You're going to have to explain to the class how pointing out Seneca's fate significantly modifies the thesis: "Ending copyright, wether that is right or wrong, would unquestionably jeopardize [everyone getting a say in who is rewarded]." Because it kinda seems to me that Seneca is Exhibit A.
Note I didn't say there wouldn't be art, I just said that it wouldn't be rewarded. I could predict that it'd probably result if a lot of art being less-than-available, but I can't say that because it's hard to know if that's true.
Given the general trend of "cloud logic," however, given its fickleness, faddishness, and 12-second attention span, it's difficult to a see a modern Juvenal getting any traction whatsoever, and while the modern Juvenal may survive and live a rich life, he ain't going to be remembered for his writing, because it won't PageRank anywhere near "bread and circuses star trek", "alice eve naked" and "armed forces recruiting". The cloud is too busy selling us our neighbor's smelly dumps as fertilizer to tell us things we might need to know.
Real property ownership laws are predicated on this physical reality.
That's a fat issue. There are these things called "club goods," things like memberships, bus fares, and movie tickets, that are basically non-rivalrous at the point of sale, so we have laws the forbid trespassing, even though it's a physical reality that you can walk on to a bus or into a theater.
And then there's the whole thorny issue of sale of a physical object versus a "service." Presenting a movie to you is a service and someone performs it: those crooks at megaupload collected over a hundred million dollars from subscribers and paid tens of millions of dollars in server and network fees to ship the movies out. It wasn't a friction-free enterprise and filesharing never will be, the Internet is never going to be free beer and somebody's always going to be a huge markup moving the data. The question is do you want J.J. Abrams getting the markup, or do you want the sum going to Comcast and some guy with a box in Macau?
Even in eras when artists depended on patronage, they produced an enormous amount of art that ignored the wishes of, or even outright lampooned, their patrons. Just look at seemingly half of the Roman canon.
Seneca: ostracized and driven to suicide for the crime of falling out of favor. Juvenal: exiled.
Artists who have no money of their own and dare pick a fight with those that do are caught and vilified, cut off from support and their community, driven to destitution and death. But in maybe one out a dozen cases their work survived and we have it today, so it's a win on the whole, right? What artist wouldn't want to work under such circumstances! After all, we're so much more advanced than the Romans, no one would get that treatment today!
State funding of art is really convenient, it obviates the need for a censorship board; in the UK and several other countries it's also an efficient way to put gambling addicts into the gutter through the various lottery film funds.
It's important to point out that the Internet isn't an invention in the way the cannon was; just knowing how the internet works doesn't allow you to create an Internet, it requires enormous capital and thousands of different private interests to participate, and to make it work in the very particular way it does. And the way people consume information through the Internet, the way the analogue hole is constructed, is always constantly changing and no one technology is ever locked in, in the way that once the cannon is invented, the cannon was locked in for hundreds of years.
You now those streaming boxes people buy now, the Rokus and the Boxees and the Revues, ever notice how none of them have enough persistent storage to save a movie, and none of them run bit torrent clients? You ever notice how the content streaming sites, owned by the studios, partner with the manufacturers to supply their channels? Ever notice how you can't save a Netflix instant watch stream or a Hulu stream on a retail streaming box? And even if you have a box that can, it's almost impossible to do faster than just watching the show? And, ever notice how nobody really seems to care about this, and the boxes fly off the shelves faster than ever? I mean some of them can be hacked and people do this, but then again some people did VHS duplication back in the day, it's just a techy thing that only a few people bother with.
The Grown Ups have been selling real solutions that sell millions of units a year and guide consumers to the beneficial equilibrium of paying for content, as they should, while a few cranks run MythTV and write white-people-problem screeds about information wanting to be free.
I think tech people are too complacent about the Bittorrent equilibrium; they think people want the freedom to copy, when all they want is the show they want conveniently. Most consumers could care less if they actually possessed a file of it-- as long as Big Media makes streams faster and more available than torrents, people will pay for streams. "Freedom to copy" isn't a make or break proposition for all but the very, very few, even most of the people that regularly copy don't have a political agenda, they just do it because it's easy.
Ownership of physical items is a "natural" extension of the physical reality of physical items being unique - if I have a nifty stick, it is challenging for you to have that same stick at the same time.
Unless I have a foot and 50 pounds on you, in which case the stick's gonna be mine. The only thing that keeps that from happening are shared values in the community that force the bigger guy, either through overt policing or social stigma, to let the little guy keep his stick. All ownership is based on coercion, I assume most anti-copyright people would be comfortable with this concept, since their entire approach is just reworking of Proudhonian anarchism, except applied exclusively to intellectual property.
"Natural" has nothing to do with it, it's strictly a question of social mores and ethics. I'm arguing for mine and others are arguing for theirs; I think mine is more beneficial for everyone, others disagree.
I don't have a problem with people singing Pat's song, nobody does. However, when Colgate-Palmolive makes a billion dollars in sales using Pat's song to sell dish detergent...
A number of people have proposed alternative systems for compensating artists, but instead of giving serious consideration to those proposals, we simply ignore them and continue to pretend that copyright is a form of property.
Many of my friends who direct and produce have absolutely been giving serious consideration to these other funding models:
- A friend of mine from school produced an entire very well-made scifi short many years ago, funding it with donations on his website, long before Kickstarter even existed. It's a great short and he got a lot of attention, and it won a lot of awards at several festivals. Aside from producing another friends feature, however, Jason's paying gig remains an editor-for-hire on E! cable shows of the "100 Craziest celebrity moments" variety. If he wasn't making money from those he would never have been able to complete his short; he was able to raise money to just make the thing with friends, and nowhere near enough to pay himself for the time it took to develop and produce the project, or pay anyone their actual market wages.
- Another friend of mine has been raising money for her project for several years now on IndieGoGo. Several years now. Luckily she has means and is able to supplement her income with writing gigs on Big Hollywood Movies.
Basically none of the proposed funding models work without either (1) Hollywood paying everybody the 10 months out of the year people aren't working on their crowdsourced project or (2) abandoning the concept of the professional artist. As I said in another post, your median open source developer doesn't live on donations, they make their money at day jobs working for Evil Corporations that Sue People for infringing IP. Open source is a "marginal time" activity, it doesn't satisfy material needs. Open content is only so far a complement to the copyright model, it can't replace it.
Crowd sourced funding promises a lot of things: the idea that people will reward good work with more money, or that new work that is "suppressed" by the old system will emerge. In practice, however, these things haven't materialized and I don't think they ever will, I just don't think entertainment works that way. People want a casual experience they can take or leave, they don't want their entertainment experience turned into an advocacy enterprise where they have to band together with people and raise money and attract friend networks and go through all this bullshit just to see 20 minutes of mumblecore.
Kill copyright and you threaten to kill everything that stands on top of it, like a lot of open source software developers, and any artist that isn't willing to whore himself out to rich patrons. That's what the world was like before copyright: there were artists and there was art, and it was whatever a rich guy said it was. With copyright everyone gets a say in who is rewarded, and they vote with their pocketbooks. Ending copyright, wether that is right or wrong, would unquestionably jeopardize this.
"And before you try, realize this: nobody's entitled to a billion dollar industry no matter how many politicians you bribe nor how many lawyers you buy to justify your existence."
I'll remember that next time Google and Comcast are on the Hill fighting over which "Net Neutrality" works best for their respective business models. (But this is a sideshow, really.)
Regardless, it's not like killing copyright would actually make the rich people in the film industry poorer-- most of the big studios own or have interest in cable channles and ISPs, and celebrity actors can make millions a year as long as their AdSense remains high. The people who will be wiped out are the creative middle class, the technicians and artists and any actor you can't remember the name of.
Meanwhile, Tom Cruise will be collecting his endorsement money and his Adwords revs, but you don't get a high Google ranking by actually being a good actor, you get it by doing the obnoxious shit celebrities are hated for. Eliminating copyright would intensify celebrity culture, until eventually filmmaking looked like the fine art market looks like now: a bunch of rich people trying to impress each other, while the broader culture couldn't care less.
Filmmaking would certainly survive as an art form, but it wouldn't really be popular or relevant anymore.
People voting with other peoples wallets, because one day we just decided that some people deserved to have their pockets picked, because Wes arbitrarily decided that what they had wasn't "property" anymore.
Firstly, Pioneer One is a very low production value show, I don't think it'd even be picked up by an American syndicator.
Secondly, it's just not sustainable-- they've managed to make 6 episodes over two years, god knows what they're all doing to feed themselves when they aren't shooting an ep; probably going back down to Manhattan and working paying gigs in the old media. We don't expect most developers to live off donations, the best ones that do have a good paying day job developing; why would we expect filmmakers to be any different?
Crowd-funded free movies are a lot like solar power: it's overhyped, doesn't scale, works best at pilot plants and can't generate baseload demand.
What one knows it means and what one claims it means are two different things. The "Apple hates us for our freedom" crowd never really cared what was meant, it was just another club to troll with.
1. A county library is not bound to respect your maximal Constitutional rights.
2. Obscenity does have a legal meaning in the United States, and states have a broad latitude to prosecute it when it's in a situation where a minor might view or hear it.
3. Sex acts in a public place, either solo, group, live or depicted, suggested or actual, are prosecuted as lewd or disorderly conduct every day.
Uh, scanning for malware is great. But i don't want Google putting itself in the position of deciding what apps are "good enough" to be in their store.
It seems like, given that the Android platform lets you use whatever stores you please (or your ODM makes you use), Google could pretty much implement whatever quality control it wants, it just reflects on their reputation ultimately. People who want to sell apps that Google bounces would still have Amazon, GetJar, Handango, or their own website.
The Commonwealth of Nations is a unitary political institution, the successor of various sovereign institutions that have existed since the at least the Tudor dynasty, and recognizing an unbroken chain of title and royal legitimacy. For a Commonwealth Realm, "Queen of Australia" is just an alias for "the constitutionally-recognized sovereign of the United Kingdom."
For the Queen to have a separate regnal number in Australia would imply that Australia had a separate royal family from the United Kingdom with a distinct patrimony.
Nobody's stolen anything... You offer a sight-seeing tour of your town for $60, another guy offers the same service for $30.
At least the "another guy" in your example is actually providing a tour. A copyright pirate is essentially taking $30 from your customers and sneaking them onto the back of your sightseeing bus.
Yeah, they would have made so much more money selling access to Kickstarter-financed mumblecore movies, Red vs. Blue episodes and Vimeo music videos. Because Open Always Wins(tm).
Can we just abandon the pretense that piracy doesn't cost any artist any money ever? I guess if you're sending an mkv of a Red Dwarf episode to your brother that just sorta happens and there's nothing evil about that, but these stories keep cropping up where some guy with a server somewhere is selling access to his pirated library for millions of dollars before getting the plug pulled. Clearly every dime this guy made was a lost sale.
I guess I could accept this if there was some sort of way to "prove" a designer did the job, but sorta by definition a designer's performance is subjective. When a designer gets pushback like this, it isn't about getting evidence, because that's impossible. It's really the engineers making a power play, and saying, in so many words: "My job is objective and requires proof, your job doesn't, therefore your contributions are worthless. A shell script could do your job."
It really isn't restricted to designers either. Marketing, public relations, sales, human resources, upper management and the "suit" jobs of all stripes basically get the same overt or covert treatment. People with authority over the engineers get malingering and minimal compliance, and people collaborating with the engineers get disrespect and obtuseness (like "Well we have to A/B test six different borders widths...").
If Page was taking Steve Jobs' advice, the 20 percent perk would be eliminated completely and Page would be walking around instructing people what the consumer wants.
The present Google operation is so engineer-centric that they're afraid to even decide what color blue they should use without submitting it to the Cloud for arbitration. The point isn't that the Cloud would give you a bad result, but that their internal groupthink is so strong that they can't even tolerate individual decision-making. Somebody wanted to make a CSS border three pixels wide, and he had to make an empirical case with evidence and metrics. This isn't about agility, it's ideological and engineers trying to stake out a higher moral ground than creatives or commercial interests.
The whole "eliminate middle management" and "bottom-up" "agile" approach is totally valid in a lot of circumstances, but to be honest I think the open source movement and the whole "cathedral and the bazaar" mentality has totally politicized any conversations about business management. Developers have been blowing their own smoke for so long that they've basically constructed an internal value system where if a product requires marketing, it's not worth making, and if a project requires management, it's not a good project to do, and if the customer doesn't like the deliverable (cuz there weren't any PMs advocating for him) the customer should RTFM.
The consumer isn't even part of the equation, it's really just a semantic battle over who gets to claim to be the more honco technologist. Google makes tons of money, and Google gives the outward appearance of making money in the "right sort of ways," the ways that most people have made prior commitment to support, so Apple making lots of money is challenging. But it's not a mystery in a business sense, nor even really in a technological sense. It's a moral problem people have, and they use terms like "agility" and "innovation" to frame the moral debate.
What does 'more polished projects' mean exactly? Who has always done the polishing and development? It wasn't management and I've often found their direction is a coin flip.
Engineers are way too fast with the "I don't understand this, therefore it must be stupid, arbitrary and redundant" judgement.
Aside:
Not having that BS middle management means we get paid more although we have more responsibilities but those responsibilities were already foisted upon us when something went wrong anyway!
I don't think you understand elasticity of wages. Not having middle managers doesn't mean you get paid more, it means your firm charges the customer less -- laying off programmer middle-managers doesn't suddenly make programmers in demand or curtail their supply, it's actually the opposite, because all those PMs and partner engineers are looking for work and can probably do your job too, and would be happy to take less than you to do it.
This might have the knock-on effect of making your firm more competitive and keeping you more consistently employed, but the marginal gain of eliminating redundancy does not accrue to the remaining employees. There's a reason the guy that's paid with stock options does the firing: he's the one with the unbounded upside.
Federalism doesn't prevent a Delaware corporation like Subway from collecting sales tax on your California-bought diet coke. A state can imposes whatever internal taxes or duties it please, and if it does business in the state and fails to abide by the laws, its assets in the state can be attached.
(For better and worse. On the one hand nobody likes paying sales tax, but on the other simply moving your company's post office box address across a duty-free border in order to get better tax treatment is the very definition of regulatory arbitrage and nonproductive rent-seeking.)
Uh Amazon doesn't push impulse buys? Are those emails I get every other day figments of my imagination, or does the fact that they scientifically determine what I'm most likely to impulse buy somehow make them "better"?
Slashdot Mirror
You're going to have to explain to the class how pointing out Seneca's fate significantly modifies the thesis: "Ending copyright, wether that is right or wrong, would unquestionably jeopardize [everyone getting a say in who is rewarded]." Because it kinda seems to me that Seneca is Exhibit A.
Note I didn't say there wouldn't be art, I just said that it wouldn't be rewarded. I could predict that it'd probably result if a lot of art being less-than-available, but I can't say that because it's hard to know if that's true.
Given the general trend of "cloud logic," however, given its fickleness, faddishness, and 12-second attention span, it's difficult to a see a modern Juvenal getting any traction whatsoever, and while the modern Juvenal may survive and live a rich life, he ain't going to be remembered for his writing, because it won't PageRank anywhere near "bread and circuses star trek", "alice eve naked" and "armed forces recruiting". The cloud is too busy selling us our neighbor's smelly dumps as fertilizer to tell us things we might need to know.
That's a fat issue. There are these things called "club goods," things like memberships, bus fares, and movie tickets, that are basically non-rivalrous at the point of sale, so we have laws the forbid trespassing, even though it's a physical reality that you can walk on to a bus or into a theater.
And then there's the whole thorny issue of sale of a physical object versus a "service." Presenting a movie to you is a service and someone performs it: those crooks at megaupload collected over a hundred million dollars from subscribers and paid tens of millions of dollars in server and network fees to ship the movies out. It wasn't a friction-free enterprise and filesharing never will be, the Internet is never going to be free beer and somebody's always going to be a huge markup moving the data. The question is do you want J.J. Abrams getting the markup, or do you want the sum going to Comcast and some guy with a box in Macau?
I completely agree with you, but that takes nothing away from my argument.
Seneca: ostracized and driven to suicide for the crime of falling out of favor. Juvenal: exiled.
Artists who have no money of their own and dare pick a fight with those that do are caught and vilified, cut off from support and their community, driven to destitution and death. But in maybe one out a dozen cases their work survived and we have it today, so it's a win on the whole, right? What artist wouldn't want to work under such circumstances! After all, we're so much more advanced than the Romans, no one would get that treatment today!
State funding of art is really convenient, it obviates the need for a censorship board; in the UK and several other countries it's also an efficient way to put gambling addicts into the gutter through the various lottery film funds.
It's important to point out that the Internet isn't an invention in the way the cannon was; just knowing how the internet works doesn't allow you to create an Internet, it requires enormous capital and thousands of different private interests to participate, and to make it work in the very particular way it does. And the way people consume information through the Internet, the way the analogue hole is constructed, is always constantly changing and no one technology is ever locked in, in the way that once the cannon is invented, the cannon was locked in for hundreds of years.
You now those streaming boxes people buy now, the Rokus and the Boxees and the Revues, ever notice how none of them have enough persistent storage to save a movie, and none of them run bit torrent clients? You ever notice how the content streaming sites, owned by the studios, partner with the manufacturers to supply their channels? Ever notice how you can't save a Netflix instant watch stream or a Hulu stream on a retail streaming box? And even if you have a box that can, it's almost impossible to do faster than just watching the show? And, ever notice how nobody really seems to care about this, and the boxes fly off the shelves faster than ever? I mean some of them can be hacked and people do this, but then again some people did VHS duplication back in the day, it's just a techy thing that only a few people bother with.
The Grown Ups have been selling real solutions that sell millions of units a year and guide consumers to the beneficial equilibrium of paying for content, as they should, while a few cranks run MythTV and write white-people-problem screeds about information wanting to be free.
I think tech people are too complacent about the Bittorrent equilibrium; they think people want the freedom to copy, when all they want is the show they want conveniently. Most consumers could care less if they actually possessed a file of it-- as long as Big Media makes streams faster and more available than torrents, people will pay for streams. "Freedom to copy" isn't a make or break proposition for all but the very, very few, even most of the people that regularly copy don't have a political agenda, they just do it because it's easy.
Unless I have a foot and 50 pounds on you, in which case the stick's gonna be mine. The only thing that keeps that from happening are shared values in the community that force the bigger guy, either through overt policing or social stigma, to let the little guy keep his stick. All ownership is based on coercion, I assume most anti-copyright people would be comfortable with this concept, since their entire approach is just reworking of Proudhonian anarchism, except applied exclusively to intellectual property.
"Natural" has nothing to do with it, it's strictly a question of social mores and ethics. I'm arguing for mine and others are arguing for theirs; I think mine is more beneficial for everyone, others disagree.
I don't have a problem with people singing Pat's song, nobody does. However, when Colgate-Palmolive makes a billion dollars in sales using Pat's song to sell dish detergent...
Hi, I've been commenting elsewhere (bitchily) on the thread and I'm a commercial artist and work in Hollywood.
Many of my friends who direct and produce have absolutely been giving serious consideration to these other funding models:
- A friend of mine from school produced an entire very well-made scifi short many years ago, funding it with donations on his website, long before Kickstarter even existed. It's a great short and he got a lot of attention, and it won a lot of awards at several festivals. Aside from producing another friends feature, however, Jason's paying gig remains an editor-for-hire on E! cable shows of the "100 Craziest celebrity moments" variety. If he wasn't making money from those he would never have been able to complete his short; he was able to raise money to just make the thing with friends, and nowhere near enough to pay himself for the time it took to develop and produce the project, or pay anyone their actual market wages.
- Another friend of mine has been raising money for her project for several years now on IndieGoGo. Several years now. Luckily she has means and is able to supplement her income with writing gigs on Big Hollywood Movies.
Basically none of the proposed funding models work without either (1) Hollywood paying everybody the 10 months out of the year people aren't working on their crowdsourced project or (2) abandoning the concept of the professional artist. As I said in another post, your median open source developer doesn't live on donations, they make their money at day jobs working for Evil Corporations that Sue People for infringing IP. Open source is a "marginal time" activity, it doesn't satisfy material needs. Open content is only so far a complement to the copyright model, it can't replace it.
Crowd sourced funding promises a lot of things: the idea that people will reward good work with more money, or that new work that is "suppressed" by the old system will emerge. In practice, however, these things haven't materialized and I don't think they ever will, I just don't think entertainment works that way. People want a casual experience they can take or leave, they don't want their entertainment experience turned into an advocacy enterprise where they have to band together with people and raise money and attract friend networks and go through all this bullshit just to see 20 minutes of mumblecore.
Kill copyright and you threaten to kill everything that stands on top of it, like a lot of open source software developers, and any artist that isn't willing to whore himself out to rich patrons. That's what the world was like before copyright: there were artists and there was art, and it was whatever a rich guy said it was. With copyright everyone gets a say in who is rewarded, and they vote with their pocketbooks. Ending copyright, wether that is right or wrong, would unquestionably jeopardize this.
"And before you try, realize this: nobody's entitled to a billion dollar industry no matter how many politicians you bribe nor how many lawyers you buy to justify your existence."
I'll remember that next time Google and Comcast are on the Hill fighting over which "Net Neutrality" works best for their respective business models. (But this is a sideshow, really.)
Regardless, it's not like killing copyright would actually make the rich people in the film industry poorer-- most of the big studios own or have interest in cable channles and ISPs, and celebrity actors can make millions a year as long as their AdSense remains high. The people who will be wiped out are the creative middle class, the technicians and artists and any actor you can't remember the name of.
Meanwhile, Tom Cruise will be collecting his endorsement money and his Adwords revs, but you don't get a high Google ranking by actually being a good actor, you get it by doing the obnoxious shit celebrities are hated for. Eliminating copyright would intensify celebrity culture, until eventually filmmaking looked like the fine art market looks like now: a bunch of rich people trying to impress each other, while the broader culture couldn't care less.
Filmmaking would certainly survive as an art form, but it wouldn't really be popular or relevant anymore.
People voting with other peoples wallets, because one day we just decided that some people deserved to have their pockets picked, because Wes arbitrarily decided that what they had wasn't "property" anymore.
Who are the ones "screaming with their fingers in their ears" again?
Firstly, Pioneer One is a very low production value show, I don't think it'd even be picked up by an American syndicator.
Secondly, it's just not sustainable-- they've managed to make 6 episodes over two years, god knows what they're all doing to feed themselves when they aren't shooting an ep; probably going back down to Manhattan and working paying gigs in the old media. We don't expect most developers to live off donations, the best ones that do have a good paying day job developing; why would we expect filmmakers to be any different?
Crowd-funded free movies are a lot like solar power: it's overhyped, doesn't scale, works best at pilot plants and can't generate baseload demand.
What one knows it means and what one claims it means are two different things. The "Apple hates us for our freedom" crowd never really cared what was meant, it was just another club to troll with.
Just throwing it out there:
1. A county library is not bound to respect your maximal Constitutional rights.
2. Obscenity does have a legal meaning in the United States, and states have a broad latitude to prosecute it when it's in a situation where a minor might view or hear it.
3. Sex acts in a public place, either solo, group, live or depicted, suggested or actual, are prosecuted as lewd or disorderly conduct every day.
Protecting ad flow is the new DRM :O
It seems like, given that the Android platform lets you use whatever stores you please (or your ODM makes you use), Google could pretty much implement whatever quality control it wants, it just reflects on their reputation ultimately. People who want to sell apps that Google bounces would still have Amazon, GetJar, Handango, or their own website.
The Commonwealth of Nations is a unitary political institution, the successor of various sovereign institutions that have existed since the at least the Tudor dynasty, and recognizing an unbroken chain of title and royal legitimacy. For a Commonwealth Realm, "Queen of Australia" is just an alias for "the constitutionally-recognized sovereign of the United Kingdom."
For the Queen to have a separate regnal number in Australia would imply that Australia had a separate royal family from the United Kingdom with a distinct patrimony.
At least the "another guy" in your example is actually providing a tour. A copyright pirate is essentially taking $30 from your customers and sneaking them onto the back of your sightseeing bus.
Yeah, they would have made so much more money selling access to Kickstarter-financed mumblecore movies, Red vs. Blue episodes and Vimeo music videos. Because Open Always Wins(tm).
Can we just abandon the pretense that piracy doesn't cost any artist any money ever? I guess if you're sending an mkv of a Red Dwarf episode to your brother that just sorta happens and there's nothing evil about that, but these stories keep cropping up where some guy with a server somewhere is selling access to his pirated library for millions of dollars before getting the plug pulled. Clearly every dime this guy made was a lost sale.
I guess I could accept this if there was some sort of way to "prove" a designer did the job, but sorta by definition a designer's performance is subjective. When a designer gets pushback like this, it isn't about getting evidence, because that's impossible. It's really the engineers making a power play, and saying, in so many words: "My job is objective and requires proof, your job doesn't, therefore your contributions are worthless. A shell script could do your job."
It really isn't restricted to designers either. Marketing, public relations, sales, human resources, upper management and the "suit" jobs of all stripes basically get the same overt or covert treatment. People with authority over the engineers get malingering and minimal compliance, and people collaborating with the engineers get disrespect and obtuseness (like "Well we have to A/B test six different borders widths...").
The present Google operation is so engineer-centric that they're afraid to even decide what color blue they should use without submitting it to the Cloud for arbitration. The point isn't that the Cloud would give you a bad result, but that their internal groupthink is so strong that they can't even tolerate individual decision-making. Somebody wanted to make a CSS border three pixels wide, and he had to make an empirical case with evidence and metrics. This isn't about agility, it's ideological and engineers trying to stake out a higher moral ground than creatives or commercial interests.
The whole "eliminate middle management" and "bottom-up" "agile" approach is totally valid in a lot of circumstances, but to be honest I think the open source movement and the whole "cathedral and the bazaar" mentality has totally politicized any conversations about business management. Developers have been blowing their own smoke for so long that they've basically constructed an internal value system where if a product requires marketing, it's not worth making, and if a project requires management, it's not a good project to do, and if the customer doesn't like the deliverable (cuz there weren't any PMs advocating for him) the customer should RTFM.
The consumer isn't even part of the equation, it's really just a semantic battle over who gets to claim to be the more honco technologist. Google makes tons of money, and Google gives the outward appearance of making money in the "right sort of ways," the ways that most people have made prior commitment to support, so Apple making lots of money is challenging. But it's not a mystery in a business sense, nor even really in a technological sense. It's a moral problem people have, and they use terms like "agility" and "innovation" to frame the moral debate.
Engineers are way too fast with the "I don't understand this, therefore it must be stupid, arbitrary and redundant" judgement.
Aside:
I don't think you understand elasticity of wages. Not having middle managers doesn't mean you get paid more, it means your firm charges the customer less -- laying off programmer middle-managers doesn't suddenly make programmers in demand or curtail their supply, it's actually the opposite, because all those PMs and partner engineers are looking for work and can probably do your job too, and would be happy to take less than you to do it.
This might have the knock-on effect of making your firm more competitive and keeping you more consistently employed, but the marginal gain of eliminating redundancy does not accrue to the remaining employees. There's a reason the guy that's paid with stock options does the firing: he's the one with the unbounded upside.
So in other words, we live in the greatest time to be alive as consumers of knowledge, but I should be shorting GOOG?
Manufacturer brand names count for a lot these days. Viz. Apple, Android, ThinkPad, Samsung
Federalism doesn't prevent a Delaware corporation like Subway from collecting sales tax on your California-bought diet coke. A state can imposes whatever internal taxes or duties it please, and if it does business in the state and fails to abide by the laws, its assets in the state can be attached.
(For better and worse. On the one hand nobody likes paying sales tax, but on the other simply moving your company's post office box address across a duty-free border in order to get better tax treatment is the very definition of regulatory arbitrage and nonproductive rent-seeking.)
Uh Amazon doesn't push impulse buys? Are those emails I get every other day figments of my imagination, or does the fact that they scientifically determine what I'm most likely to impulse buy somehow make them "better"?
So much cheaper than Kroger/Ralph's; an $80 bill at Ralph's is literally $50 at a TJs.