Why do you think content overloards are still fighting their losing battle instead of thinking ways around the problem? If they had half a brain, they would embed the commericial message they are paid to present inside the content, and they would willingly release their product for cheaper (free as in beer?), wider and more long lived distribution. Charge way more to "advertisers" doing product placements to compensate for revenue lost in theatrical release. The advertisers will pony up the cash because they know their message will live forever and not have recurring payments for broadcast. Product placement advertising costs are far cheaper than traditional commercials - but they won't stay that way once Hollywood wakes up.
This is really the key to everything that's going on. Content providers are desperately trying to hold onto a dying business model where they are paid a fixed amount per sale, instead of a fixed amount per work done. In the past when content was distributed via physical media, each sale represented significant work done so this model was somewhat justified. Digital distribution and automated databases and websites do away with that cost, so it's no longer justified. Everything that's going on with file sharing, piracy, streaming, digital distribution, is simply market forces pushing content distribution back towards reflecting payment per amount of work done.
I hate to bring this up again because I feel like I post it every couple weeks. But once upon a time, wedding photographers shot the wedding for a nominal fee, but charged per print sold. The cost of film and printed paper, and the large number of pictures a typical pro photographer throws away as not good enough (typically around 95%) justified this pricing structure. If a customer wanted a separate print of their wedding photos for each of their family members, it represented significantly more costs for the photographer than if they just wanted one set of prints for themselves.
But as scanners and photo printers came down in price, it became cheaper not only for customers to make copies of prints, but for photographers to make prints. Today, everything is shot digitally so there's practically zero material cost per-picture. All the creative work is in taking the pictures and touching up and processing the better ones. Consequently wedding photographers charge a lot for shooting the wedding, but give away the pictures for free. The pricing has changed to better reflect the change in cost of work done.
Content providers are resisting this change because they see the opportunity to be paid per sale when their cost per sale is nearly zero. They're going to do everything they can to make that pipe dream a reality; common sense and market forces aren't going to get in their way.
There's a third possibility which is actually the most likely. They're just taking the same approach to the Wikileaks releases as they do to all classified data releases - neither confirm nor deny. Once a secret is out, all you have left is uncertainty as to whether or not it was a real secret. Confirming or denying it eliminates that uncertainty. So standard U.S. policy is to do neither. (Yes the confirmation or denial could be a lie, but there's really no need to lie about it if simply not commenting accomplishes the same thing.)
This policy was reinforced after the end of the Cold War. A bunch of CIA spooks and KGB spooks got together and shared notes. The CIA commented how easy it must've been for the KGB, since they could travel freely around the U.S. and information was readily available, traded, and leaked. The KGB said on the contrary, the openness was the best protection the U.S. had. Getting information on U.S. government and military activity was easy, but there was so much information coming out, much of it contradictory, that it was often impossible to tell just how credible a specific piece of information was.
That's pretty much what I concluded. This isn't so much that tablets are a better interface for controlling your TV. It's that the interface built into cable/satellite/web TV boxes are really crappy and slow. e.g. We have wheels on wireless mice. Why haven't we seen a wheel on a TV remote to rapidly scroll through lists or letters on a virtual keyboard?
So it isn't that tablets are a better controller than a remote. It's that remote controls and interfaces have stagnated because each cable company has a virtual monopoly in each geographic region. You can't pick a better interface for your service, so there's no market pressure for a better interface to be made.
AFAIK, all big companies do this. Microsoft did it when they bought a domain name from my friend. Harvard did it when they bought real estate to expand their campus.
The problem with hypertext manuals IMHO stems from viewing them with what's effectively a single-threaded reader. I run Firefox with the Tree Style Tab extension, which organizes my tabs much like early threaded newsgroup readers a couple decades ago. This is perfect for reading HTML manuals. If I want to delve more deeply into a links on a page, they open up in new tabs all sorted by hierarchy. Reading hyperthreaded Linux manuals in Firefox is a joy. Reading Microsoft manuals in their outdated help app is a pain.
It's essentially the same thing as centralized peer-to-peer file sharing services like Napster being shut down, and decentralized ones like Grokster popping up to replace them. That happened ~10 years ago.
BTW, this is also exactly why markets are fundamentally unfair and flawed systems. When there is a resource shortage, the richest person can *always* get an item, and the poorest person can *never* get an item.
You're thinking too short-term. Say the government forced manufacturers to keep HDDs at their original price and sell them via lottery. The 50 HDDs would sell out. The manufacturers would look at the how much money they're making per HDD, and conclude they don't provide enough profit for them to repair their factories. Consequently, next month when the next batch arrives, there are 50 HDDs again, and 150 people (the 50 who didn't get one last time + 100 new people) wanting to buy them.
Your attempt at fair HDD distribution means there's a constant shortage. Then one day, some of the poorer people who got a HDD suddenly realizes that he can resell it for a lot more than they paid for it. A black market appears. Lots of other people who don't need HDDs realize the price differential between your fixed price and the true market price provides an arbitrage opportunity, and they enter the lottery for HDDs. Now you have 50 HDDs being produced per month, and 5000 people wanting to buy them. So of the 50 HDDs you're selling via lottery, only about 5 end up in the hands of people who actually need a HDD, the other 45 go to resellers flipping them on the black market for a profit. So most of the people who need HDDs are actually paying the higher price despite your price fixing, and the extra money is going to flippers instead of the manufacturers so there's no incentive for them to fix your real problem - a shortage of HDDs.
OTOH, if you allow the market price to increase, it provides the manufacturers the resources and the incentive to repair their factories and increase supply. Other companies who used to make HDDs but scaled it back look at the higher price, and say hey, there's a lot of money to be made, we should start making HDDs again. Next month they make 60 HDDs, and the price creeps down. Next month they make 85 HDDs and the price drops some more. And the next back they make 110 HDDs. The 10 extra means people who didn't get a HDD in previous months gradually get theirs. Eventually everyone who previously wanted a HDD gets one. Next month there are 100 new people who want HDDs.
Now the reverse of the previous situation happens. There are only 100 people who want HDDs, but the manufacturers are still making 110. There's an oversupply. The manufacturers cut their prices below the 100-drive level to try to sell out their drives before their competitors can. The market price now settles at the lowest price the 100th seller is willing to sell for. The extra 10 HDDs carry over to the next month and now there's a 20 drive oversupply, driving the price even lower. Eventually some of the manufacturers see their dropping profit, cry uncle, and scale back production. The manufacture of HDDs stabilizes again at 100 per month, exactly matching demand.
This isn't a system which favors sellers over buyers. It treats both the same. Sellers are at an advantage when there's a shortage. Buyers are at an advantage when there's oversupply (which is the state the HDD industry has been in most of the time - why IBM sold off its storage division to Hitachi, who is now trying to sell it to Western Digital). The price fluctuations are the feedback mechanism which cause manufacturers to produce more or fewer drives in response to demand. Eliminate it and you break the economy.
Just to elucidate, a x% reduction in amount of HDDs does not translate into an x% increase in price (which is impossible since the units are different). It results in an x% reduction in number of people who can buy HDDs.
Pretend that 100 people want to buy one HDD each. If there are only 50 identical HDDs, that doesn't mean that the price goes up 50% (or 100%). It means that only 50 people can buy HDDs. The other 50 have to go without.
Sort everyone by how much they're willing to pay for a HDD, from lowest to highest. Then the highest price that the 51th person is willing to pay for a HDD is the new market price. If he's willing to pay just 10% more, then the price for HDDs goes up 10%. If he's willing to pay 300% more, then the price for HDDs goes up 300%. His price is higher than the first 50 people are willing to pay, so they choose simply not to buy a HDD at his price. Consequently there are only 50 people left who want to buy HDDs, and only 50 HDDs for sale.
What you posted is pretty much on the mark. The only part you're missing is:
So bank shows fed a fraction of loan, fed loans bank dollar. Bank owes fed $1.01 (simplifying here). Bank loans $1 dollar to you and you owe bank say $1.05. The problem is that we've created $1 of money and $1.05 of debt. The 5 cents doesn't exist and therefore is impossible to pay back. So where do you get it? Well at some point it comes from the only place it can. Someone else borrowing another dollar from a bank who borrows from the Fed... So now we have $2 created and $2.10 worth of debt. If we pay the original $1.05 debt, there is only $0.95 money left to pay the new $1.05 debt.
Economics is not a zero-sum game. Just because an addition 5 cents of debt has been created does not mean it's impossible to pay back. Presumably, people borrowing money at $1.05 on the dollar are planning to do something with it which will result in more than $1.05 of productivity. If you can't make at least $1.05 from the loan, then it makes no sense to take out the loan. Say you buy equipment with the loan which allows you to become more productive at work, You in effect make $1.10 off the $1 loan. You pay $0.05 extra back to the bank, and pocket $0.05 for yourself.
"But nothing new has been created!" That's right. But you're forgetting that there's also value in organization and distribution. A chicken farmer laments that his family has all the eggs they can eat, but only dirty well water to drink. His neighbor the dairy farmer laments that his family has all the milk they can drink, but only his vegetables to eat. They look at each other, and agree to trade a bucket of milk for a dozen eggs every day. The amount of eggs and milk being produced before and after the trade is exactly the same as before. No new materials have been created. But the due to the improved distribution, the value of those milk and eggs has increased. The standard of living and consequently the productivity of both farmers has gone up, even though they're producing exactly as much as before. Better distribution like in the above example will increase productivity without increasing the amount of goods in the world. Efficiency improvements will increase actual production for a given cost. Better organization can also yield increased net production without actually increasing production (e.g. decreasing crop losses due to vermin).
Money is just a token symbol. The actual currency being traded is productivity, we just happen to measure it in dollars because it's easier than bartering for everything. As the population and per capita productivity increases, the money supply must increase to keep pace or else you experience currency deflation. The value of a $1 bill would go up over time, meaning people could "make" money by stuffing it under their mattress instead of doing productive work, resulting in the economy stagnating. So to keep the economy thriving, the money supply should grow slightly faster than the economy (enough money needs to "printed" to match country's increased productivity, plus a little extra). And the way the government does this is by authorizing banks to loan out more money than they actually have. Creating money "out of thin air" to match the increased productivity of the nation's economy due to improved efficiency, organization, and distribution.
Where we get in trouble when people stop appreciating just how much a dollar is worth, and spending it on frivolities whose return in improved productivity does not offset the purchase price (or loan repayment). This typically happens in a bubble, when people become irrationally exuberant that they market will keep going up, and that they'll continue to make "easy money" indefinitely so it's ok to waste it. In terms of how you put it:
Now scale this up to trillions of dollars. Basically the system works by continually creating an ever growing national debt (and no, I'm not talk
I remember playing with a beta version of a JPEG viewer around 1990. Back then GIF ruled the graphics world. JPEG promised substantially better compression and color depth than GIF on real-world scenes (i.e. photos). But on the computers of that era (and with poorer algorithms), it took about 15-30 sec to decompress a 640x480 image. Creating the JPEG from a bitmap took 5-10 minutes. I remember thinking that despite being lossy, the compression ratios (at least a 10:1 advantage over GIF) were so compelling that JPEG wold probably rule online photo distribution once computers got faster.
I just revert to the old version of the app from the backup TitaniumBackup made. Then I unlink it from the market so it's never updated again.
Remember folks, Fair Use includes being able to make backups of software you buy. Exercise that right. The only time a company should be able to pull a bait and switch like this is if they're selling you a service for an annual or monthly fee. And there you can simply stop subscribing (in the case of cell phone contracts, you can quit before your contract is up without penalty).
I also run firewalls (DroidWall or LBE Privacy Guard) which let me turn off an app's network access. If the free version of a single-player game requires network access to run, that's a big red flag that I don't want to buy the pay version.
The problem is that if this is allowed, all the companies will start suing each other over technology that they previously added to the standard on the promise of FRAND.
The flip side of this is that if those companies with F/RAND patents aren't allowed to use them to help them negotiate for better terms on non-F/RAND patents, then F/RAND is dead. No company in its right mind will want to license its patents under F/RAND. They will all want to negotiate each patent license individually, making standards virtually impossible to set.
The only attraction of F/RAND to a patent-holder is that by having your patent in the standard, you are guaranteed royalties on millions of products sold. The moment holding onto your patents becomes more valuable than that, as Apple is trying to establish by trying to get competitors banned from the market, F/RAND is dead.
You know what wouldn't be a waste of time? Creating the satellite based network their original proposal had.
They didbuild a satellite phone network using the spectrum. That business didn't go so well so they agreed to buy out the spectrum from their partner (Inmarsat), and applied with the FCC to have the satellite spectrum converted into terrestrial spectrum.
All this used to be in wiki entry for LightSquared. Unfortunately the wiki looks like it's been hijacked by a bunch of LightSquared's PR folks. It now reads like a marketing brochure, scrubbed of all reference to their failed satellite phone venture, the FCC's waiver being provisional on tests showing non-interference with existing GPS receivers, and said tests showing interference with 75% of GPS receivers when they were finally done. Reading the wiki now makes it sound like the FCC gave final approval, and only 0.5% of GPS receivers experienced interference.
Right now it's illegal for anyone to run phone cable in ATT or verizon's territory. they have government backed monopolies of these areas. Sure, they are forced to share bandwidth with other providers but those providers have no control over the cable or the prices charged for using it.
This is correct. The idea is that it is wasteful for multiple companies to run multiple cables which do the same thing. Maximum efficiency (albeit not reliability) is achieved when there's just one company and one set of cables. So a company is selected and granted a monopoly for laying down and providing service over these cables.
In exchange, they cede the right to set their own prices. All price increases have to be reviewed and OKed by a government-run Public Utilities Commission or Public Service Commission.
Getting rid of the PUC or PSC without revoking the phone company's cable service monopoly makes no sense whatsoever.
You're glossing over a pretty substantial relationship between demand for a company's stock (which in truth is a legal claim on retained earnings, not a lottery ticket) and that company's valuation, which directly affects its ability to secure financing.
For most companies I'd agree with you. But a lot of newer companies like Apple and Google aren't paying dividends (the legal claim on net earnings). You get nothing from owning them (aside from a meaningless vote at a shareholder's meeting). The only way you can get anything from them is by selling them. So they really are a lottery ticket, or as a friend called them, baseball card stocks.
Impose a 7% national sales tax, payable to the federal government. At the same time, prohibit states and localities from collecting their own sales taxes. The result would be largely revenue-neutral, since the total of state and local sales taxes averages about 7% already.
If only it were that simple. You have states like Oregon which have a high income tax but no sales tax. You have states like Washington with no income tax but high sales tax. So Oregon would complain that the new national sales tax is forcing them to completely rewrite their tax structure lest their residents revolt over paying high income tax and sales tax, while Washington is all smiles since they have to do practically nothing to comply. Meanwhile California is all upset that they're going to be getting reduced sales tax revenue (down from their >8%).
So your simple proposal actually cascades into a major overhaul of most of the country's tax structure.
Have the federal government distribute this money on a regular basis to states (6%) and localities (1%), based on some weighted formula that takes into account population, economic activity, or both.
Sales tax, by definition, already has two locations where it's assigned. The location of the buyer and the location of the seller. No fancy formula needed, except for splitting between state / county / municipality.
This would have several advantages. It would eliminate the current advantages that online stores have over brick-and-mortar retailers.
Technically it's not an advantage that online stores enjoy. It's a disadvantage state and local governments willingly impose on their brick-and-mortar stores. It's completely in their power right now to level the playing field and reduce their sales tax to 0%, while increasing income and other taxes to compensate. No Federal action needed. I don't understand why it's primarily people on the left who oppose this idea, since the flat nature of sales tax makes it regressive in practice. All money people spend on purchases was income at some point, so whether you tax it as income or tax it as sales, it's the same thing. If sales taxes are creating too many headaches, just get rid of it and replace it with income and other taxes.
It would be trivial, and WHOLLY within the power of the Congress, to pass a law requiring that advertisements show the TRUE price of an item with associated taxes rather than the misleading pre-tax value.
As has been explained above, this would effectively make advertising prices illegal. A price (with taxes) you advertise in one tax jurisdiction would be illegally showing incorrect prices in a different tax jurisdiction. I live on the border between San Bernardino County and Los Angeles County. The sales tax in SBC is 7.75%. In LAC it's 8.25%. Stores would no longer be allowed to advertise prices on TV since if the price displayed on TV sets in SBC were correct, the price displayed on TV sets in LAC would be illegal (too low). Likewise if the prices in the ad were for LAC, they would be illegal on TV sets in SBC (false advertising).
You can't have your cake and eat it too. You can't allow every level of government to charge whatever taxes it feels like, while simultaneously requiring merchants to include said taxes in their advertised prices. If you want to force merchants to include taxes in their prices, you also have to force all levels of government to harmonize their sales taxes.
No they won't. There simply isn't enough selection pressure to make that happen. noscript users are this tiny insignificant blip concealed in the statistical noise of web traffic.
I've been running across more and more sites which won't display their content until I allow Noscript to run all scripts on the page (including advertisers'), turn off Adblock, and disable Ghostery. I've been forced to set up a virtual machine with a clean snapshot of a browser without any extensions to view those sites. But recently the sites of one of the banks and one credit card I use started doing this.
I think that it is more likely that we can chalk this up to just Meg being a little under informed about Android.
She's just applying her experience while she was heading eBay. She bought PayPal so they could create a closed auction/payment monopoly, so she figures that must also be the reason Google wants to buy Motorola.
It's been tried. The Canadian Supreme Court declined to hear that case on the grounds that it did not meet the standards of a class action suit. Consequently Canada is in the perverse situation where Monsanto reaps all the financial benefit of distributing Roundup Ready Canola into the ecosystem, but bears no responsibility for the damage it does to people who don't want it.
That case was just two farmers trying to get class action status though. If this one is 300,000 farmers, then I suspect they'll have a much better chance.
California banned thimerosal from vaccines in 2006. It was the mercury-based preservative frequently cited by anti-vaxers as the cause of autism. Studies of children post-thimerosal have found autism rates continuing to climb.
I've been proposing gelatinous cubes in space for years. A big cube made of airgel. It won't get the bigger pieces (which the satellite in TFA will), but it'll catch all the little paint flecks and specks of metal and insulation which are too small to track. The cube should be big enough and the airgel material dense enough to capture debris, but not dense enough to shatter on impact (gradual deceleration). And due to its large size, eventually atmospheric drag will cause it to burn up on re-entry.
Data throttling is happening after 1.5GB to people on an unlimited plan [...]. I think the FCC should step in and stop this abuse of consumer rights.
The real abuse of consumer rights is that an "unlimited" plan even exists. Because of bandwidth overallocation, it's impossible for a company which promises unlimited bandwidth to actually deliver it to all its customers. Common sense says that tiered plans are the way to go. It's just that the marketing department found the term "unlimited" so sexy they overruled the engineering and accounting departments to be able to call their plans "unlimited". And as a competitor, how can you compete with your 1 TB plan when your competition is offering unlimited? You can't. You have to adopt their crappy marketing decision and label your plan as unlimited as well.
Now they're being hoisted by their own petard. The FTC should've cracked down on this a decade ago back when it first began, with wireless companies selling unlimited data plans but having secret data caps, which if you surpassed they would warn you and/or drop you as a customer. That practice has come under increasing criticism from the government, so they're now resorting to throttling. The root cause of the problem isn't that consumers are using too much bandwidth. It's that "unlimited" plans are snake oil. Yes I know that tech geeks love their unlimited plans (I'm on one myself). But be realistic - given your pipes to the Internet have a finite amount of bandwidth, can you think of any way in which you can make your "unlimited" plan truly unlimited? You can't. It's unlimited only as long as the bandwidth per customer * number of customers
So while the blame doesn't fall upon the customers who were sold and bought unlimited plans, neither do I think it's realistic for them (and me) to truly expect unlimited data.
Doesn't global warming help solve this problem? People have been attributing increased storms (especially hurricanes) and snowfall to global warming. The reasoning goes that increased temperatures leads to greater evaporation from the oceans, leading to greater moisture content in the air, leading to greater precipitation in the form of rain and snow.
Isn't greater precipitation exactly what you need to counter a shortage of fresh water? Yeah the terrain may tend to concentrate that precipitation in some flood-prone locales. But if fresh water is becoming scarce in other areas, then those flood waters become a resource which is worth collecting, storing, and selling to parched regions.
Won't economics just solve this problem? If food becomes scarce then its price will rise. If its price rises, then farmers will get more money. If farmers get more money they'll be willing to pay for more expensive water. If demand on water goes up its price will rise. As the price of water rises, the farmers selling expensive food will keep buying it, and people taking expensive long showers will take shorter ones.
That feedback mechanism is inoperative under current policy. Following the dust bowl of the 1930s and mass crop failures and food shortages, the government enacted programs to ensure it never happened again. We began subsidizing farming so that there would always be an adequate oversupply of food production in case of a crop failure (why corn gets subsidized), and there would be plenty of excess reserve agricultural land in case of a dust bowl-like natural disaster (why farmers get paid for leaving fields empty).
While this does stabilize the price and amount of food available, it also means that the price of food is mostly decoupled from demand. If food becomes scarce, the price remains the same because the reduced amount of food is still enough to satiate everyone. If everyone's stomachs are full, there is no additional demand, and consequently no price increase. Although if city-dwellers get their way and end agricultural subsidies because they take food for granted and don't understand the randomness and variability in food production and how the subsidies stabilize supply, this economic feedback mechanism will start to function again.
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This is really the key to everything that's going on. Content providers are desperately trying to hold onto a dying business model where they are paid a fixed amount per sale, instead of a fixed amount per work done. In the past when content was distributed via physical media, each sale represented significant work done so this model was somewhat justified. Digital distribution and automated databases and websites do away with that cost, so it's no longer justified. Everything that's going on with file sharing, piracy, streaming, digital distribution, is simply market forces pushing content distribution back towards reflecting payment per amount of work done.
I hate to bring this up again because I feel like I post it every couple weeks. But once upon a time, wedding photographers shot the wedding for a nominal fee, but charged per print sold. The cost of film and printed paper, and the large number of pictures a typical pro photographer throws away as not good enough (typically around 95%) justified this pricing structure. If a customer wanted a separate print of their wedding photos for each of their family members, it represented significantly more costs for the photographer than if they just wanted one set of prints for themselves.
But as scanners and photo printers came down in price, it became cheaper not only for customers to make copies of prints, but for photographers to make prints. Today, everything is shot digitally so there's practically zero material cost per-picture. All the creative work is in taking the pictures and touching up and processing the better ones. Consequently wedding photographers charge a lot for shooting the wedding, but give away the pictures for free. The pricing has changed to better reflect the change in cost of work done.
Content providers are resisting this change because they see the opportunity to be paid per sale when their cost per sale is nearly zero. They're going to do everything they can to make that pipe dream a reality; common sense and market forces aren't going to get in their way.
There's a third possibility which is actually the most likely. They're just taking the same approach to the Wikileaks releases as they do to all classified data releases - neither confirm nor deny. Once a secret is out, all you have left is uncertainty as to whether or not it was a real secret. Confirming or denying it eliminates that uncertainty. So standard U.S. policy is to do neither. (Yes the confirmation or denial could be a lie, but there's really no need to lie about it if simply not commenting accomplishes the same thing.)
This policy was reinforced after the end of the Cold War. A bunch of CIA spooks and KGB spooks got together and shared notes. The CIA commented how easy it must've been for the KGB, since they could travel freely around the U.S. and information was readily available, traded, and leaked. The KGB said on the contrary, the openness was the best protection the U.S. had. Getting information on U.S. government and military activity was easy, but there was so much information coming out, much of it contradictory, that it was often impossible to tell just how credible a specific piece of information was.
That's pretty much what I concluded. This isn't so much that tablets are a better interface for controlling your TV. It's that the interface built into cable/satellite/web TV boxes are really crappy and slow. e.g. We have wheels on wireless mice. Why haven't we seen a wheel on a TV remote to rapidly scroll through lists or letters on a virtual keyboard?
So it isn't that tablets are a better controller than a remote. It's that remote controls and interfaces have stagnated because each cable company has a virtual monopoly in each geographic region. You can't pick a better interface for your service, so there's no market pressure for a better interface to be made.
AFAIK, all big companies do this. Microsoft did it when they bought a domain name from my friend. Harvard did it when they bought real estate to expand their campus.
The problem with hypertext manuals IMHO stems from viewing them with what's effectively a single-threaded reader. I run Firefox with the Tree Style Tab extension, which organizes my tabs much like early threaded newsgroup readers a couple decades ago. This is perfect for reading HTML manuals. If I want to delve more deeply into a links on a page, they open up in new tabs all sorted by hierarchy. Reading hyperthreaded Linux manuals in Firefox is a joy. Reading Microsoft manuals in their outdated help app is a pain.
It's essentially the same thing as centralized peer-to-peer file sharing services like Napster being shut down, and decentralized ones like Grokster popping up to replace them. That happened ~10 years ago.
You're thinking too short-term. Say the government forced manufacturers to keep HDDs at their original price and sell them via lottery. The 50 HDDs would sell out. The manufacturers would look at the how much money they're making per HDD, and conclude they don't provide enough profit for them to repair their factories. Consequently, next month when the next batch arrives, there are 50 HDDs again, and 150 people (the 50 who didn't get one last time + 100 new people) wanting to buy them.
Your attempt at fair HDD distribution means there's a constant shortage. Then one day, some of the poorer people who got a HDD suddenly realizes that he can resell it for a lot more than they paid for it. A black market appears. Lots of other people who don't need HDDs realize the price differential between your fixed price and the true market price provides an arbitrage opportunity, and they enter the lottery for HDDs. Now you have 50 HDDs being produced per month, and 5000 people wanting to buy them. So of the 50 HDDs you're selling via lottery, only about 5 end up in the hands of people who actually need a HDD, the other 45 go to resellers flipping them on the black market for a profit. So most of the people who need HDDs are actually paying the higher price despite your price fixing, and the extra money is going to flippers instead of the manufacturers so there's no incentive for them to fix your real problem - a shortage of HDDs.
OTOH, if you allow the market price to increase, it provides the manufacturers the resources and the incentive to repair their factories and increase supply. Other companies who used to make HDDs but scaled it back look at the higher price, and say hey, there's a lot of money to be made, we should start making HDDs again. Next month they make 60 HDDs, and the price creeps down. Next month they make 85 HDDs and the price drops some more. And the next back they make 110 HDDs. The 10 extra means people who didn't get a HDD in previous months gradually get theirs. Eventually everyone who previously wanted a HDD gets one. Next month there are 100 new people who want HDDs.
Now the reverse of the previous situation happens. There are only 100 people who want HDDs, but the manufacturers are still making 110. There's an oversupply. The manufacturers cut their prices below the 100-drive level to try to sell out their drives before their competitors can. The market price now settles at the lowest price the 100th seller is willing to sell for. The extra 10 HDDs carry over to the next month and now there's a 20 drive oversupply, driving the price even lower. Eventually some of the manufacturers see their dropping profit, cry uncle, and scale back production. The manufacture of HDDs stabilizes again at 100 per month, exactly matching demand.
This isn't a system which favors sellers over buyers. It treats both the same. Sellers are at an advantage when there's a shortage. Buyers are at an advantage when there's oversupply (which is the state the HDD industry has been in most of the time - why IBM sold off its storage division to Hitachi, who is now trying to sell it to Western Digital). The price fluctuations are the feedback mechanism which cause manufacturers to produce more or fewer drives in response to demand. Eliminate it and you break the economy.
Just to elucidate, a x% reduction in amount of HDDs does not translate into an x% increase in price (which is impossible since the units are different). It results in an x% reduction in number of people who can buy HDDs.
Pretend that 100 people want to buy one HDD each. If there are only 50 identical HDDs, that doesn't mean that the price goes up 50% (or 100%). It means that only 50 people can buy HDDs. The other 50 have to go without.
Sort everyone by how much they're willing to pay for a HDD, from lowest to highest. Then the highest price that the 51th person is willing to pay for a HDD is the new market price. If he's willing to pay just 10% more, then the price for HDDs goes up 10%. If he's willing to pay 300% more, then the price for HDDs goes up 300%. His price is higher than the first 50 people are willing to pay, so they choose simply not to buy a HDD at his price. Consequently there are only 50 people left who want to buy HDDs, and only 50 HDDs for sale.
Economics is not a zero-sum game. Just because an addition 5 cents of debt has been created does not mean it's impossible to pay back. Presumably, people borrowing money at $1.05 on the dollar are planning to do something with it which will result in more than $1.05 of productivity. If you can't make at least $1.05 from the loan, then it makes no sense to take out the loan. Say you buy equipment with the loan which allows you to become more productive at work, You in effect make $1.10 off the $1 loan. You pay $0.05 extra back to the bank, and pocket $0.05 for yourself.
"But nothing new has been created!" That's right. But you're forgetting that there's also value in organization and distribution. A chicken farmer laments that his family has all the eggs they can eat, but only dirty well water to drink. His neighbor the dairy farmer laments that his family has all the milk they can drink, but only his vegetables to eat. They look at each other, and agree to trade a bucket of milk for a dozen eggs every day. The amount of eggs and milk being produced before and after the trade is exactly the same as before. No new materials have been created. But the due to the improved distribution, the value of those milk and eggs has increased. The standard of living and consequently the productivity of both farmers has gone up, even though they're producing exactly as much as before. Better distribution like in the above example will increase productivity without increasing the amount of goods in the world. Efficiency improvements will increase actual production for a given cost. Better organization can also yield increased net production without actually increasing production (e.g. decreasing crop losses due to vermin).
Money is just a token symbol. The actual currency being traded is productivity, we just happen to measure it in dollars because it's easier than bartering for everything. As the population and per capita productivity increases, the money supply must increase to keep pace or else you experience currency deflation. The value of a $1 bill would go up over time, meaning people could "make" money by stuffing it under their mattress instead of doing productive work, resulting in the economy stagnating. So to keep the economy thriving, the money supply should grow slightly faster than the economy (enough money needs to "printed" to match country's increased productivity, plus a little extra). And the way the government does this is by authorizing banks to loan out more money than they actually have. Creating money "out of thin air" to match the increased productivity of the nation's economy due to improved efficiency, organization, and distribution.
Where we get in trouble when people stop appreciating just how much a dollar is worth, and spending it on frivolities whose return in improved productivity does not offset the purchase price (or loan repayment). This typically happens in a bubble, when people become irrationally exuberant that they market will keep going up, and that they'll continue to make "easy money" indefinitely so it's ok to waste it. In terms of how you put it:
I remember playing with a beta version of a JPEG viewer around 1990. Back then GIF ruled the graphics world. JPEG promised substantially better compression and color depth than GIF on real-world scenes (i.e. photos). But on the computers of that era (and with poorer algorithms), it took about 15-30 sec to decompress a 640x480 image. Creating the JPEG from a bitmap took 5-10 minutes. I remember thinking that despite being lossy, the compression ratios (at least a 10:1 advantage over GIF) were so compelling that JPEG wold probably rule online photo distribution once computers got faster.
I just revert to the old version of the app from the backup TitaniumBackup made. Then I unlink it from the market so it's never updated again.
Remember folks, Fair Use includes being able to make backups of software you buy. Exercise that right. The only time a company should be able to pull a bait and switch like this is if they're selling you a service for an annual or monthly fee. And there you can simply stop subscribing (in the case of cell phone contracts, you can quit before your contract is up without penalty).
I also run firewalls (DroidWall or LBE Privacy Guard) which let me turn off an app's network access. If the free version of a single-player game requires network access to run, that's a big red flag that I don't want to buy the pay version.
The flip side of this is that if those companies with F/RAND patents aren't allowed to use them to help them negotiate for better terms on non-F/RAND patents, then F/RAND is dead. No company in its right mind will want to license its patents under F/RAND. They will all want to negotiate each patent license individually, making standards virtually impossible to set.
The only attraction of F/RAND to a patent-holder is that by having your patent in the standard, you are guaranteed royalties on millions of products sold. The moment holding onto your patents becomes more valuable than that, as Apple is trying to establish by trying to get competitors banned from the market, F/RAND is dead.
They did build a satellite phone network using the spectrum. That business didn't go so well so they agreed to buy out the spectrum from their partner (Inmarsat), and applied with the FCC to have the satellite spectrum converted into terrestrial spectrum.
All this used to be in wiki entry for LightSquared. Unfortunately the wiki looks like it's been hijacked by a bunch of LightSquared's PR folks. It now reads like a marketing brochure, scrubbed of all reference to their failed satellite phone venture, the FCC's waiver being provisional on tests showing non-interference with existing GPS receivers, and said tests showing interference with 75% of GPS receivers when they were finally done. Reading the wiki now makes it sound like the FCC gave final approval, and only 0.5% of GPS receivers experienced interference.
This is correct. The idea is that it is wasteful for multiple companies to run multiple cables which do the same thing. Maximum efficiency (albeit not reliability) is achieved when there's just one company and one set of cables. So a company is selected and granted a monopoly for laying down and providing service over these cables.
In exchange, they cede the right to set their own prices. All price increases have to be reviewed and OKed by a government-run Public Utilities Commission or Public Service Commission.
Getting rid of the PUC or PSC without revoking the phone company's cable service monopoly makes no sense whatsoever.
For most companies I'd agree with you. But a lot of newer companies like Apple and Google aren't paying dividends (the legal claim on net earnings). You get nothing from owning them (aside from a meaningless vote at a shareholder's meeting). The only way you can get anything from them is by selling them. So they really are a lottery ticket, or as a friend called them, baseball card stocks.
If only it were that simple. You have states like Oregon which have a high income tax but no sales tax. You have states like Washington with no income tax but high sales tax. So Oregon would complain that the new national sales tax is forcing them to completely rewrite their tax structure lest their residents revolt over paying high income tax and sales tax, while Washington is all smiles since they have to do practically nothing to comply. Meanwhile California is all upset that they're going to be getting reduced sales tax revenue (down from their >8%).
So your simple proposal actually cascades into a major overhaul of most of the country's tax structure.
Sales tax, by definition, already has two locations where it's assigned. The location of the buyer and the location of the seller. No fancy formula needed, except for splitting between state / county / municipality.
Technically it's not an advantage that online stores enjoy. It's a disadvantage state and local governments willingly impose on their brick-and-mortar stores. It's completely in their power right now to level the playing field and reduce their sales tax to 0%, while increasing income and other taxes to compensate. No Federal action needed. I don't understand why it's primarily people on the left who oppose this idea, since the flat nature of sales tax makes it regressive in practice. All money people spend on purchases was income at some point, so whether you tax it as income or tax it as sales, it's the same thing. If sales taxes are creating too many headaches, just get rid of it and replace it with income and other taxes.
As has been explained above, this would effectively make advertising prices illegal. A price (with taxes) you advertise in one tax jurisdiction would be illegally showing incorrect prices in a different tax jurisdiction. I live on the border between San Bernardino County and Los Angeles County. The sales tax in SBC is 7.75%. In LAC it's 8.25%. Stores would no longer be allowed to advertise prices on TV since if the price displayed on TV sets in SBC were correct, the price displayed on TV sets in LAC would be illegal (too low). Likewise if the prices in the ad were for LAC, they would be illegal on TV sets in SBC (false advertising).
You can't have your cake and eat it too. You can't allow every level of government to charge whatever taxes it feels like, while simultaneously requiring merchants to include said taxes in their advertised prices. If you want to force merchants to include taxes in their prices, you also have to force all levels of government to harmonize their sales taxes.
I've been running across more and more sites which won't display their content until I allow Noscript to run all scripts on the page (including advertisers'), turn off Adblock, and disable Ghostery. I've been forced to set up a virtual machine with a clean snapshot of a browser without any extensions to view those sites. But recently the sites of one of the banks and one credit card I use started doing this.
She's just applying her experience while she was heading eBay. She bought PayPal so they could create a closed auction/payment monopoly, so she figures that must also be the reason Google wants to buy Motorola.
It's been tried. The Canadian Supreme Court declined to hear that case on the grounds that it did not meet the standards of a class action suit. Consequently Canada is in the perverse situation where Monsanto reaps all the financial benefit of distributing Roundup Ready Canola into the ecosystem, but bears no responsibility for the damage it does to people who don't want it.
That case was just two farmers trying to get class action status though. If this one is 300,000 farmers, then I suspect they'll have a much better chance.
California banned thimerosal from vaccines in 2006. It was the mercury-based preservative frequently cited by anti-vaxers as the cause of autism. Studies of children post-thimerosal have found autism rates continuing to climb.
I've been proposing gelatinous cubes in space for years. A big cube made of airgel. It won't get the bigger pieces (which the satellite in TFA will), but it'll catch all the little paint flecks and specks of metal and insulation which are too small to track. The cube should be big enough and the airgel material dense enough to capture debris, but not dense enough to shatter on impact (gradual deceleration). And due to its large size, eventually atmospheric drag will cause it to burn up on re-entry.
The real abuse of consumer rights is that an "unlimited" plan even exists. Because of bandwidth overallocation, it's impossible for a company which promises unlimited bandwidth to actually deliver it to all its customers. Common sense says that tiered plans are the way to go. It's just that the marketing department found the term "unlimited" so sexy they overruled the engineering and accounting departments to be able to call their plans "unlimited". And as a competitor, how can you compete with your 1 TB plan when your competition is offering unlimited? You can't. You have to adopt their crappy marketing decision and label your plan as unlimited as well.
Now they're being hoisted by their own petard. The FTC should've cracked down on this a decade ago back when it first began, with wireless companies selling unlimited data plans but having secret data caps, which if you surpassed they would warn you and/or drop you as a customer. That practice has come under increasing criticism from the government, so they're now resorting to throttling. The root cause of the problem isn't that consumers are using too much bandwidth. It's that "unlimited" plans are snake oil. Yes I know that tech geeks love their unlimited plans (I'm on one myself). But be realistic - given your pipes to the Internet have a finite amount of bandwidth, can you think of any way in which you can make your "unlimited" plan truly unlimited? You can't. It's unlimited only as long as the bandwidth per customer * number of customers
So while the blame doesn't fall upon the customers who were sold and bought unlimited plans, neither do I think it's realistic for them (and me) to truly expect unlimited data.
Doesn't global warming help solve this problem? People have been attributing increased storms (especially hurricanes) and snowfall to global warming. The reasoning goes that increased temperatures leads to greater evaporation from the oceans, leading to greater moisture content in the air, leading to greater precipitation in the form of rain and snow.
Isn't greater precipitation exactly what you need to counter a shortage of fresh water? Yeah the terrain may tend to concentrate that precipitation in some flood-prone locales. But if fresh water is becoming scarce in other areas, then those flood waters become a resource which is worth collecting, storing, and selling to parched regions.
That feedback mechanism is inoperative under current policy. Following the dust bowl of the 1930s and mass crop failures and food shortages, the government enacted programs to ensure it never happened again. We began subsidizing farming so that there would always be an adequate oversupply of food production in case of a crop failure (why corn gets subsidized), and there would be plenty of excess reserve agricultural land in case of a dust bowl-like natural disaster (why farmers get paid for leaving fields empty).
While this does stabilize the price and amount of food available, it also means that the price of food is mostly decoupled from demand. If food becomes scarce, the price remains the same because the reduced amount of food is still enough to satiate everyone. If everyone's stomachs are full, there is no additional demand, and consequently no price increase. Although if city-dwellers get their way and end agricultural subsidies because they take food for granted and don't understand the randomness and variability in food production and how the subsidies stabilize supply, this economic feedback mechanism will start to function again.