Was Myspace a natural monopoly in 2006, when it was the largest social network site in the world and the most visited website?
The network effects just mean that there tends to be one winner at a time, but do not mean one winner over time. The switching costs control that and the cost of switching social networks is trivial, i.e. go to a different website, maybe hit an import button to pull in the old site's contacts.
If faceplant 2.0 came out and was way better than facebook, suddenly facebook would go the way of myspace.
Sure, there is only room for one facebook right now, because why switch if it's just the same thing? LinkedIn exists just fine because it has a different value proposition for people, being designed to be more work focused. If facebook wanted to charge "monopoly" profits and say, hit up all subscribers for even as little as $5/month, suddenly another site which was just the same as the existing facebook would have all the users.
Because costs of software switching for many tasks are low, there is a bandwagon effect for the current most valuable to consumers in any given software space, but that's not a monopoly. If the software maker had any real power to prevent competition from taking away their customers, you might have a point about monopoly, but they don't. Ask Lotus 1-2-3, or Wordperfect, or Internet Explorer, or any of the other software "monopolies" over the years which weren't.
All it takes is a better total value from a competitor for customers and they will switch in a heartbeat. That's not a monopoly sucking extra profits out of people, that's normal competition ensuring customers get the best deal possible at the time. That's also why the current winner gets forced to keep trying to improve what they provide in order to fend off competitors.
Software with network effects tend to settle on one winner at_a_time. This means that winner is currently the best provider to the consumers, not that they're a real monopoly. They only last until someone comes along making consumers a better offer, then poof, they're suddenly no longer a monopoly? The real answer is that they never were a monopoly, just the current winner.
Myspace wasn't a monopoly. Facebook proved that. Wordperfect and Lotus 1-2-3 weren't actually monopolies, MS word and Excel demonstrated that. IE wasn't really a monopoly, etc...
These companies make the best profit they can while staying a better value proposition to customers than their competitors. That's not monopoly profits, that's the way it's supposed to work. As soon as a competitor comes along with a better value for customers, the customers win again and get more for even less. There is nothing stopping everyone in the world from switching from MS office to Open Office except customer preference which states they prefer what they currently get with MS Office over Open Office, $ cost included (although obviously a few people disagree). Hence, no monopoly exists.
Here's a thought experiment for you... let's say MS decided tomorrow they would no longer sell MS Office licenses and instead would only sell subscriptions for $2 million a person. Obviously the day after tomorrow no one would buy MS Office again, but everyone would still be able to acquire new office software. How is that possible if they truly have a monopoly on office software?
Don't confuse a technology firm being the current winner and having most of the market share because switching costs are really cheap (i.e. go to a different website, download some software, uninstall an app and install another one on your phone, etc...) with being an actual monopoly in an economic sense.
Michael Phelps didn't have a monopoly on individual Men's gold medals in swimming in 2008, he was just the winner at the time. That's all you're seeing, these companies are winning right now.
25% of Democrats have less than a HS diploma, but only 10% of Republicans. 20% of Democrats have only a HS Diploma, 14% of Republicans.
I'm not a Trump supporter (he's a ridiculous populist who will hopefully be left behind in the primaries), but in order for your statement "His supporters are in fact the uneducated, by and large." to be true, Trump would have to have less support among Republicans than national polls currently indicate, otherwise the numbers just don't add up.
There are a lot more "educated" Republicans by your standards than uneducated ones (the majority have some sort of degree), which makes it very difficult for any Republican candidate polling highly to get most of their supporters from among the uneducated.
Your comment sounds to me like a really smart mouse crossing the Golden Gate bridge and remarking to a friend, "We sure got lucky all this steel and cables and stuff combined and fell together just exactly right in order to give us a way to get across all that water! Imagine if even one set of cabling fell a few inches over there instead..."
See, the smart mice know it was all an accident because they've shown they can carefully and deliberately drop logs across a small stream and make a similar structure with a similar function, therefore bridges must be accidental things created when something like a tree falls on it's own and happens to be across water.
Don't even get me started on deliberately designing and creating something and then using that to "prove" something else must have been a random accident with no designer...
I've met plenty of social sciences graduates and talked to them enough to see their attitudes in person, but haven't seen anything on Fox News except one of the recent presidential debates in the last year or so (can't actually remember the last time I watched the channel beyond the one debate), so I'm not exactly a regular watcher. Thanks for the advice, though. It's too bad it was based on false premises and completely devoid of valid content.
The nice thing about the ISA idea is that people don't have to argue and debate which degree programs are valuable, real investors have to put their money where their mouth would be and the ones who can't predict the values properly will quickly lose enough money to leave the market to the people who can make money at it by predicting someone's future prospects effectively.
It's essentially doubling as a prediction market for the value of a particular program of study.
Unfortunately, the current social sciences at U.S. Universities is more likely to turn out a 26 year-old government social worker who thinks all parents are idiots who need her detailed supervision and spends her free time in "safe spaces" demonstrating for vague left-wing causes in the hopes of finding an enlightened boyfriend who'll stay longer than one night.
If instead, it were to actually "teach people critical thinking, how to argue and write persuasively." and produce "well-rounded individuals who can go on to be successful in a number of fields.", then the ISA market will value that future success and ability to repay in the future appropriately.
One point of Income Share Agreements (ISA) is that if you're pursuing a STEM or other high-paying degree, you're more likely to make more money overall, so they'll charge you a lower percentage than someone with a less lucrative field. Don't be an idiot and agree to pay back a STEM degree using the same percentage as a sociology major, for example. The anonymous "observers" in the summary are whining about that detail.
One of the positive sides is if the financial services company is going to make money, the prices for an ISA becomes a good proxy for letting students know which potential majors are likely to be more valuable to society and thus earn them more income over the course of the payback period.
So doctors and engineers, yes, womyn's studies, not so much...
Yes, I read the articles. What I stated is that the article is biased and wrong. Your opinion is that the article is right and that one or two anecdotes explain the electric car market. I'd contend that actual empirical sales figures for different types of vehicles and actual costs for different types of vehicles are more illuminating than a couple of anecdote's written by someone with a well-known bias, but YMMV.:)
I'm willing to be proven wrong. Have you ever seen any data from a relatively neutral or reputable source indicating that electric cars on average have lower total cost of ownership than comparable gas vehicles?
I picked one at semi-random (literally, the first one I found in a Google search) and looked up the TCO on Edmunds: Spark EV, 5 year TCO $34K Exact same car, gas version, 5 year TCO $28K
So in exchange for your car only having an 82 mile range before needing to be charged vs a 300+ mile range before a much faster fill-up, you only need to pay 22% more for it. What a deal!
Unless you are in a rare and special situation, the EV version isn't going to be a good deal for you. You're paying more and getting less. That's why only 1.6% of new cars sold are EVs... it doesn't make sense for the vast majority of people to buy them. Occam's razor, the simple reason is the correct one here, no need for conspiracy theories about dealerships.
The problem isn't that dealers don't want to sell them to anyone if they can make a profit on them, it's that customers don't want to buy them. i.e. they're 1.6% of new car purchases (leaving out trucks,minivans, suvs, etc.. just comparing to cars).
So most sales guy's experience is that even if someone walks in wanting to ask about the latest electric car, they're really going to end up buying a gas car once they get the facts about range, battery life, etc..., so why not just sell them the gas car that makes more economical sense to them in the first place and not waste everyone's time.
Of course, the three left-wing elitist publications linked from the summary believe they need to run everyone else's life when it comes to purchasing "green", so they just can't understand that the vast majority of people don't want to throw away their money and time on an environmental status symbol, so they blame the dealer. Glad their buddies don't control things like light bulb regulations, or we wouldn't be allowed to buy less expensive bulbs, either.... oh wait...
The summary links three different left-wing (for the US) news sources complaining about dealers because electric car sales aren't as high in the US as their wishful thinking believes they should be.
In October 620K cars were sold in the U.S., of which 10K were plugin electric. That's right, 1.6% of cars. That's not counting the trucks, minivans, SUVs,etc.. Heck, they sell twice as many luxury (not regular) SUVs a month than plug in cars.
How about for a reason they don't sell, almost nobody wants to buy one because they don't make economic sense for the vast majority of people who want to use their cars more for driving places then making an expensive environmental fashion statement? Without taxpayer subsidies, virtually none would be sold. Even with subsidies, it's more economical to buy a gas car, even if you include the gas and total repair costs for both over their effective mileage life.
People aren't stupid, but environmental elitists at the NY Times, Mother Jones and Green Car Reports think they know better than all the car purchasers out there what they should be buying and if they aren't buying it, it must be some sales guy's fault. What a load of B.S...
Please, please, please stop making everything an "intuitive" icon with no easy way to get text to tell you what a button is supposed to do.
Not everyone is constantly using the same program and wants to just start guessing what menu icons do in the hopes of figuring out over time how to work the damn app!
That's my biggest issue with these minimalist pretty designs, half the time you can't figure out what the stupid menu options actually do, let alone find the one you figure should be in there but who knows what it looks like. Don't get me started on mysterious gestures being required for an app.
This lack of basic usability is one of the two major reasons Apple mobile products are banned for technical support in my family now. The other is the walled garden, but I digress..../rant
To be fair, it sounds like you read one of those "Op Center by Tom Clancy" style books, where if you look at the fine print he came up with the basic setting and the actual author is someone you've never heard of they're using to cash in a bit more on the marketing power of his name.
It does hover, actually. It's more like a drone in behavior than a rocket. So you could pick someone up, drop off breathing equipment, use it to figure out where a fire has spread to, if people are stuck somewhere, etc...
I know as the submitter I'm the only one who read TFA, but it carries 265 lbs and can be either piloted (for surveillance) or else remotely controlled.
So the idea is to go look at the fires spread, look for people trapped, etc... and as a last resort send it up under remote control to pick-up a person or two.
You provided an unsubstantiated claim and refuse to provide any evidence for your claims. I already backed mine up. So we can clearly see you're just full of B.S. and have no idea what you're talking about.
You still haven't provided any actual comparison data, just questions. Provide the answers to your questions and maybe you can attempt to make a case, but you haven't made one so far by simply musing aloud about what you imagine.
Forbes: "The two sectors currently most affected by the regulatory environment in the U.S. are healthcare and financial services."
Regdata: "Regulation on Credit Intermediation and Related Activities has grown 517.73% since 1997."
Can you point to any data which shows the financial industry isn't heavily regulated? Simply googling the question is the financial industry heavily regulated seems to have a pretty broad consensus of answers in the affirmative. Why do you think otherwise?
So your theory is that the government creates a centralized ID number, it's abused by the most heavily regulated industry we have and the problems are due to lack of enough government involvement in the process?
Dude, you gotta start sharing whatever you're smoking there...
I was more referring to the NASA scientist's statement that there isn't a consensus about the reasons for the ice accumulation and that the climate models still need a lot of improvement.
There are some folks who say his skepticism of that science could lead to the end of the world, who would then be being skeptical of the NASA scientists... quite the dilemma, which may lead to more tribal versions of what to be skeptical about.
That was meant to be a bit tongue in cheek. Of course we should be skeptical when it comes to science. My sarcasm was because I was quoting a NASA scientist who is also quick to point out that there isn't a consensus about the reasons and the climate models still need improvement.
I suppose I was picturing the heads of some folks exploding when they realized they'd have to be skeptical of NASA's science in order to prove there was a consensus no one is supposed to be skeptical about anymore...
Slashdot Mirror
Was Myspace a natural monopoly in 2006, when it was the largest social network site in the world and the most visited website?
The network effects just mean that there tends to be one winner at a time, but do not mean one winner over time. The switching costs control that and the cost of switching social networks is trivial, i.e. go to a different website, maybe hit an import button to pull in the old site's contacts.
If faceplant 2.0 came out and was way better than facebook, suddenly facebook would go the way of myspace.
Sure, there is only room for one facebook right now, because why switch if it's just the same thing? LinkedIn exists just fine because it has a different value proposition for people, being designed to be more work focused. If facebook wanted to charge "monopoly" profits and say, hit up all subscribers for even as little as $5/month, suddenly another site which was just the same as the existing facebook would have all the users.
Because costs of software switching for many tasks are low, there is a bandwagon effect for the current most valuable to consumers in any given software space, but that's not a monopoly. If the software maker had any real power to prevent competition from taking away their customers, you might have a point about monopoly, but they don't. Ask Lotus 1-2-3, or Wordperfect, or Internet Explorer, or any of the other software "monopolies" over the years which weren't.
All it takes is a better total value from a competitor for customers and they will switch in a heartbeat. That's not a monopoly sucking extra profits out of people, that's normal competition ensuring customers get the best deal possible at the time. That's also why the current winner gets forced to keep trying to improve what they provide in order to fend off competitors.
Software with network effects tend to settle on one winner at_a_time. This means that winner is currently the best provider to the consumers, not that they're a real monopoly. They only last until someone comes along making consumers a better offer, then poof, they're suddenly no longer a monopoly? The real answer is that they never were a monopoly, just the current winner.
Myspace wasn't a monopoly. Facebook proved that. Wordperfect and Lotus 1-2-3 weren't actually monopolies, MS word and Excel demonstrated that. IE wasn't really a monopoly, etc...
These companies make the best profit they can while staying a better value proposition to customers than their competitors. That's not monopoly profits, that's the way it's supposed to work. As soon as a competitor comes along with a better value for customers, the customers win again and get more for even less. There is nothing stopping everyone in the world from switching from MS office to Open Office except customer preference which states they prefer what they currently get with MS Office over Open Office, $ cost included (although obviously a few people disagree). Hence, no monopoly exists.
Here's a thought experiment for you... let's say MS decided tomorrow they would no longer sell MS Office licenses and instead would only sell subscriptions for $2 million a person. Obviously the day after tomorrow no one would buy MS Office again, but everyone would still be able to acquire new office software. How is that possible if they truly have a monopoly on office software?
Don't confuse a technology firm being the current winner and having most of the market share because switching costs are really cheap (i.e. go to a different website, download some software, uninstall an app and install another one on your phone, etc...) with being an actual monopoly in an economic sense.
Michael Phelps didn't have a monopoly on individual Men's gold medals in swimming in 2008, he was just the winner at the time. That's all you're seeing, these companies are winning right now.
Put twitter to the test.
Go search for something like "#killallmen" and start reporting users for threatening violence against people because of their sex.
See how many are required to change what they post or are banned, vs. are just ignored.
That'll be the real test if twitter is serious about what they say, or if it's just a SJW anti-conservative takeover.
I know which my money would be on.
25% of Democrats have less than a HS diploma, but only 10% of Republicans. 20% of Democrats have only a HS Diploma, 14% of Republicans.
I'm not a Trump supporter (he's a ridiculous populist who will hopefully be left behind in the primaries), but in order for your statement "His supporters are in fact the uneducated, by and large." to be true, Trump would have to have less support among Republicans than national polls currently indicate, otherwise the numbers just don't add up.
There are a lot more "educated" Republicans by your standards than uneducated ones (the majority have some sort of degree), which makes it very difficult for any Republican candidate polling highly to get most of their supporters from among the uneducated.
Your comment sounds to me like a really smart mouse crossing the Golden Gate bridge and remarking to a friend, "We sure got lucky all this steel and cables and stuff combined and fell together just exactly right in order to give us a way to get across all that water! Imagine if even one set of cabling fell a few inches over there instead..."
See, the smart mice know it was all an accident because they've shown they can carefully and deliberately drop logs across a small stream and make a similar structure with a similar function, therefore bridges must be accidental things created when something like a tree falls on it's own and happens to be across water.
Don't even get me started on deliberately designing and creating something and then using that to "prove" something else must have been a random accident with no designer...
I've met plenty of social sciences graduates and talked to them enough to see their attitudes in person, but haven't seen anything on Fox News except one of the recent presidential debates in the last year or so (can't actually remember the last time I watched the channel beyond the one debate), so I'm not exactly a regular watcher. Thanks for the advice, though. It's too bad it was based on false premises and completely devoid of valid content.
The nice thing about the ISA idea is that people don't have to argue and debate which degree programs are valuable, real investors have to put their money where their mouth would be and the ones who can't predict the values properly will quickly lose enough money to leave the market to the people who can make money at it by predicting someone's future prospects effectively.
It's essentially doubling as a prediction market for the value of a particular program of study.
Unfortunately, the current social sciences at U.S. Universities is more likely to turn out a 26 year-old government social worker who thinks all parents are idiots who need her detailed supervision and spends her free time in "safe spaces" demonstrating for vague left-wing causes in the hopes of finding an enlightened boyfriend who'll stay longer than one night.
If instead, it were to actually "teach people critical thinking, how to argue and write persuasively." and produce "well-rounded individuals who can go on to be successful in a number of fields.", then the ISA market will value that future success and ability to repay in the future appropriately.
One point of Income Share Agreements (ISA) is that if you're pursuing a STEM or other high-paying degree, you're more likely to make more money overall, so they'll charge you a lower percentage than someone with a less lucrative field. Don't be an idiot and agree to pay back a STEM degree using the same percentage as a sociology major, for example. The anonymous "observers" in the summary are whining about that detail.
One of the positive sides is if the financial services company is going to make money, the prices for an ISA becomes a good proxy for letting students know which potential majors are likely to be more valuable to society and thus earn them more income over the course of the payback period.
So doctors and engineers, yes, womyn's studies, not so much...
Yes, I read the articles. What I stated is that the article is biased and wrong. Your opinion is that the article is right and that one or two anecdotes explain the electric car market. I'd contend that actual empirical sales figures for different types of vehicles and actual costs for different types of vehicles are more illuminating than a couple of anecdote's written by someone with a well-known bias, but YMMV. :)
I'm willing to be proven wrong. Have you ever seen any data from a relatively neutral or reputable source indicating that electric cars on average have lower total cost of ownership than comparable gas vehicles?
I picked one at semi-random (literally, the first one I found in a Google search) and looked up the TCO on Edmunds:
Spark EV, 5 year TCO $34K
Exact same car, gas version, 5 year TCO $28K
So in exchange for your car only having an 82 mile range before needing to be charged vs a 300+ mile range before a much faster fill-up, you only need to pay 22% more for it. What a deal!
Unless you are in a rare and special situation, the EV version isn't going to be a good deal for you. You're paying more and getting less. That's why only 1.6% of new cars sold are EVs... it doesn't make sense for the vast majority of people to buy them. Occam's razor, the simple reason is the correct one here, no need for conspiracy theories about dealerships.
The problem isn't that dealers don't want to sell them to anyone if they can make a profit on them, it's that customers don't want to buy them. i.e. they're 1.6% of new car purchases (leaving out trucks,minivans, suvs, etc.. just comparing to cars).
So most sales guy's experience is that even if someone walks in wanting to ask about the latest electric car, they're really going to end up buying a gas car once they get the facts about range, battery life, etc..., so why not just sell them the gas car that makes more economical sense to them in the first place and not waste everyone's time.
Of course, the three left-wing elitist publications linked from the summary believe they need to run everyone else's life when it comes to purchasing "green", so they just can't understand that the vast majority of people don't want to throw away their money and time on an environmental status symbol, so they blame the dealer. Glad their buddies don't control things like light bulb regulations, or we wouldn't be allowed to buy less expensive bulbs, either.... oh wait...
The summary links three different left-wing (for the US) news sources complaining about dealers because electric car sales aren't as high in the US as their wishful thinking believes they should be.
In October 620K cars were sold in the U.S., of which 10K were plugin electric. That's right, 1.6% of cars. That's not counting the trucks, minivans, SUVs,etc.. Heck, they sell twice as many luxury (not regular) SUVs a month than plug in cars.
How about for a reason they don't sell, almost nobody wants to buy one because they don't make economic sense for the vast majority of people who want to use their cars more for driving places then making an expensive environmental fashion statement? Without taxpayer subsidies, virtually none would be sold. Even with subsidies, it's more economical to buy a gas car, even if you include the gas and total repair costs for both over their effective mileage life.
People aren't stupid, but environmental elitists at the NY Times, Mother Jones and Green Car Reports think they know better than all the car purchasers out there what they should be buying and if they aren't buying it, it must be some sales guy's fault. What a load of B.S...
Please, please, please stop making everything an "intuitive" icon with no easy way to get text to tell you what a button is supposed to do.
Not everyone is constantly using the same program and wants to just start guessing what menu icons do in the hopes of figuring out over time how to work the damn app!
That's my biggest issue with these minimalist pretty designs, half the time you can't figure out what the stupid menu options actually do, let alone find the one you figure should be in there but who knows what it looks like. Don't get me started on mysterious gestures being required for an app.
This lack of basic usability is one of the two major reasons Apple mobile products are banned for technical support in my family now. The other is the walled garden, but I digress.... /rant
To be fair, it sounds like you read one of those "Op Center by Tom Clancy" style books, where if you look at the fine print he came up with the basic setting and the actual author is someone you've never heard of they're using to cash in a bit more on the marketing power of his name.
It does hover, actually. It's more like a drone in behavior than a rocket. So you could pick someone up, drop off breathing equipment, use it to figure out where a fire has spread to, if people are stuck somewhere, etc...
Recent Stability and engine tests
Recent Stability and engine tests
5000 ft. test from 2011, including testing the emergency chute.
So, something like that in TFA, being made commercially and sold, carrying 265 lbs up to 3000 feet and either piloted or else remotely controlled?
It's for surveillance/intelligence or single person rescue, not trying to run a hose 3k ft. in the air.
I know as the submitter I'm the only one who read TFA, but it carries 265 lbs and can be either piloted (for surveillance) or else remotely controlled.
So the idea is to go look at the fires spread, look for people trapped, etc... and as a last resort send it up under remote control to pick-up a person or two.
I provided links with facts and specific measurements.
You provided an unsubstantiated claim and refuse to provide any evidence for your claims. I already backed mine up. So we can clearly see you're just full of B.S. and have no idea what you're talking about.
You still haven't provided any actual comparison data, just questions. Provide the answers to your questions and maybe you can attempt to make a case, but you haven't made one so far by simply musing aloud about what you imagine.
Forbes: "The two sectors currently most affected by the regulatory environment in the U.S. are healthcare and financial services."
Regdata: "Regulation on Credit Intermediation and Related Activities has grown 517.73% since 1997."
Can you point to any data which shows the financial industry isn't heavily regulated? Simply googling the question is the financial industry heavily regulated seems to have a pretty broad consensus of answers in the affirmative. Why do you think otherwise?
So your theory is that the government creates a centralized ID number, it's abused by the most heavily regulated industry we have and the problems are due to lack of enough government involvement in the process?
Dude, you gotta start sharing whatever you're smoking there...
Your Jedi mind tricks won't work on me, old man... :)
I was more referring to the NASA scientist's statement that there isn't a consensus about the reasons for the ice accumulation and that the climate models still need a lot of improvement.
There are some folks who say his skepticism of that science could lead to the end of the world, who would then be being skeptical of the NASA scientists... quite the dilemma, which may lead to more tribal versions of what to be skeptical about.
That was meant to be a bit tongue in cheek. Of course we should be skeptical when it comes to science. My sarcasm was because I was quoting a NASA scientist who is also quick to point out that there isn't a consensus about the reasons and the climate models still need improvement.
I suppose I was picturing the heads of some folks exploding when they realized they'd have to be skeptical of NASA's science in order to prove there was a consensus no one is supposed to be skeptical about anymore...