You neglect the cost of the machine, the individuals running it...
Of course I neglect to mention all these things and for an obvious reason, I include them in the 0.5U cost. The point I was trying to make was not that you get 50% more, or any such figure. In fact, I could just as easily have said it would cost 0.1U or 0.99999U. The only assumption (which I perhaps should have pointed out more clearly) is that the U's used by the professional and his machine is less then the non-professional with the non-machine. That you chose to nitpick over the exact U-values is of little consequence.
Already my shovel begins to look much more affordable (and doesn't impact my local tax rate, either).
No, it doesn't. But mainly, why this focus on the tax rate? Sure, if you by economic benefits mean "lower tax rate" then wow, you won the argument. But only so because you redefine the end point of the game. Imagine, we could have a tax rate of 0% and just do everything ourselves. Want to have a guess if this would be more or less benefitial in economical terms?
You also neglect the benefit to my health...
Why yes, I did. Please tell me, how much is that value in relative or absolute terms, I would very much like to know. Of course there will be people that place a high utility value on things that others find pointless. The point should not be to pick out statistical anomalies and use that as an argument to not accept a theory that is applicable to "herds" of people, not individuals.
Also, since the time that I will be using for shovelling snow would be before I'm headed into work to earn my $$, the time spent, however many hypothetical U I spent on it, wouldn't have been earning me any direct $$ in the first place.
This makes no difference what so ever. I'm not sure how to present this without going in to a mile long explanation (and belive me, I accept the possibility that I'm allready way past the ammount of text that should be put in a slashdot comment). You can't simply say "I would not have spent that time working anyways" as a negation of what I said. Perhaps the comparation gets easier to understand if you look at it from another direction - you work 24/7 (and getting payed for all those hours). Since you do not like this, you use some of that money to pay for the privilege of not working. The end result is the same and just as you realy can't say if the universe is standing still and you are moving or the universe is moving and you are standing still you can't separate the one from the other. You are, always, paying for not working, intentional or not.
Note also, I didn't even begin to delve into the potential cost savings of having my teenage son do it as part of the chores he performs to earn his allowance and develop a healthy work ethic and responsibility.
Take the chores away and send him to a real work. See, the argument doesn't change because you change the person doing the manual snow removing.
Or the portion of the city/county/other municipality who also supports the snowclearing effort with their taxes even though they may not ever get snow in amounts that necessitate removal.
Then the error is with the collection of the tax, not the system of removing snow efficiently. I'm not making an argument for government removal of snow, nor even an argument for governments or snow removal but for the efficient use of resources. Organize it as a government project, a community project, a neighbourhood project or what ever you want. The point is this - do what you do best, let others handle the rest. If it turns out that you are in fact madly skilled in your snow handling, apply the argument to the removal of garbage cans instead then.
This is slashdot, no need to explain computer acronyms or sections of the government that makes people want to invest in tin-foil. That said, was it realy that hard to do the lookup yourself?
Well, not quite. If the people in general doesn't care then the people in the government will do what they care about. There is a difference and while it might seem small in a linguistic sence it turns out it is no small difference when it hits the real world.
You precent you argument as if this would give an economical gain, i.e. it would be cheaper for "us" to do it ourselves. This is in fact a fallacy and I'm guessing it derives from the fact that you don't see any money leaving you accounts while you go out to the road and push the snow arround "by hand" (or what ever premise is used in the discussion). As I have tried to make clear several times before on this forum, and countless times in real life, even though you don't see the money it doesn't mean the economy ghosts aren't arround, waiting to sneak up on you when you least expect it.
In order to understand it you need to take a look at where you could have spent you time had you not played arround in the snow (and no, I don't mean posting on slashdot). Say that removing the snow from the road takes one unit of time (1 U), that is the cost if you do it yourself. Now picture a big machine removing the snow from the entire road in one go. This would obviously take less time that the manual, so lets say 0.5 units of time per household section (0.5 U). Had you used your original 1 U at work instead then you could have payed the machine (0.5 U) and still had 0.5 U left to spend as you wish.
See, not cheaper to do it yourself. To paraphrase, "removing snow by hand is only free if your time has no value".
As I said to another reply to this exact post, this is not what I said. While the previous person clearly missread, or in fact miss-posted (if there is such a word) what you are doing is reading more in to what I said then should be. I will try to explain what I meant by quoting you last sentence.
Companies generally pay their executives what they're seen as worth. There are lots of stories of spectacular blunders (such as Fiorina), but when a board elects to pay a CEO $HIGH_AMOUNT, it's because they believe it's a good return on their investment.
The reason for my slight sugestion of lowered pay for record industry management is in no way a reflection of my views as to if these pays are something they are "worth" from a shareholder perspective. In fact, I am sure that their shareholders, in general, feel that they are getting their moneys worth. To take it even further, I am an advocate of high pay for management personnel when they are doing a good job.
My sugestion for lowering their pay should be seen from a consumer perspective and not from a business/shareholder perspective. For the consumers these companies are an oligopol that have put itself in a middle man possition that is not benefiting them very much, even removing value according to some. When discussing this the general slashdot outcry is "greedy management, give more to artists" as if this would solve the pricing error that the oligopol creates. A transfer of money from "bureaucrats" to artists will solve none of these problems and I presented a sollution that would - keep the artists at the same level, remove cash from other personnel.
My only first-hand experience here was a guy I knew
A sample of one is not enough to make predictions from, or at least I can hear my old statistics lecturer say that in my head. But despite this fact, it kind of gives me a chance to again make my main point, this time in a slightly more forward way. Some people are not ment to be artists. With "meant" I mean that there is not enough of a demand for their work. If I were to go in to the music industry as a singer tomorrow I would be at chapter 11 the day after. There is no need/want for my, highly theoretical, musical work and I should not expect to be payed for them, even on a theoretical basis.
I can't help but look at this large mass of text that describes just how valuable this device is to you and then suddenly be gripped by the "Sure, I could operate without it, and for 3 months I had to when I was between devices. That brief experience proved the usefulness of it.".
Seriously, there is something wrong here. Either you are making claims that do not stack up or you are incredible cheap. I'm acctualy inclined to lean on the first option but then again, I do not know you and I am making assumptions from a fairly small set of data. Could you please explain the reason as to why this life giving device of yours, that you clearly treasure deeply, was not worth a couple of extra $100 (or even a couple of extra $1000)for those 3 months? I'm sure that a replacement device could have been bought to sustain you during that time frame.
Either you read my post wrong or I read you post wrong. In fact, from my point of view you did not even reply to anything that I said. I am not saying that music should be cheaper or more expensive, that artists should get a higher per centage of sales or a smaller. I am in fact making no statement that should be seen as relating to these things. What I am saying is that so many people look at the industry and conclude that executives should be payed less and artists more. Why not simply pay executives less and keep paying the artists the same? Clearly they either see the paycheque as large enough or they find other non-monetary values in creating the music.
Money is no more pre-wired in to our brains then the will to follow gravity is. We do not follow it, it is a consequence just as heat is a consequence of two 2000 ton metal slabs hitting each other while doing 20000km/h. When I try to explain this I generaly feel that it is easier to understand by looking at a world without money. In this world your neighbour kills two birds while hunting. Fine by him, since he can give the other to you (he knows you are hungry and can't hunt)or he could take it to his uncle and get some beer for the trouble.
Now let's look at what happens in both examples.
i) He gives it to his uncle -> he now owns beer. ii) He gives it to you -> he now owns nothing.
From this we can see that the cost assosiated with giving it to you is in fact a beer. In his world a bird is worth a beer just as it is wort $5 in your world. The fact that you and he value to bird differently, in beers and in dollars, makes no differences. Just as "one third" is the same as "two sixths", it is simply a matter of conversion. Cost is always present in life, marked as money or not.
To sum it all up, you might remove the pricetag on every item on the globe, there will still be a cost associated with the items. If that cost is measured in money or not makes as little difference to cost as measuring time in minutes or second has to the movement of time itself.
I guess this depends on the way you interpretate "killing of demand". Is it a total slaughter that leaves no selling CD standing or is it a slightly smaller slaughter that leaves half of the CD sales in place, or...? Anyways, to get to my point, if we take the later defenition then I'd say he is right. If I could be bothered to stand up and walk a few feet I would end up in front of the collection of DVDs I've bought during the past years. If I don't stand up then I could perhaps be bothered to fire up a DC client and look at all the dvd-r movies I could download. My bet is that a very large per centage of the movies I've bought on DVD can in fact be downloaded and yet I have not done so with these particular movies. This is not to say I am an all arround good guy that feels that it would be bad form to download them. I simply bought them because I wanted them in that physical format. I am sure that this can be applied to CDs as well since a lot of people seem to be doing exactly the same thing with them, that is "buy the onces you like realy much, download the rest".
To sum it up, it would make the CD market smaller, not remove it. Also, why is this even an issue? I doubt there was ever a meeting at a record company where anyone said "damn it, let us spread some fud about this new format called the CD. Sure we could move to it ourselves and have a better product but it would cut in to our sales of LPs".
Likewise, the vast majority of artists do not earn a handsome living from their craft.
Likewise, the vast majority of artists should not earn a handsome living from their craft. I'm not saying that the right artists are getting the money right now (according to my tastes nor my demands for quality and originality), simply that there is nothing strange about the fact that the vast majority of a profession is not rock-star-rich.
I do not understand how the recording industry can say it would destroy record companies' incentive to invest in new acts when the potential for much greater revenues can be had with increased volume and lower prices.
Then let me explain it to you. Let me first point out that I am surprised that the statement is coming from the record industry. Why? Combining the music companies that today stand for the bulk of sold music would create what? One huge company and, in that market, they would have no competition. See where I'm going with this one? Indeed. No competition = no incentive to compete. I for one do not welcome our even more powerfull music overlords.
In fact, half of his plan (the combining of the companies) should cause music executives to giggle like little girls and run arround in a circle screaming "we made it, we made it". Had this sugestion come from anyone else people would be screaming "anti-compete", "monopoly" and quite possibly even "line em' up against the wall".
Acctualy, you both are right in you own ways. Fining the company is, in essense, the same as making the product(s) more costly to produce. This increas in cost will bring about both higher prices and lower profits and the price elasticity will descide in what proportions. The fact that microsoft can be viewed as a monopoly will have an impact but not enough to negat it.
Couldn't you get this sort of info simply from how many chips people buy and cash in? I doubt there are that many people out there that walk arround the casino for an extended time while winning and losing in equal ammounts. Even so, perhaps those persons are not the one to comp anyways.
What I wonder is how long it will take untill someone writes a daemon that does it for you. The whole system of not knowing what you pay for in advance and then basing that payment on the way other people behave is a scary one indeed.
How about companies start to deliver what they promise. Not over, not under, just so! Saying that under-promising and over-delivering is good is sort of like saying that since you hate inflation you like deflation. It's hard to make informed choices when you are not told the true lay of the land.
That said, I do like many of googles products and use two of them on a daily basis. That is more then I can say about any company out there. Still, the main critique stands.
Slashdot Mirror
Or, PPP for short.
One persons savings is another persons spendings.
Of course I neglect to mention all these things and for an obvious reason, I include them in the 0.5U cost. The point I was trying to make was not that you get 50% more, or any such figure. In fact, I could just as easily have said it would cost 0.1U or 0.99999U. The only assumption (which I perhaps should have pointed out more clearly) is that the U's used by the professional and his machine is less then the non-professional with the non-machine. That you chose to nitpick over the exact U-values is of little consequence.
No, it doesn't. But mainly, why this focus on the tax rate? Sure, if you by economic benefits mean "lower tax rate" then wow, you won the argument. But only so because you redefine the end point of the game. Imagine, we could have a tax rate of 0% and just do everything ourselves. Want to have a guess if this would be more or less benefitial in economical terms?
Why yes, I did. Please tell me, how much is that value in relative or absolute terms, I would very much like to know. Of course there will be people that place a high utility value on things that others find pointless. The point should not be to pick out statistical anomalies and use that as an argument to not accept a theory that is applicable to "herds" of people, not individuals.
This makes no difference what so ever. I'm not sure how to present this without going in to a mile long explanation (and belive me, I accept the possibility that I'm allready way past the ammount of text that should be put in a slashdot comment). You can't simply say "I would not have spent that time working anyways" as a negation of what I said. Perhaps the comparation gets easier to understand if you look at it from another direction - you work 24/7 (and getting payed for all those hours). Since you do not like this, you use some of that money to pay for the privilege of not working. The end result is the same and just as you realy can't say if the universe is standing still and you are moving or the universe is moving and you are standing still you can't separate the one from the other. You are, always, paying for not working, intentional or not.
Take the chores away and send him to a real work. See, the argument doesn't change because you change the person doing the manual snow removing.
Then the error is with the collection of the tax, not the system of removing snow efficiently. I'm not making an argument for government removal of snow, nor even an argument for governments or snow removal but for the efficient use of resources. Organize it as a government project, a community project, a neighbourhood project or what ever you want. The point is this - do what you do best, let others handle the rest. If it turns out that you are in fact madly skilled in your snow handling, apply the argument to the removal of garbage cans instead then.
This is slashdot, no need to explain computer acronyms or sections of the government that makes people want to invest in tin-foil. That said, was it realy that hard to do the lookup yourself?
Well, not quite. If the people in general doesn't care then the people in the government will do what they care about. There is a difference and while it might seem small in a linguistic sence it turns out it is no small difference when it hits the real world.
You precent you argument as if this would give an economical gain, i.e. it would be cheaper for "us" to do it ourselves. This is in fact a fallacy and I'm guessing it derives from the fact that you don't see any money leaving you accounts while you go out to the road and push the snow arround "by hand" (or what ever premise is used in the discussion). As I have tried to make clear several times before on this forum, and countless times in real life, even though you don't see the money it doesn't mean the economy ghosts aren't arround, waiting to sneak up on you when you least expect it.
In order to understand it you need to take a look at where you could have spent you time had you not played arround in the snow (and no, I don't mean posting on slashdot). Say that removing the snow from the road takes one unit of time (1 U), that is the cost if you do it yourself. Now picture a big machine removing the snow from the entire road in one go. This would obviously take less time that the manual, so lets say 0.5 units of time per household section (0.5 U). Had you used your original 1 U at work instead then you could have payed the machine (0.5 U) and still had 0.5 U left to spend as you wish.
See, not cheaper to do it yourself. To paraphrase, "removing snow by hand is only free if your time has no value".
Just encode the zeros as two ones and you are set to go.
The reason for my slight sugestion of lowered pay for record industry management is in no way a reflection of my views as to if these pays are something they are "worth" from a shareholder perspective. In fact, I am sure that their shareholders, in general, feel that they are getting their moneys worth. To take it even further, I am an advocate of high pay for management personnel when they are doing a good job.
My sugestion for lowering their pay should be seen from a consumer perspective and not from a business/shareholder perspective. For the consumers these companies are an oligopol that have put itself in a middle man possition that is not benefiting them very much, even removing value according to some. When discussing this the general slashdot outcry is "greedy management, give more to artists" as if this would solve the pricing error that the oligopol creates. A transfer of money from "bureaucrats" to artists will solve none of these problems and I presented a sollution that would - keep the artists at the same level, remove cash from other personnel.
A sample of one is not enough to make predictions from, or at least I can hear my old statistics lecturer say that in my head. But despite this fact, it kind of gives me a chance to again make my main point, this time in a slightly more forward way. Some people are not ment to be artists. With "meant" I mean that there is not enough of a demand for their work. If I were to go in to the music industry as a singer tomorrow I would be at chapter 11 the day after. There is no need/want for my, highly theoretical, musical work and I should not expect to be payed for them, even on a theoretical basis.
Damn it! It started out so well with "I agree 100%". Well, you win some and you lose some ;)
A reply I did not bet on, obviously. I yield and admit defeat. Hope your son is doing better.
Yes, that was my main point. I'm glad it didn't get lost in the main body of the text. Cheapo! ;)
I can't help but look at this large mass of text that describes just how valuable this device is to you and then suddenly be gripped by the "Sure, I could operate without it, and for 3 months I had to when I was between devices. That brief experience proved the usefulness of it.".
Seriously, there is something wrong here. Either you are making claims that do not stack up or you are incredible cheap. I'm acctualy inclined to lean on the first option but then again, I do not know you and I am making assumptions from a fairly small set of data. Could you please explain the reason as to why this life giving device of yours, that you clearly treasure deeply, was not worth a couple of extra $100 (or even a couple of extra $1000)for those 3 months? I'm sure that a replacement device could have been bought to sustain you during that time frame.
No, what is sad is that I actually got curious about it. Now explain it =)
Either you read my post wrong or I read you post wrong. In fact, from my point of view you did not even reply to anything that I said. I am not saying that music should be cheaper or more expensive, that artists should get a higher per centage of sales or a smaller. I am in fact making no statement that should be seen as relating to these things. What I am saying is that so many people look at the industry and conclude that executives should be payed less and artists more. Why not simply pay executives less and keep paying the artists the same? Clearly they either see the paycheque as large enough or they find other non-monetary values in creating the music.
Money is no more pre-wired in to our brains then the will to follow gravity is. We do not follow it, it is a consequence just as heat is a consequence of two 2000 ton metal slabs hitting each other while doing 20000km/h. When I try to explain this I generaly feel that it is easier to understand by looking at a world without money. In this world your neighbour kills two birds while hunting. Fine by him, since he can give the other to you (he knows you are hungry and can't hunt)or he could take it to his uncle and get some beer for the trouble.
Now let's look at what happens in both examples.
i) He gives it to his uncle -> he now owns beer.
ii) He gives it to you -> he now owns nothing.
From this we can see that the cost assosiated with giving it to you is in fact a beer. In his world a bird is worth a beer just as it is wort $5 in your world. The fact that you and he value to bird differently, in beers and in dollars, makes no differences. Just as "one third" is the same as "two sixths", it is simply a matter of conversion. Cost is always present in life, marked as money or not.
To sum it all up, you might remove the pricetag on every item on the globe, there will still be a cost associated with the items. If that cost is measured in money or not makes as little difference to cost as measuring time in minutes or second has to the movement of time itself.
I guess this depends on the way you interpretate "killing of demand". Is it a total slaughter that leaves no selling CD standing or is it a slightly smaller slaughter that leaves half of the CD sales in place, or...? Anyways, to get to my point, if we take the later defenition then I'd say he is right. If I could be bothered to stand up and walk a few feet I would end up in front of the collection of DVDs I've bought during the past years. If I don't stand up then I could perhaps be bothered to fire up a DC client and look at all the dvd-r movies I could download. My bet is that a very large per centage of the movies I've bought on DVD can in fact be downloaded and yet I have not done so with these particular movies. This is not to say I am an all arround good guy that feels that it would be bad form to download them. I simply bought them because I wanted them in that physical format. I am sure that this can be applied to CDs as well since a lot of people seem to be doing exactly the same thing with them, that is "buy the onces you like realy much, download the rest".
To sum it up, it would make the CD market smaller, not remove it. Also, why is this even an issue? I doubt there was ever a meeting at a record company where anyone said "damn it, let us spread some fud about this new format called the CD. Sure we could move to it ourselves and have a better product but it would cut in to our sales of LPs".
Likewise, the vast majority of artists should not earn a handsome living from their craft. I'm not saying that the right artists are getting the money right now (according to my tastes nor my demands for quality and originality), simply that there is nothing strange about the fact that the vast majority of a profession is not rock-star-rich.
Then let me explain it to you. Let me first point out that I am surprised that the statement is coming from the record industry. Why? Combining the music companies that today stand for the bulk of sold music would create what? One huge company and, in that market, they would have no competition. See where I'm going with this one? Indeed. No competition = no incentive to compete. I for one do not welcome our even more powerfull music overlords.
In fact, half of his plan (the combining of the companies) should cause music executives to giggle like little girls and run arround in a circle screaming "we made it, we made it". Had this sugestion come from anyone else people would be screaming "anti-compete", "monopoly" and quite possibly even "line em' up against the wall".
Acctualy, you both are right in you own ways. Fining the company is, in essense, the same as making the product(s) more costly to produce. This increas in cost will bring about both higher prices and lower profits and the price elasticity will descide in what proportions. The fact that microsoft can be viewed as a monopoly will have an impact but not enough to negat it.
Couldn't you get this sort of info simply from how many chips people buy and cash in? I doubt there are that many people out there that walk arround the casino for an extended time while winning and losing in equal ammounts. Even so, perhaps those persons are not the one to comp anyways.
Is that you, Scotty?
What I wonder is how long it will take untill someone writes a daemon that does it for you. The whole system of not knowing what you pay for in advance and then basing that payment on the way other people behave is a scary one indeed.
/etc/adwordsofcompaniesihate.txt | screen grape -t 1
user@box:~$cat
How about companies start to deliver what they promise. Not over, not under, just so! Saying that under-promising and over-delivering is good is sort of like saying that since you hate inflation you like deflation. It's hard to make informed choices when you are not told the true lay of the land.
That said, I do like many of googles products and use two of them on a daily basis. That is more then I can say about any company out there. Still, the main critique stands.
Or, just imagine it for a while, it could just be that they are not happy with either of the extremes.
How about General Emergency? Perhaps he can comment on this himself and answer all our questions.