With due respect, in my view, this is like trying to buy homeowner's insurance while your house is on fire, and complaining that they won't sell it to you.
Can we please stop with the "it's like buying insurance when your house is on fire/you have cancer/etc" argument? As far as I can tell it's not like buying insurance and (on the other side) it's not like a store jacking up the price of fire extinguishers when your house is on fire.
Here's why it's not like buying insurance when your house is on fire:
(1) If you buy homeowners insurance while your house is on fire, well -- you're going to have a bunch of damaged stuff that they have to replace (because the fire has already destroyed it or because it's inevitable that the fire will destroy it). This means you're paying (say) $100 and the insurance company is on the hook for thousands or tens of thousands of dollars. It's obviously a bad deal for the insurance company in that case.
(2) Companies simply won't sell you fire insurance or health insurance when you have a fire or cancer. Rackspace will sell you backup services, but at a higher cost. The fact that Rackspace is willing to sell you these services at all should tell you that it's not like buying fire insurance during a fire -- because nobody would do that.
On the other side of the fence, why selling these services is not like a store jacking up the price of fire extinguishers during a fire:
(1) Rackspace is on the hook for providing backup services immediately. Providing backup services costs more than providing the potential for backup services. In other words, you're going to be depending on their servers (meaning traffic is going to their site), whereas, if you don't have DOS attack in progress, they're just backing up your servers and don't have to handle the traffic. Plus, there's a lot of urgency with the "my server is under a DOS attack right now" - which might mean putting you in front of their current work queue. Both of these mean extra costs for Rackspace.
(2) Fire extinguishers have a fixed cost, regardless of whether you use them or not. Rackspace is providing a service, which does cost them more money when you use them.
I submit that the unreasonable percentage is vanishingly small.
Well, you're wrong. I live in a neighborhood with a lot of college students. They avoid paying for anything if they can get away with it. The result? If you leave your wireless network open, you might have six or seven different people on your network at the same time. Even worse, unless you're a little tech savy, you won't know why you can't stream video off the internet (hint: it's because they're streaming internet or pirating content with bit torrent). Your internet experience will suck if you don't password protect your internet.
I recommend looking at the current solar powered aircraft - they're extremely light, look fragile, and barely carry anything. They generally look like gliders with some efficient propellers. Seems like it's a matter of efficiency and getting enough power from solar panels. I'm also betting they don't travel very fast (commercial aircraft travel above 500 MPH).
http://www.google.com/search?q=solar+power+aircraft
Can you give us a source for the "4-6%" yearly pay increase? You also say "an already generous starting salary", which also seems like speculation. Both my parents were teachers in Michigan. They said that Michigan was one of the better states to teach in because of how much they paid their teachers. My dad (34 years of teaching, nearly had his PhD) never earned anywhere near $80k.
> Taxing your way out of an economic crisis is only feasible in the [very] short term.
First, I don't know why this is relevant to the tax evasion issue. Although, I know a lot of right-wingers can get pretty anti-tax.
Second, would you agree that governments need to have *some* form of taxation? Based on your statement, I assume the only ideologically-consistent position you can take is a total anti-tax position.
Are you suggesting that the woman in your story was one of the powerful elite?
I don't know exactly what the laws are, but isn't it illegal to use illegally-obtained evidence in court? I assume this is to prevent the police from using illegal means to collect evidence. Like I said, I don't know exactly what the laws are, but it seems like this might be pertinent in this case.
But they did not get credit for their work. The correct term here is plagiarize.
Actually, the pirates did (inadvertently) get credited for their work. The summary says "Netflix failed to remove references to the pirate site". I'd say that counts as getting credit for their work.
Besides, it's kind of a weird paradox to say that NetFlix plagarized the pirates. It's a bit like - if I gave a speech in public, then someone writes down my words, and then I copy-and-pasted the text - now I'm guilty of plagarizing the textual version of the speech I originally wrote. Generally speaking, people don't like plagarism because it's people taking credit for ideas that they didn't come up with in the first place (for example, taking credit for a book I didn't write or a quote I didn't originally say). In this case, it's the movie creators' words/ideas, not the pirates ideas.
I actually thought it was the pirates themselves referring to it as "piracy" because they wanted to make the argument "See! Pirating is so good for the magazine that they're helping people pirate! Everyone should let everything be pirated! Down with copyright!"
Yeash. You have a bizarrely Chinese-centric version of history.
The war in Korea was a US "proxy war" against China? What nonsense. It was a war started by the (Communist) North Koreans. It's a lot easier to make the argument that the Korean war was a Chinese proxy war against the United States than vice-versa. (Or are you aiming to make the US the bad guy?) The USSR was also a big backer of the North Koreans (so why don't you call the Korea war a proxy war against the USSR?) Afterall, the North Koreans were using some of the most recent Russian military equipment and Russians were actually flying aircraft against US pilots. http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Who_provided_military_support_for_North_Korea_during_the_Korean_War
The Vietnam war was about stopping the spread of communism into South Vietnam (see the Domino Theory). It's nonsense to say Vietnam was about fighting a war with China.
The world is awash with evil fuckers who, rather than trying to win you over with solid products and services, will expend their effort and money on bribes, advertising, patent warchests, takeovers and suchlike with the sole goal of manipulating, extorting, deceiving and straitjacketing you, not just to get the money you have now, but an ever increasing tithe, in perpetuity.
What does that have to do with open source software and open source hardware? Open-source companies can still "expend their effort and money on bribes, advertising, patent warchests, takeovers and suchlike with the sole goal of manipulating, extorting, deceiving and straitjacketing you". You can't seriously believe open-source companies are limited from things like "bribes and advertising" by the FSF's bullet points. At this point, you're just going hyperbolic to try to make everyone agree with you.
Against this backdrop, a small organisation starts a modest initiative to help lift the veil from these practices to help you, and you... mock them for it.
My view of the FSF is that they are as misguided as communists - they fight against capitalists (which makes them good in your mind), but they have a crappy understanding of economics so they'll never manage to get people paid for their work. Yeah, the communists were once a "small organization" too.
That 800 is just 6.5% of the Internet radio streaming. That means the total Internet streaming business is over 15 times larger than that, which (assuming there is no overlap, which is of course quite false, but for the sake of argument) means there are 12,000 people making more than $50k.... which is actually a thriving industry.
Actually, the summary states something different: "Pandora accounts for just 6.5% of radio listening in the U.S". Internet radio pays higher fees than terrestrial radio. So, your calculation is not correct. Here's a quote:
"Consider this: last year Pandora generated $274MM of gross revenue, and paid $136MM of performance royalties — approximately 50 percent of the total revenue. In the same year, SiriusXM, on revenues of $2.7B paid $205M in royalties, or 7.5 percent. Radio delivered over cable television pays 15 percent of revenue. Radio delivered over the FM/AM spectrum pays nothing to performers."
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/09/21/meet-internet-radio-fairness-act-law-will-massive-financial-boon-pandora/
I'm actually confused by the claim that FM/AM radio pay nothing to performers, since I'm pretty sure that they did pay ( see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Society_of_Composers,_Authors_and_Publishers ). Anyway, my point is that you can't take "Pandora accounts for just 6.5% of radio listening in the U.S" and multiply everything by ( 100 / 6.5% ) to come up with a claim that "12,000 people making more than $50k".
"Congress must stop the discrimination against internet radio and allow it to operate on a level playing field, under the same rules as other forms of digital radio.'"
I had to wonder about this quote at the end. Most of the summary talks about how musicians are earning money from Pandora, but Pandora then says that they want the fees lowered for internet radio so that they (wait for it) can pay less money to the musicians. It was just weird. It was like "Hey! Look how much money were giving to the artists!" followed with "um, could we pass legislation to lower how much we pay them"? I'm not actually saying that the fees shouldn't be lowered. It's just a weird flip that they make. I've also heard that musicians aren't terribly happy with the cut they get from stuff like radio.
Also, the summary states, "Over 2,000 different artists will pull in $10,000 or more in the next year, and 800 will get paid over $50,000.", but I had to wonder how many ways that money gets split. For example, if we ignored the middle-men (i.e. labels) and the money was split between four band members and one manager, you've split the money five ways. If 2,000 artists are pulling in over $10,000 next year -- well, assuming the low-end of $10,000, that works out to $2,000 per person per year. When you consider the costs of recording the music in the first place, that really isn't much. Admittedly, there are other revenue streams for musicians, so I'm agnostic about the question of how much money musicians should earn when radio/internet radio wants to stream their music.
Grupo Bryndis, who has a sales rank on Amazon of 183,187 (in other words, who is not at all a household name), is on track to receive $114,192.
My first thought on reading this was that there's some error. Pandora states that 800 musicians get paid over $50,000 - that means that Grupo Bryndis has to be in the top 800 musicians - probably somewhere around the 400th highest paid artist on Pandora - even though he's ranked 183,187 on Amazon? Well, Grupo Bryndis is a Mexican band ( "Grupo Bryndis is an internationally known Mexican musical group... Grupo Bryndis is also a Latin Grammy Award winner for best album in 2007." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grupo_Bryndis ) - of course they're not a household name to Americans or Europeans. If they're getting that much money from Pandora, I'd bet that the group is a household name in Mexico, though. I'd also bet the gap between the Amazon sales rank and Pandora's rank is a reflection of their fanbase - since it's a Mexican band and his Mexicans listeners (because they tend to be poor) probably look for lower-cost alternatives to buying, or maybe the Venn-Diagram intersection between Amazon customers and Grupo Bryndis listeners is small (perhaps Amazon isn't popular in Mexico).
"The result will be a metered Internet that discourages use of the services so valuable for work and play."
You'd think that should've already happened - afterall, whenever you use your computer, you're using metered electricity. Why haven't people already stopped using their computers?
What a silly opinion. You should read up on things like barriers to entry. Or, take this quote from Adam Smith (that socialist who wrote "The Wealth of Nations"), who didn't quite trust the market, either: "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."
That the authors of the study chose to focus on a trivial aspect of the organic versus conventional comparison is regrettable. That they published a study that would so obviously be construed as a blanket knock against organic agriculture is willfully misleading and dangerous. That so many leading news agencies fall for this stuff is scary.
Yes, the authors of the study chose to focus on "a trivial aspect of the organic versus conventional comparison". And by "trivial aspect" he means the actual nutritional content of the food. (roll eyes)
I also like how the author writes:
Susan Clark, the executive director of the Columbia Foundation, summed up the flaws of the Stanford approach perfectly in a letter to her colleagues, "“The researchers started with a narrow set of assumptions and arrived at entirely predictable conclusions. Stanford should be ashamed of the lack of expertise about food and farming among the researchers, a low level of academic rigor in the study, its biased conclusions, and lack of transparency about the industry ties of the major researchers on the study. Normally we busy people would simply ignore another useless academic study, but this study was so aggressively spun by the PR masters that it requires a response."
The "PR masters"? My first thought was that this sounded rather biased on Susan Clark's part. I looked up Susan Clark and the Columbia Foundation. In one article Susan Clark writes: "Our communities desperately need a transformation of our food system. All over the country, people are calling for locally produced, healthy, fresh, affordable food... The sad fact is that most of our food is still produced on huge industrial farms and shipped thousands of miles. We dig it out from layers of plastic without knowing where it came from, when it was harvested, or if it has any nutritional value left." (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/susan-clark/delicious-nutritious-loca_b_522555.html) So, it sounds like she's a big proponent of organic/local food (and is likely biased), but I'm still rather doubtful that she's well informed on the science.
The about page for the Columbia Foundation says "The foundation's broad philanthropic purpose has given it flexibility to respond to changing social conditions. Long-standing interests in world peace, human rights, the environment, cross-cultural and international understanding, the quality of urban life, and the arts have evolved to reflect current conditions and opportunities." Gee, that seems awfully broad. How am I supposed to accept the opinions of Susan Clark when food isn't even a main area of study for the Columbia Foundation? My initial thought was that, since the foundation's positions are very broad and seems to conform to a kind of "hippy" worldview, it's likely that her opinions about organic food are largely informed by those kinds of preexisting beliefs about the world - i.e. organic food is good, regardless of what other (more well informed) people might say about it.
"Nutritious" doesn't just mean "containing nutrients" it means:
nutritious adjective - having substances that a person or animal needs to be healthy and grow properly : promoting good health and growth
I disagree. Nutritious food generally does mean a food that promotes good health and growth because that's what nutrients do - i.e. provide your body with the nutrients it needs for good health and growth. But, conversely, just because something "promotes good health and growth", that doesn't mean it's "nutritious". For example, a vaccine contains things that "promote good health". Washing your hands "promotes good health". Drinking clean water "promotes good health". None of those three things are referred to as "nutritious", even though vaccines and water are put into your body.
Could you imagine someone saying, "drinking clean water is more nutritious than drinking dirty water"? Yet, drinking clean water promotes good health, so why not? In general, people who are into organic food believe that it contains more nutrients (in addition to containing fewer pesticides). If we're going to use "nutritious" to mean two slightly different things, then we are put into a bad position of not being able to differentiate between those two issues (nutrients in the food and pesticides on the food). Nutritious means that it contains nutrients which help the body.
But you can't eat music, you can't gas your car with it, and the only way to get people to pay for it directly (in certain formats) is to have the government enforce the "value" in monetary terms.
I'm unclear on the point of your argument. I often hear pirates try to denigrate digital-media because "You can't eat it. It doesn't provide shelter." - as if nothing is important unless it provides one of a handful of very basic human needs. I reject that viewpoint, of course. If it were true, we might as well say that people should be able to break into music concerts because "concerts don't feed people - they do not cover any basic human needs". It's funny, because I once heard an anti-copyright activist talk-up the importance of our "culture" and how culture is everything and, so, music and movies and all that stuff *needed* to be free because otherwise it's allowing corporations to lock-up the most important thing of all - since "our culture makes us who we are!" It's so ridiculous when I hear pirates using completely opposite points of view (music is nothing because it doesn't provide for basic human needs / music is everything because it's our culture - it's who we are - we can't allow it to be locked up).
Of course, it has always had financial value in non-subsidized formats. People paid to see Mozart live. People paid him substantial amounts to teach them how to play. He made a living. But he made very little on CDs:)
No, the "non-subsidized formats" are valuable because of bouncers. Besides, I work in software. I'm not going to be doing software concerts anytime soon. My products are inherently digital.
That would be a very short-term situation. Once the shop is emptied, the goods would be worth what they were (or even more) than when the looting started.
More importantly, you'd teach shopkeepers to stop selling things.
An MP3 has very little, if any, intrinsic value - though again, in certain circumstances, people will pay for music naturally.
No, an MP3 does have value. It just has no market value in an environment where it's passed around prolifically.
A jukebox is a good example. People who steal music rather than pay $1 on iTunes will feed a dollar into a jukebox to hear a song once without even blinking.
That's a different situation. For one thing: people don't control the music playing in bars unless they pay the jukebox.
Laws against shoplifting and enforcement raises the value of those products up near their proper value.
You have it backwards. Laws keep prices low, because the shop owner doesn't need to hire people to protect his goods. Can you imagine what it would cost to keep a store like Walmart protected in total anarchy? It wouldn't even be feasible. The cost of simple goods would skyrocket, if you could get them at all.
You're confusing "cost" and "value". Actual value is how much it's worth to a person. Market value is how much it can be bought/sold on the market. Cost (or "price") is how much they're going to charge you for it. In the shopkeeper example, the costs increase in an environment of rampant theft because shopkeepers respond by hiring lots of security. In the digital-media sector, there is no security that can be purchased (unless we're talking about DRM). The analogy would be good if there was some expensive, unbreakable DRM that could be purchased - thus driving up the cost of digital-media due to the increased cost of buying the DRM. Conversely, if there was store security was constantly being broken, so that shopkeepers eventually decided it was futile to hire any security, it would lead to rampant theft, eventually all stores would go out of business - if not directly from theft of their own stores, then from trying to compete by selling items for their proper price (based on
That's probably because hardware isn't subject to a model of artificial scarcity. There are actual manufacturing and distribution costs involved in producing things like CPUs and hard drives.
There are costs associated with creating things besides their per-unit cost. There are design costs. People who think they should only have to pay the per-unit cost are saying that they should only have to pay for one category of production costs (the marginal cost), but believe they should be allowed to not pay for another category of production costs (all the overhead costs, which can quite extensive).
RIAA = Recording Industry Association of America. They're involved with music labels. Maybe you mean the Japanese version of the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America)?
I'm confused. That's the total revenue to artists? So, if the number of musicians doubled, then each artist (individually) is getting less money? Do you have a link to the actual information to make sure this chart isn't pulled out of thin air? Also, I've seen charts of much deeper cuts to music-industry revenue. To quote a recent Wired article: "from 2001 to 2011, [US music] sales dropped from $13.7 billion to $3.4 billion". It's hard for me to believe that artists are getting a bigger and bigger cut of music-sales money (in actual dollars) when 75% of the revenue has evaporated in ten years.
The term "government subsidy" suggests that the government gives you money merely for creating it. That's not at all what's happening. Copyright gives artists a fighting chance to sell their digital-media. The good ones can succeed and the bad ones fail. I'd put it closer to forcing gambling casinos to have "fair" games. Sure, you - as a casino owner - might call it a "government subsidy" because you aren't allowed to rig the casino games against gamblers, but I see it as giving gamblers at least a chance of playing a reasonably honest game (whether that means slot machines that payout a certain percentage of the time, or enacting laws against casino owners secretly spying on the cards of poker players so that you can give an advantage to certain players).
Short of a patron or a performance, the only reason a songwriter holds anything of value at all is because of a government subsidy.
No, a songwriter does have something of value, it's just that, without copyright, he has something of low **MARKET** value. There's a huge difference between the two. Copyright allows the *market* value to be somewhere in the ballpark of the *actual* value of his work. Without copyright, it is the equivalent of a store owner trying to sell *valuable* products, but where all the customers find it so easy to steal stuff from the store that everything has a *market* value of zero. Laws against shoplifting and enforcement raises the value of those products up near their proper value. I think you could - just as legitimately - argue that shoplifting laws are a "government subsidy" for businesses.
That article was remarkably free of actual numbers. I was hoping for some statistics. Speaking of which, here's an article about Kickstarter projects that I read a while back ( http://www.appsblogger.com/behind-kickstarter-crowdfunding-stats/ ). They included some actual numbers - for example: "Projects that are featured have a 89% chance of being successful, compared to 30% without." (I presume that means "featured on the Kickstarter homepage".) The downside to that statistic is that, as more projects appear on Kickstarter, the smaller percentage of them will be on the front page (because there's limited space). If that's true, it means the percentage of successful Kickstarter projects will decline as more projects appear on Kickstarter.
A little viral marketing, and you have $50-100k in no time because a buck is nothing to people and you are never scrutinized for wanting some pocket change.
Honestly, I think it's about a hundred times more difficult to get something to go viral than this sentence suggests.
Slashdot Mirror
With due respect, in my view, this is like trying to buy homeowner's insurance while your house is on fire, and complaining that they won't sell it to you.
Can we please stop with the "it's like buying insurance when your house is on fire/you have cancer/etc" argument? As far as I can tell it's not like buying insurance and (on the other side) it's not like a store jacking up the price of fire extinguishers when your house is on fire.
Here's why it's not like buying insurance when your house is on fire:
(1) If you buy homeowners insurance while your house is on fire, well -- you're going to have a bunch of damaged stuff that they have to replace (because the fire has already destroyed it or because it's inevitable that the fire will destroy it). This means you're paying (say) $100 and the insurance company is on the hook for thousands or tens of thousands of dollars. It's obviously a bad deal for the insurance company in that case.
(2) Companies simply won't sell you fire insurance or health insurance when you have a fire or cancer. Rackspace will sell you backup services, but at a higher cost. The fact that Rackspace is willing to sell you these services at all should tell you that it's not like buying fire insurance during a fire -- because nobody would do that.
On the other side of the fence, why selling these services is not like a store jacking up the price of fire extinguishers during a fire:
(1) Rackspace is on the hook for providing backup services immediately. Providing backup services costs more than providing the potential for backup services. In other words, you're going to be depending on their servers (meaning traffic is going to their site), whereas, if you don't have DOS attack in progress, they're just backing up your servers and don't have to handle the traffic. Plus, there's a lot of urgency with the "my server is under a DOS attack right now" - which might mean putting you in front of their current work queue. Both of these mean extra costs for Rackspace.
(2) Fire extinguishers have a fixed cost, regardless of whether you use them or not. Rackspace is providing a service, which does cost them more money when you use them.
I submit that the unreasonable percentage is vanishingly small.
Well, you're wrong. I live in a neighborhood with a lot of college students. They avoid paying for anything if they can get away with it. The result? If you leave your wireless network open, you might have six or seven different people on your network at the same time. Even worse, unless you're a little tech savy, you won't know why you can't stream video off the internet (hint: it's because they're streaming internet or pirating content with bit torrent). Your internet experience will suck if you don't password protect your internet.
I recommend looking at the current solar powered aircraft - they're extremely light, look fragile, and barely carry anything. They generally look like gliders with some efficient propellers. Seems like it's a matter of efficiency and getting enough power from solar panels. I'm also betting they don't travel very fast (commercial aircraft travel above 500 MPH).
http://www.google.com/search?q=solar+power+aircraft
Can you give us a source for the "4-6%" yearly pay increase? You also say "an already generous starting salary", which also seems like speculation. Both my parents were teachers in Michigan. They said that Michigan was one of the better states to teach in because of how much they paid their teachers. My dad (34 years of teaching, nearly had his PhD) never earned anywhere near $80k.
> Taxing your way out of an economic crisis is only feasible in the [very] short term.
First, I don't know why this is relevant to the tax evasion issue. Although, I know a lot of right-wingers can get pretty anti-tax.
Second, would you agree that governments need to have *some* form of taxation? Based on your statement, I assume the only ideologically-consistent position you can take is a total anti-tax position.
Are you suggesting that the woman in your story was one of the powerful elite?
I don't know exactly what the laws are, but isn't it illegal to use illegally-obtained evidence in court? I assume this is to prevent the police from using illegal means to collect evidence. Like I said, I don't know exactly what the laws are, but it seems like this might be pertinent in this case.
But they did not get credit for their work. The correct term here is plagiarize.
Actually, the pirates did (inadvertently) get credited for their work. The summary says "Netflix failed to remove references to the pirate site". I'd say that counts as getting credit for their work.
Besides, it's kind of a weird paradox to say that NetFlix plagarized the pirates. It's a bit like - if I gave a speech in public, then someone writes down my words, and then I copy-and-pasted the text - now I'm guilty of plagarizing the textual version of the speech I originally wrote. Generally speaking, people don't like plagarism because it's people taking credit for ideas that they didn't come up with in the first place (for example, taking credit for a book I didn't write or a quote I didn't originally say). In this case, it's the movie creators' words/ideas, not the pirates ideas.
I actually thought it was the pirates themselves referring to it as "piracy" because they wanted to make the argument "See! Pirating is so good for the magazine that they're helping people pirate! Everyone should let everything be pirated! Down with copyright!"
Yeash. You have a bizarrely Chinese-centric version of history.
The war in Korea was a US "proxy war" against China? What nonsense. It was a war started by the (Communist) North Koreans. It's a lot easier to make the argument that the Korean war was a Chinese proxy war against the United States than vice-versa. (Or are you aiming to make the US the bad guy?) The USSR was also a big backer of the North Koreans (so why don't you call the Korea war a proxy war against the USSR?) Afterall, the North Koreans were using some of the most recent Russian military equipment and Russians were actually flying aircraft against US pilots. http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Who_provided_military_support_for_North_Korea_during_the_Korean_War
The Vietnam war was about stopping the spread of communism into South Vietnam (see the Domino Theory). It's nonsense to say Vietnam was about fighting a war with China.
The world is awash with evil fuckers who, rather than trying to win you over with solid products and services, will expend their effort and money on bribes, advertising, patent warchests, takeovers and suchlike with the sole goal of manipulating, extorting, deceiving and straitjacketing you, not just to get the money you have now, but an ever increasing tithe, in perpetuity.
What does that have to do with open source software and open source hardware? Open-source companies can still "expend their effort and money on bribes, advertising, patent warchests, takeovers and suchlike with the sole goal of manipulating, extorting, deceiving and straitjacketing you". You can't seriously believe open-source companies are limited from things like "bribes and advertising" by the FSF's bullet points. At this point, you're just going hyperbolic to try to make everyone agree with you.
Against this backdrop, a small organisation starts a modest initiative to help lift the veil from these practices to help you, and you... mock them for it.
My view of the FSF is that they are as misguided as communists - they fight against capitalists (which makes them good in your mind), but they have a crappy understanding of economics so they'll never manage to get people paid for their work. Yeah, the communists were once a "small organization" too.
That 800 is just 6.5% of the Internet radio streaming. That means the total Internet streaming business is over 15 times larger than that, which (assuming there is no overlap, which is of course quite false, but for the sake of argument) means there are 12,000 people making more than $50k.... which is actually a thriving industry.
Actually, the summary states something different: "Pandora accounts for just 6.5% of radio listening in the U.S". Internet radio pays higher fees than terrestrial radio. So, your calculation is not correct. Here's a quote:
"Consider this: last year Pandora generated $274MM of gross revenue, and paid $136MM of performance royalties — approximately 50 percent of the total revenue. In the same year, SiriusXM, on revenues of $2.7B paid $205M in royalties, or 7.5 percent. Radio delivered over cable television pays 15 percent of revenue. Radio delivered over the FM/AM spectrum pays nothing to performers." http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/09/21/meet-internet-radio-fairness-act-law-will-massive-financial-boon-pandora/
I'm actually confused by the claim that FM/AM radio pay nothing to performers, since I'm pretty sure that they did pay ( see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Society_of_Composers,_Authors_and_Publishers ). Anyway, my point is that you can't take "Pandora accounts for just 6.5% of radio listening in the U.S" and multiply everything by ( 100 / 6.5% ) to come up with a claim that "12,000 people making more than $50k".
"Congress must stop the discrimination against internet radio and allow it to operate on a level playing field, under the same rules as other forms of digital radio.'"
I had to wonder about this quote at the end. Most of the summary talks about how musicians are earning money from Pandora, but Pandora then says that they want the fees lowered for internet radio so that they (wait for it) can pay less money to the musicians. It was just weird. It was like "Hey! Look how much money were giving to the artists!" followed with "um, could we pass legislation to lower how much we pay them"? I'm not actually saying that the fees shouldn't be lowered. It's just a weird flip that they make. I've also heard that musicians aren't terribly happy with the cut they get from stuff like radio.
Also, the summary states, "Over 2,000 different artists will pull in $10,000 or more in the next year, and 800 will get paid over $50,000.", but I had to wonder how many ways that money gets split. For example, if we ignored the middle-men (i.e. labels) and the money was split between four band members and one manager, you've split the money five ways. If 2,000 artists are pulling in over $10,000 next year -- well, assuming the low-end of $10,000, that works out to $2,000 per person per year. When you consider the costs of recording the music in the first place, that really isn't much. Admittedly, there are other revenue streams for musicians, so I'm agnostic about the question of how much money musicians should earn when radio/internet radio wants to stream their music.
Grupo Bryndis, who has a sales rank on Amazon of 183,187 (in other words, who is not at all a household name), is on track to receive $114,192.
My first thought on reading this was that there's some error. Pandora states that 800 musicians get paid over $50,000 - that means that Grupo Bryndis has to be in the top 800 musicians - probably somewhere around the 400th highest paid artist on Pandora - even though he's ranked 183,187 on Amazon? Well, Grupo Bryndis is a Mexican band ( "Grupo Bryndis is an internationally known Mexican musical group... Grupo Bryndis is also a Latin Grammy Award winner for best album in 2007." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grupo_Bryndis ) - of course they're not a household name to Americans or Europeans. If they're getting that much money from Pandora, I'd bet that the group is a household name in Mexico, though. I'd also bet the gap between the Amazon sales rank and Pandora's rank is a reflection of their fanbase - since it's a Mexican band and his Mexicans listeners (because they tend to be poor) probably look for lower-cost alternatives to buying, or maybe the Venn-Diagram intersection between Amazon customers and Grupo Bryndis listeners is small (perhaps Amazon isn't popular in Mexico).
"The result will be a metered Internet that discourages use of the services so valuable for work and play."
You'd think that should've already happened - afterall, whenever you use your computer, you're using metered electricity. Why haven't people already stopped using their computers?
What a silly opinion. You should read up on things like barriers to entry. Or, take this quote from Adam Smith (that socialist who wrote "The Wealth of Nations"), who didn't quite trust the market, either: "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."
That the authors of the study chose to focus on a trivial aspect of the organic versus conventional comparison is regrettable. That they published a study that would so obviously be construed as a blanket knock against organic agriculture is willfully misleading and dangerous. That so many leading news agencies fall for this stuff is scary.
Yes, the authors of the study chose to focus on "a trivial aspect of the organic versus conventional comparison". And by "trivial aspect" he means the actual nutritional content of the food. (roll eyes)
I also like how the author writes:
Susan Clark, the executive director of the Columbia Foundation, summed up the flaws of the Stanford approach perfectly in a letter to her colleagues, "“The researchers started with a narrow set of assumptions and arrived at entirely predictable conclusions. Stanford should be ashamed of the lack of expertise about food and farming among the researchers, a low level of academic rigor in the study, its biased conclusions, and lack of transparency about the industry ties of the major researchers on the study. Normally we busy people would simply ignore another useless academic study, but this study was so aggressively spun by the PR masters that it requires a response."
The "PR masters"? My first thought was that this sounded rather biased on Susan Clark's part. I looked up Susan Clark and the Columbia Foundation. In one article Susan Clark writes: "Our communities desperately need a transformation of our food system. All over the country, people are calling for locally produced, healthy, fresh, affordable food... The sad fact is that most of our food is still produced on huge industrial farms and shipped thousands of miles. We dig it out from layers of plastic without knowing where it came from, when it was harvested, or if it has any nutritional value left." (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/susan-clark/delicious-nutritious-loca_b_522555.html) So, it sounds like she's a big proponent of organic/local food (and is likely biased), but I'm still rather doubtful that she's well informed on the science.
The about page for the Columbia Foundation says "The foundation's broad philanthropic purpose has given it flexibility to respond to changing social conditions. Long-standing interests in world peace, human rights, the environment, cross-cultural and international understanding, the quality of urban life, and the arts have evolved to reflect current conditions and opportunities." Gee, that seems awfully broad. How am I supposed to accept the opinions of Susan Clark when food isn't even a main area of study for the Columbia Foundation? My initial thought was that, since the foundation's positions are very broad and seems to conform to a kind of "hippy" worldview, it's likely that her opinions about organic food are largely informed by those kinds of preexisting beliefs about the world - i.e. organic food is good, regardless of what other (more well informed) people might say about it.
I disagree. Nutritious food generally does mean a food that promotes good health and growth because that's what nutrients do - i.e. provide your body with the nutrients it needs for good health and growth. But, conversely, just because something "promotes good health and growth", that doesn't mean it's "nutritious". For example, a vaccine contains things that "promote good health". Washing your hands "promotes good health". Drinking clean water "promotes good health". None of those three things are referred to as "nutritious", even though vaccines and water are put into your body.
Could you imagine someone saying, "drinking clean water is more nutritious than drinking dirty water"? Yet, drinking clean water promotes good health, so why not? In general, people who are into organic food believe that it contains more nutrients (in addition to containing fewer pesticides). If we're going to use "nutritious" to mean two slightly different things, then we are put into a bad position of not being able to differentiate between those two issues (nutrients in the food and pesticides on the food). Nutritious means that it contains nutrients which help the body.
After reading the article, I was about to post a comment similar to yours. I'd vote you up if I had mod points.
Ahhh, a trap! We know you're just trying to sucker us into trusting you, necromancer.
But you can't eat music, you can't gas your car with it, and the only way to get people to pay for it directly (in certain formats) is to have the government enforce the "value" in monetary terms.
I'm unclear on the point of your argument. I often hear pirates try to denigrate digital-media because "You can't eat it. It doesn't provide shelter." - as if nothing is important unless it provides one of a handful of very basic human needs. I reject that viewpoint, of course. If it were true, we might as well say that people should be able to break into music concerts because "concerts don't feed people - they do not cover any basic human needs". It's funny, because I once heard an anti-copyright activist talk-up the importance of our "culture" and how culture is everything and, so, music and movies and all that stuff *needed* to be free because otherwise it's allowing corporations to lock-up the most important thing of all - since "our culture makes us who we are!" It's so ridiculous when I hear pirates using completely opposite points of view (music is nothing because it doesn't provide for basic human needs / music is everything because it's our culture - it's who we are - we can't allow it to be locked up).
Of course, it has always had financial value in non-subsidized formats. People paid to see Mozart live. People paid him substantial amounts to teach them how to play. He made a living. But he made very little on CDs :)
No, the "non-subsidized formats" are valuable because of bouncers. Besides, I work in software. I'm not going to be doing software concerts anytime soon. My products are inherently digital.
That would be a very short-term situation. Once the shop is emptied, the goods would be worth what they were (or even more) than when the looting started.
More importantly, you'd teach shopkeepers to stop selling things.
An MP3 has very little, if any, intrinsic value - though again, in certain circumstances, people will pay for music naturally.
No, an MP3 does have value. It just has no market value in an environment where it's passed around prolifically.
A jukebox is a good example. People who steal music rather than pay $1 on iTunes will feed a dollar into a jukebox to hear a song once without even blinking.
That's a different situation. For one thing: people don't control the music playing in bars unless they pay the jukebox.
Laws against shoplifting and enforcement raises the value of those products up near their proper value.
You have it backwards. Laws keep prices low, because the shop owner doesn't need to hire people to protect his goods. Can you imagine what it would cost to keep a store like Walmart protected in total anarchy? It wouldn't even be feasible. The cost of simple goods would skyrocket, if you could get them at all.
You're confusing "cost" and "value". Actual value is how much it's worth to a person. Market value is how much it can be bought/sold on the market. Cost (or "price") is how much they're going to charge you for it. In the shopkeeper example, the costs increase in an environment of rampant theft because shopkeepers respond by hiring lots of security. In the digital-media sector, there is no security that can be purchased (unless we're talking about DRM). The analogy would be good if there was some expensive, unbreakable DRM that could be purchased - thus driving up the cost of digital-media due to the increased cost of buying the DRM. Conversely, if there was store security was constantly being broken, so that shopkeepers eventually decided it was futile to hire any security, it would lead to rampant theft, eventually all stores would go out of business - if not directly from theft of their own stores, then from trying to compete by selling items for their proper price (based on
That's probably because hardware isn't subject to a model of artificial scarcity. There are actual manufacturing and distribution costs involved in producing things like CPUs and hard drives.
There are costs associated with creating things besides their per-unit cost. There are design costs. People who think they should only have to pay the per-unit cost are saying that they should only have to pay for one category of production costs (the marginal cost), but believe they should be allowed to not pay for another category of production costs (all the overhead costs, which can quite extensive).
RIAA = Recording Industry Association of America. They're involved with music labels. Maybe you mean the Japanese version of the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America)?
I'm confused. That's the total revenue to artists? So, if the number of musicians doubled, then each artist (individually) is getting less money? Do you have a link to the actual information to make sure this chart isn't pulled out of thin air? Also, I've seen charts of much deeper cuts to music-industry revenue. To quote a recent Wired article: "from 2001 to 2011, [US music] sales dropped from $13.7 billion to $3.4 billion". It's hard for me to believe that artists are getting a bigger and bigger cut of music-sales money (in actual dollars) when 75% of the revenue has evaporated in ten years.
No, a songwriter does have something of value, it's just that, without copyright, he has something of low **MARKET** value. There's a huge difference between the two. Copyright allows the *market* value to be somewhere in the ballpark of the *actual* value of his work. Without copyright, it is the equivalent of a store owner trying to sell *valuable* products, but where all the customers find it so easy to steal stuff from the store that everything has a *market* value of zero. Laws against shoplifting and enforcement raises the value of those products up near their proper value. I think you could - just as legitimately - argue that shoplifting laws are a "government subsidy" for businesses.
That article was remarkably free of actual numbers. I was hoping for some statistics. Speaking of which, here's an article about Kickstarter projects that I read a while back ( http://www.appsblogger.com/behind-kickstarter-crowdfunding-stats/ ). They included some actual numbers - for example: "Projects that are featured have a 89% chance of being successful, compared to 30% without." (I presume that means "featured on the Kickstarter homepage".) The downside to that statistic is that, as more projects appear on Kickstarter, the smaller percentage of them will be on the front page (because there's limited space). If that's true, it means the percentage of successful Kickstarter projects will decline as more projects appear on Kickstarter.
Honestly, I think it's about a hundred times more difficult to get something to go viral than this sentence suggests.