For one thing, few musicians could make enough money to get by today from live performances alone, even the good ones.
Allow me to explain some basic High School Free Market Economics. The selling price of anything is determined by one simple thing: the intersection of supply and demand. Revenue is determined by the selling price multiplied by the units sold, and profit is determined by revenue minus costs.
So if a musician cannot survive off of live performances alone then there are three possibilities (keeping it simple here):
1) People don't like them (demand)
2) They use too many props (costs)
3) There are too many musicians (supply)
So let's address those from a free market perspective.
1) Find something you are better at and excel at that.
2) Cut your costs.
3) Perhaps some people need to stop making music (at least full time anyway)
See, all of those things happen in lots of other industries all the time. Not everyone that can flip burgers should be opening a burger joint and trying to sell it as their only source of income. It just wouldn't work. If they did, there would be too many burger joints (too much supply), and prices would fall (the intersection of supply and demand remember). Thus revenues fall (selling price x units sold) but costs remain the same so profits fall (revenue - costs). So somebody (probably a lot of somebodys) are going to leave that market. When they do (supply decreases) selling point can go back up (revenues increase) and so do profits. A perfect market would eventually reach some equilibrium where no one else would want to enter because they couldn't make a profit due to the extra supply.
So if someone can't make enough money off of touring alone, then maybe the supply is already too much and they should get out of the market. Now that might mean we don't get to hear some really good songs by some people. That really is too bad, and I mean that sincerely. It is a shame but it is also a fact of life. I'm sure that sometime since Beethoven, somebody out there somewhere thought of a song that was much better than Symphony #9. For whatever reason though we don't have it. Maybe they couldn't compose all that well. Maybe it was the only song they ever thought of and it wasn't a sustainable business proposition to make money off of it. Maybe they were oppressed by the RIAA or whatever. Maybe they were just about to be hung when they thought of it. We miss things like that all the time, and it's a real shame, but that doesn't mean we prop up some dying business model in order to find the best.
Again, this happens in every industry all the time. I'm not going to shed a tear because some people can't make enough money doing live performances full time. If they really cared about the music as an art, they could do it part time, do small local shows, or just put it out on the Internet.
I was about to go off about copyrights, which are related to the overall topic, but it was slightly off-topic to the above stuff. So now I am done.
I agree with most of what you are saying whole-heartedly, except for this:
...and the customers (CDs costs pennies to manufacture but cost much more, 30-year-old titles selling for more than new releases, etc.)...
In a normal unregulated free market, the selling price of an item has absolutely nothing to do with the cost to produce it or its age. Selling prices are determined by the intersection of supply and demand. That CDs cost pennies has nothing to do with it. That some music is older has nothing to do with it.
Having said that...I'm not so naive to think that the market for music is at all a "normal unregulated free market." The RIAA controls prices there pretty darn well. So in that situation the selling price then becomes a matter of maximizing revenue for the smart business man. So they see how many people are willing to pay for it at x, y, z and then pick the price that gives them the most money
Having said that...I'm not so naive to think that the music industry is full of "smart business men."
I don't fault MS for wanting to go with Option A. I fault people for being OK with it. I fault people for being OK with ignoring standards this long. If everyone had written their sites according to standards the first time, and then came to the browser makers (all of them as none are perfect AFAIK) and told them which part of the standard their browser was borked on, then all of the browsers would already be standards compliant. Instead, everyone bent over and took it. That's the price you pay though. If you can't afford to fix the mistakes, then make sure you get it right the first time. That goes for both the developers of the web sites that are broken, and the developers of the browsers that are broken.
Were you also in favor of changing how we record time just so we could save money on Y2K issues that came up because idiots didn't think we'd ever reach the turn of the century?
Hey everyone, I propose a fix to the Unix time conundrum. At 03:14:07 UTC on Tuesday, January 19, 2038, I propose we just switch all time to Midnight January 1, 1970. That way we don't have to spend any money fixing any problems.
The financial investment involved would be huge. It would be foolish for MS to make such a change and then expect every organization an person to go through every live and legacy website to update code.
Yes, and Y2K was free.
Oh wait, no it wasn't. Maybe we should have just changed to a revolving year system where every 100 years we go back to 00. That way we wouldn't have had to deal with that whole fiasco.
Please enlighten us as to these myriad possibilities hat you allude to. Keep in mind that you have to keep existing web sites from breaking.
Why? Why do existing pages not have to break. The standard was published. It was there in the open for all people to see. Anybody could look at it and use it and wouldn't have to pay a dime to do so. It's not difficult to follow the standard. I don't write html for a living, but whenever I do write a web page, I write according to the standards. If it doesn't work in IE, then it doesn't work in IE. If it doesn't work in Firefox, then it doesn't work in Firefox. If it doesn't work in Opera, then it doesn't work in Opera. And if it doesn't work in any browser, then it doesn't work in any browser. I might consider not using whatever it is that doesn't work, and doing something else instead, but I refuse to write according to some browser's whims. IOW, I will write according to standards. If every web developer did that, browser makers would be forced to make their browser's standards compliant. Instead, we have everyone writing willy-nilly as if there was no standard at all.
Go with the standard. Period. Full stop. If that breaks millions of websites then millions of websites were written by idiots. If you stop tolerating non-standards compliance (from all browser makers) then we would have standards compliance already. Instead we just write according to silly quirks and deal with it and now we're in a quandry.
I view this somewhat like y2k. A bunch of idiots didn't use proper methods and then we had to pay a bunch of people to change it. A lot of apps would have broken (not nearly as much as the hype suggested, but a lot nonetheless) and we had to pay for people to fix the mistakes from previous. It's going to have to happen eventually, so you might as well do it now. Otherwise, there's going to be a new meta-tag for IE9 that says "No seriously now we're really standards compliant," when they are only 90% there, then one for IE10 "We mean it, this time it works," when they are only 91% there, and so on and forever.
Get over it, the html and css, etc. you wrote was shoddy and broken. It does not matter one whit that you did it so the browser with the largest market share would render it correctly. You could look up the standard, you could tell MS that they weren't following it and that their browser would not be supported. If everyone had done that, IE6 would be standards compliant. Instead, everyone bent over and took it. Now they're upset about the cum stains on the sheets.
I pay $33/month and get unlimited bandwidth, no ports blocked and I can run any servers I want...and I get a static IP. My city said that Comcast wasn't delivering what they thought they should (not bandwidth, I'm talking getting service to homes) so they laid down their own lines and started their own ISP. AFAIK, anyone can start their own ISP using those lines. Someone around here mentions Utah and their UTOPIA project every once in a while. A bunch of cities there got together and paid for a massive project putting fiber to everyone's home, and then they lease out the lines to anybody who wants to be an ISP. That's how it should work, just like highways. The Internet is important enough to our economy and society just like the highway system. Nobody would want the car companies to lay down their own roads, so why do we let communications companies lay down their own lines (especially when they are using our money (taxes) to do it anyway)?
I know my daughter's. Well, I could if I was wearing the shirt my brother made for me that has her name written in binary and her birth date/time in unix time on the bottom. I love that shirt. For some reason my wife doesn't dig it as much. Go figure.
Copy protection is, fundamentally, supposed to set the bar high enough that one cannot accidentally steal; it has to be a directed effort.
What on earth are you talking about? How does one accidentally "steal" media? If you bought the DVD/song/ebook/whatever, then you should be able to make copies of it for you own personal use. If you didn't buy it, then you would have to download it from somewhere, which is going to require a "directed effort." DRM on the media didn't create the need for that effort. You not buying the media created the need for it.
watermarking methods in order to really deter the people that acquired legally some work from illegaly distributing it.
Yay, and then my iPod gets stolen and suddenly I'm charged with hundreds of thousands of dollars for copyright infringement. But I could point to a police report that states my iPod was stolen, you say? Then it's a good thing I never let anyone borrow my iPod. It's a good thing my computer is never attached to a network so there is no possibility of someone breaking into it and copying my media. It's a good thing the idiots at Best Buy never copy media from a customer's computer. Boy, if those things happened somebody might be held liable for copyright infringement they never did.
Note: I don't own an iPod, I'd never use the idiots at Best Buy (or anywhere else for that matter), and seeing as how I'm on/., of course my network is immune to any and all network attacks. I'm just sayin'.
What on earth makes you think a 'savings card' saves you money?
I'll let you answer that one.
Of course, now we're all trapped into using them because if we don't we pay the inflated prices. Every store has one, so there's no way around it.
Fortunately, however, I do know of two places to shop for groceries that don't even offer savings cards. I frequent them regularly and enjoy lower prices.
Of course, to be fair, they use all this detailed itemized purchasing data you provide them via your 'savings card' in order to improve their effectiveness at squeezing even more money out of you
If by they can somehow squeeze more money out of me by sending targeted advertising to some dude with a random name at some random address that may or may not even exist, then they win.
Just because I have all the software to make great CGI at home, doesn't mean I'm suddenly a 3D modeler and animation artist. Just because I have High Definition video equipment doesn't mean I can write a good script.
You are exactly right. Just because you have the equipment, doesn't mean you can write a good script. But I'm positive that there are lots of people out there who can write really great scripts that for one reason or another have not made they're script into a movie. But with the technological barriers being reduced, maybe they can now.
I agree with many of the ideas in your post. Especially this:
The point of ethics is to rise above one's natural inclinations and to behave in a manner that serves a larger interest than what our human nature would otherwise dictate
But I can't help but see that you equated the free sharing of information and lying as both being harmful to society.
Second, who you vote for is a CHOICE. Think about how that's different from everything else on your list, and you'll realize why your suggestion fails.
Let me help you out with this:
Age -- Nope, no choice
Race -- Nope, still no choice
Gender & Sex -- Possible Sexual Preference -- Also possible (at the very least you could fake it in any direction)
Health Status -- Definitelypossibletochange Religious Background -- Also possible
Disability -- Alsochangeable
Now I'm not crazy enough to think a lot of people are going to make those choices, or would want to, or that those choices are easy, or even desirable, etc. However, the choices could be made. We don't just protect against non-choosable things.
Do you think this is an improvement we need to make?
Yes we certainly do. As for me, I would like to vote last and then stand up and say, "I'm voting for the guy who has the most votes, because he's gonna win and I don't want it publicly known that I was against him when he comes looking to rough up those who voted against him."
If GM is the one producing this and if GM produces a better MPG car are you going to let a brand name stop you from embracing it?
No, I wouldn't let brand name get in the way of an actual product. But I will let brand trust get in the way of my believing that GM (who has yet to manage basic fuel efficiency) will be able to make this work, especially when they give such a long shot prediction of 10 years.
I don't find any reason to believe that this won't be put into a hybrid.
I do. GM doesn't have a hybrid car. The tech has been around for a long time. Both Toyota and Honda have been successfully marketing it for several years. Why doesn't GM make a car for purchase that has hybrid technology in it instead of bothering with such long shot ideas. There are so many unknowns about these driverless cars, so many untested aspects about it, that I find it hard to believe GM will make it work when they can't even get a hybrid car out of concept phase. So I see lots of reasons why this won't make it into a hybrid car.
As for the rest? There are electric cars for sale now. The biggest problem they have is cost. If I could get the Tesla Roadster for under $20,000 I would buy it in a heartbeat and not because of its looks. That would be a perfect commuter car. 220 miles on one charge is more than enough for over a weeks worth of commute for me. I can get to work, come home, go shopping, go to some friends, drive around town, and then park it in the garage and charge it over night. That's a whole lot cleaner than what any hybrid, and we don't have to wait for fuel cell and it doesn't require any change in infrastructure.
Actually, this may be part of that solution. For the most part the guy behind the wheel causes his own problems with gas mileage
This is true. However, when looking at gas mileage, having a computer drive a Honda will still get better gas mileage than having it drive a GM car. Neither of which would come close to a human driving an electric/solar/fuel cell/hybrid(?) car.
There will not be a mass-produced flying car though. That simply requires too much energy
Thank you, thank you, thank you for saying this. The idea of a flying car is absolutely stupid on so many levels. People complain that their current cars aren't efficient, and yet they want a flying car, whose energy needs would be at least double (being ultra conservative). People complain that there are too many idiot drivers, and yet they want a flying car, so those idiots can crash through their roof. It amazes me that any one with half a brain would ever want to have flying cars.
You make absolutely no sense. Let's assume Warner got paid. There is no proof and no rumors of any substance to back that up, but let's run with it. Paramount got paid to do HD-DVD, and that is well known. So how does it make it any different?
According to vgchartz.com, the PS3 has only sold slightly under 9 million units. Let's pretend that is correct, and also that you're made up number of 1/5 is also correct. That still puts people who know they have a Bluray player at about double your number of 1 million HD-DVD player buyers. But we haven't counted people who bought stand alone Bluray players.
You're last paragraph is where you lose me. So you are in the HD-DVD camp. That's fine. But then you go on to say you refuse to go Bluray until fair use is supported. Where is fair use supported in HD-DVD. Just because the DRM has been cracked, doesn't mean it's supported. So OK, you say you'll stick with DVD. Again, there is still DRM and breaking it is not supported. But how are you going to stick with DVDs when you are in the HD-DVD camp?
There are two givens here: prices will come down (just like DVDs did) and DRM will be cracked (just like it always is).
Slashdot Mirror
So if a musician cannot survive off of live performances alone then there are three possibilities (keeping it simple here):
1) People don't like them (demand)
2) They use too many props (costs)
3) There are too many musicians (supply)
So let's address those from a free market perspective.
1) Find something you are better at and excel at that.
2) Cut your costs.
3) Perhaps some people need to stop making music (at least full time anyway)
See, all of those things happen in lots of other industries all the time. Not everyone that can flip burgers should be opening a burger joint and trying to sell it as their only source of income. It just wouldn't work. If they did, there would be too many burger joints (too much supply), and prices would fall (the intersection of supply and demand remember). Thus revenues fall (selling price x units sold) but costs remain the same so profits fall (revenue - costs). So somebody (probably a lot of somebodys) are going to leave that market. When they do (supply decreases) selling point can go back up (revenues increase) and so do profits. A perfect market would eventually reach some equilibrium where no one else would want to enter because they couldn't make a profit due to the extra supply.
So if someone can't make enough money off of touring alone, then maybe the supply is already too much and they should get out of the market. Now that might mean we don't get to hear some really good songs by some people. That really is too bad, and I mean that sincerely. It is a shame but it is also a fact of life. I'm sure that sometime since Beethoven, somebody out there somewhere thought of a song that was much better than Symphony #9. For whatever reason though we don't have it. Maybe they couldn't compose all that well. Maybe it was the only song they ever thought of and it wasn't a sustainable business proposition to make money off of it. Maybe they were oppressed by the RIAA or whatever. Maybe they were just about to be hung when they thought of it. We miss things like that all the time, and it's a real shame, but that doesn't mean we prop up some dying business model in order to find the best.
Again, this happens in every industry all the time. I'm not going to shed a tear because some people can't make enough money doing live performances full time. If they really cared about the music as an art, they could do it part time, do small local shows, or just put it out on the Internet.
I was about to go off about copyrights, which are related to the overall topic, but it was slightly off-topic to the above stuff. So now I am done.
Having said that...I'm not so naive to think that the market for music is at all a "normal unregulated free market." The RIAA controls prices there pretty darn well. So in that situation the selling price then becomes a matter of maximizing revenue for the smart business man. So they see how many people are willing to pay for it at x, y, z and then pick the price that gives them the most money
Having said that...I'm not so naive to think that the music industry is full of "smart business men."
And there was much rejoicing.
I don't fault MS for wanting to go with Option A. I fault people for being OK with it. I fault people for being OK with ignoring standards this long. If everyone had written their sites according to standards the first time, and then came to the browser makers (all of them as none are perfect AFAIK) and told them which part of the standard their browser was borked on, then all of the browsers would already be standards compliant. Instead, everyone bent over and took it. That's the price you pay though. If you can't afford to fix the mistakes, then make sure you get it right the first time. That goes for both the developers of the web sites that are broken, and the developers of the browsers that are broken.
Were you also in favor of changing how we record time just so we could save money on Y2K issues that came up because idiots didn't think we'd ever reach the turn of the century?
Hey everyone, I propose a fix to the Unix time conundrum. At 03:14:07 UTC on Tuesday, January 19, 2038, I propose we just switch all time to Midnight January 1, 1970. That way we don't have to spend any money fixing any problems.
You aren't thinking about business opportunities then.
You are a COBOL programmer. The year is 1999. What do you do?
Oh wait, no it wasn't. Maybe we should have just changed to a revolving year system where every 100 years we go back to 00. That way we wouldn't have had to deal with that whole fiasco.
Go with the standard. Period. Full stop. If that breaks millions of websites then millions of websites were written by idiots. If you stop tolerating non-standards compliance (from all browser makers) then we would have standards compliance already. Instead we just write according to silly quirks and deal with it and now we're in a quandry.
I view this somewhat like y2k. A bunch of idiots didn't use proper methods and then we had to pay a bunch of people to change it. A lot of apps would have broken (not nearly as much as the hype suggested, but a lot nonetheless) and we had to pay for people to fix the mistakes from previous. It's going to have to happen eventually, so you might as well do it now. Otherwise, there's going to be a new meta-tag for IE9 that says "No seriously now we're really standards compliant," when they are only 90% there, then one for IE10 "We mean it, this time it works," when they are only 91% there, and so on and forever.
Get over it, the html and css, etc. you wrote was shoddy and broken. It does not matter one whit that you did it so the browser with the largest market share would render it correctly. You could look up the standard, you could tell MS that they weren't following it and that their browser would not be supported. If everyone had done that, IE6 would be standards compliant. Instead, everyone bent over and took it. Now they're upset about the cum stains on the sheets.
I pay $33/month and get unlimited bandwidth, no ports blocked and I can run any servers I want...and I get a static IP. My city said that Comcast wasn't delivering what they thought they should (not bandwidth, I'm talking getting service to homes) so they laid down their own lines and started their own ISP. AFAIK, anyone can start their own ISP using those lines. Someone around here mentions Utah and their UTOPIA project every once in a while. A bunch of cities there got together and paid for a massive project putting fiber to everyone's home, and then they lease out the lines to anybody who wants to be an ISP. That's how it should work, just like highways. The Internet is important enough to our economy and society just like the highway system. Nobody would want the car companies to lay down their own roads, so why do we let communications companies lay down their own lines (especially when they are using our money (taxes) to do it anyway)?
Just for reference, here is a link to a really cool comparison of fiber speeds. That is the UTOPIA website also, so you can find out more about it and maybe take it to your city, county, state or federal government leaders in your local area.
I know my daughter's. Well, I could if I was wearing the shirt my brother made for me that has her name written in binary and her birth date/time in unix time on the bottom. I love that shirt. For some reason my wife doesn't dig it as much. Go figure.
Note: I don't own an iPod, I'd never use the idiots at Best Buy (or anywhere else for that matter), and seeing as how I'm on
Are you crazy? That's utter poppycock hogwash. Everyone knows you always get the Diet Coke with your large order of fries.
I'll agree that some of those are pretty far fetched. But are you going to tell me that people never change their religion or health status?
Age -- Nope, no choice
Race -- Nope, still no choice
Gender & Sex -- Possible
Sexual Preference -- Also possible (at the very least you could fake it in any direction)
Health Status -- Definitely possible to change
Religious Background -- Also possible
Disability -- Also changeable
Now I'm not crazy enough to think a lot of people are going to make those choices, or would want to, or that those choices are easy, or even desirable, etc. However, the choices could be made. We don't just protect against non-choosable things.
I do. GM doesn't have a hybrid car. The tech has been around for a long time. Both Toyota and Honda have been successfully marketing it for several years. Why doesn't GM make a car for purchase that has hybrid technology in it instead of bothering with such long shot ideas. There are so many unknowns about these driverless cars, so many untested aspects about it, that I find it hard to believe GM will make it work when they can't even get a hybrid car out of concept phase. So I see lots of reasons why this won't make it into a hybrid car.
As for the rest? There are electric cars for sale now. The biggest problem they have is cost. If I could get the Tesla Roadster for under $20,000 I would buy it in a heartbeat and not because of its looks. That would be a perfect commuter car. 220 miles on one charge is more than enough for over a weeks worth of commute for me. I can get to work, come home, go shopping, go to some friends, drive around town, and then park it in the garage and charge it over night. That's a whole lot cleaner than what any hybrid, and we don't have to wait for fuel cell and it doesn't require any change in infrastructure.
And it will benefit the would-be victims of drunk driving jerks even more.
You make absolutely no sense. Let's assume Warner got paid. There is no proof and no rumors of any substance to back that up, but let's run with it. Paramount got paid to do HD-DVD, and that is well known. So how does it make it any different?
According to vgchartz.com, the PS3 has only sold slightly under 9 million units. Let's pretend that is correct, and also that you're made up number of 1/5 is also correct. That still puts people who know they have a Bluray player at about double your number of 1 million HD-DVD player buyers. But we haven't counted people who bought stand alone Bluray players.
You're last paragraph is where you lose me. So you are in the HD-DVD camp. That's fine. But then you go on to say you refuse to go Bluray until fair use is supported. Where is fair use supported in HD-DVD. Just because the DRM has been cracked, doesn't mean it's supported. So OK, you say you'll stick with DVD. Again, there is still DRM and breaking it is not supported. But how are you going to stick with DVDs when you are in the HD-DVD camp?
There are two givens here: prices will come down (just like DVDs did) and DRM will be cracked (just like it always is).