things. That's all I wonder about.
After the economy turns around, everyone can go back to bar hopping, song singing and screen saver watching ... okay ... ?
Now that I'd like to see. Use your flash mob powers for good, people....
There are plenty of things worth protesting these days. Besides the war in Iraq, what about globalization, outsourcing, mass layoffs, health care, the states' budget deficit, the federal budget deficit, the disparity between rich and poor, the "walmartization" of america, the obesity epidemic, heck, the crappy Matrix sequel, the scourge of reality television, etc. etc. etc.
I'm just thinking, people who have nothing better to do than organize and stand around and admit theres no point? That's just embarassing. Do none of these people believe in anything that might be worth gathering for? Do they have nothing going on in their lives that they'd get together with a bunch of random strangers and do nothing? This country is totally going down the crapper, when there's all this ridiculous, unfair, unjust stuff going on and people are organizing these pointless stand ins.
argh.
No, execs do set up pointless gatherings, but they're called "off-site strategy meetings" and usually involve Vegas, bar tabs and strip clubs. Hardly the same thing as these flash mobs.
Well, for starters, when people rent a movie, they only want to watch it once and return it. They sit and watch it all the way through, get the full experience, and usually don't feel the need to experience it again, ever. With music, people tend to experience it non-lineraly. They listen to a song or two, turn it off, turn it on days later, listen to one fave song over and over, etc. I can't name many people that go home with their new cd, sit in a chair in front of the stereo and listen to the whole thing in one sitting, and then don't feel the need to listen to it. Hence, I don't think people would be into renting CDs to experience like how they experience movies. People tend to want to own their music so they can listen to it in various environments, at different times, etc. This is why cd rental businesses, imho, haven't happened in the past.
but now that we can copy cds easily, I actually think a CD rental service would do quite well...
... a lot of these people, especially the ones organizing on the web, are recently laid off techies, with copious amounts of free time on their hands.
I have an mp3 collection, not an audiophile collection. This is pop music we're talking about ...
Why not just copy the netflix model but have it be for CDs. Charge something like 10 bucks a month subscription. Of course it's a fair bet people, once they get their cd mailed to them, *might* be ripping 'em, but hey that's the customers deal not the company.
I'd sign up for this.
am I breaking the law when I borrow a cd from the library, rip it to my computer and then return the cd? If so, my bad, I better stop doing that right away (wink).
While on the surface it seems amusing enough there's some things I don't totally get, maybe someone else can explain where I'm wrong...
First off, owning company stock is not necesarially the same thing as wanting to own the company's product. I might want to own the product but not take on any of the risk of owningthe stock. Likewise, there are plenty of companies I'd own the stock for only for the point of making money, not because I want to personally want to use their products (stock in a pharmecutical company comes to mind)
related to this is the idea that there will be tons of people who want to own tons of stock for the point of being rich, namely the insiders or the investment bankers that want to make money off the IPO. Typically a large amount of shares of any company is held by institutions, not individuals. This idea sounds like he wants stock to be held by all the customers which totally goes against the way investments are usually held. I don't think the institutions would like this idea one bit.
Then, what happens to people who own shares of the stock via a mutual fund? People who own the stock that don't even know about the service? Or people who want to download the music but don't have any means of getting shares of stock because they can't open a brokerage for whatever reason (bad credit)?
Lastly, what happens at the shareholder meeting?
Maybe I just don't get this idea, but to sum up, the product / service a company provides is (and should be) totally separate from its stock.
My mp3 collection is proudly offline. Never got into the Kazaa thing. However, pretty much everyone I know who has a CD collection, I've been ripping and adding to mine. So, instead of sharing stuff online, I suggest everyone start sharing with people you know off-line. Meaning, bring your HD over to their house, copy the contents, merge your collections. I don't see any way the RIAA will be able to stop THIS kind of sharing, unless they start busting down people's doors and seizing your HD because they saw you carrying a HD into someone else's home ... if they start doing that, then we've got much bigger problems to worry about ...
Management ... well, those jobs won't be outsourced because it's the managers who are making the decisions to do all the outsourcing / layoffs. Hell if they are going to move their own jobs to India. Instead, they'll just slap each other on the backs saying "Great idea to outsource! It'll save us money!" while giving themselves a hefty bonus.
Ah, yeah, but just ask someone in upper management why their jobs are safe and they'll give you some BS about "meeting face to face with people" and "understanding the market" ... yeah.