You forgot the 24 comets just blew by in a freak incident unforeseen by astronomers anywhere on Earth...
I'm denser than lead. What's the joke? That I'm stupid? If you believe that, then you might try debating the issue; otherwise, I'll write you off as incapable of wielding any better a rhetorical sword than the logical fallacy of ad-hominem attack...
I took your original post as sarcasm. The irony is that a profit motive was *absolutely* behind BellSouth's thinking all along; the sarcasm matched the truth.
Where I disagree with apparently the rest of Slashdot (unsurprisingly) is on whether that's a good thing -- whether a business should do charitable things purely out of the supposed goodness of its legal-fiction's heart, or whether it should seek solutions that are at least superficially-charitable *and* profit-bearing...
Of course, everyone is all for rebuilding New Orleans. How could anyone, aside from a cold-blooded sociopath, be against it?
Because, uh, the city is 7 feet below sea-level? Or because it's hugely-expensive? Or because demand to live in New Orleans is now lower than it was pre-Katrina?
There are plenty of reasons not to rebuild New Orleans (at least, not to its pre-Katrina levels).
How many products do you buy every week? How many of them do you research in review magazines? How many even appear in such magazines?
I don't know how many need-to-research products I buy in an average week, but probably around 1. I don't spend much though; I go whole weeks buying nothing more than groceries and gasoline (and paying bills for rent, credit cards, cable TV/internet, etc.).
But take my Sharp Zaurus 6000L. Sharp pulled out of the U.S. market because they sold so few of them; I picked one up when Amazon had dropped the price from $700 to $450. I did LOTS of research on this handheld; I read every review on the web I could find, I read user forums, I hopped on IRC, etc. It was so extensive that that the stats I was keeping on my study habits in university and my purchasing habits at the time showed that much of the time I didn't spend studying (IIRC, it was like a 30-40% decrease in time that particular week) could be correlated to the fact that I spent so much time researching this product. I do that much research for every product that is what I deem "too expensive not to research" (these days, typically anything over $150, but I still do a lesser amount of research on anything that exceeds about $20-$30 or so. I did some research on the quality of a local comedy club's performances, found they were generally positive, and ultimately came out of the place having had a good time).
FYI, there are around 4 million subscribers to Consumer Reports. I will hazard a guess that an order of magnitude more read the magazine on grocery store shelves (some of whom would buy it there too). And then there are the people who (like me presently) don't buy the magazine, but read it at the store or the library or borrow copies from people who do buy it -- who knows what that number of people might be...
I agree that when you buy a car, you take a good look around, and also when you buy a house or a boat, but those are extreme cases. How many read the magazine reviews before buying a stereo or a TV? Certainly not everyone, I would guess less than 50% (but it's just a guess). What about when you buy shoes? Or toothpaste, or baked beans?
Compare this to the amount of advertising we are exposed to and that we can't avoid. Don't you think that for the vast majority of products that we consume, "brand awareness" is a lot more important that consumer test reports?
Sure. For inexpensive things, like toothpaste and baked beans, we can afford to test these things ourselves without somebody better-funded doing it. If my can of chili sucks, well, that's $2 spent on chili I know I'll never buy again. If my $0.70 loaf of bread goes moldy in a week (it does), then I'll buy the $1.00 bread which tastes better and takes 2 weeks to go moldy (and I'll finish the bread before then). And so on. I might try things based on their brand name -- I know Pillsbury's name better than my local no-name bread maker's, and as a result, I'll be inclined to believe Pillsbury's bread is better, else they would't have the money to advertise -- but at this level, products are so cheap that practically anybody can afford to do their own evaluations.
Meanwhile the advertising keeps feeding us easily digestible "arguments" to buy one product or another.
Jesus, people don't *completely* resemble cattle. What, are you an open mouth with cash-in-hand waiting for somebody to walk by, leave something in your gaping craw and take your money?:P
Think for yourself. Even based on nothing but advertising, a semi-informed decision can be made. Compare 2 products: do they have the same features? What is the price of each? What does each producer emphasize?
For example, take pickup trucks. F150 vs. Chevy Silverado (or whatever they're hawking this week). Ford touts its truck's dependability and po
What a naive assumption. You could just as well say "if computer companies were not regulated, software companies will not want to get sued over buggy, hard-to-use software, so they will therefore make efforts to improve their customer service and reliability in order to get more business." With the exception of very expensive government and business contracts that specify reliability as a requirement for purchase, have you ever seen this occur?
Yes. Microsoft had the horribly-unstable Win9x/ME series of garbage until 2001 or so, when WinXP was released. I don't know if you were using a ocmputer then, but I was, and I can confirm that XP is light-years ahead of their previous operating systems in terms of stability.
There are FAA regulations that require the airline to insure baggage against loss or damage.
The parent of my original post spawning this thread claimed that airlines are not regulated, and subsequent posts claimed things like "the FAA regulates the airlines like the FCC". Are you contradicting those posts now?
Where public safety is concerned, deregulation is not an option, and should never even be considered by anyone remotely sane.
This much I agree on (unlike the grandparent). I'm also not convinced that airlines will behave in a manner consistent with maintaining the safety of the people and property existing below their flights, and on these grounds, the FAA has a legitimate reason to exist IMO.
I should have prefaced the phrase "free markets" with the word "relatively"...
In public utilities, yes, they're natural monopolies, and they are aided in their monopoly by local govn't fiat which prevents competitors from entering the market. But they are an exception to the rule and besides, phone companies are now competing against cable companies on each others' turf: digital TV subscriptions and VoIP services. These are industries that didn't have to compete with each other just 10 years ago (thank the Internet for providing the platform for this competition).
You forget that most of our economy does not consist of monopoly-provided goods/services. How many retailers sell electronics (Frys, Circuit City, Best Buy, CompUSA, newegg.com, Amazon, etc.)? How many competing fast food companies are there (McD's, Wendy's, Burger King, Steak 'n Shake, etc.)? How many credit card companies are there (MC, Visa, Discover, AMEX, Diner's Club, etc.)? How many bookstore companies are there (Borders, Barnes & Noble, Amazon)? Gasoline (Shell, Mobil, BP, Sinclair, Citgo, etc.)? Pizza places (too many to list!)? And consider all the non-national, locall or regional businesses catering to these markets!
The U.S. is certainly not a *pure* free market anymore than France or Sweden are pure socialist nations. In terms of economic policy, most nations have moderated themselves away from either extreme. But we still have more of a free market than most nations, particularly in terms of our labor laws.
The political-economic debate of our time is not whether "capitalism is good and communism/socialism is evil" or vice-versa, but what mix of capitalism and socialism is the right mix...
The thing about our "free trade" agreements is that they tend not to be in the vision of "free trade" that economists speak of, in which neither trading nation has any particular govn't intervention (subsidies, tarriffs, etc.) giving them an advantage. And there are politicians who claim to believe in "free trade", but then pass a huge tarriff on steel imports and Canadian lumber -- like our current President Bush. People like these give "free trade" a bad name.
Consumers don't make informed choices most of the time For consumers to be able to "vote with the wallet" (this feature is supposedly what makes a deregulated market good) they need to be able to make informed choices. But no company is compelled to inform their customers, only to persuade them. Hence all the marketing BS that we are constantly exposed to, and that is also why the one with the biggest marketing budget wins, not the one with the best product. This doesn't benefit consumers.
It's true that companies have no self-interest to fairly review their prodcuts against their competitors'. Is this really a surprise?
But the idea that consumers don't make informed decisions, although true in plenty of cases, is also a theory that contradicts the various review-oriented publications that are out there. Ever heard of Consumer Reports? PC Magazine? Car & Driver? How about the movie and book review sections of your local newspaper? If consumers made uninformed decisions, these publications would not exist, because consumers wouldn't be demanding them.
But consumers *do* demand them -- and thus, they exist. And thus, their decisions are not entirely uninformed.
The FAA regulates the airline industry in about the same way the FCC regulates television and radio...
So what, if somebody comes on board a plane and ax-murders a dozen people, the FAA won't bat an eyelash, but if a woman flashes a tit to the passengers, she's immediately thrown off the plane and fined $550,000?:P
Don't kid yourself; the FCC regulates the hell out of TV and radio. Far too much so. The FAA at least regulates airlines on the stronger basis of public safety and private transport over private and public property, but the FCC has no such excuses...
Slashdot has never been a haven of economically-literate people. People here are computer geeks; they have little, if any interest in business, finance, or economics, and indeed, many are openly-hostile to the very *idea* that such systems work as described.
Nevermind that well over 90% of all economists, both in academia and in the business world, agree that free trade is good for trading nations and that price controls (already enjoying support in a post to this very topic) are a proven failure. Slashdotters, like most economically-left-leaning people, make-believe that the entire study of economics is one giant conspiracy against mankind (because much economics study disproves their ideology they want to make-believe actually works when in practice it does not); that *somehow*, there is no scarcity of goods in the world. Nevermind the Law of Conservation found in physics says the same thing -- this is Slashdot, and on Slashdot, we don't like facts!
Most Slashdotters, being high school or college students, I would hazard a guess have never taken an economics course in their lives. Slashdotters, categorically-speaking, are economically-illiterate, and no matter how many times you beat them with the cluesticks of Adam Smith, Frederic Bastiat, Henry Hazlitt, Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek, Gary Becker, James Buchanan, Milton Friedman, or Arnold Kling, you find that the generally-socialist population of Slashdot refuses to learn, because they are blinded by their dreams and ideals that can never be and which ultimately failed in practice 15 years ago. There is no reputable economist in the western world at this point that promotes socialism and communism to the extent that most Slashdotters do; even the "old guard" of socialist economics (John Kenneth Galbraith, George Stigler, and to a lesser-extent (though from which the former two derive their work), J.M. Keynes) have started fading-away in light of economic reality.
In terms of overall economic design, pure socialism failed, true communism was never actually achieved by the Soviets or anybody else (though Chairman Mao came close), and free market capitalism emerged victorious. That is the political-economic conclusion of the 20th century.
Yet, Slashdotters remain clueless to economic history, theory, econometrics, etc.. For such "intelligent" people, they sure like to remain ignorant!
Me, I'm one of those rare people who actively seeks out intersections between the computing and economics worlds. But you will find very few people (perhaps a dozen or so) like me here unfortunately...
I knew you weren't trolling... Some SS lover somewhere decided you were though.
What you say is probably true regarding the way the compounded interest works out. Unfortunately, most people have no understanding of even basic financial math, and even those who do -- and especially those who are bright enough to not only understand, but apply it -- just don't, because they're financially-irresponsible.
We need more financially-disciplined people in our society, we really do... Only then would people realize how mediocre a system SS is for helping to take care of the elderly and disabled.
I, for one, welcome our federal judicial overlords.:-)
Seriously, here in the People's Republic of Illinois, I'm not surprised this law went through, but I'm also not surprised (and I'm happy) that this judge had the common sense that our current set of corrupt public officials (this is Illinois after all) do not.
The so-called "expert" in this article works for the "NPD Group". The "expert's" name is Stephen Baker, one of NPD's analysts.
Who pays NPD, which in turn pays Baker? One look at NPD's homepage at the flash banner on the left will show that they are proud of their clients -- clients which apparently include Panasonic, and Gateway.
The entire article is based on the supposedly "expert" knowledge of somebody paid to tell you what his check-signers tell him to.
This is a basic economics question: where's the incentive? The incentive for Baker's testimony comes not from telling you the truth (whatever that may be, which indeed may be what Baker says in the first place), but from giving you a spin that is pleasing to his paycheck-signer -- which happens to be at least 2 companies who use rebates!
This entire article is biased garbage. Nowhere in the article does Mitchell (the article's author) talk about the real reasons why rebates exist in the first place. Obviously manufacturers don't do rebates just because they like processing thousands of pieces of paper per day! No, in fact, there are one or more other reasons. The article claims this as the explanation:
Rebates are used, Baker says, because unlike regular sales, people perceive them as a one-time opportunity to get a product at a lower price than it would normally be sold at. "You want to make believe that there is a special opportunity here and rebates are the best mechanism for that," he says. They are especially valuable to electronics retailers because they don't scale pricing up and down the way some other retailers do.
This is certainly one reason. But for all the effort involved on the manufacturers' and retailers' side of things, is this the *only* reason? Tricking consumers into believing they're getting a special deal? It's possible, but I doubt it's likely. What other reasons might there be?
Oh, that 12.4% you and I pay in Social Security taxes is indeed welfare. Just not welfare *to you*. It's welfare to somebody else old enough to qualify for it: the government steals from you and gives to somebody else who didn't work for the money...
While I'm certainly no "anarcho-capitalist" like the grandparent (dada21), and while I *mostly* agree with the your post, I will say that there is one way in which you, the individual, control private organizations: wallet power.
Don't like Sony for their rootkit bullshit? Don't buy Sony's CDs. Want to stick it to 'em even more? Don't buy a PS3 when it comes out in a few months. Want Sony to just totally FOAD? Don't buy anything made by Sony and convince your friends not to either; maybe even organize a boycott.
Unlike the government, which takes money from you in the form of taxes whether you like it or not and whether you agree with its end-use or not, Sony has no such power. For as big and powerful and well-lawyered as Sony is, they *still* don't have the power to take your money against your will. But your even your backwoods local government -- to say nothing of state and federal govn'ts -- have that power.
True, you're just 1 person in the sea of revenues Sony has. You, by yourself, are not even a drop in Sony's buckets. Your $15 Sony-produced CD, $300 PS3 (I'm guesstimating the PS3's release price), $200 Sony MP3 player -- that $515 is not even sofa money to Sony. You are not a unique and beautiful snowflake.
But the same is true of government; indeed, it's true of *ANY* sufficiently-large organization. Your voice in our democracy is drowned-out by the cacaphony of the herd; your vote -- your single vote -- is one of over 100 million in any recent national, Presidential election (125 million in 2004). And thanks to the Electoral College, if you don't vote the same way the majority of the people in your state did, then your vote is rendered irrelevant in the federal election. You don't win, and thus, the ultimate outcome is just the same as if you had not voted at all; you could've voted for Daffy Duck or the Unabomber, and either way, it'd be the same as voting for a candidate that lost - mainstream or not.
And that assumes a *fair* election. But as Stalin once said, "It's not the people who vote that count. It's the people who count the votes." Black-Box voting, anybody?
At least with Sony you get to vote with your dollars and not buy their crap. And, given that for as big as Sony is, they still have a lower amount of revenues than the U.S. government -- pit Sony's $67 billion vs. last year's IRS revenues of around $2.4 trillion -- your missing dollars, all $515 of them, *still* matter 35 times more to Sony than they would to the govn't.
The fact that businesses don't get to write law -- at least, not explicitly, and not without our elected retards in Congress approving it -- makes them generally less-oppressive than governments, even local ones...
Point being, big organizations -- government or business -- try to fuck people. Or, as the higher-minded Milton Friedman once put it in Free to Choose:
We have been forgetting the basic truth that the greatest threat to human freedom is the concentration of power, whether in the hands of government or anyone else. We have persuaded ourselves that it is safe to grant power, provided it is for good reasons.
That's the nature of humanity: eat or be eaten; kill or be killed; Darwinistic law-of-the-jungle; some days you're the statue, some days you're the bird. The only question is, how do we minimize the effect of that nature?
By keeping organizations small and competitive. Small, local governments (or barring that, state-level governments) doing most of the governing, and competing against other small, local governments for your citizenship and tax dollars. Small businesses (or barring that, at least several larger, non-colluding businesses) doing most of the bus
Give me that which I want, and you shall have this which you want, is the meaning of every such offer; and it is in this manner that we obtain from one another the far greater part of those good offices which we stand in need of. It is not from the benevolence of the butcher the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages.
No. There is something you must realize about the social sciences: they are not *hard* science. Very little in the social sciences can ever be "proven" or "disproven", because there is rarely a control in any study. You can't force people to naturally behave some way and use that as a control -- it is logically-impossible (and certainly in contradiction to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle).
Hypothesis-testing occurs on large datasets, but those datasets are generated by behavior which can never be simultaneously fully-controlled and fully-natural. Hence, the hypothesis is not fully-testable, unless it is so general as to be meaningless.
Economics is a powerful study, and I use its mindset all the time, but I would never call it a "science". It's a pseudo-science; a branch of applied mathematics and statistics that bases itself on uncontrollable natural processes. As such, "proof" never occurs, but strong suggestions (e.g. correlations, tendencies, etc.) do.
It was a socialist/communist nation that put the first man into space.
And it was a capitalist (more or less) nation that put the first man on the moon. Your point?
Bureaucracy and inefficiency are not a uniquely socialist phenomenon as anyone who's worked for a large corporation can easily see.
This is true; companies on the Fortune list have horrible amounts of bureaucracy.
But the Federal govn't, being the biggest of all American employers, is even worse, from the experiences I've heard of people I work with now who used to work for the govn't...
You are my new hero! In one easy-to-understand post, you simultaneously combine sound economics (and a nice example of the basic arithmetic behind free-trade) with a CPU optimization.
I wish more people saw the parallels between economics and computing -- they're linked by the mutual goal of increasing efficiency after all...:-)
But grocery stores sell alcohol now, don't they? As do gas stations.
And alcohol was once illegal, just like the drugs that the drug lords, well... lord over.
The main difference I see is that alcohol was illegal for a much shorter time span than cocaine, marijuana, etc., giving the drug lords a longer time to build up their criminal empire, making them more well-financed foes. They're powerful enough and sophisticated enough now that they buy mainframes to crunch their drug-peddling data, after all!
But in the long run, they cannot keep up their racket in the face of legitimate market competition -- they can only screw with so many Walgreens' at a time! Moreover, attempts to corrupt the market (via extortion, threats of violence, etc.) would be still be illegal and could be met with things like the RICO statute and other laws targeting organized and violent crime which are already on the books and have been for decades (if not since the founding of the nation).
Diamonds are legal, but the problem with the diamond industry is that it is a monopolized industry; DeBeers is pretty much the sole source of the world's diamonds, last I checked. And they manipulate the South African govn't (among other African govnt's) into driving out competition and letting DeBeers do their mining.
Slashdot Mirror
You forgot the 24 comets just blew by in a freak incident unforeseen by astronomers anywhere on Earth...
I'm denser than lead. What's the joke? That I'm stupid? If you believe that, then you might try debating the issue; otherwise, I'll write you off as incapable of wielding any better a rhetorical sword than the logical fallacy of ad-hominem attack...
I took your original post as sarcasm. The irony is that a profit motive was *absolutely* behind BellSouth's thinking all along; the sarcasm matched the truth.
Where I disagree with apparently the rest of Slashdot (unsurprisingly) is on whether that's a good thing -- whether a business should do charitable things purely out of the supposed goodness of its legal-fiction's heart, or whether it should seek solutions that are at least superficially-charitable *and* profit-bearing...
"A witty saying proves nothing." -- Voltaire
Because, uh, the city is 7 feet below sea-level? Or because it's hugely-expensive? Or because demand to live in New Orleans is now lower than it was pre-Katrina?
There are plenty of reasons not to rebuild New Orleans (at least, not to its pre-Katrina levels).
Since when are businesses in the business of charity?
The business of business is business, not giving money away.
I don't know how many need-to-research products I buy in an average week, but probably around 1. I don't spend much though; I go whole weeks buying nothing more than groceries and gasoline (and paying bills for rent, credit cards, cable TV/internet, etc.).
But take my Sharp Zaurus 6000L. Sharp pulled out of the U.S. market because they sold so few of them; I picked one up when Amazon had dropped the price from $700 to $450. I did LOTS of research on this handheld; I read every review on the web I could find, I read user forums, I hopped on IRC, etc. It was so extensive that that the stats I was keeping on my study habits in university and my purchasing habits at the time showed that much of the time I didn't spend studying (IIRC, it was like a 30-40% decrease in time that particular week) could be correlated to the fact that I spent so much time researching this product. I do that much research for every product that is what I deem "too expensive not to research" (these days, typically anything over $150, but I still do a lesser amount of research on anything that exceeds about $20-$30 or so. I did some research on the quality of a local comedy club's performances, found they were generally positive, and ultimately came out of the place having had a good time).
FYI, there are around 4 million subscribers to Consumer Reports. I will hazard a guess that an order of magnitude more read the magazine on grocery store shelves (some of whom would buy it there too). And then there are the people who (like me presently) don't buy the magazine, but read it at the store or the library or borrow copies from people who do buy it -- who knows what that number of people might be...
Sure. For inexpensive things, like toothpaste and baked beans, we can afford to test these things ourselves without somebody better-funded doing it. If my can of chili sucks, well, that's $2 spent on chili I know I'll never buy again. If my $0.70 loaf of bread goes moldy in a week (it does), then I'll buy the $1.00 bread which tastes better and takes 2 weeks to go moldy (and I'll finish the bread before then). And so on. I might try things based on their brand name -- I know Pillsbury's name better than my local no-name bread maker's, and as a result, I'll be inclined to believe Pillsbury's bread is better, else they would't have the money to advertise -- but at this level, products are so cheap that practically anybody can afford to do their own evaluations.
Jesus, people don't *completely* resemble cattle. What, are you an open mouth with cash-in-hand waiting for somebody to walk by, leave something in your gaping craw and take your money? :P
Think for yourself. Even based on nothing but advertising, a semi-informed decision can be made. Compare 2 products: do they have the same features? What is the price of each? What does each producer emphasize?
For example, take pickup trucks. F150 vs. Chevy Silverado (or whatever they're hawking this week). Ford touts its truck's dependability and po
Yes. Microsoft had the horribly-unstable Win9x/ME series of garbage until 2001 or so, when WinXP was released. I don't know if you were using a ocmputer then, but I was, and I can confirm that XP is light-years ahead of their previous operating systems in terms of stability.
The parent of my original post spawning this thread claimed that airlines are not regulated, and subsequent posts claimed things like "the FAA regulates the airlines like the FCC". Are you contradicting those posts now?
This much I agree on (unlike the grandparent). I'm also not convinced that airlines will behave in a manner consistent with maintaining the safety of the people and property existing below their flights, and on these grounds, the FAA has a legitimate reason to exist IMO.
I should have prefaced the phrase "free markets" with the word "relatively"...
In public utilities, yes, they're natural monopolies, and they are aided in their monopoly by local govn't fiat which prevents competitors from entering the market. But they are an exception to the rule and besides, phone companies are now competing against cable companies on each others' turf: digital TV subscriptions and VoIP services. These are industries that didn't have to compete with each other just 10 years ago (thank the Internet for providing the platform for this competition).
You forget that most of our economy does not consist of monopoly-provided goods/services. How many retailers sell electronics (Frys, Circuit City, Best Buy, CompUSA, newegg.com, Amazon, etc.)? How many competing fast food companies are there (McD's, Wendy's, Burger King, Steak 'n Shake, etc.)? How many credit card companies are there (MC, Visa, Discover, AMEX, Diner's Club, etc.)? How many bookstore companies are there (Borders, Barnes & Noble, Amazon)? Gasoline (Shell, Mobil, BP, Sinclair, Citgo, etc.)? Pizza places (too many to list!)? And consider all the non-national, locall or regional businesses catering to these markets!
The U.S. is certainly not a *pure* free market anymore than France or Sweden are pure socialist nations. In terms of economic policy, most nations have moderated themselves away from either extreme. But we still have more of a free market than most nations, particularly in terms of our labor laws.
The political-economic debate of our time is not whether "capitalism is good and communism/socialism is evil" or vice-versa, but what mix of capitalism and socialism is the right mix...
The thing about our "free trade" agreements is that they tend not to be in the vision of "free trade" that economists speak of, in which neither trading nation has any particular govn't intervention (subsidies, tarriffs, etc.) giving them an advantage. And there are politicians who claim to believe in "free trade", but then pass a huge tarriff on steel imports and Canadian lumber -- like our current President Bush. People like these give "free trade" a bad name.
It's true that companies have no self-interest to fairly review their prodcuts against their competitors'. Is this really a surprise?
But the idea that consumers don't make informed decisions, although true in plenty of cases, is also a theory that contradicts the various review-oriented publications that are out there. Ever heard of Consumer Reports? PC Magazine? Car & Driver? How about the movie and book review sections of your local newspaper? If consumers made uninformed decisions, these publications would not exist, because consumers wouldn't be demanding them.
But consumers *do* demand them -- and thus, they exist. And thus, their decisions are not entirely uninformed.
So what, if somebody comes on board a plane and ax-murders a dozen people, the FAA won't bat an eyelash, but if a woman flashes a tit to the passengers, she's immediately thrown off the plane and fined $550,000?
Don't kid yourself; the FCC regulates the hell out of TV and radio. Far too much so. The FAA at least regulates airlines on the stronger basis of public safety and private transport over private and public property, but the FCC has no such excuses...
Slashdot has never been a haven of economically-literate people. People here are computer geeks; they have little, if any interest in business, finance, or economics, and indeed, many are openly-hostile to the very *idea* that such systems work as described.
Nevermind that well over 90% of all economists, both in academia and in the business world, agree that free trade is good for trading nations and that price controls (already enjoying support in a post to this very topic) are a proven failure. Slashdotters, like most economically-left-leaning people, make-believe that the entire study of economics is one giant conspiracy against mankind (because much economics study disproves their ideology they want to make-believe actually works when in practice it does not); that *somehow*, there is no scarcity of goods in the world. Nevermind the Law of Conservation found in physics says the same thing -- this is Slashdot, and on Slashdot, we don't like facts!
Most Slashdotters, being high school or college students, I would hazard a guess have never taken an economics course in their lives. Slashdotters, categorically-speaking, are economically-illiterate, and no matter how many times you beat them with the cluesticks of Adam Smith, Frederic Bastiat, Henry Hazlitt, Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek, Gary Becker, James Buchanan, Milton Friedman, or Arnold Kling, you find that the generally-socialist population of Slashdot refuses to learn, because they are blinded by their dreams and ideals that can never be and which ultimately failed in practice 15 years ago. There is no reputable economist in the western world at this point that promotes socialism and communism to the extent that most Slashdotters do; even the "old guard" of socialist economics (John Kenneth Galbraith, George Stigler, and to a lesser-extent (though from which the former two derive their work), J.M. Keynes) have started fading-away in light of economic reality.
In terms of overall economic design, pure socialism failed, true communism was never actually achieved by the Soviets or anybody else (though Chairman Mao came close), and free market capitalism emerged victorious. That is the political-economic conclusion of the 20th century.
Yet, Slashdotters remain clueless to economic history, theory, econometrics, etc.. For such "intelligent" people, they sure like to remain ignorant!
Me, I'm one of those rare people who actively seeks out intersections between the computing and economics worlds. But you will find very few people (perhaps a dozen or so) like me here unfortunately...
What??! Does the FAA not exist in your parallel dimension or something?
I knew you weren't trolling... Some SS lover somewhere decided you were though.
What you say is probably true regarding the way the compounded interest works out. Unfortunately, most people have no understanding of even basic financial math, and even those who do -- and especially those who are bright enough to not only understand, but apply it -- just don't, because they're financially-irresponsible.
We need more financially-disciplined people in our society, we really do... Only then would people realize how mediocre a system SS is for helping to take care of the elderly and disabled.
I, for one, welcome our federal judicial overlords. :-)
Seriously, here in the People's Republic of Illinois, I'm not surprised this law went through, but I'm also not surprised (and I'm happy) that this judge had the common sense that our current set of corrupt public officials (this is Illinois after all) do not.
Who pays NPD, which in turn pays Baker? One look at NPD's homepage at the flash banner on the left will show that they are proud of their clients -- clients which apparently include Panasonic, and Gateway.
Doesn't Gateway do rebates, as indicated by their Gateway Rebate Tracker? And hey, so does Panasonic!
The entire article is based on the supposedly "expert" knowledge of somebody paid to tell you what his check-signers tell him to.
This is a basic economics question: where's the incentive? The incentive for Baker's testimony comes not from telling you the truth (whatever that may be, which indeed may be what Baker says in the first place), but from giving you a spin that is pleasing to his paycheck-signer -- which happens to be at least 2 companies who use rebates!
This entire article is biased garbage. Nowhere in the article does Mitchell (the article's author) talk about the real reasons why rebates exist in the first place. Obviously manufacturers don't do rebates just because they like processing thousands of pieces of paper per day! No, in fact, there are one or more other reasons. The article claims this as the explanation:
This is certainly one reason. But for all the effort involved on the manufacturers' and retailers' side of things, is this the *only* reason? Tricking consumers into believing they're getting a special deal? It's possible, but I doubt it's likely. What other reasons might there be?
Market research? Sure, why not -- geographic and demographic information about consumers is always profitable enough to sell. Moving old inventory to make room for new products? Very likely. Doing it because "everybody else in the industry does it, and we need to compete with them?" Clearly!
I sure wish journalists would "follow the money trail" before writing articles like this...
Oh, that 12.4% you and I pay in Social Security taxes is indeed welfare. Just not welfare *to you*. It's welfare to somebody else old enough to qualify for it: the government steals from you and gives to somebody else who didn't work for the money...
Quiet you! You're calling out the "freedom only for people of my viewpoint" hypocrisy of 99% of all Americans!
Don't like Sony for their rootkit bullshit? Don't buy Sony's CDs. Want to stick it to 'em even more? Don't buy a PS3 when it comes out in a few months. Want Sony to just totally FOAD? Don't buy anything made by Sony and convince your friends not to either; maybe even organize a boycott.
Unlike the government, which takes money from you in the form of taxes whether you like it or not and whether you agree with its end-use or not, Sony has no such power. For as big and powerful and well-lawyered as Sony is, they *still* don't have the power to take your money against your will. But your even your backwoods local government -- to say nothing of state and federal govn'ts -- have that power.
True, you're just 1 person in the sea of revenues Sony has. You, by yourself, are not even a drop in Sony's buckets. Your $15 Sony-produced CD, $300 PS3 (I'm guesstimating the PS3's release price), $200 Sony MP3 player -- that $515 is not even sofa money to Sony. You are not a unique and beautiful snowflake.
But the same is true of government; indeed, it's true of *ANY* sufficiently-large organization. Your voice in our democracy is drowned-out by the cacaphony of the herd; your vote -- your single vote -- is one of over 100 million in any recent national, Presidential election (125 million in 2004). And thanks to the Electoral College, if you don't vote the same way the majority of the people in your state did, then your vote is rendered irrelevant in the federal election. You don't win, and thus, the ultimate outcome is just the same as if you had not voted at all; you could've voted for Daffy Duck or the Unabomber, and either way, it'd be the same as voting for a candidate that lost - mainstream or not.
And that assumes a *fair* election. But as Stalin once said, "It's not the people who vote that count. It's the people who count the votes." Black-Box voting, anybody?
At least with Sony you get to vote with your dollars and not buy their crap. And, given that for as big as Sony is, they still have a lower amount of revenues than the U.S. government -- pit Sony's $67 billion vs. last year's IRS revenues of around $2.4 trillion -- your missing dollars, all $515 of them, *still* matter 35 times more to Sony than they would to the govn't.
The fact that businesses don't get to write law -- at least, not explicitly, and not without our elected retards in Congress approving it -- makes them generally less-oppressive than governments, even local ones...
Point being, big organizations -- government or business -- try to fuck people. Or, as the higher-minded Milton Friedman once put it in Free to Choose:
That's the nature of humanity: eat or be eaten; kill or be killed; Darwinistic law-of-the-jungle; some days you're the statue, some days you're the bird. The only question is, how do we minimize the effect of that nature?
By keeping organizations small and competitive. Small, local governments (or barring that, state-level governments) doing most of the governing, and competing against other small, local governments for your citizenship and tax dollars. Small businesses (or barring that, at least several larger, non-colluding businesses) doing most of the bus
Well, what else are introverts going to do with their time if they (OK, we, being an introvert myself) don't spend it talking?
OK, there's pr0n. But besides that?
This is an appeal to one's financial self-interest! Self-interest - BAD! Collective interest - GOOD!
But... but... it's OSS. An aspect of OSS appeals to one's self-interest. And OSS is GOOD.
</sarcasm>
Seriously though, as Adam Smith, father of modern capitalism wrote some 229 years ago:
No. There is something you must realize about the social sciences: they are not *hard* science. Very little in the social sciences can ever be "proven" or "disproven", because there is rarely a control in any study. You can't force people to naturally behave some way and use that as a control -- it is logically-impossible (and certainly in contradiction to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle).
Hypothesis-testing occurs on large datasets, but those datasets are generated by behavior which can never be simultaneously fully-controlled and fully-natural. Hence, the hypothesis is not fully-testable, unless it is so general as to be meaningless.
Economics is a powerful study, and I use its mindset all the time, but I would never call it a "science". It's a pseudo-science; a branch of applied mathematics and statistics that bases itself on uncontrollable natural processes. As such, "proof" never occurs, but strong suggestions (e.g. correlations, tendencies, etc.) do.
And it was a capitalist (more or less) nation that put the first man on the moon. Your point?
This is true; companies on the Fortune list have horrible amounts of bureaucracy.
But the Federal govn't, being the biggest of all American employers, is even worse, from the experiences I've heard of people I work with now who used to work for the govn't...
You are my new hero! In one easy-to-understand post, you simultaneously combine sound economics (and a nice example of the basic arithmetic behind free-trade) with a CPU optimization.
:-)
I wish more people saw the parallels between economics and computing -- they're linked by the mutual goal of increasing efficiency after all...
Just in case the Calvin and Hobbes title didn't make sense... :-)
But grocery stores sell alcohol now, don't they? As do gas stations.
And alcohol was once illegal, just like the drugs that the drug lords, well... lord over.
The main difference I see is that alcohol was illegal for a much shorter time span than cocaine, marijuana, etc., giving the drug lords a longer time to build up their criminal empire, making them more well-financed foes. They're powerful enough and sophisticated enough now that they buy mainframes to crunch their drug-peddling data, after all!
But in the long run, they cannot keep up their racket in the face of legitimate market competition -- they can only screw with so many Walgreens' at a time! Moreover, attempts to corrupt the market (via extortion, threats of violence, etc.) would be still be illegal and could be met with things like the RICO statute and other laws targeting organized and violent crime which are already on the books and have been for decades (if not since the founding of the nation).
Diamonds are legal, but the problem with the diamond industry is that it is a monopolized industry; DeBeers is pretty much the sole source of the world's diamonds, last I checked. And they manipulate the South African govn't (among other African govnt's) into driving out competition and letting DeBeers do their mining.
is that it hides the atrocities committed by Hitler's regime.
That's why Godwin's "Law" is both stupid and dangerous.