However it's clear that if smoking had been banned a long time ago, fewer people would have died as a result.
How's that? You assume that fewer people will smoke under prohibition. Obviously, if you look at the history of alcohol and drug prohibition, that is not a reasonable assumption.
Several states actually did ban smoking in the years prior to alcohol prohibition. (This isn't as well known as alcohol prohibition because it wasn't done at the national level.) Just as with alcohol prohibition, the increased crime and smuggling led to costs in excess of benefits, and the experiment was ultimately abandoned.
[I don't know how] He managed to get screenshots of the 1977 release, since the one that ended up on video all those years ago wasn't the same as what I saw 50 times in the theatre. I know C3P0 had a tendency to babble, but he did have some great lines that got nixed.
According to one of the DVD extra features, there were multiple remixes of the audio for the original feature. They tried to get theaters to upgrade to THX Audio, but weren't entirely successful - some theaters were in plain stereo, and many were just plain monaural.
Thus, they had to redo the audio track several times, and some small things were changed a bit from one version to the next. So it's quite possible that you couldn't hear a line or a sound effect as well in the version that went to laser disk as in the version that played at whatever theater you went to 50 times.
On the other hand, maybe you just imagined it. Can you give an example of a specific C3PO line you think was dropped?
What you're saying is that you want someone to string a second wire to your house (and from a different direction, so as to avoid having both lost at the same time.) That's just not cost effective for anyone, and you'll have to pay for it yourself.
What I'm saying is that i want the option of having someone string a second wire, yes. In places where people have that option, they tend to see lower utility rates and better service even if they don't subscribe to both (or all) providers. It is an urban legend that "the last mile" is a natural monopoly; the cost of laying a little extra wire is a tiny fraction of the overall cost of serving a customer. The extra efficiencies that are brought about through competition far outweigh the slight inefficiency of that wire.
Specific example: local cable television competition - rates in competitive areas were about half the price per channel as in similar areas that had a regulated-monopoly provider, according to a survey in Consumer's Digest magazine some time back. Also: local power competition in Texas. There was a town where one provider shared lines with the telephone company and the other shared lines with the cable company; rates were among the lowest in the country.
If local utilities were a natural monopoly, it would be more expensive in areas that have competition in that domain, but it isn't.
What I'm saying is that I don't want SBC to own the (single) wire going to my house, so that I can choose any carrier I want equally.
Right now, if your cable stops working, the last-mile providers are notoriously unreliable at getting somebody to come out and take a look at it. I don't understand why you don't want the right to switch to a competitor. To say, "I've had it! Cancel my service, I'm taking my business elsewhere!" to your last-mile provider when they fail to deliver the goods in a cheap, efficient, effective manner.
Actually, I think the government should own the 'last mile' telephone lines (between the local switch and individual houses). This is where the monopoly is.
Ick! I want competition for the "last mile" so that if one service provider is unreliable I can switch to the competition. People who really really need high availability should be able to subscribe to BOTH local providers, so when a tree falls or somebody digs a hole that knocks out one line, there's some chance they still have service.
Energy deregulation was supposed to lower bills by adding competition to the equation. If you lived in California, prices skyrocketed due to the fact many energy producers (see Enron) were keeping production off-line in order to artifically inflate prices.
Nonsense. Prices skyrocketed primarily because it was a weird parody of a market rather than the real thing. Companies were forbidden by law to make any long-term contracts; they had to buy all power in a short-term spot market. Which naturally meant we got greater volatility.
Also, there wasn't really enough spare capacity to meet existing demand a few times. Rates were still regulated at the consumer end; had PG&E had been legally allowed to pass on the expense to customers, the higher prices would have choked off demand; people would have voluntarily reduced use on the worst days.
Government-regulated monopolies are the worst of both worlds: The regulation causes shortages or gluts due to pricing mistakes that an unregulated monopoly wouldn't make, and when new technology inevitably makes competition practical, the government doesn't permit the existing operator to lose business or go broke as it naturally ought to.
If it ever happened that there was a market which was a natural monopoly, "as good as it gets" is to let it be a private monopoly that regulates itself rather than getting government involved. The monopolist will still be in competition with itself, with substitute and near-substitute goods, and with all the potential competitors in the world. Paying "the monopoly price" for just a little while while the economies of scale happen to outweigh the diseconomies is probably a better deal for consumers than having to pay "the regulated price" now and forever.
(Example of a "good" free-market monopoly: Alcoa Aluminum. It produced all the original aluminum in the world, but couldn't charge very much for it because if it charged too much people would melt down and recycle previously-made aluminum or would substitute some slightly-less-good alternative such as steel, wood, glass, plastic, etcetera.)
Chomsky makes the NONmainstream arguments. That is a Good Thing.
That's fine, but sometimes - and I can't believe that I, an anarchocapitalist, am saying this - the mainstream arguments are actually correct. Intellectual honesty includes admitting you were wrong, and Chomsky lacks that ability.
I read _The Chomsky Reader_ way back when and saw him give a talk or two in the late 80s and figured at the time that he had a good grasp of the problems but a poor grasp of the solutions. He was good at implying that other people were making horrible mistakes that HE never would have made, but was strangely vague as to the question of what he would have done differently. Chomsky often provides handwavy support for vaguely socialist sentiments, but refuses to be put on the spot. His contribution is entirely negative.
Combine that with his "aura of infallibility" and he garners acolytes who are relieved to know that somebody out there seems to have all the answers, and seems to agree with them as to the solutions. But this emporer has no clothes.
I used to like Chomsky too, but eventually I grew out of it as I came to realize that...well...he lies a lot. He enjoys being a loud contrarian so much that on just many issues he is willing to ignore good arguments for the mainstream view in order to latch on to obscure arguments for some contrary view. And he so hates to admit error that he loudly and willfully ignores not just evidence that might prove him wrong now but also evidence that might make any of his prior views look foolish. (Sadly, Chomsky shares this quality with our current president.)
Change your name. Senator Kennedy should just legally change his name to something else, get some new ID, and his problems will be solved.
If that's too much trouble, he could always buy or make a fake ID and use that...:-)
Rubberize your hands instead! That way you get a better grip with every controller you own, with arcade games, with your keyboard and mouse at work, when shaking hands with random people you meet...
[focus groups] can only respond to what you show them, and only in the context of what you showed them prior. Did they show consumers a small device?
Yes, as a matter of fact they did. From the article:
Probably the most important thing I learned from the Lynx: never trust focus groups. In all the focus group testing, and we did a lot of it with consumers, we had a bunch of different models that we showed them. [We asked] "which one do you like? Which one would you like to have it be?" We showed them big ones; we showed them little ones. We showed them gigantic ones; we showed them little tiny ones. They loved the big ones. They all told us, "Make it big. Make it big. This one feels like it's substantial and I'm really getting my money's worth." They all told us to make it big, so we made it big. And when it came out on the market, they all said, "Why is this damn thing so big?" It'd drive me nuts, because the original Lynx was mostly air space inside. We put it in, because that's what they told us they wanted.
Shakey's a friend of mine, and I think he'd be insulted to be called "Shakeyboy". His full name is "Shakey the robot", or just "Shakey" for short.
Shakey's name came about because his drive motor didn't do continuous accelleration. I'm not sure whether the limitation was in the mechanics or in the control logic, but the effect was that his wheels would start and stop almost instantaneously, and the rest of him -- having a fair bit of mass -- would naturally wobble a bit when transitioning to a new direction or speed.
(My father's team at SRI built Shakey, so I got to meet the robot for the first time when I was about 6 years old at some sort of SRI open house event.)
Shakey is retired now, and spends most of his days reminiscing from within a large glass display case at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.
So in 6 months they are going to go from a prototype that goes 100 feet to carrying three people into space? Obviously they are not contenders for the X-Prize.
They are contenders, but a bit of a long shot. Space Ship One is the leading contender to win the prize. If SSO crashes, Armadillo is the next best hope.
And, they aren't that far away. They've got the big rocket that carries three people built; they are just very - and appropriately - cautious. They are extensively testing all the algorithms and principles on the smaller rocket first. The main thing they think will take over 5 months is getting permission to make the shot.
Scrapping the FCC would lead to complete anarchy which would in turn result in very bad things for consumers, such as cell phones that only worked half the time or in certain parts of the country
/sarcasm ON/
And this would be different from our current system HOW? /sarcasm OFF/
Seriously, though, the FCC caused the problem of cellphones "that only work half the time or in certain parts of the country". Deliberately, by design. Irrational fear of monopoly led to auctions in which only local providers could bid for only a couple of slots per region. It took a huge effort for providers to stitch together enough coverage to sell the coast-to-coast plans people wanted, starting from the mess the FCC created with the initial cellphone auctions.
Bad coverage and poor reception is something a freer market would be good at fixing. The FCC is sand in the gears: the way it makes it difficult for people to consolidate frequencies, exchange lower-valued uses for higher ones and offer new services outweighs any reasonable estimate of the good they might do.
I do agree that privatizing the radio spectrum will promote an even worse situation where only the highest bidder will be able to transmit.
Can we then assume you're in favor of having a government agency own and allocate all the real estate in the country because otherwise "only the highest bidder" would be able to build houses and restaurants?
Senator Figueroa probably noticed that Google is about to have a huge pile of money and hadn't planned on giving any of it to the local politicians, by which I mean her and her friends.
Legislators generally propose regulating an industry primarily in order to get that industry to cough up campaign contributions. Of course this bill does nothing to protect consumers -- that's not its real goal! The real goal is simply to make sure that a big chunk of the $2.7 billion raised in the IPO goes to politicians.
Once Google gets the message and hires a few political consultants to start spreading green around, the problem will go away.
It's like the Microsoft antitrust trial, but on a slightly smaller scale.
The reason I had trouble tracking down the reference to recent-era competition is that I misremembered the city. Lubbock, Texas, had retail electricity competition for about 80 years.
I believe the cable argument, I dont believe the power argument... Can I read about this somewhere?
You can read some recent analysis of the historic municipal competition period in this cato report. Relevant quote:
"Primeaux conducted a similar study on the prices actually paid by customers of competing versus monopoly firms. He found that the impact of competition on prices was even more profound than that on costs. He attributed that difference to lower profit rates under competition. He found that competition lowered prices by 16 or 19 percent, depending on the quantity of electricity used. The average price (total sales revenue divided by quantity sold) decreased by 33 percent. Thus, the potential gains to consumers from competition, through greater internal efficiency and more favorable profit rates, appear to be substantial."
Cable is easy because - barring legislation to the contrary - any neighborhood could set up its own cable service. In the suburbs, all you need is one guy with a satellite dish in his backyard willing to share with his neighbors. In the cities, this model is particularly relevant to large apartment buildings - the owner who puts a dish on the roof can offers cable to all the tenants.
Electricity is harder, but in the past when competition was legal there was significant competition - especially on the margins between territories - that drove down prices. In El Paso for quite a while there was a duopoly - one private service and one public one. This came about because enough people got fed up with the monopoly provider that they voted to form a sort of community co-op competitor. One of the power companies shared lines with the local cable company, the other shared lines with the phone company, and if you got sick of the service from one you could call up the other and they would come out and change the meters. Prices were regulated but they competed on service and I believe had separate production facilities - you were getting your power from a different generator if you switched.
I'm having trouble finding an online source on that era but it looks like texas has been trying to introduce competition throughout the state recently. Here are a couple PDF papers from an industry association on that:
Saving Money with Electric Choice (PDF)
Quote: "On January 1, 2002, about 60 percent of Texans were given the opportunity to choose their retail Electric Providers (REPs) for the first time."
If you had multiple electric wres coming into your home from different vendors then your energy prices would sky rocket because in order for the companies to all compete they would need to all build wires to all the homes.
Actually, prices tend to be much lower in that situation. Most utilities are/not/ natural monopolies, they are only monopolized because the government prohibits competition. If you look at cities that have multiple competing cable companies or multiple competing electric companies (El Paso, Texas is one of the latter), they tend to provide better service at a lower price than cities that have regulated monopoly provision.
Yes, there's a little extra cost in running an extra set of wires to some of the customers. But it turns out that running the wires is a small part of the overall cost of running a utility business, and competition leads to savings in all aspects of the business that dwarf those costs. Also, not all duplication of effort is wasteful; there is a large potential benefit to be had in extra reliability. People who really need reliable power can subscribe to two or more suppliers and flip a switch when there is an outage due to a tree bringing down a cable somewhere.
Consumer Review magine did a survey of similar cities with and without cable television monopolies, and found that in the relatively laissez-faire cities where multiple providers were allowed to coexist, customers had more channels available at about half the per-channel cost than in the regulated-monopoly cities.
oops, I think I deleted the invitation as spam. And it looks like the "I forgot my password" link doesn't work if you haven't accepted the initial invitation yet. So, sigh, Could you send it again? Thanks!
Dude, nobody legitimate has to charge you for the chance to work.
That's not entirely true. For instance, casting agencies often charge applicants a few bucks for the costs involved in taking a series of headshots and doing the data entry to get your profile into their system. That doesn't mean the jobs don't exist, just that there's a surplus of applicants.
I paid the sfcasting.com folks ten bucks to get into their system, and have since gotten thousands of dollars of work from them. (Most of it was during the filming of _Matrix II_; I drove one of the cars in the background during the freeway chase sequence. Also, I've been in some foreign commercials and television series.)
The idea that America has an advantage in certain areas always comes up. But what jobs are Americans better at when the definition of doing a job well is increasingly based solely on the cost of labor?
Neil Stephenson's _Snow Crash_ claimed our advantages turn out to be something like this:
Movies, music, microcode, and high-speed pizza delivery.
I'm to sit for my CSTE in September. The study guide from QAI is one of the most bloated, poorly-written books I've ever had the misfortune of reading.
I guess I'm glad I didn't buy it, then! My plan was just to review the various and sundry QA-related books I've bought in the past (including the two I mentioned in my post) and buy one or two new ones. If I take their claims about the test at face value, combining that sort of review with my relevant industry experience should suffice for the CSTE.
The CSQA test, on the other hand, I'll probably get the study guide for. But first things first...
Option's called "Filter for more relevant results"
on
GarageBand Roundup
·
· Score: 1
By default, searches only show sound clips within two semitones of your song key. Uncheck that box and you get all of them.
It's also worth noting that if you're in the button view and drag the center divider up so the window gets bigger, you'll see many more buttons.
Slashdot Mirror
According to one of the DVD extra features, there were multiple remixes of the audio for the original feature. They tried to get theaters to upgrade to THX Audio, but weren't entirely successful - some theaters were in plain stereo, and many were just plain monaural.
Thus, they had to redo the audio track several times, and some small things were changed a bit from one version to the next. So it's quite possible that you couldn't hear a line or a sound effect as well in the version that went to laser disk as in the version that played at whatever theater you went to 50 times.
On the other hand, maybe you just imagined it. Can you give an example of a specific C3PO line you think was dropped?
What I'm saying is that i want the option of having someone string a second wire, yes. In places where people have that option, they tend to see lower utility rates and better service even if they don't subscribe to both (or all) providers. It is an urban legend that "the last mile" is a natural monopoly; the cost of laying a little extra wire is a tiny fraction of the overall cost of serving a customer. The extra efficiencies that are brought about through competition far outweigh the slight inefficiency of that wire. Specific example: local cable television competition - rates in competitive areas were about half the price per channel as in similar areas that had a regulated-monopoly provider, according to a survey in Consumer's Digest magazine some time back. Also: local power competition in Texas. There was a town where one provider shared lines with the telephone company and the other shared lines with the cable company; rates were among the lowest in the country.
If local utilities were a natural monopoly, it would be more expensive in areas that have competition in that domain, but it isn't.
What I'm saying is that I don't want SBC to own the (single) wire going to my house, so that I can choose any carrier I want equally.
Right now, if your cable stops working, the last-mile providers are notoriously unreliable at getting somebody to come out and take a look at it. I don't understand why you don't want the right to switch to a competitor. To say, "I've had it! Cancel my service, I'm taking my business elsewhere!" to your last-mile provider when they fail to deliver the goods in a cheap, efficient, effective manner.
Actually, I think the government should own the 'last mile' telephone lines (between the local switch and individual houses). This is where the monopoly is. Ick! I want competition for the "last mile" so that if one service provider is unreliable I can switch to the competition. People who really really need high availability should be able to subscribe to BOTH local providers, so when a tree falls or somebody digs a hole that knocks out one line, there's some chance they still have service.
Nonsense. Prices skyrocketed primarily because it was a weird parody of a market rather than the real thing. Companies were forbidden by law to make any long-term contracts; they had to buy all power in a short-term spot market. Which naturally meant we got greater volatility.
Also, there wasn't really enough spare capacity to meet existing demand a few times. Rates were still regulated at the consumer end; had PG&E had been legally allowed to pass on the expense to customers, the higher prices would have choked off demand; people would have voluntarily reduced use on the worst days.
Government-regulated monopolies are the worst of both worlds: The regulation causes shortages or gluts due to pricing mistakes that an unregulated monopoly wouldn't make, and when new technology inevitably makes competition practical, the government doesn't permit the existing operator to lose business or go broke as it naturally ought to.
If it ever happened that there was a market which was a natural monopoly, "as good as it gets" is to let it be a private monopoly that regulates itself rather than getting government involved. The monopolist will still be in competition with itself, with substitute and near-substitute goods, and with all the potential competitors in the world. Paying "the monopoly price" for just a little while while the economies of scale happen to outweigh the diseconomies is probably a better deal for consumers than having to pay "the regulated price" now and forever.
(Example of a "good" free-market monopoly: Alcoa Aluminum. It produced all the original aluminum in the world, but couldn't charge very much for it because if it charged too much people would melt down and recycle previously-made aluminum or would substitute some slightly-less-good alternative such as steel, wood, glass, plastic, etcetera.)
That's fine, but sometimes - and I can't believe that I, an anarchocapitalist, am saying this - the mainstream arguments are actually correct. Intellectual honesty includes admitting you were wrong, and Chomsky lacks that ability.
I read _The Chomsky Reader_ way back when and saw him give a talk or two in the late 80s and figured at the time that he had a good grasp of the problems but a poor grasp of the solutions. He was good at implying that other people were making horrible mistakes that HE never would have made, but was strangely vague as to the question of what he would have done differently. Chomsky often provides handwavy support for vaguely socialist sentiments, but refuses to be put on the spot. His contribution is entirely negative.
Combine that with his "aura of infallibility" and he garners acolytes who are relieved to know that somebody out there seems to have all the answers, and seems to agree with them as to the solutions. But this emporer has no clothes.
Here's a list of anti-chomsky links.
Change your name. Senator Kennedy should just legally change his name to something else, get some new ID, and his problems will be solved. If that's too much trouble, he could always buy or make a fake ID and use that... :-)
Rubberize your hands instead! That way you get a better grip with every controller you own, with arcade games, with your keyboard and mouse at work, when shaking hands with random people you meet...
Yes, as a matter of fact they did. From the article:
Shakey's name came about because his drive motor didn't do continuous accelleration. I'm not sure whether the limitation was in the mechanics or in the control logic, but the effect was that his wheels would start and stop almost instantaneously, and the rest of him -- having a fair bit of mass -- would naturally wobble a bit when transitioning to a new direction or speed.
(My father's team at SRI built Shakey, so I got to meet the robot for the first time when I was about 6 years old at some sort of SRI open house event.)
Shakey is retired now, and spends most of his days reminiscing from within a large glass display case at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.
And, they aren't that far away. They've got the big rocket that carries three people built; they are just very - and appropriately - cautious. They are extensively testing all the algorithms and principles on the smaller rocket first. The main thing they think will take over 5 months is getting permission to make the shot.
And this would be different from our current system HOW?
Seriously, though, the FCC caused the problem of cellphones "that only work half the time or in certain parts of the country". Deliberately, by design. Irrational fear of monopoly led to auctions in which only local providers could bid for only a couple of slots per region. It took a huge effort for providers to stitch together enough coverage to sell the coast-to-coast plans people wanted, starting from the mess the FCC created with the initial cellphone auctions.
Bad coverage and poor reception is something a freer market would be good at fixing. The FCC is sand in the gears: the way it makes it difficult for people to consolidate frequencies, exchange lower-valued uses for higher ones and offer new services outweighs any reasonable estimate of the good they might do.
Can we then assume you're in favor of having a government agency own and allocate all the real estate in the country because otherwise "only the highest bidder" would be able to build houses and restaurants?
Legislators generally propose regulating an industry primarily in order to get that industry to cough up campaign contributions. Of course this bill does nothing to protect consumers -- that's not its real goal! The real goal is simply to make sure that a big chunk of the $2.7 billion raised in the IPO goes to politicians.
Once Google gets the message and hires a few political consultants to start spreading green around, the problem will go away. It's like the Microsoft antitrust trial, but on a slightly smaller scale.
You can read more here.
You can read some recent analysis of the historic municipal competition period in this cato report. Relevant quote:
"Primeaux conducted a similar study on the prices actually paid by customers of competing versus monopoly firms. He found that the impact of competition on prices was even more profound than that on costs. He attributed that difference to lower profit rates under competition. He found that competition lowered prices by 16 or 19 percent, depending on the quantity of electricity used. The average price (total sales revenue divided by quantity sold) decreased by 33 percent. Thus, the potential gains to consumers from competition, through greater internal efficiency and more favorable profit rates, appear to be substantial."
Cable is easy because - barring legislation to the contrary - any neighborhood could set up its own cable service. In the suburbs, all you need is one guy with a satellite dish in his backyard willing to share with his neighbors. In the cities, this model is particularly relevant to large apartment buildings - the owner who puts a dish on the roof can offers cable to all the tenants.
Electricity is harder, but in the past when competition was legal there was significant competition - especially on the margins between territories - that drove down prices. In El Paso for quite a while there was a duopoly - one private service and one public one. This came about because enough people got fed up with the monopoly provider that they voted to form a sort of community co-op competitor. One of the power companies shared lines with the local cable company, the other shared lines with the phone company, and if you got sick of the service from one you could call up the other and they would come out and change the meters. Prices were regulated but they competed on service and I believe had separate production facilities - you were getting your power from a different generator if you switched. I'm having trouble finding an online source on that era but it looks like texas has been trying to introduce competition throughout the state recently. Here are a couple PDF papers from an industry association on that:
Saving Money with Electric Choice (PDF)
Quote: "On January 1, 2002, about 60 percent of Texans were given the opportunity to choose their retail Electric Providers (REPs) for the first time."
legislative briefing (PDF)
Yes, there's a little extra cost in running an extra set of wires to some of the customers. But it turns out that running the wires is a small part of the overall cost of running a utility business, and competition leads to savings in all aspects of the business that dwarf those costs. Also, not all duplication of effort is wasteful; there is a large potential benefit to be had in extra reliability. People who really need reliable power can subscribe to two or more suppliers and flip a switch when there is an outage due to a tree bringing down a cable somewhere.
Consumer Review magine did a survey of similar cities with and without cable television monopolies, and found that in the relatively laissez-faire cities where multiple providers were allowed to coexist, customers had more channels available at about half the per-channel cost than in the regulated-monopoly cities.
Glen Raphael
raphael@pobox.com
I'd like to check it out too. Thanks! raphael @ pobox . com
That's not entirely true. For instance, casting agencies often charge applicants a few bucks for the costs involved in taking a series of headshots and doing the data entry to get your profile into their system. That doesn't mean the jobs don't exist, just that there's a surplus of applicants.
I paid the sfcasting.com folks ten bucks to get into their system, and have since gotten thousands of dollars of work from them. (Most of it was during the filming of _Matrix II_; I drove one of the cars in the background during the freeway chase sequence. Also, I've been in some foreign commercials and television series.)
Neil Stephenson's _Snow Crash_ claimed our advantages turn out to be something like this:
Movies, music, microcode, and high-speed pizza delivery.
I guess I'm glad I didn't buy it, then! My plan was just to review the various and sundry QA-related books I've bought in the past (including the two I mentioned in my post) and buy one or two new ones. If I take their claims about the test at face value, combining that sort of review with my relevant industry experience should suffice for the CSTE.
The CSQA test, on the other hand, I'll probably get the study guide for. But first things first...
By default, searches only show sound clips within two semitones of your song key. Uncheck that box and you get all of them. It's also worth noting that if you're in the button view and drag the center divider up so the window gets bigger, you'll see many more buttons.
Selective hiding of loops that might not be appropriate to your project is a preference setting; you can turn that feature off.