Not many musicians are "signed" to labels, and if there's only one Spotify, it's not like they need an exclusive contract, they're the only game in streaming.
Pandora and Spotify are just labels by a different name. They tweaked the business model, and the managers are careful to wear pocket protectors instead of sunglasses, but that's about it.
I'm well versed in the works of John C. Calhoun and I'm pretty sure he never used the word "weaksauce."
And most secessionists aren't racists. Some are racist, and the rest just think racism is an imaginary conspiracy theory invented by liberals in the 1950s in order to shame and embarrass good honest folk, and the real racists in America are the people who talk about diversity.
The only reason that they don't have any chance of winning is because everybody thinks that they don't have any chance of winning
That's a legitimate reason to not vote for someone, you can't control what other people think.
Winner-take-all systems throw votes away, that's a fact. Acting like its some sort of government mind control or the result of perfidious "SHEEPLE!" is elitist and solves nothing.
If Google or Apple started acquiring locomotive manufacturers, medical device companies, stock brokerages and frozen yogurt chains, this would begin to be a comparison. Sony's a conglomerate, Apple and Google are quite specialized. Also you're passing judgement on Sony's entire divisional structure based on their inability to execute a GoogleTV STB and an Android tablet, both classes of devices that every manufacturer has managed to screw up. Your complaints about the tablet could just as easily be applied to ASUS or any old KIRF.
I'm not saying that Sony's organization actually works, but integrating Google Docs with Android is an utterly different class of problem from integrating a musical act with a movie studio, video game developer and distribution infrastructure. The one just involves some code, while the other involves people, lots and lots of people.
If I were you I'd hold off on singing the praises of Google's synergy until we saw how the Motorola merger shook out. As it is, it looks like they simply don't know how to run the company that actually makes things, and are letting it wither, loosing billions of dollars in the process.
which touches on another one of sony's problems: it's like 100 different companies.
Country music albums, life insurance, Adam Sandler movies, flow cytometry machines, Wheel of Fortune, and virtual swag for your online avatar. All of these things are Sony. (Oh yeah and they make consumer electronics too.)
You can only integrate these businesses so much -- collaboration between units has the effect of multiplying the number of managers you need, because pooling resources inevitably creates more contention and need for arbitration, and makes it more difficult to analyze who's making profitable decisions and who isn't. Think of it like the Unix principle: each businesses does one thing well, and they're connected to each other with clean interfaces. If you have two programs that parse JSON, it doesn't necessarily follow that they should share the same address space or kernel resources to do that, or even that they should use the same libraries. Similarly, a recording engineer at Sony Pictures Studios in Los Angeles, doesn't necessarily make an engineer at Arista in Nashville redundant.
I'm a Sony employee. Note that Tim Schaaf was head of Sony Network Entertainment, which is a distinct entity from the movie and music groups. Sony Pictures*, Sony Music**, and Sony Computer Entertainment (the videogames) are all direct reports to the parent. Sony Network Ent. is strictly the Playstation Network and some other stuff, mainly services that compete with iTunes/Roku/Unbox.
The entertainment divisions are all distinct with regard to Sony Corp. There is no all-encompassing "Entertainment division."
* (incl. Columbia Pictures, Sony Classics, Screen Gems, Sony Pictures Animation, Sony Imageworks, the distribution network, the studio, Crackle.com)
Remember, the US is NOT one big blob of a nation. We are a collection of states, each given a certain 'weight' of say in national decisions.
Note that for the purposes of individual rights, the United States is both, thus the big "and" in Amendment 14:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.
The deeper problem with the assignment of EC weights is that just about every state line in the US was drawn for extremely obscure political reasons that have no bearing on modern communities: the colonies were divided by British noblemen through land grants, the middle states were divided by Whigs and Democrats in order to prevent each other the senate majority necessary to alter slavery, and the western states were drawn by Republicans to deny Redeemer Democrats a majority in the senate to roll back Reconstruction.
Some systems have a proportional executive: Switzerland has a governing council of seven people, none is the sole "president." Parliamentary governments assign cabinet seats based on support in the legislature.
Many, many systems have proportional legislatures. Winner-take-all is simple but it encourages tactical voting and has a tendency to produce an equilibrium of two parties with mediocre support.
When the information on the object is legally privileged or confidential. If you take a picture of a piece of paper with the secret formula for Coca-Cola on it, sharing that image would certainly open you up to civil liability.
I'm not sure what you're disagreeing with, I never said the government was better at doing anything. It's spelled "twaddle."
It is no secret that government is an incredibly inefficient redistributor.
Efficiency is irrelevant. The question of wether or not someone should live or die for lack funds is a moral one. The issue of wether or not it's right, or to what lengths we should go to stop it, are questions or right and wrong. No amount of "efficiency" can justify a death.
However. I acknowledge the laissez-faire perspective on this issue, which is to just let the market sort out who can pay and who can't. Laissez-faire libertarians are all rationalists who believe markets are objective and as long as people are dying on their own account, no evil is done -- even though a lot of people may die, and the dying people, their family and loved ones, might not see the elegant "fairness" of the system in exactly the same way the rich might.
Yes, but this was back when the insurance was used to pay for spa vacations -- this information does not go to the efficacy of health care per se. Bismarck's labor market reforms were really about benefit competition; they were designed specifically to gut the political power of labor unions, by depriving them of the power to give their members superior services. He believed that if you didn't have to get health care through union negotiation, unions would lose power, and he was correct to a large extent.
His reforms were very similar to the reforms in the US post-war. Health care in 1880s Germany wasn't about health care, any more than Taft-Hartley was about health insurance-- they were strategic concessions in an ongoing political conflict between government authorities and the organized labor cadres trying to outmaneuver them.
Right Libertarians are anti-union. Libertarians in the US are mostly anti-union because of cultural issues peculiar to the US: a lot of libertarians in the US align with laissez-faire Nozick-style lib philosophy, and a lot of US libertarian writers spent a lot of time in the 70s writing anti-union polemics in order to win the support of rich benefactors (I'm looking at you, Murray Rothbard).
There is of course this thing called left-libertarianism, from people like Noam Chomsky and innumerable anarcho-capitalists and anarcho-syndicalists of every stripe for the last 150 years. Remember, unions were seen as primarily anti-government organizations up through World War II.
Doctors have the AMA and state boards, lawyers have state bars. They do not set wages but the operate like medieval-style labor guilds, restricting supply and regulating the sorts of business the members can do. These organizations then turn around and aggressively lobby the government to protect their interests, and both trades are protected by an elaborate framework of law and custom that makes it very difficult for a median customer to evaluate their performance or price their services.
The system works, there's nothing evil with it. But arguing that doctors and lawyers are just simple individual actors in a transparent market, succeeding or failing purely by their skills and talents, is naive at best.
I'm in an entertainment union and I make what I negotiate. The union sets the scale rate, and no one makes less than that, but the wages are at mine and the employers discretion. It's when they don't pay the proper overtime rates that the union gets angry.
The biggest problem in the US with unions (and it is mostly just a US thing) is that the Taft-Harley Act in the 40s froze most of the unions existing at that time into a privileged position, and it's almost impossible, practically and legally, for new labor organizations with different rules and ideas to push out the incumbents.
It's a lot cheaper to pay a few rockstars 15%, than give everyone a health plan. Really economical trade actually:)
I work in the movie business and before the unions this sort of thing was SOP. Actors and artists would get 7 year ironclad deals under which the employer could pay, essentially, whatever they wanted to, and work them under whatever conditions they pleased. The only people in a position to complain where the stars, but they would get bought off with salary, not a cut of the grosses, mind you, but enough folding money to give them social status (read: a nice car).
It's sortof a philosophical question, but what if the premium wasn't 15%, just 5%? Would a union suddenly make sense, then? And why would a 15% premium be so good if its only purpose was to give you positional wealth? If the base rate is $4 an hour, I bet the guy making that extra 60 cents thinks he's the king of the hill, but it's plainly a sham.
As a brother of a democratically-run union, it's really not that simple.
We vote for the board of directors, who are all people who work for a living, they get together a couple times a month and vote on things. In practice they just ratify whatever the permanent staff recommends, the professional field organizers, the negotiators and lawyers, and the folks from the International. We aren't always happy with every outcome but it's very difficult to find someone to vote for who (1) has the right mix of ideas and reforms and (2) is popular and legitimate enough to win votes, and then (3) persuasive and well-connected enough to get a board of directors to go along. Democracy isn't a panacea.
Though I much prefer the current system to a direct one, where we all voted on everything -- I don't have time to read a 200 page contract agreement, nor the technical knowledge to understand it.
Medical and legal board certifications are quasi-state organizations that exist because (1) a bad doctor can kill you, and (2) a bad lawyer can land you in prison. We, as a society, just aren't willing to accept fraud in these particular fields.
Meanwhile, people spent a decade paying good money for Windows XP when something like Linux existed. The pressure to regulate the quality of software, by the state or a guild or anyone else, is pretty low.
While everyone would love to run their own business, there are profound inefficiencies associated with having a large numbers of small businesses, mainly losses caused by competition and misallocations of labor. Having a large proportion of small businesses is actually a symptom of a backward or developing economy; Egypt has more self-employed per capita than the US, for example.
People seem to forget that employer-provided healthcare is a product of the 20th Century.
People seem to forget that effective healthcare is a product of the 20th Century. People used to pay 100% of their own way for healthcare, when they were buying mustard poultices and lizard fat oil, and soaking in epson salt baths four hours a day. It was all worthless and elective, for entertainment purposes only, and thus the market worked.
It's when people started actually surviving fatal conditions, and not having money became a death sentence, that the actual moral and ethical problems with pay-as-you-go started to become salient.
Slashdot Mirror
Not many musicians are "signed" to labels, and if there's only one Spotify, it's not like they need an exclusive contract, they're the only game in streaming.
They're just middlemen.
Pandora and Spotify are just labels by a different name. They tweaked the business model, and the managers are careful to wear pocket protectors instead of sunglasses, but that's about it.
I'm well versed in the works of John C. Calhoun and I'm pretty sure he never used the word "weaksauce."
And most secessionists aren't racists. Some are racist, and the rest just think racism is an imaginary conspiracy theory invented by liberals in the 1950s in order to shame and embarrass good honest folk, and the real racists in America are the people who talk about diversity.
Map looks vaguely familiar.
That's a legitimate reason to not vote for someone, you can't control what other people think.
Winner-take-all systems throw votes away, that's a fact. Acting like its some sort of government mind control or the result of perfidious "SHEEPLE!" is elitist and solves nothing.
If Google or Apple started acquiring locomotive manufacturers, medical device companies, stock brokerages and frozen yogurt chains, this would begin to be a comparison. Sony's a conglomerate, Apple and Google are quite specialized. Also you're passing judgement on Sony's entire divisional structure based on their inability to execute a GoogleTV STB and an Android tablet, both classes of devices that every manufacturer has managed to screw up. Your complaints about the tablet could just as easily be applied to ASUS or any old KIRF.
I'm not saying that Sony's organization actually works, but integrating Google Docs with Android is an utterly different class of problem from integrating a musical act with a movie studio, video game developer and distribution infrastructure. The one just involves some code, while the other involves people, lots and lots of people.
If I were you I'd hold off on singing the praises of Google's synergy until we saw how the Motorola merger shook out. As it is, it looks like they simply don't know how to run the company that actually makes things, and are letting it wither, loosing billions of dollars in the process.
Country music albums, life insurance, Adam Sandler movies, flow cytometry machines, Wheel of Fortune, and virtual swag for your online avatar. All of these things are Sony. (Oh yeah and they make consumer electronics too.)
You can only integrate these businesses so much -- collaboration between units has the effect of multiplying the number of managers you need, because pooling resources inevitably creates more contention and need for arbitration, and makes it more difficult to analyze who's making profitable decisions and who isn't. Think of it like the Unix principle: each businesses does one thing well, and they're connected to each other with clean interfaces. If you have two programs that parse JSON, it doesn't necessarily follow that they should share the same address space or kernel resources to do that, or even that they should use the same libraries. Similarly, a recording engineer at Sony Pictures Studios in Los Angeles, doesn't necessarily make an engineer at Arista in Nashville redundant.
I'm a Sony employee. Note that Tim Schaaf was head of Sony Network Entertainment, which is a distinct entity from the movie and music groups. Sony Pictures*, Sony Music**, and Sony Computer Entertainment (the videogames) are all direct reports to the parent. Sony Network Ent. is strictly the Playstation Network and some other stuff, mainly services that compete with iTunes/Roku/Unbox.
The entertainment divisions are all distinct with regard to Sony Corp. There is no all-encompassing "Entertainment division."
* (incl. Columbia Pictures, Sony Classics, Screen Gems, Sony Pictures Animation, Sony Imageworks, the distribution network, the studio, Crackle.com)
** (incl. Arista, RCA, Columbia, Gracenote)
Note that for the purposes of individual rights, the United States is both, thus the big "and" in Amendment 14:
The deeper problem with the assignment of EC weights is that just about every state line in the US was drawn for extremely obscure political reasons that have no bearing on modern communities: the colonies were divided by British noblemen through land grants, the middle states were divided by Whigs and Democrats in order to prevent each other the senate majority necessary to alter slavery, and the western states were drawn by Republicans to deny Redeemer Democrats a majority in the senate to roll back Reconstruction.
That would be an interesting idea.
Some systems have a proportional executive: Switzerland has a governing council of seven people, none is the sole "president." Parliamentary governments assign cabinet seats based on support in the legislature.
Many, many systems have proportional legislatures. Winner-take-all is simple but it encourages tactical voting and has a tendency to produce an equilibrium of two parties with mediocre support.
Can't really draw any conclusions until he's done 5 or 10 elections.
Strictly speaking, early hominids learned toolmaking from the Colonials and Gaius Baltar, so you have a point.
(He used to be a farmer, you know. Changed his Aerilon accent to hide his past, but... )
I agree, it's stupid that the US doesn't have free compulsory national photo IDs.
When the information on the object is legally privileged or confidential. If you take a picture of a piece of paper with the secret formula for Coca-Cola on it, sharing that image would certainly open you up to civil liability.
This isn't relevant to the issue at hand though.
(nit) Unless there's a tie in the Electoral College.
I'm not sure what you're disagreeing with, I never said the government was better at doing anything. It's spelled "twaddle."
Efficiency is irrelevant. The question of wether or not someone should live or die for lack funds is a moral one. The issue of wether or not it's right, or to what lengths we should go to stop it, are questions or right and wrong. No amount of "efficiency" can justify a death.
However. I acknowledge the laissez-faire perspective on this issue, which is to just let the market sort out who can pay and who can't. Laissez-faire libertarians are all rationalists who believe markets are objective and as long as people are dying on their own account, no evil is done -- even though a lot of people may die, and the dying people, their family and loved ones, might not see the elegant "fairness" of the system in exactly the same way the rich might.
Yes, but this was back when the insurance was used to pay for spa vacations -- this information does not go to the efficacy of health care per se. Bismarck's labor market reforms were really about benefit competition; they were designed specifically to gut the political power of labor unions, by depriving them of the power to give their members superior services. He believed that if you didn't have to get health care through union negotiation, unions would lose power, and he was correct to a large extent.
His reforms were very similar to the reforms in the US post-war. Health care in 1880s Germany wasn't about health care, any more than Taft-Hartley was about health insurance-- they were strategic concessions in an ongoing political conflict between government authorities and the organized labor cadres trying to outmaneuver them.
Right Libertarians are anti-union. Libertarians in the US are mostly anti-union because of cultural issues peculiar to the US: a lot of libertarians in the US align with laissez-faire Nozick-style lib philosophy, and a lot of US libertarian writers spent a lot of time in the 70s writing anti-union polemics in order to win the support of rich benefactors (I'm looking at you, Murray Rothbard).
There is of course this thing called left-libertarianism, from people like Noam Chomsky and innumerable anarcho-capitalists and anarcho-syndicalists of every stripe for the last 150 years. Remember, unions were seen as primarily anti-government organizations up through World War II.
Doctors have the AMA and state boards, lawyers have state bars. They do not set wages but the operate like medieval-style labor guilds, restricting supply and regulating the sorts of business the members can do. These organizations then turn around and aggressively lobby the government to protect their interests, and both trades are protected by an elaborate framework of law and custom that makes it very difficult for a median customer to evaluate their performance or price their services.
The system works, there's nothing evil with it. But arguing that doctors and lawyers are just simple individual actors in a transparent market, succeeding or failing purely by their skills and talents, is naive at best.
I'm in an entertainment union and I make what I negotiate. The union sets the scale rate, and no one makes less than that, but the wages are at mine and the employers discretion. It's when they don't pay the proper overtime rates that the union gets angry.
The biggest problem in the US with unions (and it is mostly just a US thing) is that the Taft-Harley Act in the 40s froze most of the unions existing at that time into a privileged position, and it's almost impossible, practically and legally, for new labor organizations with different rules and ideas to push out the incumbents.
It's a lot cheaper to pay a few rockstars 15%, than give everyone a health plan. Really economical trade actually :)
I work in the movie business and before the unions this sort of thing was SOP. Actors and artists would get 7 year ironclad deals under which the employer could pay, essentially, whatever they wanted to, and work them under whatever conditions they pleased. The only people in a position to complain where the stars, but they would get bought off with salary, not a cut of the grosses, mind you, but enough folding money to give them social status (read: a nice car).
It's sortof a philosophical question, but what if the premium wasn't 15%, just 5%? Would a union suddenly make sense, then? And why would a 15% premium be so good if its only purpose was to give you positional wealth? If the base rate is $4 an hour, I bet the guy making that extra 60 cents thinks he's the king of the hill, but it's plainly a sham.
As a brother of a democratically-run union, it's really not that simple.
We vote for the board of directors, who are all people who work for a living, they get together a couple times a month and vote on things. In practice they just ratify whatever the permanent staff recommends, the professional field organizers, the negotiators and lawyers, and the folks from the International. We aren't always happy with every outcome but it's very difficult to find someone to vote for who (1) has the right mix of ideas and reforms and (2) is popular and legitimate enough to win votes, and then (3) persuasive and well-connected enough to get a board of directors to go along. Democracy isn't a panacea.
Though I much prefer the current system to a direct one, where we all voted on everything -- I don't have time to read a 200 page contract agreement, nor the technical knowledge to understand it.
Medical and legal board certifications are quasi-state organizations that exist because (1) a bad doctor can kill you, and (2) a bad lawyer can land you in prison. We, as a society, just aren't willing to accept fraud in these particular fields.
Meanwhile, people spent a decade paying good money for Windows XP when something like Linux existed. The pressure to regulate the quality of software, by the state or a guild or anyone else, is pretty low.
While everyone would love to run their own business, there are profound inefficiencies associated with having a large numbers of small businesses, mainly losses caused by competition and misallocations of labor. Having a large proportion of small businesses is actually a symptom of a backward or developing economy; Egypt has more self-employed per capita than the US, for example.
People seem to forget that effective healthcare is a product of the 20th Century. People used to pay 100% of their own way for healthcare, when they were buying mustard poultices and lizard fat oil, and soaking in epson salt baths four hours a day. It was all worthless and elective, for entertainment purposes only, and thus the market worked.
It's when people started actually surviving fatal conditions, and not having money became a death sentence, that the actual moral and ethical problems with pay-as-you-go started to become salient.