"Those circumstances" were that he had never taken administrative or personal action against anyone under his managerial authority while working at Mozilla, but people didn't like his personal opinions. It seems like the problem is on somebody else's end, but the fact that everyone else is an insecure asshole doesn't matter in the real world.
People can be offended by donations of $1,000 to advancing the legalization of same-sex marriage. Should they press for resignation of CEOs who support same-sex marriage because they don't like them, or would that be wrong?
Not liking gays and being hostile in the workplace are two different things. There are a lot of people I don't like for the simple fact that they disturb me; I deal with that by avoiding them. Since I have no administrative power over them, that doesn't do them any harm; if I did, well, I'd have to deal with them when necessary, and otherwise avoid them. So maybe I'm not going to hang out with you at the bar after work, but I'm not going to pass you up on a raise, a promotion, or an important project because you're weird and make me direly uncomfortable.
Some people are actually mature. They're allowed to work in their own interests.
Basically, everyone is misinterpreting this paper.
The conclusion was robots displace jobs in the local region. It's like factories in Detroit shutting down because we've automated manufacturing, meanwhile Seattle, Silicon Valley, and the East Coast tech industry start growing.
Technical progress reduces the cost of goods and services, which reduces the minimum price. When the minimum price falls lower, more people can access those things, broadening the market and allowing for more competition; this effect tapers off as markets become large (because the things are cheap and common goods), and instead cost reductions just directly control (reduce) prices because any new guy on the block can jump in and take a chunk of the market by selling it cheaper--and the existing players can try to take away from competitors in the same way. Do note that "reducing" prices can be done by increasing them more slowly than progress; the monetary policy discussion is really long and complicated, and the short version is to think of price in terms of hours of wage paid instead of in terms of currency.
Here's the thing: what happens if cars get cheaper?
Well, cars could get cheaper by replacing Detroit workers with machines. If those workers's wages and benefits are 20% of the cost of the car, then replacing 90% of them cuts the cost of the car by 18%. What happens?
Everyone who buys cars from Detroit now pays 18% less for the same car--or buys a fancier car for the same price--roughly 80% of which goes to the other 80% of the production chain. In either case, you end up with many fewer people working at car factories in Detroit.
Since some of that money either goes unspent or goes to the car maker's suppliers, it's going somewhere other than Detroit. If it goes unspent, then car buyers can now buy local services, such as more food out of home (a continuing trend in the past few decades). They can import something else--iPhones, Spotify (which isn't run in Detroit, but is American), or some other thing. Even if they import a Chinese good, that good must be shipped and retailed in America, which means jobs are created across the country--not in Detroit.
Your population keeps growing; ratio of number-of-employed to size-of-labor-force (everyone 16 and older who isn't retired--this isn't unemployment, but rather is an employment number that ignores labor force participation) continues to hover around the same stable span; and people who lost their job in one place remain unemployed while people the next city or state over get shiny new jobs.
It's not that everyone gets jobs buliding the robots--that wouldn't make sense. It's that it takes half as many people to both build the robots and operate the robots; we build twice as many robots, make twice as much stuff, and most people are now robot operators. Thing is most of the robot operators aren't the same people whose jobs were replaced by a robot and a smaller workforce; a new market appears somewhere else.
Yeah, that's what I was thinking: people just want you to take a hammer and start putting in nails. Architects and engineers are overhead; just start putting up walls and don't worry about if it'll blow over in the first moderate wind.
Historically, cut-down populations lead to growth. Nobody in history established a policy to reduce the population "to conserve resources", and then held it down that way. The GP is suggesting that population is too big; there is a popular argument that we need to cut the world population back a few billion to conserve our resources, and he's made the first part without stating the conclusion. My response was in that context: the economic boom you describe wouldn't happen because we would prevent growth.
That wasn't the point. The cost differences in shipping and installation are because the panels are of various sizes and weights; if I could get an impossible device that's a cubic centimeter, 3 grams, and generates 500GW of power, I could ship it via 32 cents of postage and install it in a few minutes of labor. Do you know how much it costs just to ship the concrete to build the nuclear containment building for a reactor?
Moving material around requires time. Mining large amounts of material requires time. You're going to expend more to install and maintain a big, 1%-efficient array than a small, 24%-efficient array.
Probably not. He's likely better at saying things with big words; and he's also human, and likely looks at people playing real instruments and people doing exactly the same thing with a thing shaped like a real instrument as... well, performance art. His brain would immediately recognize the visible, physical aspect of playing the game as something he's accepted as performance art, and would build his entire appreciation of the game based on the presumption that it's leading people to engage in a non-video-game artform.
From there, attacking the game is attacking performance art. He might have actually had the impulse to attack the game based on his existing bias against video games, with the uncomfortable sensation of attacking performance art pushing back--simultaneously.
Whatever he then came up with from there is, in all likelihood, compensation for said irreconcilable conflict.
Seriously, what's the difference between Guitar Hero 4 and The Beatles: Rock Band? GH4 has a 5-button, plastic guitar; The Beatles: Rock Band has a two-octave keyboard that you can play in the same physical manner as a real instrument. Why wasn't Guitar Hero art?
Uh, April 2010, "Back Then". Roger Ebert says "video games can never be art." Can never.
Let's make a new Plinkett/Bechtel type test right here. Describe artistic game expression without relying on irrelevant (to the medium) things like pretty backgrounds, models, or movie cut scenes.
Video games are mechanics affecting these things. Even Atari games move a few pixels. Those things have to be identifiable.
Xenosaga does this with cutscenes, voice acting, complex 3D graphics, orchestral music, and the like; Golden Sun did it with two-dimensional sprites and some transformations, along with text-based dialogue and some sound-effects, and music; and Adventure: Colossal Caves did it with only text. The first two have immensely complex stories and deeply-developed characters, like a Brandon Sanderson novel or a TV series such as Babylon 5; the last is largely an exploration of a descriptive and somewhat-fantastic world inside a mountain cave, with much less depth of plot and character.
The Metroid games does the same kind of thing, notably with Fusion, Other-M, and Prime; Super Metroid is said to have a strong story backing it, but doesn't express it directly via any kind of dialogue or cut-scenes, which draws some argument from people like me who say a game that doesn't demarcate plot and purpose isn't exactly conveying a story from the writer's mind to the player's. Nevertheless, even the original 8-bit game had complex level design and creative ideas of how a game is played, combining the "platformer" and "action-adventure" genres.
Video games are often a medium to tell a story (any genre), evoke an emotion (e.g. horror), or describe a place (the world in which the game occurs). Movies and books have to tell a story; static art (images) can only describe a situation at a moment (although, as with my argument about Super Metroid not demarcating plot elements, many people argue that a picture implies a timeline events leading into and out of the situation, and thus can tell a long and complex story on its own). A video game can just world-build, giving you a place to explore without explanation or purpose other than to see it; or it can create that place and then render it in a particular art style to show off the visual medium; or it can deliver a deep and immersive cinematic experience with the player in control, or at least the illusion of control. It has options.
Ebert's main argument was that video games aren't art because art is a thing you do and show others. Video games allow players to control the outcome--you can go left or right at this point--thus they have not expressed what the player will see and hear, and so aren't art. He essentially claims anything that doesn't play out exactly the same for everyone who observes it is not an artistic expression.
The idea that he considered for even a moment trying to make an argument that music is not art is preposterous.
I said he probably didn't think he could get away with the argument; I didn't specify how long it took him to conclude that, or by what route. The game he conceded on is essentially performance of music.
Unless you're burning more energy than you're eating and you have no glycogen or fat stores, this doesn't matter.
If you are burning more energy than you're eating and you have no glycogen or fat stores, you're going to die unless you eat something like straight sugar right now.
That sounds like "music is art, so I guess this counts." He didn't see video games as a medium which could tell a story in complex ways; it sounds like he wasn't sure he could argue that music is somehow not art.
Okay, well, with a cut-down population, you also lose the labor required to produce to support the population. Then labor becomes a short resource. Without a labor reserve, you can't take advantage of technical progress, and so the economy becomes unstable and poverty becomes more wide-spread, rather than the normal model of developing better access to food, clean water, and healthcare as technology improves.
It is true that population does expand to fit our current resources, but it is not true that = constant scarcity.
Population expands to fit our current resources because it hits a wall. Communist leaders have not spent the past 10,000 year of human history dictating how many children each family shall have to properly manage global resources; we've just expanded until maximum.
That means, yes, we expand until scarcity. We expand until the cost to acquire food starts increasing. We advance until the number of farmers needed grows proportionally-faster than the number of people being born. We expand until we can't build houses fast enough to house all these people, can't mine oil fast enough to provide all the industrial services they need, and so forth. Then we get more poor people and continued expansion necessarily will cause a rise in unemployment, a rise in poverty, and a visible and obvious economic recession, which slows population growth.
Look at the United States, the United Kingdom, China, France, and Germany. Sure, there seems to be tons of food, employment, etc... except if you're in the bottom 5% of the country, since we have about 5% unemployment and about half of those are begging on the streets and getting their food from trash cans.
In African nations, they have a lower quality-of-life and a reduced standard-of-living. They outbreed the failures of their healthcare systems--we do, too, but we have great healthcare and so don't have to have 18 kids to ensure 2 survive polio and malaria--and have a population limited by availability of things like food.
In America and Europe, the population spiked around the 1920s. There was food scarcity, and so a lot of Nobel-Prize-winning work went into developing new agricultural tools and methods. In a world with 1.9 billion people and an add of around 100 million per year, we suddenly saw growth to 3.2 billion people in less than a decade as food became more-accessible.
So yes, historically, this is how it works. Not how it might work; not how it works with foxes and lemmings; this is how it works with people, throughout human history.
Also, people are rational agents; they simply don't always have 100% of all information available. They make a rational decision based on imperfect information.
Resource problems are a myth, in a sense. Population always expands until scarcity: at a point, you can't scale production of some products without investing more labor, which means the basic cost of those products increases, the economization of means decreases, the poor get poorer, and more people become poor. At that point, population expansion slows until technical progress raises the scarcity cap.
Take food. Without GMO, fertilizers, pesticides, irrigation, tractors, and other modern intensive techniques, you need more land to grow the same food. That doesn't just mean more labor per yield of food; it also means you run out of good-climate, good-soil, accessible-irrigation land with a lower total food-per-year yield. Bump that and you can have more population.
The resource scarcity issue is constant, and has always been constant. When we find more, we expand.
They don't support extremism. If you suggest extremism might be a thing in their presence, they will swiftly bar you from any and all contact with them, and call all their friends to ensure your cash flows stop and you die a slow death.
The fun part comes when Google starts obeying all the little wishlist things and so rightsholders's stuff stops getting as much visibility, thus sales.
Copyright is valid. Making a car requires an enormous capital investment for equipment, plus a ton of labor per-vehicle; the engineering expense to design that car is millions of dollars, and the production of that car is enormous. The Chevrolet Volt sold 21,000 units in 2012 and 25,000 in 2013, at MSRPs around $40,000; that's $840 million and $1,000 million. At below 20% gross profit margins, that's over $672 million and $800 million of production costs. By contrast, making music requires large amounts of labor to compose, perform, record, and master; making copies of music requires pennies per thousand copies and a capital start-up cost of a $400 PC you probably already own.
Given the above, copyright obviously requires protection. The impact of partial copyright compromise is non-obvious even to many marketing executives: illegal things like playing your radio loud enough for others to hear in public cause people to buy your song, even though these things also compromise your ability to charge money for performance in that context. Focusing too hard on protection of rights will lead to loss of the benefits conferred by those rights, just as if you protected the right to remain silent by prosecuting anyone who speaks without first raising his hand.
(By "rights" I of course mean "protections provided by laws which may be changed to expand, diminish, or extinguish their scope after appropriate legal process".)
Panels of the same form factor with higher-efficiency cells install in exactly the same way. 255W panels install the same way as 180W panels and 355W panels (all of the same size). They rack up onto the same hardware.
Oddly enough, the cost of micro-inverters for panels above 255W increases; and modern power-optimizing inverters actually cost the same, but fail less-often and provide more-efficient power regulation. The installation for string inverters, micro-inverters, and power-optimizing inverters is roughly the same: connect each cell to the next, then run a home-run wire to each end of the array. String inverters plug a wire into each end; micro-inverters and power-optimizers plug in the same wire connector, but with a little box dangling off.
The three options have some rough differences.
String Inverters are cheap. You might pay $500 for a 5kW array. The array feeds each solar panel into the next, and so an underperforming module drags the entire array down and strains other panels: shade on one cell can cut your entire array's efficiency by 50%.
Micro-inverters are more-expensive. You might pay $1,200 for a 5kW array. The array plugs each solar module into the next through a micro-inverter, which really converts the panel's 600VDC into 3-wire 240VAC. This gives you a 3-wire service feed. Micro-inverters have a relatively-high failure rate.
Power optimizers cost about what micro-inverters cost. You might pay $1,300 for a 5kW array. They wire in the same way as micro-inverters, but pass 600VDC down to what amounts to a string inverter. The power optimizers themselves function similar to a modern lithium cell battery management system, drawing more power from higher-output panels and less from lower-output panels without letting the panels interact and stress each other. Power optimizers are simpler than micro-inverters, dissipate less heat, and thus have less loss and a lower failure rate.
So the physical aspect of installing any solar array is the same. If you use high-efficiency cells, nothing changes. If you use high-output panels--larger panels or similarly-sized panels with high-efficiency cells--you have to use either a cheap string inverter or a power optimizer. Micro-inverters are probably the worst choice in any installation: for a single-panel or small area, you should use a string inverter; for multi-panel, use power optimizers.
Shipping the cells requires more energy because they're larger and heavier. It requires more shipping hardware and energy infrastructure maintenance. It requires more handling to install them, wire them, and keep them free of the energy-robbing layer of dust. Manufacturing costs increase for an array with the same output, so decay from oxidization, delamination, imbalanced arrays and overvoltage, or plain old damage costs more--as does the shipping and handling, again.
If I could get a single 2 meter by 1 meter panel that output 6kW, I could have that slapped up on my roof for $500, and have a cheap $450 string inverter installed for $1,000. As it stands, I can get a 6kW array with a $1,800 power-optimizing inverter (required only for multiple-panel installations) for $5,800; I can also pay about $5,000 for the full installation labor, plus a good $400-$600 to ship the material in the first place.
I simply don't want the instability of future rate changes--granted that can happen anyway, but it's typical for the long-term, non-promotional price to be higher for a bundle than an individual element. They might give me TV for free for 12 months, then what? I don't check my bill and I pay $30 extra one month, and I don't even watch TV!
Comcast wanted to offer me 265 TV channels including HBO for 4 cents more than I was paying for 200Mbit Internet alone. I simply don't watch TV, so I don't need it.
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"Those circumstances" were that he had never taken administrative or personal action against anyone under his managerial authority while working at Mozilla, but people didn't like his personal opinions. It seems like the problem is on somebody else's end, but the fact that everyone else is an insecure asshole doesn't matter in the real world.
People can be offended by donations of $1,000 to advancing the legalization of same-sex marriage. Should they press for resignation of CEOs who support same-sex marriage because they don't like them, or would that be wrong?
Not liking gays and being hostile in the workplace are two different things. There are a lot of people I don't like for the simple fact that they disturb me; I deal with that by avoiding them. Since I have no administrative power over them, that doesn't do them any harm; if I did, well, I'd have to deal with them when necessary, and otherwise avoid them. So maybe I'm not going to hang out with you at the bar after work, but I'm not going to pass you up on a raise, a promotion, or an important project because you're weird and make me direly uncomfortable.
Some people are actually mature. They're allowed to work in their own interests.
Basically, everyone is misinterpreting this paper.
The conclusion was robots displace jobs in the local region. It's like factories in Detroit shutting down because we've automated manufacturing, meanwhile Seattle, Silicon Valley, and the East Coast tech industry start growing.
Technical progress reduces the cost of goods and services, which reduces the minimum price. When the minimum price falls lower, more people can access those things, broadening the market and allowing for more competition; this effect tapers off as markets become large (because the things are cheap and common goods), and instead cost reductions just directly control (reduce) prices because any new guy on the block can jump in and take a chunk of the market by selling it cheaper--and the existing players can try to take away from competitors in the same way. Do note that "reducing" prices can be done by increasing them more slowly than progress; the monetary policy discussion is really long and complicated, and the short version is to think of price in terms of hours of wage paid instead of in terms of currency.
Here's the thing: what happens if cars get cheaper?
Well, cars could get cheaper by replacing Detroit workers with machines. If those workers's wages and benefits are 20% of the cost of the car, then replacing 90% of them cuts the cost of the car by 18%. What happens?
Everyone who buys cars from Detroit now pays 18% less for the same car--or buys a fancier car for the same price--roughly 80% of which goes to the other 80% of the production chain. In either case, you end up with many fewer people working at car factories in Detroit.
Since some of that money either goes unspent or goes to the car maker's suppliers, it's going somewhere other than Detroit. If it goes unspent, then car buyers can now buy local services, such as more food out of home (a continuing trend in the past few decades). They can import something else--iPhones, Spotify (which isn't run in Detroit, but is American), or some other thing. Even if they import a Chinese good, that good must be shipped and retailed in America, which means jobs are created across the country--not in Detroit.
Your population keeps growing; ratio of number-of-employed to size-of-labor-force (everyone 16 and older who isn't retired--this isn't unemployment, but rather is an employment number that ignores labor force participation) continues to hover around the same stable span; and people who lost their job in one place remain unemployed while people the next city or state over get shiny new jobs.
It's not that everyone gets jobs buliding the robots--that wouldn't make sense. It's that it takes half as many people to both build the robots and operate the robots; we build twice as many robots, make twice as much stuff, and most people are now robot operators. Thing is most of the robot operators aren't the same people whose jobs were replaced by a robot and a smaller workforce; a new market appears somewhere else.
I don't know. Apparently Mozilla dismissed a CEO because he didn't like gays. This is more like dismissing a guy because he is gay.
Yeah, that's what I was thinking: people just want you to take a hammer and start putting in nails. Architects and engineers are overhead; just start putting up walls and don't worry about if it'll blow over in the first moderate wind.
Historically, cut-down populations lead to growth. Nobody in history established a policy to reduce the population "to conserve resources", and then held it down that way. The GP is suggesting that population is too big; there is a popular argument that we need to cut the world population back a few billion to conserve our resources, and he's made the first part without stating the conclusion. My response was in that context: the economic boom you describe wouldn't happen because we would prevent growth.
That wasn't the point. The cost differences in shipping and installation are because the panels are of various sizes and weights; if I could get an impossible device that's a cubic centimeter, 3 grams, and generates 500GW of power, I could ship it via 32 cents of postage and install it in a few minutes of labor. Do you know how much it costs just to ship the concrete to build the nuclear containment building for a reactor?
Moving material around requires time. Mining large amounts of material requires time. You're going to expend more to install and maintain a big, 1%-efficient array than a small, 24%-efficient array.
Probably not. He's likely better at saying things with big words; and he's also human, and likely looks at people playing real instruments and people doing exactly the same thing with a thing shaped like a real instrument as ... well, performance art. His brain would immediately recognize the visible, physical aspect of playing the game as something he's accepted as performance art, and would build his entire appreciation of the game based on the presumption that it's leading people to engage in a non-video-game artform.
From there, attacking the game is attacking performance art. He might have actually had the impulse to attack the game based on his existing bias against video games, with the uncomfortable sensation of attacking performance art pushing back--simultaneously.
Whatever he then came up with from there is, in all likelihood, compensation for said irreconcilable conflict.
Seriously, what's the difference between Guitar Hero 4 and The Beatles: Rock Band? GH4 has a 5-button, plastic guitar; The Beatles: Rock Band has a two-octave keyboard that you can play in the same physical manner as a real instrument. Why wasn't Guitar Hero art?
Uh, April 2010, "Back Then". Roger Ebert says "video games can never be art." Can never.
Let's make a new Plinkett/Bechtel type test right here. Describe artistic game expression without relying on irrelevant (to the medium) things like pretty backgrounds, models, or movie cut scenes.
Video games are mechanics affecting these things. Even Atari games move a few pixels. Those things have to be identifiable.
Xenosaga does this with cutscenes, voice acting, complex 3D graphics, orchestral music, and the like; Golden Sun did it with two-dimensional sprites and some transformations, along with text-based dialogue and some sound-effects, and music; and Adventure: Colossal Caves did it with only text. The first two have immensely complex stories and deeply-developed characters, like a Brandon Sanderson novel or a TV series such as Babylon 5; the last is largely an exploration of a descriptive and somewhat-fantastic world inside a mountain cave, with much less depth of plot and character.
The Metroid games does the same kind of thing, notably with Fusion, Other-M, and Prime; Super Metroid is said to have a strong story backing it, but doesn't express it directly via any kind of dialogue or cut-scenes, which draws some argument from people like me who say a game that doesn't demarcate plot and purpose isn't exactly conveying a story from the writer's mind to the player's. Nevertheless, even the original 8-bit game had complex level design and creative ideas of how a game is played, combining the "platformer" and "action-adventure" genres.
Video games are often a medium to tell a story (any genre), evoke an emotion (e.g. horror), or describe a place (the world in which the game occurs). Movies and books have to tell a story; static art (images) can only describe a situation at a moment (although, as with my argument about Super Metroid not demarcating plot elements, many people argue that a picture implies a timeline events leading into and out of the situation, and thus can tell a long and complex story on its own). A video game can just world-build, giving you a place to explore without explanation or purpose other than to see it; or it can create that place and then render it in a particular art style to show off the visual medium; or it can deliver a deep and immersive cinematic experience with the player in control, or at least the illusion of control. It has options.
Ebert's main argument was that video games aren't art because art is a thing you do and show others. Video games allow players to control the outcome--you can go left or right at this point--thus they have not expressed what the player will see and hear, and so aren't art. He essentially claims anything that doesn't play out exactly the same for everyone who observes it is not an artistic expression.
The idea that he considered for even a moment trying to make an argument that music is not art is preposterous.
I said he probably didn't think he could get away with the argument; I didn't specify how long it took him to conclude that, or by what route. The game he conceded on is essentially performance of music.
It's not that concentrated in your blood, or else it would kill you.
A scientifically-standard drink is 10mL of pure ethanol in carrier medium.
Unless you're burning more energy than you're eating and you have no glycogen or fat stores, this doesn't matter.
If you are burning more energy than you're eating and you have no glycogen or fat stores, you're going to die unless you eat something like straight sugar right now.
That sounds like "music is art, so I guess this counts." He didn't see video games as a medium which could tell a story in complex ways; it sounds like he wasn't sure he could argue that music is somehow not art.
Ebert also said video games are not an expressive media and only idiots consume them.
978sqft houses in 1950. 2,300sqft in 2003. We buy more shit, we get bigger houses, we fill the houses with more shit.
Okay, well, with a cut-down population, you also lose the labor required to produce to support the population. Then labor becomes a short resource. Without a labor reserve, you can't take advantage of technical progress, and so the economy becomes unstable and poverty becomes more wide-spread, rather than the normal model of developing better access to food, clean water, and healthcare as technology improves.
It is true that population does expand to fit our current resources, but it is not true that = constant scarcity.
Population expands to fit our current resources because it hits a wall. Communist leaders have not spent the past 10,000 year of human history dictating how many children each family shall have to properly manage global resources; we've just expanded until maximum.
That means, yes, we expand until scarcity. We expand until the cost to acquire food starts increasing. We advance until the number of farmers needed grows proportionally-faster than the number of people being born. We expand until we can't build houses fast enough to house all these people, can't mine oil fast enough to provide all the industrial services they need, and so forth. Then we get more poor people and continued expansion necessarily will cause a rise in unemployment, a rise in poverty, and a visible and obvious economic recession, which slows population growth.
Look at the United States, the United Kingdom, China, France, and Germany. Sure, there seems to be tons of food, employment, etc... except if you're in the bottom 5% of the country, since we have about 5% unemployment and about half of those are begging on the streets and getting their food from trash cans.
In African nations, they have a lower quality-of-life and a reduced standard-of-living. They outbreed the failures of their healthcare systems--we do, too, but we have great healthcare and so don't have to have 18 kids to ensure 2 survive polio and malaria--and have a population limited by availability of things like food.
In America and Europe, the population spiked around the 1920s. There was food scarcity, and so a lot of Nobel-Prize-winning work went into developing new agricultural tools and methods. In a world with 1.9 billion people and an add of around 100 million per year, we suddenly saw growth to 3.2 billion people in less than a decade as food became more-accessible.
So yes, historically, this is how it works. Not how it might work; not how it works with foxes and lemmings; this is how it works with people, throughout human history.
Also, people are rational agents; they simply don't always have 100% of all information available. They make a rational decision based on imperfect information.
Resource problems are a myth, in a sense. Population always expands until scarcity: at a point, you can't scale production of some products without investing more labor, which means the basic cost of those products increases, the economization of means decreases, the poor get poorer, and more people become poor. At that point, population expansion slows until technical progress raises the scarcity cap.
Take food. Without GMO, fertilizers, pesticides, irrigation, tractors, and other modern intensive techniques, you need more land to grow the same food. That doesn't just mean more labor per yield of food; it also means you run out of good-climate, good-soil, accessible-irrigation land with a lower total food-per-year yield. Bump that and you can have more population.
The resource scarcity issue is constant, and has always been constant. When we find more, we expand.
They don't support extremism. If you suggest extremism might be a thing in their presence, they will swiftly bar you from any and all contact with them, and call all their friends to ensure your cash flows stop and you die a slow death.
The fun part comes when Google starts obeying all the little wishlist things and so rightsholders's stuff stops getting as much visibility, thus sales.
Copyright is valid. Making a car requires an enormous capital investment for equipment, plus a ton of labor per-vehicle; the engineering expense to design that car is millions of dollars, and the production of that car is enormous. The Chevrolet Volt sold 21,000 units in 2012 and 25,000 in 2013, at MSRPs around $40,000; that's $840 million and $1,000 million. At below 20% gross profit margins, that's over $672 million and $800 million of production costs. By contrast, making music requires large amounts of labor to compose, perform, record, and master; making copies of music requires pennies per thousand copies and a capital start-up cost of a $400 PC you probably already own.
Given the above, copyright obviously requires protection. The impact of partial copyright compromise is non-obvious even to many marketing executives: illegal things like playing your radio loud enough for others to hear in public cause people to buy your song, even though these things also compromise your ability to charge money for performance in that context. Focusing too hard on protection of rights will lead to loss of the benefits conferred by those rights, just as if you protected the right to remain silent by prosecuting anyone who speaks without first raising his hand.
(By "rights" I of course mean "protections provided by laws which may be changed to expand, diminish, or extinguish their scope after appropriate legal process".)
Panels of the same form factor with higher-efficiency cells install in exactly the same way. 255W panels install the same way as 180W panels and 355W panels (all of the same size). They rack up onto the same hardware.
Oddly enough, the cost of micro-inverters for panels above 255W increases; and modern power-optimizing inverters actually cost the same, but fail less-often and provide more-efficient power regulation. The installation for string inverters, micro-inverters, and power-optimizing inverters is roughly the same: connect each cell to the next, then run a home-run wire to each end of the array. String inverters plug a wire into each end; micro-inverters and power-optimizers plug in the same wire connector, but with a little box dangling off.
The three options have some rough differences.
String Inverters are cheap. You might pay $500 for a 5kW array. The array feeds each solar panel into the next, and so an underperforming module drags the entire array down and strains other panels: shade on one cell can cut your entire array's efficiency by 50%.
Micro-inverters are more-expensive. You might pay $1,200 for a 5kW array. The array plugs each solar module into the next through a micro-inverter, which really converts the panel's 600VDC into 3-wire 240VAC. This gives you a 3-wire service feed. Micro-inverters have a relatively-high failure rate.
Power optimizers cost about what micro-inverters cost. You might pay $1,300 for a 5kW array. They wire in the same way as micro-inverters, but pass 600VDC down to what amounts to a string inverter. The power optimizers themselves function similar to a modern lithium cell battery management system, drawing more power from higher-output panels and less from lower-output panels without letting the panels interact and stress each other. Power optimizers are simpler than micro-inverters, dissipate less heat, and thus have less loss and a lower failure rate.
So the physical aspect of installing any solar array is the same. If you use high-efficiency cells, nothing changes. If you use high-output panels--larger panels or similarly-sized panels with high-efficiency cells--you have to use either a cheap string inverter or a power optimizer. Micro-inverters are probably the worst choice in any installation: for a single-panel or small area, you should use a string inverter; for multi-panel, use power optimizers.
Shipping the cells requires more energy because they're larger and heavier. It requires more shipping hardware and energy infrastructure maintenance. It requires more handling to install them, wire them, and keep them free of the energy-robbing layer of dust. Manufacturing costs increase for an array with the same output, so decay from oxidization, delamination, imbalanced arrays and overvoltage, or plain old damage costs more--as does the shipping and handling, again.
If I could get a single 2 meter by 1 meter panel that output 6kW, I could have that slapped up on my roof for $500, and have a cheap $450 string inverter installed for $1,000. As it stands, I can get a 6kW array with a $1,800 power-optimizing inverter (required only for multiple-panel installations) for $5,800; I can also pay about $5,000 for the full installation labor, plus a good $400-$600 to ship the material in the first place.
I simply don't want the instability of future rate changes--granted that can happen anyway, but it's typical for the long-term, non-promotional price to be higher for a bundle than an individual element. They might give me TV for free for 12 months, then what? I don't check my bill and I pay $30 extra one month, and I don't even watch TV!
Comcast wanted to offer me 265 TV channels including HBO for 4 cents more than I was paying for 200Mbit Internet alone. I simply don't watch TV, so I don't need it.