Sorry it's taken a while to respond. Interesting discussion by the way, it's rare to find people who actually appear to want to think these issues through:).
No problem, I enjoy a good debate that makes me think, and learn:)
For example, look at Coca-Colas introduction of Dasani bottled water in Britain. A supposedly very, from the perspective of trademark investments, accountable company introduces a product that is actually more or less dangerous to ones health?
But branding allowed traceability. They could clearly identify that it was Dasani water and pull the appropriate bottles off the shelf. Further, it was Coca-cola's own tests that found the issue. The company knows that if somebody outside the company discovered the issue, they would immediately be able to traceback to them, so they must maintain high levels of quality.
It's when it's combined with anti-competetive measures such as exclusive deals, IP law, etc, that the problem and real economic damage sets in
I don't make the connection, trademark is IP law which gives exclusive use of a symbol in a particular industry. Does the fact that only Apple can sell computers with the Apple logo really restrict the industry significantly?
The ever more efficient creation of desired goods. That is the fundamental engine of material wealth.
What makes a desired good though? The difference between $20 golf club vs a $400 golf club is design and marketing, the actual production issue is negligable.
Play some mind-game simulations, create smaller economies, like villages and compete them against eachother as you assign people different tasks, and see where the actual wealth comes from.
See what happens if one village makes all the goods, and the other one only makes designs? You'd better hope the good-making village doesnt start making their own designs, or simply copying the design-villages designs, or the design-only village gets in deep trouble.
What is the opportunity cost of the good-making village to have some people switch to design? They can't have them work on production if they are doing design, so they lose some of their comptitive advantage in production. The other issue is if the good-making village doesn't make designs which are as desireable as the design village's (since the design village has much more experience, expertise, and resources this would likely happen) then their goods production is worse off. Would either side want to go to a less efficient production with inferior goods?
On the flip side of your arguement lets say another village offers better and/or cheaper production. Now who is better off? For the purpose of self preservation each village needs to identify areas where it has advantages and not just hope that trade stays balanced. Each side must continue using competitive advantage and trade for existing goods, but continue to innovate and diversify in other areas. For example, the design only village better continue making better designs, or even start production of goods that could not be as efficiently made in the other village.
Yes, the design of goods is important, but it will never employ as many people as other fields did, simply because it's infinitely reproducible at zero cost.
But think about that, if the higher value items are reproducable at zero cost, what sense does it make to go into the manufacturing of such items? Does it make sense to go into manufacturing envelopes as more and more mail goes electronic? The same arguement was made for robot replacements of people working on automobiles. The problem with that arguement is the assumption that new layers of jobs aren't created. The US doesn't really make computers anymore, but what happened to all those manufacturing jobs? They evolved into programming jobs which had many more branches and positions available. What happens when most of the fundamental programming job
Re:Probably this is just a trick by Merrill Lynch.
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A $251 Million Typo
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Finally someone who is reading with a critical eye. A $251 million dollar typo?
So you've never entered $100, instead of $1.00? Although I would suspect most companies have some sort of system that automatically requires a double check over some threshold.
I think not. A $12 million dollar paper loss?
Maybe it's broker fees for the transaction, 5% sounds about right.
That said, there definately should be an investigation anytime there are questionable accounting issues. I always wonder about the quality systems in the financial sector. In the manufacturing world there are a number of international/consortium certifications, such as ISO to ensure there are systems to prevent mistakes from happening. It seems like most of the financial world uses 3rd party auditors which are established as businesses to make money, rather than as an independent group established by the industry to improve overall quality.
I should of stayed" is a sentence without a verb, therefore without sense.
Easy answer, make "of" a verb.
What I mean is, if you want to add a fifth wheel to a car, why not, if it works, but don't take away one of the 4 original wheels, because the car won't work anymore on 3.
Or redesign the car to work with 3.
Excusing the fact that it is poetry, try reading the middle english version of Canterbury Tales. Language definately evolves, what may be "right" today may be painful to read tomorrow.
I try to use the rules, but if I understand you, what else matters?
I think of it like a stuck pixel on an LCD around the edge of the screen. During normal use you wouldn't even notice it; the monitor works fine, you can watch movies, play games, surf the net... but in the back of your mind that monitor is still broken. Poor spelling or grammar still gets the point across. Though, if the reader notices it lingers in the back of their mind and detracts from your message.
I've said it before, but it's not the diction that matters, but the message.
You would think so, logically. However, people tend to pass judgement on the messenger and weigh the argument accordingly.
I'm not writing a fucking paper, it's an response in a damn forum
You're involving yourself in a public conversation. As such you invite others to criticize any weakness. Whether it's a flaw in your logic, information, or spelling. You have the option of ignoring those responses, or using them constructively to improve your skills.
We're doing a much better job exporting our culture to them than they are to us.
It's give and take really. Certain parts of other cultures catch on here, just as certain parts of US culture catch on elsewhere. For every Hollywood movie or McDonalds we export, there is a Pokemon, Spanish soap opera, swiss watch, or Kung-fu film we import.
But how many hours did you play HL2? About 12? Maybe 20, max?
Sure 15 hours, but I never ran into a real "deadspot" where I was stuck. 1 hour of figuring out you needed to "buy a stamp to send out the order get the skeleton key to open a door" is not fun for me. Some games may be short but as gratifying as a 40 hour game. Also multiplayer has added another dimension, giving games greater longevity. Moreover, many modern games have become open, allowing you to experience many games with the purchase of one.
I don't want to sound like the 'in my day, we had to walk b arefoot over snowy mountains to have some fun' kinda guy, but The Secret of Monkey Island, or the Space Quest games, or even Larry, took months to beat. And everyu moment (even the frustration! I can't say that for for example GTA:SA) was fun.
I felt the same with KOTOR and Everquest.
As for variety: since the 'golden age of gaming' (Elite to Civ1),
You mean Elite, which is similar to many earlier "space trader" genre games, but with prettier graphics. Or Civ which was another in the 4x game genre, which also existed in the text days. Games haven't really changed that much at, even the great games of the "golden days" were just really great implementations of existing genres. If you want to take it a step further, many of these genres existed as board games before computers really took hold. Missle command is a nifty whack-a-mole game, civilization was inspired in part by the board game civilization, and RPGs obviously had paperback roots.
The main difference is that than, the mayority of the budget was spent on gameplay and story...now at leats! 80% of the budget is spent on polygons and sound.
Yes but don't forget there were many games with bad gameplay in the past also. It's not like the entire industry was oh-so-glorious with every title genre defining. There are great games of the past, there will be great games in the future. Our ability to pick and choose only the greats to look back on influences our impression of how things were back in the day.
This is absolutely eltists trying to widen the tech gap by eliminating the trailing end of the curve. Things are already headed in that direction; let's not try to deliberatly speed it up, okay?
Yeah why do people design webpages that take so long to download on my 9600bps modem, I mean some of us can't afford to upgrade our computer. What was wrong with text only?
Look at a game like VGA Planets, it just keeps adding layers of complexity. Civ 3 also wasn't as much fun as Civ 2 because of some of the complexity. FPS level designs are becoming more complex, and with squad tactics even the gameplay is more complex..
2. As an additional reason for that, there's a bunch of stuff that's just hard to implement properly in 3D, or not obvious to the casual player in 3D, so it either disappeared or got the equivalent of a big neon sign saying "use it HERE ==>"
Yes there is a tradeoff with a simpler design, easier on the user, but also gives the game less flexibility.
For example adventure games have a simpler interface. No more frustration of "open door with crowbar" not working because "pry door open with crowbar" is what the game requires. However, the interface makes it more difficult to do less obvious things.
When the switch was made to 3D, the level of interaction basically started over. Same thing happened when text games went to 2D visuals. With Half-life 2's gravity gun, I felt like I could really interact with the environment in a meaningful way. As 3D games mature, I'm sure there will be more complex interaction.
Of course it's difficult to figure out what to streamline. Some people would rather just fly their spaceship around and blow things up, others find it just as enjoyable to manually control the ship's power systems.
3. There's a lot of stuff that gets streamlined because everything today has to be real-time. Actual strategy tends to be replaced by whack-a-mole clicking without a plan. E.g., whereas a PC RPG used to involve basically squad tactics and use of a whole range of spells (status effects, buffs, etc), nowadays you get action-RPGs where you have to run, hit and block in real time, and if you get any spells they're direct damage.
I agree single player RPGs have been dying, but MMOs are much more complex. Getting 50+ humans all working together each doing their own specialty is no easy task. In fact with multiplayer, you now need leadership, teamwork, and communication skills to be successful. As for real time strategy games, good players need sound tactics. Sure the click and rush may work in some games, but the good ones require actual thought.
4. Variety _is_ shrinking. Games tend to be easily dividable in narrow "genres" lately, often meaning a clone of other games that sold well. While it doesn't necessarily say "new games are bad", playing an exact clone of a game I've already bought before, does somewhat reduce my satisfaction.
What variety was there in the old days? Pretty much everything was a Doom clone, flight sim, civ clone, gold box clone, or adventure game.
However, they do give an excuse for governments, corporations and people to not move toward a safe, clean energy grid made up of wind, solar, biofuels and maybe fusion.
Wind that can alter weather patterns and slice up birds, solar which requires large amounts of chemicals to make, and biofuels which still emit green house gases.
The best way would probably be to leave them alone and simply run some form of consumer database tracking product equivalence.
Pretty much what we have now, while there is no central database, there is a wealth of information any consumer can access about a given brand. The negative effects of granting a monopoly to a specific name/symbol for use in trade is outweighed by the positive aspects of accountability.
That would remove part of the incentive to overmarket, as well as discourage simple markup of generic products, and force the actual value of the mark to be concentrated into the good aspects.
People by their nature want certain psychological aspects from a product. Whether its the style of a car, or which celebrity uses the product, there are always things beyond pure quality that people will gravitate to. So long as products can be differentiated there will always be an opportunity for marketing.
Oh, I'm sure there's been a lot of damage caused from it, but in general we dont tend to notice it as wealth is partly a comparative factor.
We can look at different industries to get an idea of the effect on the overall economy. The food industry is one to look at where there are really no monopolies, many suppliers, many alternatives. Branding and marketing becomes the most important aspect of making money, even beyond efficiency. Not much gets spent in developing new products. Certainly the marketing bloat would go away without trademarks, however, as discussed before this would be offset by the push towards lower quality and cutting corners to make profit.
But what we're experiencing now, unlike what we've done in the past, is that our engine of wealth creation is being successively moved out from our economy, while we keep the cost aggregators.
What is our engine of wealth creation? Used to be the engine was the laboring of the people, then it became the manufacturing of goods, now it's the design of goods. With automation the cost to create things has dropped enormously, you won't continue to generate wealth by making things. Now the design of things is what generates wealth. For example computers are becoming commodities, the real wealth is writing code that's useful.
Yep, and as long as we do that, it's fine. But that's been changing you know...
People have said that for decades, you know automation was supposed to ruin the economy because people weren't needed anymore, then it was manufacturing jobs, now its IT jobs
The cost doesnt really matter for the example.
The cost is important because it dictates the economic opportunity cost. If it costs 0 to make air, then the opportunity cost of switching those people to industry is 0 (basically it doesn't matter how many breaths people take). If to make air it was very expensive, where large amounts of society's wealth was placed towards air creation (ie air creating machines) then there is an opportunity cost of switching people to industry. So you might want to have people counting breaths, to ensure you have enough capacity for the future so people don't die..
That will still take time, and always being number two, a year behind the competition, may not be good enough.
How much time, is one year enough time for somebody to recover the investment costs? If not, nobody will make the investment. That's where patents come in, they assure a time period where there is an advantage so people will take the risks. Further, to get the patent the inventor must publish exactly how it works (once again software patents are screwed up), competitors don't have to waste resources on reverse engineering (basically reinventing the wheel).
Yes, well, from me, for example. Perhaps not a hundred million dollars, but frankly, if someone said they wanted to run a project to improve engine efficiency and that it'd cost 100M I wouldnt give them a cent, no matter how many years I'd have exclu
So, what you want is actually a form of quality control, guaranteeing that a certain product fulfills certain criteria. You cant call it Coke unless it tastes a certain way and contains certain ingredients.
So who would ensure this quality control, some monopoly company, some bloated goverment agency? Trademark is a much more efficient way for the free market to take care of ensuring quality.
However, anything which unduly increases the price of the desired product to the consumer instead _decreases_ wealth of society, as it prevents the consumer from obtaining more of the desired products
So you are all for the Walmart type displacement of mom & pop shops? It provides alot more efficiency.
Marketing is by definition a negative-value product for the consumer (and is even used to pay for positive value products!).
Marketing isn't just ads, marketing is the communication process between customers and suppliers. Marketing encompasses surveying of the market to find out what people want to drive new product creation, as well as informing people on the existance of products. Further it encourages innovation, in that marketing works best with product differentiation. It's much easier to market a product with a new feature or some other improvement over the competition. iPod marketing is based around a very well designed product, which encouraged the invention of the click wheel. GUI came out of research done by Xerox to create an improved product. The drive to create a competitive advantage for the product, encouraged invention of new human interfaces which have helped in our ability to interact with machines in general.
Indeed. The main problem with that is the systemic failure of resource dilution; we do indeed have that choice, but our economy will in the long run be damaged because resource waste is encouraged.
Because the use of trademarks (or similar marking) for the past 4000+ years, and patents for 200+ years isn't really "long run"?
Eventually the trade balance will even things out, currency will float and the resource wasting economy will have comparatively lost that amount of wealth, absolute-value wages will fall until they cannot sustain the waste and they will be forced to adapt.
That's just competitive advange, eventually trade will even out if things exist in a vaccuum. Of course, we use the products we import for more value added activities. In the 90s all the cheap electronics we imported allowed us to create even greater wealth through improved efficiency, and higher value activities.
For an vastly simplified example, if you have two countries, one with free air and one with owned air, but otherwise pretty much exactly the same. The country with owned air employs 200K workers in the air industry, counting breaths and charging the rest of the population for that. The other country employs 100k people in other industrial production, and has 100k people unemployed.
You give a bad example, because the cost to create air is 0, the cost to create new ideas can be millions or even billions of dollars.
The resources dont go to the research. That's the whole problem. We're already spending more than five times the money that goes to research.
It varies by industry. Looking at the financial records of the drug industry the ratio for Marketing vs. R&D is 2:1, looking at that for some tech companies its 1:1 or even 1:2. The fact that these companies invest anything at all in R&D is because they know they can gain an advantage.
Making things better is in itself an improvement in efficiency that gives you a competetive edge.
Yes, but you still aren't creating anything new. You don't have those breakthroughs, that change industries, that change society. Just incrimental improvements.
Because someone else in a free market will incrementally improve his engine and if they're not keeping up with th
Again, that's the propaganda, not the practice. In reality, it enables the owner of the trademark to label generic goods and extort a premium from the market.
There is no extortion in this. If I want to buy a walkman anybody can provide it, if I want a Sony walkman because it is a name I associate with quality, then it is my choice to pay a premium. Without trademarks the consumer has no clue what they are getting. If there are 2 competitors making cola, and no way to differentiate, then in the attempt to make more money quality will suffer. There are no reprocussions to company A if they water down their cola to save money because it is indistiguishable, until after purchase, from company B who is their competitor.
Anything that diverts resources from that impoverishes us by encouraging undesired work.
How do you define undesired work? Music, art, going to a ball game do not generate wealth. They are things we enjoy, but long term they do not improve society. However, those things are still important to the identity of a society.
Monopoly affected markets always have a cap where there simply isnt any more free capital to spend for a specific purpose; that's what you see in pharms, and that's what you see in music. That's why you rarely see any prices falling in those markets, even if production becomes cheaper
Music is not a monopoly, the RIAA has a monopoly on only certain titles. Anybody can make music, anybody can share the music they make. While copyright is out of control, I also don't want all my music to sound like it was made in a garage. It takes an investment of money to make a good sounding CD. So that we as a society can enable those talented people to pursue such non-tangible endevours (music, art, inventing), from which we gain tangible value (happiness, new products); we grant them the ability to control their creations (for a limited time) so they can specialize.
Is it any wonder western workers cant compete when they are tricked into paying $150 for shoes that cost $5 to produce?
I wasn't aware of the western shoe monopoly. I can go to the store and get $5 shoes. I also have the choice to buy $150 shoes. Everybody has that choice, there is no great trick. Most people know shoes are cheap to produce, they want to get something that is fashionable. Removing tradmarks means the only profit that can be made is by improved production, which is great, except people like more than something that is cheap. They don't want an MP3 player, they want an iPod. But who is going to work on a new design, or improved interface, when they won't be able to recover those investment dollars. Like I said before, we may have cheaper cars, and music players, but they won't be better.
But you can still buy the cheaper versions, which means that unlike patented drugs, the brand labels cost a few bucks extra, rather than a few hundred bucks extra.
It's better those patented drugs cost a few hundred bucks extra than never have them at all. Sure maybe the drug will come out of the university some time in the future, how long would that take? It's not like those reseachers employed in industry would all be working in academia instead. The pace of progress would slow down. Between the actual discovery and getting new manufacturer (since in an environment of perfect competition there would be no excess capacity) could take maybe 20 years or more for that drug would show up to the consumer. Patents only last 20 years, so think of the higher costs as the price for early adoption.
The creator team of a new medicine could sell their product to multiple generics, thus only allowing the monopoly incentive to protect and generate ROI on the actual research.
These sorts of things happen already through consortia and university sponsorship. Industries as a whole already recognize there are certain very difficult roadblocks that a single company alone can't o
Would that it were that way, because then it would be rational. As a whole, the exclusivity effects of the incentives encourage more diversion into unproductive areas than into research (for the extreme, look at trademarks).
Trademarks are a great example of the positive effects of IP law. It enables the consumer to easily identify the maker of a product by using a specific symbol. It ensures accountability, and product differentiation, which encourages innovation and quality. Ever been to southeast asia. It's great to pick up an iPod or watch there, looks just like the real thing, and works like junk. Imagine if it was like there everywhere. You wouldn't be able to identify junk from the good stuff, so why would any company try to make a quality product?
Oh, I'm not arguing against that. I'm arguing that IP isnt very effective at accomplishing that, or that it might even be counterproductive.
I agree if IP law is not carefully examined and controlled it could easily become counterproductive. For example Copyright law is way out of control, to the point where it protects profits rather than the original purpose of encouraging investment. For a movie probably 90% of all profits are made within the first 10 years, I feel copyright should not extend beyond that. If copyright was only 10 years, $100M movies would still be made, because there will be plenty of profits. Without any copyright protection, those movies would never be made. That is the balance that must be struck, ensure enough protection so that investments will be made, but don't overextend them where they become counterproductive.
One could think so, but as far as I can tell, empirical evidence indicates otherwise.
Take a look at the generics production; typically they spend far less on marketing than the protected pharms. And their production tends to be cheaper.
What evidence? Look at drugs like aspirin, ibuprofen, acetominophin. These drugs have no patents on them, anybody can make them... yet there are still companies that spend millions on brand marketing every year. Why would any of these companies invest in researching a new pain reliever, when a competitor would save that research money and spend it on marketing? As for generics, take a look at flu vaccine shortages, nobody was making them because there was no money to be made.
And for the absolutely worst effects, as the available resources for pharmaceutical spending is limited by the fixed or slowly increasing size budget of social security systems,
Maybe you mean medicaid/medicare. That is an entirely different can of worms where you have direct goverment involvement in capping prices.
Can you even _imagine_ where we'd be today with a more efficient system? Can you imagine if the incentives that are lost today were directed into research and art? The number of people who could live on writing music, the number of people who could be working to cure diseases?
Moving to a sponsorship type model has alot of problems. First you have to trust in the general goodness of people, what makes you think people will donate the money they save on drugs into drug research? More likely they'd go buy a bigger TV. Capital would be even more focused on purchasing existing products, with less on research Second is the inefficiency of a sponsorship system. Who do you give money to, who decides? There are many projects that are important, but dont have public visibility. Do you prefer the "telethon model" of raising money for research?
Imagine how many books, movies, inventions would not have been made, because those people had to work in a factory 9-5 everyday to keep a roof over their heads.
While a world of perfect competition may sound great, it does not encourage innovation. Perfect competition gives you an economic profit of 0. Innovation in the marketplace comes from the idea of competitive advantage (and creating imperfect competition) so that
It would depend on the industry, as patents are proportionally damaging to the extent that their monopoly effects divert resources from the primary production capacity of the industries.
Those resources are diverted from production capacity to IP generation. Companies wouldn't invest millions in things like Xerox PARC or IBM Research, unless they could control the IP generated to create a competitive advantage. Rather than people being innovative on their free time, there are specialized positions where people can just be creative and innovate. I would argue we might have cheaper cars, however, without a specialized workforce of people dedicated to being creative, they wouldn't be better.
For example, look at the pharmaceuticals, where twice as much is spent on marketing and administration as is spent on research, largely due to monopoly protection.
And without IP protections it would be even more lopsided. Why invest in any research if the next company over can just take your product, out spend you on the marketing and manufacturing front and run you out of business.
Great philosophy: "People have always screwed each other, so why expect more? Why aspire to be better?"
We can aspire, it's not like I'm against laws against greedy executives. I'm just pointing out the problem with your arguement that this generation was in particular raised to be morally bankrupt. The US probably wouldn't exist without greed. Not the perceived unfair taxation, but rather the greedy tea smugglers who helped found the country (who do you think profited by the Boston Tea Party?). Think you are immune? What makes you think you deserve a job over somebody else, how can you say this is your job. You do know these jobs being outsourced go to other people. People with families and needs just like you. Do you feel entitled to your house, car, TV, computer?
Support the move of manufacturing capacity to communist China
When textile jobs moved out of the country it really hurt. How could manufacturers using cotton grown in the south ever compete with foreign goods, I mean they didn't even have the luxury of slave labor to keep costs low. I think we can all point to that as the time when the country began it's collapse. What about when most electronics manufacturing moved offshore? Wow our country really went to hell once those high paying electronics jobs went away. Oh wait, we had an economic boom in the 90s once computers and electronics became cheap enough for everybody to use. Look how far our country has fallen, losing so many jobs in the 20th century alone.
At some point, there will be a heavy price to pay for that behavior, either by you or your kids.
I work as an engineer in electronics manufacturing. It's not like I'm an executive sitting in an ivory tower. I know my job can be outsourced; I've trained people to do my job. But how can I be totally against outsourcing when I'm on my computer made in Taiwan, wearing clothes made in China, and watching TV made in Japan. Complain all you want, but we've enjoyed the spoils of outsourcing for decades. Of course, the way to not be outsourced is to demonstrate value beyond those somebody else can offer.
A sense of entitlement and economic isolationism won't keep the country strong in the future. Innovation, entreprenuership and pursuing higher value activities will.
We have raised a generation of people who are morally bankrupt. Their focus is what they will make today, this week, this quarter. There is no thought of long term profits, or any concern for their neighbors.
Ah yes, I wish we had the simpler moral times, like when there was slavery, or when we could enjoy the charity of the robber barons, or when the industrialists exploited city labor, or the times of the Savings & Loan collapse. Every generation has its share of greedy snakes.
Ask them what they'll do when they can't sell stuff to out of work Americans and they'll tell you, without shame, that someone, somewhere will be working, they'll sell to them! Pathetic.
It's called competition, if somebody came along and offered you the same job but at 20% higher pay you'd take it. There is no loyalty from the employees or the business. Jobs move, jobs get eliminated, the world changes; adapt.
until proven otherwise, it might actually be true that physically smaller races have slightly lower average intelligence. Has it been proven otherwise? No. Never.
Of course until proven it might not be true, what about those short asians who sterotypically are considered smarter? There are alot of variables to take into account, like cultural, economic, education, nutritional, etc. differences between races. Even the definition of intelligence differs from researcher to researcher. Musical and artistic talent is difficult to quantify, does that make those people less intelligent?
It's still hard to grok what this "prevention" means to the time traveller. If you go back, are you physically prevented from firing the gun or will the gun misfire?
The idea is the past already took into account you going back in time. Your travel to the past is part of the past therefore the future already took it into account, so things wouldn't change. This would mean that there is a single timeline from the beginning to the end of the universe that is unchanging.
but how does future you exist without first waiting for the past to change from present to past?
This might be a limitation of our ability to observe and therefore understand the universe. By our nature we can only create cause-effect models, because we only "know" something after our brain cells make the proper connections. Since we can only observe time in one direction, our models reflect such bias. Just a thought.
As an extension to your explaination. The only "truth" in science is what you have measured/observed, with all the caveats of when, where, how, such measurements were done. What science does is try to create models for explaining those observations. Things like gravity, dark matter, magnetism are only interpretations of data that has been collected. If suddenly we discovered an asteroid that didn't have gravity, it doesn't disprove the "truth" of our observations here on earth. It does mean that our models would have to be changed to account for the new information.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry it's taken a while to respond. Interesting discussion by the way, it's rare to find people who actually appear to want to think these issues through :).
:)
No problem, I enjoy a good debate that makes me think, and learn
For example, look at Coca-Colas introduction of Dasani bottled water in Britain. A supposedly very, from the perspective of trademark investments, accountable company introduces a product that is actually more or less dangerous to ones health?
But branding allowed traceability. They could clearly identify that it was Dasani water and pull the appropriate bottles off the shelf. Further, it was Coca-cola's own tests that found the issue. The company knows that if somebody outside the company discovered the issue, they would immediately be able to traceback to them, so they must maintain high levels of quality.
It's when it's combined with anti-competetive measures such as exclusive deals, IP law, etc, that the problem and real economic damage sets in
I don't make the connection, trademark is IP law which gives exclusive use of a symbol in a particular industry. Does the fact that only Apple can sell computers with the Apple logo really restrict the industry significantly?
The ever more efficient creation of desired goods. That is the fundamental engine of material wealth.
What makes a desired good though? The difference between $20 golf club vs a $400 golf club is design and marketing, the actual production issue is negligable.
Play some mind-game simulations, create smaller economies, like villages and compete them against eachother as you assign people different tasks, and see where the actual wealth comes from.
See what happens if one village makes all the goods, and the other one only makes designs? You'd better hope the good-making village doesnt start making their own designs, or simply copying the design-villages designs, or the design-only village gets in deep trouble.
What is the opportunity cost of the good-making village to have some people switch to design? They can't have them work on production if they are doing design, so they lose some of their comptitive advantage in production. The other issue is if the good-making village doesn't make designs which are as desireable as the design village's (since the design village has much more experience, expertise, and resources this would likely happen) then their goods production is worse off. Would either side want to go to a less efficient production with inferior goods?
On the flip side of your arguement lets say another village offers better and/or cheaper production. Now who is better off? For the purpose of self preservation each village needs to identify areas where it has advantages and not just hope that trade stays balanced. Each side must continue using competitive advantage and trade for existing goods, but continue to innovate and diversify in other areas. For example, the design only village better continue making better designs, or even start production of goods that could not be as efficiently made in the other village.
Yes, the design of goods is important, but it will never employ as many people as other fields did, simply because it's infinitely reproducible at zero cost.
But think about that, if the higher value items are reproducable at zero cost, what sense does it make to go into the manufacturing of such items? Does it make sense to go into manufacturing envelopes as more and more mail goes electronic?
The same arguement was made for robot replacements of people working on automobiles. The problem with that arguement is the assumption that new layers of jobs aren't created. The US doesn't really make computers anymore, but what happened to all those manufacturing jobs? They evolved into programming jobs which had many more branches and positions available.
What happens when most of the fundamental programming job
Finally someone who is reading with a critical eye. A $251 million dollar typo?
So you've never entered $100, instead of $1.00? Although I would suspect most companies have some sort of system that automatically requires a double check over some threshold.
I think not. A $12 million dollar paper loss?
Maybe it's broker fees for the transaction, 5% sounds about right.
That said, there definately should be an investigation anytime there are questionable accounting issues. I always wonder about the quality systems in the financial sector. In the manufacturing world there are a number of international/consortium certifications, such as ISO to ensure there are systems to prevent mistakes from happening. It seems like most of the financial world uses 3rd party auditors which are established as businesses to make money, rather than as an independent group established by the industry to improve overall quality.
I should of stayed" is a sentence without a verb, therefore without sense.
Easy answer, make "of" a verb.
What I mean is, if you want to add a fifth wheel to a car, why not, if it works, but don't take away one of the 4 original wheels, because the car won't work anymore on 3.
Or redesign the car to work with 3.
Excusing the fact that it is poetry, try reading the middle english version of Canterbury Tales. Language definately evolves, what may be "right" today may be painful to read tomorrow.
I try to use the rules, but if I understand you, what else matters?
I think of it like a stuck pixel on an LCD around the edge of the screen. During normal use you wouldn't even notice it; the monitor works fine, you can watch movies, play games, surf the net... but in the back of your mind that monitor is still broken.
Poor spelling or grammar still gets the point across. Though, if the reader notices it lingers in the back of their mind and detracts from your message.
I've said it before, but it's not the diction that matters, but the message.
You would think so, logically. However, people tend to pass judgement on the messenger and weigh the argument accordingly.
I'm not writing a fucking paper, it's an response in a damn forum
You're involving yourself in a public conversation. As such you invite others to criticize any weakness. Whether it's a flaw in your logic, information, or spelling. You have the option of ignoring those responses, or using them constructively to improve your skills.
that's unpossible
We're doing a much better job exporting our culture to them than they are to us.
It's give and take really. Certain parts of other cultures catch on here, just as certain parts of US culture catch on elsewhere.
For every Hollywood movie or McDonalds we export, there is a Pokemon, Spanish soap opera, swiss watch, or Kung-fu film we import.
But how many hours did you play HL2? About 12? Maybe 20, max?
Sure 15 hours, but I never ran into a real "deadspot" where I was stuck. 1 hour of figuring out you needed to "buy a stamp to send out the order get the skeleton key to open a door" is not fun for me. Some games may be short but as gratifying as a 40 hour game. Also multiplayer has added another dimension, giving games greater longevity.
Moreover, many modern games have become open, allowing you to experience many games with the purchase of one.
I don't want to sound like the 'in my day, we had to walk b arefoot over snowy mountains to have some fun' kinda guy, but The Secret of Monkey Island, or the Space Quest games, or even Larry, took months to beat. And everyu moment (even the frustration! I can't say that for for example GTA:SA) was fun.
I felt the same with KOTOR and Everquest.
As for variety: since the 'golden age of gaming' (Elite to Civ1),
You mean Elite, which is similar to many earlier "space trader" genre games, but with prettier graphics. Or Civ which was another in the 4x game genre, which also existed in the text days. Games haven't really changed that much at, even the great games of the "golden days" were just really great implementations of existing genres. If you want to take it a step further, many of these genres existed as board games before computers really took hold. Missle command is a nifty whack-a-mole game, civilization was inspired in part by the board game civilization, and RPGs obviously had paperback roots.
The main difference is that than, the mayority of the budget was spent on gameplay and story...now at leats! 80% of the budget is spent on polygons and sound.
Yes but don't forget there were many games with bad gameplay in the past also. It's not like the entire industry was oh-so-glorious with every title genre defining. There are great games of the past, there will be great games in the future. Our ability to pick and choose only the greats to look back on influences our impression of how things were back in the day.
This is absolutely eltists trying to widen the tech gap by eliminating the trailing end of the curve. Things are already headed in that direction; let's not try to deliberatly speed it up, okay?
Yeah why do people design webpages that take so long to download on my 9600bps modem, I mean some of us can't afford to upgrade our computer. What was wrong with text only?
Because we all know it's everybody's right to be able to watch TV.
1. Games are becoming more and more simplified, I assume for the benefit of the casual gamer.
Some games are, many aren't
Look at a game like VGA Planets, it just keeps adding layers of complexity. Civ 3 also wasn't as much fun as Civ 2 because of some of the complexity. FPS level designs are becoming more complex, and with squad tactics even the gameplay is more complex..
2. As an additional reason for that, there's a bunch of stuff that's just hard to implement properly in 3D, or not obvious to the casual player in 3D, so it either disappeared or got the equivalent of a big neon sign saying "use it HERE ==>"
Yes there is a tradeoff with a simpler design, easier on the user, but also gives the game less flexibility.
For example adventure games have a simpler interface. No more frustration of "open door with crowbar" not working because "pry door open with crowbar" is what the game requires. However, the interface makes it more difficult to do less obvious things.
When the switch was made to 3D, the level of interaction basically started over. Same thing happened when text games went to 2D visuals. With Half-life 2's gravity gun, I felt like I could really interact with the environment in a meaningful way. As 3D games mature, I'm sure there will be more complex interaction.
Of course it's difficult to figure out what to streamline. Some people would rather just fly their spaceship around and blow things up, others find it just as enjoyable to manually control the ship's power systems.
3. There's a lot of stuff that gets streamlined because everything today has to be real-time. Actual strategy tends to be replaced by whack-a-mole clicking without a plan. E.g., whereas a PC RPG used to involve basically squad tactics and use of a whole range of spells (status effects, buffs, etc), nowadays you get action-RPGs where you have to run, hit and block in real time, and if you get any spells they're direct damage.
I agree single player RPGs have been dying, but MMOs are much more complex. Getting 50+ humans all working together each doing their own specialty is no easy task. In fact with multiplayer, you now need leadership, teamwork, and communication skills to be successful. As for real time strategy games, good players need sound tactics. Sure the click and rush may work in some games, but the good ones require actual thought.
4. Variety _is_ shrinking. Games tend to be easily dividable in narrow "genres" lately, often meaning a clone of other games that sold well. While it doesn't necessarily say "new games are bad", playing an exact clone of a game I've already bought before, does somewhat reduce my satisfaction.
What variety was there in the old days? Pretty much everything was a Doom clone, flight sim, civ clone, gold box clone, or adventure game.
However, they do give an excuse for governments, corporations and people to not move toward a safe, clean energy grid made up of wind, solar, biofuels and maybe fusion.
Wind that can alter weather patterns and slice up birds, solar which requires large amounts of chemicals to make, and biofuels which still emit green house gases.
The best way would probably be to leave them alone and simply run some form of consumer database tracking product equivalence.
Pretty much what we have now, while there is no central database, there is a wealth of information any consumer can access about a given brand. The negative effects of granting a monopoly to a specific name/symbol for use in trade is outweighed by the positive aspects of accountability.
That would remove part of the incentive to overmarket, as well as discourage simple markup of generic products, and force the actual value of the mark to be concentrated into the good aspects.
People by their nature want certain psychological aspects from a product. Whether its the style of a car, or which celebrity uses the product, there are always things beyond pure quality that people will gravitate to. So long as products can be differentiated there will always be an opportunity for marketing.
Oh, I'm sure there's been a lot of damage caused from it, but in general we dont tend to notice it as wealth is partly a comparative factor.
We can look at different industries to get an idea of the effect on the overall economy.
The food industry is one to look at where there are really no monopolies, many suppliers, many alternatives. Branding and marketing becomes the most important aspect of making money, even beyond efficiency. Not much gets spent in developing new products.
Certainly the marketing bloat would go away without trademarks, however, as discussed before this would be offset by the push towards lower quality and cutting corners to make profit.
But what we're experiencing now, unlike what we've done in the past, is that our engine of wealth creation is being successively moved out from our economy, while we keep the cost aggregators.
What is our engine of wealth creation? Used to be the engine was the laboring of the people, then it became the manufacturing of goods, now it's the design of goods. With automation the cost to create things has dropped enormously, you won't continue to generate wealth by making things. Now the design of things is what generates wealth. For example computers are becoming commodities, the real wealth is writing code that's useful.
Yep, and as long as we do that, it's fine. But that's been changing you know...
People have said that for decades, you know automation was supposed to ruin the economy because people weren't needed anymore, then it was manufacturing jobs, now its IT jobs
The cost doesnt really matter for the example.
The cost is important because it dictates the economic opportunity cost. If it costs 0 to make air, then the opportunity cost of switching those people to industry is 0 (basically it doesn't matter how many breaths people take). If to make air it was very expensive, where large amounts of society's wealth was placed towards air creation (ie air creating machines) then there is an opportunity cost of switching people to industry. So you might want to have people counting breaths, to ensure you have enough capacity for the future so people don't die..
That will still take time, and always being number two, a year behind the competition, may not be good enough.
How much time, is one year enough time for somebody to recover the investment costs? If not, nobody will make the investment. That's where patents come in, they assure a time period where there is an advantage so people will take the risks.
Further, to get the patent the inventor must publish exactly how it works (once again software patents are screwed up), competitors don't have to waste resources on reverse engineering (basically reinventing the wheel).
Yes, well, from me, for example. Perhaps not a hundred million dollars, but frankly, if someone said they wanted to run a project to improve engine efficiency and that it'd cost 100M I wouldnt give them a cent, no matter how many years I'd have exclu
So, what you want is actually a form of quality control, guaranteeing that a certain product fulfills certain criteria. You cant call it Coke unless it tastes a certain way and contains certain ingredients.
So who would ensure this quality control, some monopoly company, some bloated goverment agency? Trademark is a much more efficient way for the free market to take care of ensuring quality.
However, anything which unduly increases the price of the desired product to the consumer instead _decreases_ wealth of society, as it prevents the consumer from obtaining more of the desired products
So you are all for the Walmart type displacement of mom & pop shops? It provides alot more efficiency.
Marketing is by definition a negative-value product for the consumer (and is even used to pay for positive value products!).
Marketing isn't just ads, marketing is the communication process between customers and suppliers. Marketing encompasses surveying of the market to find out what people want to drive new product creation, as well as informing people on the existance of products.
Further it encourages innovation, in that marketing works best with product differentiation. It's much easier to market a product with a new feature or some other improvement over the competition. iPod marketing is based around a very well designed product, which encouraged the invention of the click wheel. GUI came out of research done by Xerox to create an improved product. The drive to create a competitive advantage for the product, encouraged invention of new human interfaces which have helped in our ability to interact with machines in general.
Indeed. The main problem with that is the systemic failure of resource dilution; we do indeed have that choice, but our economy will in the long run be damaged because resource waste is encouraged.
Because the use of trademarks (or similar marking) for the past 4000+ years, and patents for 200+ years isn't really "long run"?
Eventually the trade balance will even things out, currency will float and the resource wasting economy will have comparatively lost that amount of wealth, absolute-value wages will fall until they cannot sustain the waste and they will be forced to adapt.
That's just competitive advange, eventually trade will even out if things exist in a vaccuum. Of course, we use the products we import for more value added activities. In the 90s all the cheap electronics we imported allowed us to create even greater wealth through improved efficiency, and higher value activities.
For an vastly simplified example, if you have two countries, one with free air and one with owned air, but otherwise pretty much exactly the same. The country with owned air employs 200K workers in the air industry, counting breaths and charging the rest of the population for that. The other country employs 100k people in other industrial production, and has 100k people unemployed.
You give a bad example, because the cost to create air is 0, the cost to create new ideas can be millions or even billions of dollars.
The resources dont go to the research. That's the whole problem. We're already spending more than five times the money that goes to research.
It varies by industry. Looking at the financial records of the drug industry the ratio for Marketing vs. R&D is 2:1, looking at that for some tech companies its 1:1 or even 1:2. The fact that these companies invest anything at all in R&D is because they know they can gain an advantage.
Making things better is in itself an improvement in efficiency that gives you a competetive edge.
Yes, but you still aren't creating anything new. You don't have those breakthroughs, that change industries, that change society. Just incrimental improvements.
Because someone else in a free market will incrementally improve his engine and if they're not keeping up with th
that's matter
Again, that's the propaganda, not the practice. In reality, it enables the owner of the trademark to label generic goods and extort a premium from the market.
There is no extortion in this. If I want to buy a walkman anybody can provide it, if I want a Sony walkman because it is a name I associate with quality, then it is my choice to pay a premium.
Without trademarks the consumer has no clue what they are getting. If there are 2 competitors making cola, and no way to differentiate, then in the attempt to make more money quality will suffer. There are no reprocussions to company A if they water down their cola to save money because it is indistiguishable, until after purchase, from company B who is their competitor.
Anything that diverts resources from that impoverishes us by encouraging undesired work.
How do you define undesired work? Music, art, going to a ball game do not generate wealth. They are things we enjoy, but long term they do not improve society. However, those things are still important to the identity of a society.
Monopoly affected markets always have a cap where there simply isnt any more free capital to spend for a specific purpose; that's what you see in pharms, and that's what you see in music. That's why you rarely see any prices falling in those markets, even if production becomes cheaper
Music is not a monopoly, the RIAA has a monopoly on only certain titles. Anybody can make music, anybody can share the music they make. While copyright is out of control, I also don't want all my music to sound like it was made in a garage. It takes an investment of money to make a good sounding CD.
So that we as a society can enable those talented people to pursue such non-tangible endevours (music, art, inventing), from which we gain tangible value (happiness, new products); we grant them the ability to control their creations (for a limited time) so they can specialize.
Is it any wonder western workers cant compete when they are tricked into paying $150 for shoes that cost $5 to produce?
I wasn't aware of the western shoe monopoly. I can go to the store and get $5 shoes. I also have the choice to buy $150 shoes. Everybody has that choice, there is no great trick. Most people know shoes are cheap to produce, they want to get something that is fashionable.
Removing tradmarks means the only profit that can be made is by improved production, which is great, except people like more than something that is cheap. They don't want an MP3 player, they want an iPod. But who is going to work on a new design, or improved interface, when they won't be able to recover those investment dollars.
Like I said before, we may have cheaper cars, and music players, but they won't be better.
But you can still buy the cheaper versions, which means that unlike patented drugs, the brand labels cost a few bucks extra, rather than a few hundred bucks extra.
It's better those patented drugs cost a few hundred bucks extra than never have them at all. Sure maybe the drug will come out of the university some time in the future, how long would that take?
It's not like those reseachers employed in industry would all be working in academia instead. The pace of progress would slow down. Between the actual discovery and getting new manufacturer (since in an environment of perfect competition there would be no excess capacity) could take maybe 20 years or more for that drug would show up to the consumer. Patents only last 20 years, so think of the higher costs as the price for early adoption.
The creator team of a new medicine could sell their product to multiple generics, thus only allowing the monopoly incentive to protect and generate ROI on the actual research.
These sorts of things happen already through consortia and university sponsorship. Industries as a whole already recognize there are certain very difficult roadblocks that a single company alone can't o
Would that it were that way, because then it would be rational. As a whole, the exclusivity effects of the incentives encourage more diversion into unproductive areas than into research (for the extreme, look at trademarks).
Trademarks are a great example of the positive effects of IP law. It enables the consumer to easily identify the maker of a product by using a specific symbol.
It ensures accountability, and product differentiation, which encourages innovation and quality. Ever been to southeast asia. It's great to pick up an iPod or watch there, looks just like the real thing, and works like junk. Imagine if it was like there everywhere. You wouldn't be able to identify junk from the good stuff, so why would any company try to make a quality product?
Oh, I'm not arguing against that. I'm arguing that IP isnt very effective at accomplishing that, or that it might even be counterproductive.
I agree if IP law is not carefully examined and controlled it could easily become counterproductive.
For example Copyright law is way out of control, to the point where it protects profits rather than the original purpose of encouraging investment. For a movie probably 90% of all profits are made within the first 10 years, I feel copyright should not extend beyond that. If copyright was only 10 years, $100M movies would still be made, because there will be plenty of profits. Without any copyright protection, those movies would never be made.
That is the balance that must be struck, ensure enough protection so that investments will be made, but don't overextend them where they become counterproductive.
One could think so, but as far as I can tell, empirical evidence indicates otherwise.
Take a look at the generics production; typically they spend far less on marketing than the protected pharms. And their production tends to be cheaper.
What evidence? Look at drugs like aspirin, ibuprofen, acetominophin. These drugs have no patents on them, anybody can make them... yet there are still companies that spend millions on brand marketing every year. Why would any of these companies invest in researching a new pain reliever, when a competitor would save that research money and spend it on marketing?
As for generics, take a look at flu vaccine shortages, nobody was making them because there was no money to be made.
And for the absolutely worst effects, as the available resources for pharmaceutical spending is limited by the fixed or slowly increasing size budget of social security systems,
Maybe you mean medicaid/medicare. That is an entirely different can of worms where you have direct goverment involvement in capping prices.
Can you even _imagine_ where we'd be today with a more efficient system? Can you imagine if the incentives that are lost today were directed into research and art? The number of people who could live on writing music, the number of people who could be working to cure diseases?
Moving to a sponsorship type model has alot of problems.
First you have to trust in the general goodness of people, what makes you think people will donate the money they save on drugs into drug research? More likely they'd go buy a bigger TV. Capital would be even more focused on purchasing existing products, with less on research
Second is the inefficiency of a sponsorship system. Who do you give money to, who decides? There are many projects that are important, but dont have public visibility. Do you prefer the "telethon model" of raising money for research?
Imagine how many books, movies, inventions would not have been made, because those people had to work in a factory 9-5 everyday to keep a roof over their heads.
While a world of perfect competition may sound great, it does not encourage innovation. Perfect competition gives you an economic profit of 0. Innovation in the marketplace comes from the idea of competitive advantage (and creating imperfect competition) so that
It would depend on the industry, as patents are proportionally damaging to the extent that their monopoly effects divert resources from the primary production capacity of the industries.
Those resources are diverted from production capacity to IP generation. Companies wouldn't invest millions in things like Xerox PARC or IBM Research, unless they could control the IP generated to create a competitive advantage. Rather than people being innovative on their free time, there are specialized positions where people can just be creative and innovate.
I would argue we might have cheaper cars, however, without a specialized workforce of people dedicated to being creative, they wouldn't be better.
For example, look at the pharmaceuticals, where twice as much is spent on marketing and administration as is spent on research, largely due to monopoly protection.
And without IP protections it would be even more lopsided. Why invest in any research if the next company over can just take your product, out spend you on the marketing and manufacturing front and run you out of business.
Great philosophy: "People have always screwed each other, so why expect more? Why aspire to be better?"
We can aspire, it's not like I'm against laws against greedy executives. I'm just pointing out the problem with your arguement that this generation was in particular raised to be morally bankrupt.
The US probably wouldn't exist without greed. Not the perceived unfair taxation, but rather the greedy tea smugglers who helped found the country (who do you think profited by the Boston Tea Party?).
Think you are immune? What makes you think you deserve a job over somebody else, how can you say this is your job. You do know these jobs being outsourced go to other people. People with families and needs just like you. Do you feel entitled to your house, car, TV, computer?
Support the move of manufacturing capacity to communist China
When textile jobs moved out of the country it really hurt. How could manufacturers using cotton grown in the south ever compete with foreign goods, I mean they didn't even have the luxury of slave labor to keep costs low. I think we can all point to that as the time when the country began it's collapse.
What about when most electronics manufacturing moved offshore? Wow our country really went to hell once those high paying electronics jobs went away. Oh wait, we had an economic boom in the 90s once computers and electronics became cheap enough for everybody to use.
Look how far our country has fallen, losing so many jobs in the 20th century alone.
At some point, there will be a heavy price to pay for that behavior, either by you or your kids.
I work as an engineer in electronics manufacturing. It's not like I'm an executive sitting in an ivory tower. I know my job can be outsourced; I've trained people to do my job. But how can I be totally against outsourcing when I'm on my computer made in Taiwan, wearing clothes made in China, and watching TV made in Japan.
Complain all you want, but we've enjoyed the spoils of outsourcing for decades. Of course, the way to not be outsourced is to demonstrate value beyond those somebody else can offer.
A sense of entitlement and economic isolationism won't keep the country strong in the future. Innovation, entreprenuership and pursuing higher value activities will.
We have raised a generation of people who are morally bankrupt. Their focus is what they will make today, this week, this quarter. There is no thought of long term profits, or any concern for their neighbors.
Ah yes, I wish we had the simpler moral times, like when there was slavery, or when we could enjoy the charity of the robber barons, or when the industrialists exploited city labor, or the times of the Savings & Loan collapse. Every generation has its share of greedy snakes.
Ask them what they'll do when they can't sell stuff to out of work Americans and they'll tell you, without shame, that someone, somewhere will be working, they'll sell to them! Pathetic.
It's called competition, if somebody came along and offered you the same job but at 20% higher pay you'd take it. There is no loyalty from the employees or the business. Jobs move, jobs get eliminated, the world changes; adapt.
until proven otherwise, it might actually be true that physically smaller races have slightly lower average intelligence. Has it been proven otherwise? No. Never.
Of course until proven it might not be true, what about those short asians who sterotypically are considered smarter?
There are alot of variables to take into account, like cultural, economic, education, nutritional, etc. differences between races. Even the definition of intelligence differs from researcher to researcher. Musical and artistic talent is difficult to quantify, does that make those people less intelligent?
It's still hard to grok what this "prevention" means to the time traveller. If you go back, are you physically prevented from firing the gun or will the gun misfire?
The idea is the past already took into account you going back in time. Your travel to the past is part of the past therefore the future already took it into account, so things wouldn't change.
This would mean that there is a single timeline from the beginning to the end of the universe that is unchanging.
but how does future you exist without first waiting for the past to change from present to past?
This might be a limitation of our ability to observe and therefore understand the universe. By our nature we can only create cause-effect models, because we only "know" something after our brain cells make the proper connections. Since we can only observe time in one direction, our models reflect such bias.
Just a thought.
As an extension to your explaination.
The only "truth" in science is what you have measured/observed, with all the caveats of when, where, how, such measurements were done.
What science does is try to create models for explaining those observations. Things like gravity, dark matter, magnetism are only interpretations of data that has been collected.
If suddenly we discovered an asteroid that didn't have gravity, it doesn't disprove the "truth" of our observations here on earth. It does mean that our models would have to be changed to account for the new information.
Yes and science is above such practices