Justification is a function of perception; and perception is a complex behavior interpreting many factors. You seem to have skipped over this.
The fact is we have a group which perceives itself as a group; perceives its group as disadvantaged; and perceives another group as being advantaged. That creates a perception that the advantaged group is some sort of enemy, and the members of its own group are some sort of kin. This creates a perception of justified action to establish fairness. Such a group will more readily respond to adverse conditions by physically remedying the perceived unfairness--and any societal rules are pushed aside.
Any group which perceives itself as excluded from the benefits of society will inevitably begin to function as if it is less a part of society. If the group perceives itself as a part of a group which is very much included in society, it will perceive the situation as less-unfair, and attempt to integrate into the more-successful portion of the social structure. Poor blacks can't readily integrate with middle-class white folks due to an immediate perception of exclusion; poor whites can readily integrate with middle-class white folk, and often do form economically-disparate social groups.
Again: the socioeconomic problems are a root cause. Solving them would reduce these disparities. The ideal of a colorblind society with full equality and a full understanding of the fairness of said society is a fantasy; the ideal of a less-broken society is not.
Some people might not call sleep deprivation "torture" because, while it sucks, we've all been tired and we've all had shitty jobs that made us work after we didn't get enough sleep. Many people have been in college while working a full-time job and spent weeks or months under chronic sleep deprivation. It seems like too common a thing and too common a tolerated thing for people to imagine it as the bloody evil they want to envision under such a damning term as "torture".
Loud music and cold temperatures are both physically dangerous (you can easily damage someone's hearing), as well as painful (your body interprets cold as pain at some point). Some people might misinterpret loud music due to lack of information (it's physically painful and can cause physical injury), which only serves to illustrate that people try to measure the metric of coercion and torture by what makes them personally wince.
I have a hard line--a fairly universal one--at anything that can cause lasting physical injury; a few bruises are not a concern in the physical sense, and raise ethical, social, and psychiatric considerations instead (there are no psychological concerns with interrogation because interrogation is intended to produce an immediate psychological impact; psychiatric impacts--developed mental health issues--are a form of injury). That means I'll broadly define any deliberate trauma which causes long-term harm (physical, mental) as torture; and I'll raise questions about effectiveness and about philosophical considerations when you get down to short-term annoyances. In that large space is the gray area: something that is not *definitely* torture is not necessarily definitely *not* torture. Physically battering someone is not *definitely* torture because a bruise is a triviality; but the fear of being physically helpless and battered at the hands of your captors can inflict long-term psychiatric trauma, and so we might evaluate this as torture. Maybe you think slapping someone across the face is "intimidation" because it does no real physical harm and only serves as a method of frightening someone with the threat of further physical discomfort. Welcome to the gray lands.
Making someone look at an ugly, old, naked woman could be torture. What people find unattractive can be psychologically painful--naked fat chicks might actually inflict as much torment on a person as waterboarding. You can say the same for making someone watch gay porn, if they're disturbed by that sort of thing.
Again: we don't have a dialogue on what we perceive as torture. We don't have a dialogue on the political use of the term "torture". We've made it into a vague term that essentially means "something done to a prisoner which we don't like", and have demonstrated that we will happily accept some pretty horrendous stuff as long as we don't perceive it as being disturbing, while complaining about things which aren't nearly as severe. Bamboo under the fingernails and hot pokers on the flesh upset our empathetic reason; we interpret waterboarding as a physical assault rather than a psychological one; and we say nothing about the violation of people's religious sensibilities when we perceive those sensibilities as either not important (because we don't share them) or evil (because they are the beliefs of our enemies).
How is imprisonment not a form of torture? If imprisonment is an acceptable form of coercion, how is sleep deprivation not? How is waterboarding different than holding a thick rod over someone's head and threatening to beat them, in the case that you can make them truly believe and fear the threat?
The most useful legislation for these things is "facilitation by limitation": doing X is a liability nightmare and legally ambiguous, thus we write laws describing when and how you can do X and banning any doing of X outside these limitations. In this case, a useful law would facilitate the transfer of data between countries by describing how those transfers are handled and what legal and contractual agreements for handling that data must be in place, including requirements for mutual legal protections (i.e. you can transfer data to Germany as long as German law requires the same protections outlined in this law).
Whether the limitations in this bill are actually useful, complete, or correct is another matter. You can always execute a correct strategy in an incorrect manner.
Waterboarding is a form of psychological torture. The problem is torture is a huge, arbitrary gray area: any form of coercion is uncomfortable, yet at some point we call it "torture". In other words: we know inflicting extreme pain is torture; and we know inflicting mild discomfort (e.g. a fucking prison cell?) is *not* torture; and somewhere in the middle we argue over where something goes from not-torture to torture.
To some people, torture must be physical; and to some, it must include physical pain. Some people don't recognize simple torment as torture, and some people don't recognize small pains as torture (is a static shock now and then torture? It's not something most people consider as more than an annoyance in daily life).
Wiping your ass with pages of the Qu'ran: is it torture? You can inflict as much psychological harm on a highly-religious Muslim by doing such things as you can by physically torturing someone's small child in front of them. By the same token, waterboarding is only psychological: it makes the subject experience a fear of drowning without the physical possibility of drowning, and so is not a physical form of torture. Can you believe waterboarding is torture and also believe that violating someone's deeply-seated religious beliefs is not torture?
The sense of ambiguity is very real. Torture is one of those words used in a meaningless sense in politics: the line is twisted, blurred, and outright smeared to say what we want. We categorize high forms of torment as torture, and then dismiss other *worse* forms as not being torture because they don't offend our personal sensibilities and wouldn't bother us. Until we have a dialogue about *why* the term "torture" is ambiguous and practically meaningless, we cannot address the problem of inhumane treatment of prisoners of war.
That also ignores that a high population of blacks and hispanics are low-income families, and thus more tended to group socially with other low-income individuals of the same race. A low-income area of high racial concentration will form more effective gangs out of the races which group most effectively: if there are scattered whites and lots and *lots* of blacks in the ghetto, you'll get more black gangs and more black gang crime.
Lots of confounding variables due to weird social factors. Things like the "us-versus-them" mentality that comes with wide racial perceptions--the perception that white people are all rich and blacks are all poor would drive blacks to feel the world is less-fair, thus more toward crime (most criminals believe their actions are justified). If you swap the races--the whole country is rich blacks and we have a media dialogue of all the minority white people being held down by all the blacks--you'd get docile blacks and violent whites.
Race is a modulator. It gives us nice lines to draw. That doesn't mean we imagine race X is involved in more crime than race Y; it means race X gets to see more justifiable reason to involve itself in more crime than race Y, and behaves as a rational actor. Your source problem is social: economic and political factor feed a perception of unfairness and social isolation which creates blame, anger, and violence.
Blurring the lines of poverty is one of the great advantages of strong economic policies: the social impact is a reduction in racial social pressures due to a stronger perception of fairness. Unfortunately, most people are more interested in class warfare--tax the rich instead of stabilizing the poor--so they want high taxes for high earners, and start screaming when you show them no such thing is necessary.
What Brave does is no different than if someone picked up a copy of a newspaper and taped their own ads over the existing ads before handing the paper to you for perusal.
They have a partnership with the newspaper, and pay them part of the revenue.
Actually, if he pulled together data and published a research paper, he'd get chucked in the kook bin. Welcome to climate science.
We chuck a lot of people in the kook bin, from vaccines-cause-autism whackjobs right up to those people who... well, invented vaccination. We've got a pretty bad track record for figuring out whose science is bullshit and whose is valid.
It's more that they're competing in a market where technology allows them to mutually compete, and this is the painful growth phase. This is technological growth in adolescence.
This is true so long as you either A. have root on your web server or B. have a means of automating installation of renewed certificates.
(A) is a matter of service and marketing; (B) is a matter of technology. That it's cheap to do something (i.e. technology) doesn't mean people have done it (else everything would have gone TLS in the mid-2000s, when this privacy dialogue had gotten nice and hot--remember PGP in the 90s?).
That's what my original content about rent-seeking was: Netflix asserts everyone is shoving their blood-tentacles down any hole from which they smell money. $1,000 per 100,000 users licensing deal? Oh you have 1,000,000 users? $25,000 per 100,000 users is our fee for the next contract!
The big push for HTTPS is a technological one as far as I can see. Back in the day, you'd buy a separate SSL endpoint to handle the encryption; today, TLS encryption of HTTP causes latency increases of a statistical 5mS at worst (i.e. there's a lot of overlap and it looks like 0, but a lot of math tells us there's 5mS lost on average somewhere in there if you look hard enough), and the CPU toll is about 2% more computational overhead in the most complex part of the key exchange. TLS costs a fraction of a percent of CPU now for the ongoing session.
In other words: HTTPS is approximately identical to HTTP in terms of cost, and the likelihood that your site dies under load at any given time is roughly equivalent when using either protocol. Suddenly it's a big dialogue.
True. That raises questions about rent-seeking; Netflix asserts the studios have been rent-seeking by charging more per title, while ISPs have provided favorable access by placing Netflix source nodes inside their networks (reducing peer-to-peer infrastructure cost).
Even the major broadcasters (e.g. SBGI) are now getting into producing their own shows; while Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, and YouTube have been heavily advertising in-house productions to avoid licensing fees and attract an audience to exclusive content. Considering the start-up cost, letting a professional studio and media delivery market sell you the content should reduce costs; why is everyone standing up their own?
Their shrinking ability to provide service undermines my economics arguments; and I always lean heavily on macroeconomics, leaving market behaviors to sort themselves out. My arguments will hold perfectly and Netflix or a Netflix-like service will become objectively cheaper over the course of decades; but over several years? The market economics will bounce things up and down. I concluded that Netflix appears to be charging more for the same service unless a bunch of other conditions are true because there are gaps in my analysis of the market, and because it appears to be objectively true; I'm not about to override what's going on between one day and the next by claiming multi-decade macroeconomics prove that could never happen.
I've more recently amused myself by telling people about the other cultural impacts. This works well for me since I have no fixed moral compass and will just reconfigure to operate within society's bounds; that's a secondary effect of being SPD I think: I'm not socially-attached to you and so don't sympathize with your moral panic. I'll raise issue when objective harm is done--which happens a lot both when you break moral systems (regardless of if the moral system is essential--that is, an act that's harmless in a society without a moral opinion on the matter is detrimental in a society with one) and when you follow them.
We're all familiar with that last bit. Half the arguments against the War on Drugs cite its ineffectiveness at actually curbing drug use and its creation of a landscape of scattered criminal enterprise, gang violence, and excessive public costs which produce no real benefit. The other half point out that meth and heroin are bad, but marijuana is not very bad, and alcohol and cigarettes are even worse (toxicologically and socially) than marijuana.
So here's where my shifting moral compass comes into effect.
People from the 20s freaked out at the knee-length skirts the sluts of the 50s liked to wear. People from the 50s freaked out about the sexual and pharmacological exploits of people of the 60s and 70s. People from the 60s freaked out about the miniskirts of the 90s. People from the 80s are now freaking out about their kids smoking pot.
I'm simply re-evaluating. Pot isn't that bad; when they legalize Codine OTC I'll have issues. I'm already completely baffled Marijuana is Schedule 1 and yet phenibut is OTC?? Schedule 1 - No medical use, high abuse (addictive) potential. Phenibut works *once* per month, and then you have to increase the dose... then withdrawal is nearly suicide--you WILL want to kill yourself, literally, since the withdrawal effects are suicidal ideation coupled with horrible depression. It's in Relax-All in an unspecified dose--an OTC drug advertised as a stress reliever. Meanwhile, marijuana is practically harmless and almost completely non-addictive, and it somehow warrants paramilitary assaults on your house if you have one potted plant.
No moral issues. Procedural issues.
In 20 years, they'll have given up on soft-core teenage porn. Proliferation of camera phones will make pictures of 13-year-old tits ubiquitous. My generation will complain a lot, and people will fret about their teenage daughter sending her tits around the internet, and what if a pedophile on the other side of the continent sees her boobs on some Internet archive, etc.
I'll just shrug and tell them to maybe educate their kids about risks, instead of treating them like eternal first-graders up until they turn 18. What do I care if people are passing around pictures of naked middle-schoolers or bestiality or whatnot? They already pass around gay porn and furry porn and all, and the world hasn't ended despite a lot of people crying about that; my hard drive also hasn't filled up with gay porn, and my computer doesn't greet me with a giant male anus dripping semen every morning. I'm sure it won't fill itself with tweenage orgies in 2035, whether or not my neighbors are googling up all kinds of torrents of the stuff.
Of course people are horrified at the ideal of giving their kids weapons and medical supplies; they want to wrap them in EVA foam padding and hide them from the world forever. Your kids are going to do stupid shit, and they're going to need to dig their way out of trouble and clean their wounds; try treating them like adults, fight off other adults that might harm your kids, and hope for the best. Sara Palin's daughter blahblah withholding risk decision education.
They're making insane profits and they're giving it away? Sounds to me like prices are market-corrected for competition.
Note: I am not a theory-of-value economist, and don't try to predict the correct price of goods and services; I simply point out that the price is above the cost, including cost of risk, and so it seems nobody is undercutting their costs as a loss-lead strategy. This looks like the normal market behavior of various economic factors pushing price toward costs, allowing technological growth to reduce the cost of goods and services.
A 60 minute show is 45 minutes of content; a half-hour episode is consistently 22.5 minutes. That's 25% commercial-to-content ratio.
If your TV wasn't from 1990, you wouldn't need to rent a cable box. It also wouldn't be all fuzzy and flickery. A new such TV costs less than that cable box you cited.
For Netflix, your CPU/GPU/OS may not be enough. $150 Windows purchase, a $300 monitor, and an $800 PC purchase not included.
Most of us have the TV/decoder or the PC already, so we don't count those things. I use an HDTV as a computer monitor, so I avoid the split cost and save physical space in my house.
Netflix started its service in 1997 as a DVD-only service. They originally added streaming for $1 per hour, including a top-tier $16.99/month plan still available in 2007 for 17 hours per month. In 2008, Netflix went to a $7.99 streaming model; and in 2011, they raised their streaming service to $8.99/month and then $9.99/month.
Let's ignore that Netflix $9.99/month unlimited streaming is more service for 53% of the dollar price of their 2007 service.
In 2008, Netflix allowed unlimited streaming for $7.99/month at a median income of $52,050. In 2014, it was $53,650, a 3.07% increase. That means $8.23 would be price parity; Netflix seems to be more expensive now. That's in terms of median income, not per-capita.
On the other hand, the per-capita GDP was $48,400 in 2008 and $53,00 in 2013. That's a 9.5% increase, making a fair Netflix price $8.75/month. That's a more correct measure, but still falls short.
That means Netflix is charging more for the same service, so long as it supplies the same service per individual--same amount of streaming, same simultaneous streaming, same amount of content to manage, etc. If they're supplying more, consuming more bandwidth per subscription, or otherwise delivering a better service in 2015 than they did in 2008, then of course the price is up. It's a 25% price increase.
I did not and will not put a revocation clause for felony offence in my Citizen's Dividend plan. I refuse to disenfranchise Americans from their rightful public support just because they got arrested; if you're left with nothing and thrown into the streets to die, why would you not become a dangerous criminal? Do you have a choice? You must steal and mug and deal drugs and prostitute to survive; that's not good policy.
A much higher percentage of State taxi drivers than Uber drivers have drunk driving convictions in the past 10 years of their criminal record. On average, the layperson would call that "Safest drivers on the road".
It's better than that. 25 people in THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA. The CITY of Houston has hundreds of them, despite requiring a clean criminal record.
Let me say that again: One city, hundreds of rapists and drug dealers, 8% of cab drivers. One state, 160,000 Uber drivers, 25 convicted felons, 0.016% of Uber drivers.
It sounds like Uber is outdoing some municipalities.
Slashdot Mirror
Justification is a function of ethics
Justification is a function of perception; and perception is a complex behavior interpreting many factors. You seem to have skipped over this.
The fact is we have a group which perceives itself as a group; perceives its group as disadvantaged; and perceives another group as being advantaged. That creates a perception that the advantaged group is some sort of enemy, and the members of its own group are some sort of kin. This creates a perception of justified action to establish fairness. Such a group will more readily respond to adverse conditions by physically remedying the perceived unfairness--and any societal rules are pushed aside.
Any group which perceives itself as excluded from the benefits of society will inevitably begin to function as if it is less a part of society. If the group perceives itself as a part of a group which is very much included in society, it will perceive the situation as less-unfair, and attempt to integrate into the more-successful portion of the social structure. Poor blacks can't readily integrate with middle-class white folks due to an immediate perception of exclusion; poor whites can readily integrate with middle-class white folk, and often do form economically-disparate social groups.
Again: the socioeconomic problems are a root cause. Solving them would reduce these disparities. The ideal of a colorblind society with full equality and a full understanding of the fairness of said society is a fantasy; the ideal of a less-broken society is not.
Some people might not call sleep deprivation "torture" because, while it sucks, we've all been tired and we've all had shitty jobs that made us work after we didn't get enough sleep. Many people have been in college while working a full-time job and spent weeks or months under chronic sleep deprivation. It seems like too common a thing and too common a tolerated thing for people to imagine it as the bloody evil they want to envision under such a damning term as "torture".
Loud music and cold temperatures are both physically dangerous (you can easily damage someone's hearing), as well as painful (your body interprets cold as pain at some point). Some people might misinterpret loud music due to lack of information (it's physically painful and can cause physical injury), which only serves to illustrate that people try to measure the metric of coercion and torture by what makes them personally wince.
I have a hard line--a fairly universal one--at anything that can cause lasting physical injury; a few bruises are not a concern in the physical sense, and raise ethical, social, and psychiatric considerations instead (there are no psychological concerns with interrogation because interrogation is intended to produce an immediate psychological impact; psychiatric impacts--developed mental health issues--are a form of injury). That means I'll broadly define any deliberate trauma which causes long-term harm (physical, mental) as torture; and I'll raise questions about effectiveness and about philosophical considerations when you get down to short-term annoyances. In that large space is the gray area: something that is not *definitely* torture is not necessarily definitely *not* torture. Physically battering someone is not *definitely* torture because a bruise is a triviality; but the fear of being physically helpless and battered at the hands of your captors can inflict long-term psychiatric trauma, and so we might evaluate this as torture. Maybe you think slapping someone across the face is "intimidation" because it does no real physical harm and only serves as a method of frightening someone with the threat of further physical discomfort. Welcome to the gray lands.
Making someone look at an ugly, old, naked woman could be torture. What people find unattractive can be psychologically painful--naked fat chicks might actually inflict as much torment on a person as waterboarding. You can say the same for making someone watch gay porn, if they're disturbed by that sort of thing.
Again: we don't have a dialogue on what we perceive as torture. We don't have a dialogue on the political use of the term "torture". We've made it into a vague term that essentially means "something done to a prisoner which we don't like", and have demonstrated that we will happily accept some pretty horrendous stuff as long as we don't perceive it as being disturbing, while complaining about things which aren't nearly as severe. Bamboo under the fingernails and hot pokers on the flesh upset our empathetic reason; we interpret waterboarding as a physical assault rather than a psychological one; and we say nothing about the violation of people's religious sensibilities when we perceive those sensibilities as either not important (because we don't share them) or evil (because they are the beliefs of our enemies).
How is imprisonment not a form of torture? If imprisonment is an acceptable form of coercion, how is sleep deprivation not? How is waterboarding different than holding a thick rod over someone's head and threatening to beat them, in the case that you can make them truly believe and fear the threat?
Are these questions uncomfortable?
The most useful legislation for these things is "facilitation by limitation": doing X is a liability nightmare and legally ambiguous, thus we write laws describing when and how you can do X and banning any doing of X outside these limitations. In this case, a useful law would facilitate the transfer of data between countries by describing how those transfers are handled and what legal and contractual agreements for handling that data must be in place, including requirements for mutual legal protections (i.e. you can transfer data to Germany as long as German law requires the same protections outlined in this law).
Whether the limitations in this bill are actually useful, complete, or correct is another matter. You can always execute a correct strategy in an incorrect manner.
Waterboarding is a form of psychological torture. The problem is torture is a huge, arbitrary gray area: any form of coercion is uncomfortable, yet at some point we call it "torture". In other words: we know inflicting extreme pain is torture; and we know inflicting mild discomfort (e.g. a fucking prison cell?) is *not* torture; and somewhere in the middle we argue over where something goes from not-torture to torture.
To some people, torture must be physical; and to some, it must include physical pain. Some people don't recognize simple torment as torture, and some people don't recognize small pains as torture (is a static shock now and then torture? It's not something most people consider as more than an annoyance in daily life).
Wiping your ass with pages of the Qu'ran: is it torture? You can inflict as much psychological harm on a highly-religious Muslim by doing such things as you can by physically torturing someone's small child in front of them. By the same token, waterboarding is only psychological: it makes the subject experience a fear of drowning without the physical possibility of drowning, and so is not a physical form of torture. Can you believe waterboarding is torture and also believe that violating someone's deeply-seated religious beliefs is not torture?
The sense of ambiguity is very real. Torture is one of those words used in a meaningless sense in politics: the line is twisted, blurred, and outright smeared to say what we want. We categorize high forms of torment as torture, and then dismiss other *worse* forms as not being torture because they don't offend our personal sensibilities and wouldn't bother us. Until we have a dialogue about *why* the term "torture" is ambiguous and practically meaningless, we cannot address the problem of inhumane treatment of prisoners of war.
That also ignores that a high population of blacks and hispanics are low-income families, and thus more tended to group socially with other low-income individuals of the same race. A low-income area of high racial concentration will form more effective gangs out of the races which group most effectively: if there are scattered whites and lots and *lots* of blacks in the ghetto, you'll get more black gangs and more black gang crime.
Lots of confounding variables due to weird social factors. Things like the "us-versus-them" mentality that comes with wide racial perceptions--the perception that white people are all rich and blacks are all poor would drive blacks to feel the world is less-fair, thus more toward crime (most criminals believe their actions are justified). If you swap the races--the whole country is rich blacks and we have a media dialogue of all the minority white people being held down by all the blacks--you'd get docile blacks and violent whites.
Race is a modulator. It gives us nice lines to draw. That doesn't mean we imagine race X is involved in more crime than race Y; it means race X gets to see more justifiable reason to involve itself in more crime than race Y, and behaves as a rational actor. Your source problem is social: economic and political factor feed a perception of unfairness and social isolation which creates blame, anger, and violence.
Blurring the lines of poverty is one of the great advantages of strong economic policies: the social impact is a reduction in racial social pressures due to a stronger perception of fairness. Unfortunately, most people are more interested in class warfare--tax the rich instead of stabilizing the poor--so they want high taxes for high earners, and start screaming when you show them no such thing is necessary.
Waiting for a woman to sexually assault a woman.
You're the only one who saw it. "Come spend tourist money!"
Like I said: nothing new.
What Brave does is no different than if someone picked up a copy of a newspaper and taped their own ads over the existing ads before handing the paper to you for perusal.
They have a partnership with the newspaper, and pay them part of the revenue.
Actually, if he pulled together data and published a research paper, he'd get chucked in the kook bin. Welcome to climate science.
We chuck a lot of people in the kook bin, from vaccines-cause-autism whackjobs right up to those people who... well, invented vaccination. We've got a pretty bad track record for figuring out whose science is bullshit and whose is valid.
It's more that they're competing in a market where technology allows them to mutually compete, and this is the painful growth phase. This is technological growth in adolescence.
This is true so long as you either A. have root on your web server or B. have a means of automating installation of renewed certificates.
(A) is a matter of service and marketing; (B) is a matter of technology. That it's cheap to do something (i.e. technology) doesn't mean people have done it (else everything would have gone TLS in the mid-2000s, when this privacy dialogue had gotten nice and hot--remember PGP in the 90s?).
That's what my original content about rent-seeking was: Netflix asserts everyone is shoving their blood-tentacles down any hole from which they smell money. $1,000 per 100,000 users licensing deal? Oh you have 1,000,000 users? $25,000 per 100,000 users is our fee for the next contract!
The big push for HTTPS is a technological one as far as I can see. Back in the day, you'd buy a separate SSL endpoint to handle the encryption; today, TLS encryption of HTTP causes latency increases of a statistical 5mS at worst (i.e. there's a lot of overlap and it looks like 0, but a lot of math tells us there's 5mS lost on average somewhere in there if you look hard enough), and the CPU toll is about 2% more computational overhead in the most complex part of the key exchange. TLS costs a fraction of a percent of CPU now for the ongoing session.
In other words: HTTPS is approximately identical to HTTP in terms of cost, and the likelihood that your site dies under load at any given time is roughly equivalent when using either protocol. Suddenly it's a big dialogue.
Your TV doesn't already support ATSC?
True. That raises questions about rent-seeking; Netflix asserts the studios have been rent-seeking by charging more per title, while ISPs have provided favorable access by placing Netflix source nodes inside their networks (reducing peer-to-peer infrastructure cost).
Even the major broadcasters (e.g. SBGI) are now getting into producing their own shows; while Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, and YouTube have been heavily advertising in-house productions to avoid licensing fees and attract an audience to exclusive content. Considering the start-up cost, letting a professional studio and media delivery market sell you the content should reduce costs; why is everyone standing up their own?
Their shrinking ability to provide service undermines my economics arguments; and I always lean heavily on macroeconomics, leaving market behaviors to sort themselves out. My arguments will hold perfectly and Netflix or a Netflix-like service will become objectively cheaper over the course of decades; but over several years? The market economics will bounce things up and down. I concluded that Netflix appears to be charging more for the same service unless a bunch of other conditions are true because there are gaps in my analysis of the market, and because it appears to be objectively true; I'm not about to override what's going on between one day and the next by claiming multi-decade macroeconomics prove that could never happen.
Look, if we could rid the world of the Dark Oculators, I'd be right on that. Those guys are bad juju.
Based on William Strunk's observation that the last point made in a sentence or paragraph makes the strongest impression in the reader's mind?
I've more recently amused myself by telling people about the other cultural impacts. This works well for me since I have no fixed moral compass and will just reconfigure to operate within society's bounds; that's a secondary effect of being SPD I think: I'm not socially-attached to you and so don't sympathize with your moral panic. I'll raise issue when objective harm is done--which happens a lot both when you break moral systems (regardless of if the moral system is essential--that is, an act that's harmless in a society without a moral opinion on the matter is detrimental in a society with one) and when you follow them.
We're all familiar with that last bit. Half the arguments against the War on Drugs cite its ineffectiveness at actually curbing drug use and its creation of a landscape of scattered criminal enterprise, gang violence, and excessive public costs which produce no real benefit. The other half point out that meth and heroin are bad, but marijuana is not very bad, and alcohol and cigarettes are even worse (toxicologically and socially) than marijuana.
So here's where my shifting moral compass comes into effect.
People from the 20s freaked out at the knee-length skirts the sluts of the 50s liked to wear. People from the 50s freaked out about the sexual and pharmacological exploits of people of the 60s and 70s. People from the 60s freaked out about the miniskirts of the 90s. People from the 80s are now freaking out about their kids smoking pot.
I'm simply re-evaluating. Pot isn't that bad; when they legalize Codine OTC I'll have issues. I'm already completely baffled Marijuana is Schedule 1 and yet phenibut is OTC?? Schedule 1 - No medical use, high abuse (addictive) potential. Phenibut works *once* per month, and then you have to increase the dose... then withdrawal is nearly suicide--you WILL want to kill yourself, literally, since the withdrawal effects are suicidal ideation coupled with horrible depression. It's in Relax-All in an unspecified dose--an OTC drug advertised as a stress reliever. Meanwhile, marijuana is practically harmless and almost completely non-addictive, and it somehow warrants paramilitary assaults on your house if you have one potted plant.
No moral issues. Procedural issues.
In 20 years, they'll have given up on soft-core teenage porn. Proliferation of camera phones will make pictures of 13-year-old tits ubiquitous. My generation will complain a lot, and people will fret about their teenage daughter sending her tits around the internet, and what if a pedophile on the other side of the continent sees her boobs on some Internet archive, etc.
I'll just shrug and tell them to maybe educate their kids about risks, instead of treating them like eternal first-graders up until they turn 18. What do I care if people are passing around pictures of naked middle-schoolers or bestiality or whatnot? They already pass around gay porn and furry porn and all, and the world hasn't ended despite a lot of people crying about that; my hard drive also hasn't filled up with gay porn, and my computer doesn't greet me with a giant male anus dripping semen every morning. I'm sure it won't fill itself with tweenage orgies in 2035, whether or not my neighbors are googling up all kinds of torrents of the stuff.
Of course people are horrified at the ideal of giving their kids weapons and medical supplies; they want to wrap them in EVA foam padding and hide them from the world forever. Your kids are going to do stupid shit, and they're going to need to dig their way out of trouble and clean their wounds; try treating them like adults, fight off other adults that might harm your kids, and hope for the best. Sara Palin's daughter blahblah withholding risk decision education.
They're making insane profits and they're giving it away? Sounds to me like prices are market-corrected for competition.
Note: I am not a theory-of-value economist, and don't try to predict the correct price of goods and services; I simply point out that the price is above the cost, including cost of risk, and so it seems nobody is undercutting their costs as a loss-lead strategy. This looks like the normal market behavior of various economic factors pushing price toward costs, allowing technological growth to reduce the cost of goods and services.
A 60 minute show is 45 minutes of content; a half-hour episode is consistently 22.5 minutes. That's 25% commercial-to-content ratio.
If your TV wasn't from 1990, you wouldn't need to rent a cable box. It also wouldn't be all fuzzy and flickery. A new such TV costs less than that cable box you cited.
For Netflix, your CPU/GPU/OS may not be enough. $150 Windows purchase, a $300 monitor, and an $800 PC purchase not included.
Most of us have the TV/decoder or the PC already, so we don't count those things. I use an HDTV as a computer monitor, so I avoid the split cost and save physical space in my house.
It's better than that.
Netflix started its service in 1997 as a DVD-only service. They originally added streaming for $1 per hour, including a top-tier $16.99/month plan still available in 2007 for 17 hours per month. In 2008, Netflix went to a $7.99 streaming model; and in 2011, they raised their streaming service to $8.99/month and then $9.99/month.
Let's ignore that Netflix $9.99/month unlimited streaming is more service for 53% of the dollar price of their 2007 service.
In 2008, Netflix allowed unlimited streaming for $7.99/month at a median income of $52,050. In 2014, it was $53,650, a 3.07% increase. That means $8.23 would be price parity; Netflix seems to be more expensive now. That's in terms of median income, not per-capita.
On the other hand, the per-capita GDP was $48,400 in 2008 and $53,00 in 2013. That's a 9.5% increase, making a fair Netflix price $8.75/month. That's a more correct measure, but still falls short.
That means Netflix is charging more for the same service, so long as it supplies the same service per individual--same amount of streaming, same simultaneous streaming, same amount of content to manage, etc. If they're supplying more, consuming more bandwidth per subscription, or otherwise delivering a better service in 2015 than they did in 2008, then of course the price is up. It's a 25% price increase.
I did not and will not put a revocation clause for felony offence in my Citizen's Dividend plan. I refuse to disenfranchise Americans from their rightful public support just because they got arrested; if you're left with nothing and thrown into the streets to die, why would you not become a dangerous criminal? Do you have a choice? You must steal and mug and deal drugs and prostitute to survive; that's not good policy.
A much higher percentage of State taxi drivers than Uber drivers have drunk driving convictions in the past 10 years of their criminal record. On average, the layperson would call that "Safest drivers on the road".
It's better than that. 25 people in THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA. The CITY of Houston has hundreds of them, despite requiring a clean criminal record.
Let me say that again: One city, hundreds of rapists and drug dealers, 8% of cab drivers. One state, 160,000 Uber drivers, 25 convicted felons, 0.016% of Uber drivers.
It sounds like Uber is outdoing some municipalities.