Unfortunately, this seems to be the way things are going. There will be one or two "retailers" left on the Internet which will be in unassailable positions because of heavy discounting on freight and committments from suppliers. Buying anything locally will be an option fondly remembered by grandparents and a concept utterly foreign to the next generation.
Why will there be only two? Well, Amazon ships with UPS and UPS charges them so little based on volume that they can make money offering free 2-day shipping. Should some new player come along they aren't going to get discounts like that until they have a huge volume, which means their prices will be higher, meaning they aren't going to get that huge volume. Same thing with suppliers: if you buy 1,000 TVs from Samsung they give you a different price than if you buy 100. If you sell 1000 a week you are going to be buying a huge number - maybe more like 10,000 at a time - and get such a better price that they new start-up can't ever get that good a price.
So what do we have now? A monopoly. Mostly driven by the Internet and the way shipping works in the US. Best Buy had their own fleet of truck for distribution so their costs were quite different than using UPS or FedEx. The idea that some new startup can come along - as Best Buy did - is pretty much gone. The market is closed to new entrants. Would there be room for two such distributors? Maybe not - we might end up with only Amazon as the big retailer in the US and WalMart for low-end stuff. We can all see that the small independent seller is doomed if they haven't already closed up shop now. WalMart put those folks out of business a long time ago.
You can certainly say that Best Buy failed in providing customer service, but we are seeing a passing of a lifestyle. We are also seeing an interesting phenomenon whereby more and more things in people's daily lives are being supplied through a single source. Did you know there is only one factory in the US making glass bottles? If one can do it, why have more, right? Except it is a single point of failure and there are many substances that a glass bottle is required for. If that one factory has a fire or some other accident the entire US is without glass bottles for perhaps a very long time. With retailers being eliminated we are focusing more and more on online retailers and two shipping companies - of which there will only be one in the end. When it is only Amazon and FedEx (far more diversified then UPS and therefore the more likely one to survive), what happens if there is a strike against FedEx? Well, it means people stop getting stuff. When it is WalMart and Amazon alone and everyone is getting food, clothes and everything else through these channels what does it mean?
One big thing it means is that if the buyer at WalMart doesn't like some supplier, their stuff isn't getting sold in the US. It means decisions that consumers get to make today are then made by the buyers for the retailers that are left. If the buyer doesn't choose it, the consumer can't choose it. Period.
Oh, you think "the long tail" will solve this problem. Not really. There will be only a few retailers because the dynamics of an online store are quite different from opening a little shop on Main Street. It is already pretty much impossible for an upstart to compete with Amazon today and it isn't going to get any better. Which means if Amazon doesn't strike a deal with a supplier - on Amazon's terms - their stuff doesn't get sold. Manufacturers are ill-suited to sell things directly, so that isn't really an option. Neither is Amazon going to take on a new product that completes with an existing high-volume product unless they get a really good deal - why trade dollars for pennies? This puts Amazon in control of what brands of toothpase you get to choose from - you will not have the option of going to a different store.
Pretty sad, isn't it. At least it isn't the government making these decisions for us.
Really old example of this: Jetson's cartoon where Mr. Spacely brings in a new robot for the office. Robot tapes everything George says and selectively plays back stuff to Mr. Spacely that is "colorful". Sounds remarkably like the office culture has finally caught up to 1960s cartoons.
Can you think if the response when at some ungarded moment you say something about your boss that is perhaps unflattering? And then have the video of that moment posted for all to see or sent around to all employees?
Unethical or bad behavior is not the point. Comedy is the point - making someone look like a fool. So you walk into the office and trip over something and end up with coffee on your shirt. Expect it to be on YouTube within the hour.
Some people think this is funny and the new explosion of camera phones and web services make it possible for these people to illustrate to others the humor (?) they find in the office and on the street. Maybe recording people in bars are good for a few laughs as well. Ever get shot down by a woman in a bar? Once again, if it is flamboyant enough, expect it on YouTube soon.
Privacy? Civility? Forget it. We are in the age of the Internet now.
Unfortunately, what you are proposing is that US rules are better. Why? Why isn't "grease" an acceptable answer? It has worked in many cultures for longer than the US has been in existance.
Maybe it doesn't work well in the US, which is fine. But it is difficult to say it should not work in China or Saudi Arabia because... well, just because. Because it is wrong in the US isn't an answer for everyone else.
Now, the specific idea of bribing people to do business with you is certainly in effect strongly in the US today. What do you think a coupon is, anyway? How about the offer of "buy $5000 in furniture and get a free TV." It is just that we call it something else and try to cover it up. Other cultures may be more open about it, which in my opinion is more transparent and at least everyone knows what they are dealing with.
If you trying to "prove" to some "foreigner" that the US culture is better than theirs, you are making a huge mistake. First off, it probably can't be done. Secondly, half of the problems the US has in foreign relations today are because we consistently try to do this and it is insulting on many levels. Who the heck are we to tell cultures thousands of years older than ours that we are better than they are? Sure, we may feel better about it and might even have a point that on a purely objective level it IS better. But human relations are never conducted on a purely objective level.
What you are describing is pretty much a rule for all of humanity from now on. If you don't want it posted, permanently, for everyone on the planet to see, don't do it.
That means having a beer with friends is pretty much off-limits. Not only might you do something stupid, but there are plenty of people that think instead of out having a beer you or your friends should be home with the wife and kids. And they will call you on it. Loudly.
Ever fallen down? Expect someone with a camera to record this moment and make sure it can never be forgotten. How about a TV show titled "Funny Falls" where they just edit together some posted videos.
We have gone way, way beyond anything that could be considered "civil". Basically it is you are on camera 24x7 and the slightest transgression will be made public. Permanently.
If the US had a municipality with an extra $6 million, or if the federal government could dole out an extra $6 million all it would take is the local government using their eminent domain rights to condemm whatever property they wanted to build the network. They could rip commercial wires down from poles and replace them with their own to get this done. There really is no limit to what could be done with this, if a government decided to do this.
Except, within a week of doing so such a city would be sued out of existance. Sorry, but municipalities do not get to run roughshod over commercial businesses in the US. Nor do they get to compete on the basis of offering services for tax dollars that other commercial entities have to charge their users for. Also, pretty much any use of eminent domain these days is going to result in a court fight if it deprives any individual or commercial entity of real property rights. The old days where a county could build a road through a bunch of existing homes is pretty much gone and has been for quite a while. And after the last public court fight over eminent domain rights, nobody is going to want to push the envelope much at all.
Another problem is geographic boundaries. If you want to offer fiber service to one part of a town and not another you better be awfully sure of yourself. And have lots of data to back up the decision. Because if there are minorities living in the part that you were not planning on serving, they will likely sue. Heck, people will sue no matter what because they aren't being served in the manner they think they should be. It doesn't matter that you might only have two customers that would pay for the service in that area - not offering it is not an option.
And people wonder all the time why this stuff is so complicated.
Sustainable population for the Earth is somewhere around 250 million people. This can easily be shown by figuring out the population at a point in time when natural processes were able to recycle wastes produced by humans. Literally and crudely, a sustainable population can take dumps in the woods and not worry about pollution because natural processes recycle their wastes faster than they accumulate. Once the population exceeds this point is is no longer sustainable.
The figure of 250 million assumes some level of technology beyond that of the Egyptians. Say around 1750 or so. Forget electricity and huge buildings - not sustainable.
Of course there is a choice. We could collect resources from off-planet. Lots of work and a lot of it is pretty risky for a long time before it becomes routine. But it could be done.
The alternative is to tell 90% of the population to crawl off and die somewhere and please do it quickly.
If the residents on Planet Earth insist on treating the universe as a closed system confined to their little planet, they are going to run out of resources at some point. Sooner or later, someone will realize that the Sun is contributing resources to Earth and these off-planet resources should not be used. I can't imagine the environmentalist/limited growth response to this revelation. It is certain to be severe.
There are two choices here - zero growth (stagnation) with a greatly reduced population so life is sustainable within its limited bounds, or the serious pursuit and acquisition of off-planet resources. It is a choice that we have nearly made with the virtual abandonment of manned space flight. Within a few years the decision will be irreversable and there will be no choice of either embarking on a massive population reduction program or watching while it is done for us.
The idea that without nuclear energy we can sustain life for over 6 billion people on the planet is a joke. It is the only possible course of action for constant, reliable energy - both electrical power and other forms. The idea of burning anything to produce heat in large quantities is just absurd - look at a steel mill for an example of large amounts of thermal energy that could be from non-fossil fuel sources. Sure, fusion power is a great goal and we will likely get there, but we will never get there if the zero-growth "sustainable" crowd gets there way.
Anyone that has studied biology understands there are two and only two states for life: growth and death. If we aren't growing, we are dying. It applies to mold in a petri dish and it applies to the human race. There is a substantial fraction of humanity that believes constant growth is impossible and we must "cut back" to remain "sustainable" They do not understand that this sustainable way of life is just a delayed form of extinction because they weren't paying attention in high school.
So yes, we need off-planet resources to maintain life on Earth. The universe is not a closed system on any scale humans can comprehend and the resources are out there for the taking. If we fail in this we doom the human race to extinction - nobody is going to be coming to rescue us from our own folly and there is no third "sustainable" alternative. Grow or die. It is a lesson learned by every form of life one way or another.
Having someone apologize to the victim of a successful suicide doesn't really do all that much good. Intent can be pretty hard to judge in a objective manner.
The problem with laws like this is they are an attempt to legislate civility and decency, neither of which exists on the Internet. Sorry, but you can't make people that have been trained since early childhood not to be civil to be nice to other people. Can't be done. The people that would like to live in a civil society may as well get used to that fact - civility is dead.
What would you have Arizona do? Perhaps it might be nice if they passed a law that said poor people deserve to be supported by anyone else with money, please line up over here to start contributing...
A bicameral legistlature is designed to do nothing - except maybe those things that are so egregious that everyone can obviously agree on. This would seem to be one of those. No way are you going to get a majority of the legislature to agree that poor people need a handout or that the state should require all electricity to be generated from burning cowpies. The advantage of a bicameral legislature is that they do not pass laws willy-nilly - which was what the founders of the US intended. It should be extraordinarily difficult to get anything passed, so difficult that most things simply never get passed.
Probably would be better to eliminate the idea of "news" from television completely. Some people know that everything televised is like wrestling - completely staged, phony and utterly irrelevant to all but a few people. The problem is, the majority believe that the "news" as well as "reality programs" are the absolute truth and completely relevant to their lives.
I do not see any way to correct that other than to eliminate TV News... or perhaps eliminate TV. Funny, but I don't see either of those happening. I think we are doomed to suffer from a majority that believe what they are told by TV News.
CBS News announced Gore won in 2000 and a lot of people turned off the TV and went to bed. When they woke up, Gore was no longer the winner, so obviously Bush stole the election - because CBS told them who the winner was before they went to bed. As far as these people were concerned, this was clear and obvious the morning after the election. It is still clear to them.
So, while Verizon doesn't like people bringing in phones, resellers of Verizon service (Cricket, Virgin, etc.) are more than happy to do so. Verizon isn't in complete control of their own mobile service since a lot (25%? 30%? more?) of it is due to resellers selling access to the same towers.
Oh, an what do you need to use Cricket? A Verizon-compatible phone.
The difference between piracy making a small dent in revenue and totally wiping it out is the difference between the cracking (and playing sometimes) only being possible by really knowledgable and dedicated people vs. anyone can rip, download and play.
With your Internet connection being limited to less than 2Mb/sec, it might take a week to download a ripped Blu-Ray movie and this all by itself means piracy for these folks is a non-starter. That is where most of the US is right now. What has pretty much ended revenue from recorded music is anyone and everyone can download music files, put them on their iPod within minutes and play them. Non-Blu-Ray movies are approaching that point today but there is a lot of crappy content out there and outright misleading/fake/trojan stuff. This means that movies are still producing meaningful revenue whereas music is not.
I give it at most three more years and the pirates will have shut off revenue from movies as well. The question is what happens then? My guess is that streaming can recycle the catalog from the last 60 years or so for decades if the studios let them, but I don't see anyone putting up money for a lot of new big-budget movie production - unless it is purely ego-driven where some big name decides he (or she) wants to make a movie and knows it will be the best movie ever made.
The utilities answer is an easy one. You take a city like Chandler with lots and lots of wells feeding the water supply and each and every single site is connected to some kind of network. Maybe public, maybe not - it is just not disclosed. But with a lot of different sites not being connected it would lead to a lot more staff cost and probably a lot more travel costs - fuel, vehicles, etc.
So everything is networked and remotely controllable. Means instead of a staff of ten people they can have just one. I would suspect the same reasoning applies to plenty of small-to-medium size cities with any sort of dispersed facilities.
A huge problem today is pension funds investing, period.
What a pension fund wants is some growth but stable growth and a solid indication that they aren't going to lose anything, ever. That is perfect for AAA bonds but really awful for investing in company stock in any form. Since these funds have so much money to invest - usually in big blocks - they have a great deal of influence. Which means once your company is deeply in with a pension fund or two as major stockholders the company must be run in a manner that produces steady, stable growth and will never, ever lose money. This generates a risk-adverse environment and means companies that are supposed to be engaging in high-risk investments for the future have to change their methodolgy if they want to keep their major stockholders happy.
Hence we have a lot of companies that should be throwing cash at projects which might fail but might also pay off big deciding not to do much at all like that. Risk-adverse means no big risks, no big rewards, but happy stockholders. And when the risk-adverse stockholders are holding more than 50% of the company's stock the board is going to pretty much have to go along with this new strategy or get replaced with people that have the proper respect for the pension fund's money.
This is what we have gotten ourselves into today, pretty much worldwide. By letting the pension funds in the door - heck, we encouraged them with special road shows tailored to the "institutional investors" - we have made sure that high-risk projects and products are just never approved.
The idea that someone can become an investor - and start thinking they are going to have input into the operation of their investment - without having any knowledge of what they are investing in is a sure road to disaster.
Unfortunately, the disaster isn't just for stupid investor that puts some money into something relatively blindly and then regrets it. Oh no, if it was just that the limits on how much money might be OK. No, the trouble starts when J.B. Moneybags shows up on the doorstep of what he invested in and thinks (ignoring all statements to the contrary) he should have some input now. Of course, if the guy really had lots of money to invest he would have done things sensibly (maybe). But what you are looking at is a guy who wants to get in on the ground floor of something and is sure he knows more about running the business than the people who started it.
Oh, and of course if you don't listen to him he will sue. Might take a while to find a lawyer that will take the case, but he will end up suing. Which will eat up every bit of whatever he invested in legal fees and court time. And probably a lot more money than he invested to go along with it.
No, if you haven't had a investor you probably do not understand. But anyone with a past or present investor knows exactly what this is about and wants nothing to do with it at all. Some people are going to get burned by this - the investors that deserve it and the start-up guys that do not.
My take on the Fox News court case was that they were defending themselves from a baseless lawsuit. There is no law or regulation that requires any sort of government-certified (or anyone else for that matter) correctness of their broadcast. Failure to take this position would clearly be stupid because future lawsuits on both affiliates and Fox News themselves could have been based on some perceived requirement of accuracy.
The problem is, who's accuracy? Once the government steps into a quagmire like that there is no escape - we are living in the world of 1984. So clearly the US Federal Government wants no part in such a thing. There are plenty of people that would like to believe that the mention of anything beyond "theory" or "slimmest unproven theory" for things like gravity, evolution and the Earth circling the Sun constitutes in their eyes "inaccuracy". Again, who do we want judging accuracy in broadcasting or other media?
Then there is the question if not the government, then who? Who do we think should be the final arbitrator of truth in the US? For a long while various churches could have stepped into that role pretty easily. We had the early motion picture board approving and licensing movies for a long time which is almost the same thing. But the authoratative nature of those groups is pretty much gone. I do not believe you could get 10 people, much less 330 million people, to agree to any single arbitrator of truth today.
So I'd say Fox News was absolutely correct and did a job that needed doing - there is no arbitrator of truth in broadcasting and there better not be anyone that thinks they can use the courts to bludgeon someone into believing there is.
The idea behind this is that is the only way they can be sure that the information is exchanged with one and only one other device.
How else would you do it? Just broadcast the information so at a trade show someone can sit 20 feet away and pick up contacts? Yes, I think it is silly, but I understand the motivation for it and it might be hard to come up with a simplistic easy-for-managers sort of secure exchange technique.
There are lots of Bluetooth networking applications for the iPhone, but you are correct that Bump isn't one of them. I suspect it wouldn't be secure enough - other people could listen in and capture contact information. Their whole web site is about how secure it is.
I think another problem with Bump using Bluetooth is that while it is available on the iPhone the availability of it on other platforms is questionable. You can have lots of phones that are Internet-capable and run Java applications but do not support applications using Bluetooth and I suspect they would like to be able to use those phones as well.
Hence, no Bluetooth. Now, if all the people you interact with have iPhones, there might be another answer. But for me that is the whole problem with Bump to begin with - insufficient penetration. I have't had anyone, ever ask about using Bump to exchange information. Sure, I could get it and put it on my phone but until I run into someone (anyone... just one person) that is (a) interested and (b) a user I have no use for it at all.
There are a lot of problems with Bump... Probably the biggest one for me is I have yet to talk with someone that actually has it. Then you get into the problems with getting two people to use it together when likely as not only one is really interested - the other party would rather not but if the limit of their involvement in the process is to hand over a card, well OK then.
The problem I have with QR is the information IS NOT encoded in the code itself. Instead, a QR code is a pointer to some other (commercial) entity that is holding the information hostage, usually for a fee. So yes, you can have your own personal QR code - except you have to pay someone to hold the information for you. How about a 2D bar code that actually has the information in it and is directly readable? This can easily be done, it just isn't because QR is a really great business opportunity for the QR code vendor.
I would also say that you have no idea what you are getting with a QR code. With a business card and a scanner you know what you are getting and it is all useful information.
Look, that is what insurance is for. If you can afford an iPad, then you can afford the insurance.
In reality the thief is doing someone a favor. Their iPad was older and had some wear, so they get a new one. Apple is happy because they sold another iPad. The guy that got it is happy because he didn't have one before. Everyone wins.
The problem is in the US there is a cultural mindset of "I'm getting mine!" Other cultures are far less expecting of material (and non-material) rewards. Some cultures completely reject everything in this life with their goals firmly fixed on an afterlife.
What this gets you is in the US theft is common. 1 in 10 people going into a store are going to steal stuff. If it isn't locked down, it will disappear. The idea of people in rural areas being able to leave their doors unlocked and inviting their neighbors in disappeared when the gangs moved into rural areas. The idea of people fleeing the urban inner city to reach some kind of paradise in the suburbs disappeared in the 1970s - today the suburbs are as gang and crime ridden as the inner cities.
Sure, overall as a percentage of the population violent crime is down in the US from where it was in the 1980s and early 1990s. But that doesn't mean the overall effect on people is much different. If you walk down the street in the "wrong" part of town you will likely be robbed or beaten up just for being there and not belonging. If you stick to places where "your kind" are, you will probably be alright - most cities are very territorial with different ethnic groups staking out their turf and being very protective of it. A Hispanic man walking through a White neighborhood might just get the police down on him but a White man in a Hispanic neighborhood clearly doesn't belong there and riles up a lot of feelings. The assumption seems to be that by moving out of their own territory the invader wants to take over their neighborhood as well. As this has been the history of the US, the feelings like this aren't exactly wrong.
Unfortunately the penetration of guns in the general population is low enough that it is a virtual certainity that nobody you rob is going to have a gun. When a robber confronts someone with a gun it is a big news story, usually because the robber sues the victim and wins. It is clear that outlawing guns only means the outlaws will have them and the rest will not. Since we can't keep guns out of the hands of the criminals, crazy people or anyone who wants one and doesn't care about laws against it there are many that believe the US should be a far more armed society than it is. At least then people will have some defense and support. The police openly admit that they have no interest in confronting robbers and such - they will be happy to come along later and take your report - if you are in any condition to give it.
The problem is, the US cannot survive today for very long at all without imports from China. We put ourselves into this box and basically everyone knew it was a box. Today, we can decide anything we want but the pipeline from China must remain open or there will be massive shortages of all sorts of goods.
So what happens when there is no low-price pet food on the store shelves? Do low-income people just decide to let their pets starve? Or do they start calling their Congresscritters with the message that "something needs to be done right away?" How about something silly like mops. Yes, there are US companies making devices for mopping floors, but most of the ones at WalMart are made in China and few people are actively shopping for mops at high-end stores.
Then there is the problem of commercial supplies. Grainger, which supplies almost everyone, would just run out of mops and the suggestion from the school's custodial department to buy some mops from Macy's is going to get a good laugh.
Sadly, even if we recognize the problem as a real problem and decided to rebuild the manufacturing base in the US, it will not stop the riots. Do you think your elected representative will tolerate being voted out of office because of some pets starving or a lack of mops in WalMart? Nope. The pipeline will remain open until there is a suitable replacement - and economically there is no suitable replacement as long as the pipeline is open. We got ourselves into this box and we are pretty much destined to remain here.
China? They can do whatever the heck they want. The WTO is an utterly toothless organization that cannot back up any of their "decisions" in any manner - other than to suggest the US commit economic (and civil) suicide.
In most countries the government has mandated pricing which is very low compared to pricing in the US. I do not know what their justification for these prices are, but they are dictated to the manufacturer.
The US pricing is set by the manufacturer, not the government.
Why India in this case is not simply telling Bayer to sell their drug at $175 I do not know. Perhaps they did and Bayer refused which is pretty rare.
Why do you think both the manufacturers and the US government is concerned about reimportation of drugs from Canada and Mexico? These governments set the prices for the drugs with the clear understanding that this was their price and not for distribution in the US. Clearly the US is picking up the tab for advertising, R&D and testing of drugs worldwide. I think we should stop. How about if the US government mandated pricing for all drugs at $1 for a 30 day supply?
Obviously, after six months the supply would dry up. It might take it a while, but some other country would be forced to pick up the slack and restart drug R&D and testing once again. Might take five or ten years, but then pricing would be lower in the US and we could all have cheap drugs here.
This is the 21st Century where if you do not do unto others they most certainly will do unto you.
Let's see, if some folks have so much money that they can lose a phone that is worth more than $400 (used) then someone else is going to benefit from this. It isn't like anyone is going to stop them and say "Is that your phone?" - Kitty Genovese was 50 years ago and things haven't gotten any better since then.
Sure, it sucks to be confronted with the reality of humanity but that is the way things are.
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Unfortunately, this seems to be the way things are going. There will be one or two "retailers" left on the Internet which will be in unassailable positions because of heavy discounting on freight and committments from suppliers. Buying anything locally will be an option fondly remembered by grandparents and a concept utterly foreign to the next generation.
Why will there be only two? Well, Amazon ships with UPS and UPS charges them so little based on volume that they can make money offering free 2-day shipping. Should some new player come along they aren't going to get discounts like that until they have a huge volume, which means their prices will be higher, meaning they aren't going to get that huge volume. Same thing with suppliers: if you buy 1,000 TVs from Samsung they give you a different price than if you buy 100. If you sell 1000 a week you are going to be buying a huge number - maybe more like 10,000 at a time - and get such a better price that they new start-up can't ever get that good a price.
So what do we have now? A monopoly. Mostly driven by the Internet and the way shipping works in the US. Best Buy had their own fleet of truck for distribution so their costs were quite different than using UPS or FedEx. The idea that some new startup can come along - as Best Buy did - is pretty much gone. The market is closed to new entrants. Would there be room for two such distributors? Maybe not - we might end up with only Amazon as the big retailer in the US and WalMart for low-end stuff. We can all see that the small independent seller is doomed if they haven't already closed up shop now. WalMart put those folks out of business a long time ago.
You can certainly say that Best Buy failed in providing customer service, but we are seeing a passing of a lifestyle. We are also seeing an interesting phenomenon whereby more and more things in people's daily lives are being supplied through a single source. Did you know there is only one factory in the US making glass bottles? If one can do it, why have more, right? Except it is a single point of failure and there are many substances that a glass bottle is required for. If that one factory has a fire or some other accident the entire US is without glass bottles for perhaps a very long time. With retailers being eliminated we are focusing more and more on online retailers and two shipping companies - of which there will only be one in the end. When it is only Amazon and FedEx (far more diversified then UPS and therefore the more likely one to survive), what happens if there is a strike against FedEx? Well, it means people stop getting stuff. When it is WalMart and Amazon alone and everyone is getting food, clothes and everything else through these channels what does it mean?
One big thing it means is that if the buyer at WalMart doesn't like some supplier, their stuff isn't getting sold in the US. It means decisions that consumers get to make today are then made by the buyers for the retailers that are left. If the buyer doesn't choose it, the consumer can't choose it. Period.
Oh, you think "the long tail" will solve this problem. Not really. There will be only a few retailers because the dynamics of an online store are quite different from opening a little shop on Main Street. It is already pretty much impossible for an upstart to compete with Amazon today and it isn't going to get any better. Which means if Amazon doesn't strike a deal with a supplier - on Amazon's terms - their stuff doesn't get sold. Manufacturers are ill-suited to sell things directly, so that isn't really an option. Neither is Amazon going to take on a new product that completes with an existing high-volume product unless they get a really good deal - why trade dollars for pennies? This puts Amazon in control of what brands of toothpase you get to choose from - you will not have the option of going to a different store.
Pretty sad, isn't it. At least it isn't the government making these decisions for us.
Really old example of this: Jetson's cartoon where Mr. Spacely brings in a new robot for the office. Robot tapes everything George says and selectively plays back stuff to Mr. Spacely that is "colorful". Sounds remarkably like the office culture has finally caught up to 1960s cartoons.
Can you think if the response when at some ungarded moment you say something about your boss that is perhaps unflattering? And then have the video of that moment posted for all to see or sent around to all employees?
Unethical or bad behavior is not the point. Comedy is the point - making someone look like a fool. So you walk into the office and trip over something and end up with coffee on your shirt. Expect it to be on YouTube within the hour.
Some people think this is funny and the new explosion of camera phones and web services make it possible for these people to illustrate to others the humor (?) they find in the office and on the street. Maybe recording people in bars are good for a few laughs as well. Ever get shot down by a woman in a bar? Once again, if it is flamboyant enough, expect it on YouTube soon.
Privacy? Civility? Forget it. We are in the age of the Internet now.
Unfortunately, what you are proposing is that US rules are better. Why? Why isn't "grease" an acceptable answer? It has worked in many cultures for longer than the US has been in existance.
Maybe it doesn't work well in the US, which is fine. But it is difficult to say it should not work in China or Saudi Arabia because ... well, just because. Because it is wrong in the US isn't an answer for everyone else.
Now, the specific idea of bribing people to do business with you is certainly in effect strongly in the US today. What do you think a coupon is, anyway? How about the offer of "buy $5000 in furniture and get a free TV." It is just that we call it something else and try to cover it up. Other cultures may be more open about it, which in my opinion is more transparent and at least everyone knows what they are dealing with.
If you trying to "prove" to some "foreigner" that the US culture is better than theirs, you are making a huge mistake. First off, it probably can't be done. Secondly, half of the problems the US has in foreign relations today are because we consistently try to do this and it is insulting on many levels. Who the heck are we to tell cultures thousands of years older than ours that we are better than they are? Sure, we may feel better about it and might even have a point that on a purely objective level it IS better. But human relations are never conducted on a purely objective level.
What you are describing is pretty much a rule for all of humanity from now on. If you don't want it posted, permanently, for everyone on the planet to see, don't do it.
That means having a beer with friends is pretty much off-limits. Not only might you do something stupid, but there are plenty of people that think instead of out having a beer you or your friends should be home with the wife and kids. And they will call you on it. Loudly.
Ever fallen down? Expect someone with a camera to record this moment and make sure it can never be forgotten. How about a TV show titled "Funny Falls" where they just edit together some posted videos.
We have gone way, way beyond anything that could be considered "civil". Basically it is you are on camera 24x7 and the slightest transgression will be made public. Permanently.
If the US had a municipality with an extra $6 million, or if the federal government could dole out an extra $6 million all it would take is the local government using their eminent domain rights to condemm whatever property they wanted to build the network. They could rip commercial wires down from poles and replace them with their own to get this done. There really is no limit to what could be done with this, if a government decided to do this.
Except, within a week of doing so such a city would be sued out of existance. Sorry, but municipalities do not get to run roughshod over commercial businesses in the US. Nor do they get to compete on the basis of offering services for tax dollars that other commercial entities have to charge their users for. Also, pretty much any use of eminent domain these days is going to result in a court fight if it deprives any individual or commercial entity of real property rights. The old days where a county could build a road through a bunch of existing homes is pretty much gone and has been for quite a while. And after the last public court fight over eminent domain rights, nobody is going to want to push the envelope much at all.
Another problem is geographic boundaries. If you want to offer fiber service to one part of a town and not another you better be awfully sure of yourself. And have lots of data to back up the decision. Because if there are minorities living in the part that you were not planning on serving, they will likely sue. Heck, people will sue no matter what because they aren't being served in the manner they think they should be. It doesn't matter that you might only have two customers that would pay for the service in that area - not offering it is not an option.
And people wonder all the time why this stuff is so complicated.
Sustainable population for the Earth is somewhere around 250 million people. This can easily be shown by figuring out the population at a point in time when natural processes were able to recycle wastes produced by humans. Literally and crudely, a sustainable population can take dumps in the woods and not worry about pollution because natural processes recycle their wastes faster than they accumulate. Once the population exceeds this point is is no longer sustainable.
The figure of 250 million assumes some level of technology beyond that of the Egyptians. Say around 1750 or so. Forget electricity and huge buildings - not sustainable.
Of course there is a choice. We could collect resources from off-planet. Lots of work and a lot of it is pretty risky for a long time before it becomes routine. But it could be done.
The alternative is to tell 90% of the population to crawl off and die somewhere and please do it quickly.
If the residents on Planet Earth insist on treating the universe as a closed system confined to their little planet, they are going to run out of resources at some point. Sooner or later, someone will realize that the Sun is contributing resources to Earth and these off-planet resources should not be used. I can't imagine the environmentalist/limited growth response to this revelation. It is certain to be severe.
There are two choices here - zero growth (stagnation) with a greatly reduced population so life is sustainable within its limited bounds, or the serious pursuit and acquisition of off-planet resources. It is a choice that we have nearly made with the virtual abandonment of manned space flight. Within a few years the decision will be irreversable and there will be no choice of either embarking on a massive population reduction program or watching while it is done for us.
The idea that without nuclear energy we can sustain life for over 6 billion people on the planet is a joke. It is the only possible course of action for constant, reliable energy - both electrical power and other forms. The idea of burning anything to produce heat in large quantities is just absurd - look at a steel mill for an example of large amounts of thermal energy that could be from non-fossil fuel sources. Sure, fusion power is a great goal and we will likely get there, but we will never get there if the zero-growth "sustainable" crowd gets there way.
Anyone that has studied biology understands there are two and only two states for life: growth and death. If we aren't growing, we are dying. It applies to mold in a petri dish and it applies to the human race. There is a substantial fraction of humanity that believes constant growth is impossible and we must "cut back" to remain "sustainable" They do not understand that this sustainable way of life is just a delayed form of extinction because they weren't paying attention in high school.
So yes, we need off-planet resources to maintain life on Earth. The universe is not a closed system on any scale humans can comprehend and the resources are out there for the taking. If we fail in this we doom the human race to extinction - nobody is going to be coming to rescue us from our own folly and there is no third "sustainable" alternative. Grow or die. It is a lesson learned by every form of life one way or another.
Having someone apologize to the victim of a successful suicide doesn't really do all that much good. Intent can be pretty hard to judge in a objective manner.
The problem with laws like this is they are an attempt to legislate civility and decency, neither of which exists on the Internet. Sorry, but you can't make people that have been trained since early childhood not to be civil to be nice to other people. Can't be done. The people that would like to live in a civil society may as well get used to that fact - civility is dead.
What would you have Arizona do? Perhaps it might be nice if they passed a law that said poor people deserve to be supported by anyone else with money, please line up over here to start contributing...
A bicameral legistlature is designed to do nothing - except maybe those things that are so egregious that everyone can obviously agree on. This would seem to be one of those. No way are you going to get a majority of the legislature to agree that poor people need a handout or that the state should require all electricity to be generated from burning cowpies. The advantage of a bicameral legislature is that they do not pass laws willy-nilly - which was what the founders of the US intended. It should be extraordinarily difficult to get anything passed, so difficult that most things simply never get passed.
Probably would be better to eliminate the idea of "news" from television completely. Some people know that everything televised is like wrestling - completely staged, phony and utterly irrelevant to all but a few people. The problem is, the majority believe that the "news" as well as "reality programs" are the absolute truth and completely relevant to their lives.
I do not see any way to correct that other than to eliminate TV News... or perhaps eliminate TV. Funny, but I don't see either of those happening. I think we are doomed to suffer from a majority that believe what they are told by TV News.
CBS News announced Gore won in 2000 and a lot of people turned off the TV and went to bed. When they woke up, Gore was no longer the winner, so obviously Bush stole the election - because CBS told them who the winner was before they went to bed. As far as these people were concerned, this was clear and obvious the morning after the election. It is still clear to them.
So, while Verizon doesn't like people bringing in phones, resellers of Verizon service (Cricket, Virgin, etc.) are more than happy to do so. Verizon isn't in complete control of their own mobile service since a lot (25%? 30%? more?) of it is due to resellers selling access to the same towers.
Oh, an what do you need to use Cricket? A Verizon-compatible phone.
No matter what the price, zero is always better.
The difference between piracy making a small dent in revenue and totally wiping it out is the difference between the cracking (and playing sometimes) only being possible by really knowledgable and dedicated people vs. anyone can rip, download and play.
With your Internet connection being limited to less than 2Mb/sec, it might take a week to download a ripped Blu-Ray movie and this all by itself means piracy for these folks is a non-starter. That is where most of the US is right now. What has pretty much ended revenue from recorded music is anyone and everyone can download music files, put them on their iPod within minutes and play them. Non-Blu-Ray movies are approaching that point today but there is a lot of crappy content out there and outright misleading/fake/trojan stuff. This means that movies are still producing meaningful revenue whereas music is not.
I give it at most three more years and the pirates will have shut off revenue from movies as well. The question is what happens then? My guess is that streaming can recycle the catalog from the last 60 years or so for decades if the studios let them, but I don't see anyone putting up money for a lot of new big-budget movie production - unless it is purely ego-driven where some big name decides he (or she) wants to make a movie and knows it will be the best movie ever made.
The utilities answer is an easy one. You take a city like Chandler with lots and lots of wells feeding the water supply and each and every single site is connected to some kind of network. Maybe public, maybe not - it is just not disclosed. But with a lot of different sites not being connected it would lead to a lot more staff cost and probably a lot more travel costs - fuel, vehicles, etc.
So everything is networked and remotely controllable. Means instead of a staff of ten people they can have just one. I would suspect the same reasoning applies to plenty of small-to-medium size cities with any sort of dispersed facilities.
A huge problem today is pension funds investing, period.
What a pension fund wants is some growth but stable growth and a solid indication that they aren't going to lose anything, ever. That is perfect for AAA bonds but really awful for investing in company stock in any form. Since these funds have so much money to invest - usually in big blocks - they have a great deal of influence. Which means once your company is deeply in with a pension fund or two as major stockholders the company must be run in a manner that produces steady, stable growth and will never, ever lose money. This generates a risk-adverse environment and means companies that are supposed to be engaging in high-risk investments for the future have to change their methodolgy if they want to keep their major stockholders happy.
Hence we have a lot of companies that should be throwing cash at projects which might fail but might also pay off big deciding not to do much at all like that. Risk-adverse means no big risks, no big rewards, but happy stockholders. And when the risk-adverse stockholders are holding more than 50% of the company's stock the board is going to pretty much have to go along with this new strategy or get replaced with people that have the proper respect for the pension fund's money.
This is what we have gotten ourselves into today, pretty much worldwide. By letting the pension funds in the door - heck, we encouraged them with special road shows tailored to the "institutional investors" - we have made sure that high-risk projects and products are just never approved.
The idea that someone can become an investor - and start thinking they are going to have input into the operation of their investment - without having any knowledge of what they are investing in is a sure road to disaster.
Unfortunately, the disaster isn't just for stupid investor that puts some money into something relatively blindly and then regrets it. Oh no, if it was just that the limits on how much money might be OK. No, the trouble starts when J.B. Moneybags shows up on the doorstep of what he invested in and thinks (ignoring all statements to the contrary) he should have some input now. Of course, if the guy really had lots of money to invest he would have done things sensibly (maybe). But what you are looking at is a guy who wants to get in on the ground floor of something and is sure he knows more about running the business than the people who started it.
Oh, and of course if you don't listen to him he will sue. Might take a while to find a lawyer that will take the case, but he will end up suing. Which will eat up every bit of whatever he invested in legal fees and court time. And probably a lot more money than he invested to go along with it.
No, if you haven't had a investor you probably do not understand. But anyone with a past or present investor knows exactly what this is about and wants nothing to do with it at all. Some people are going to get burned by this - the investors that deserve it and the start-up guys that do not.
My take on the Fox News court case was that they were defending themselves from a baseless lawsuit. There is no law or regulation that requires any sort of government-certified (or anyone else for that matter) correctness of their broadcast. Failure to take this position would clearly be stupid because future lawsuits on both affiliates and Fox News themselves could have been based on some perceived requirement of accuracy.
The problem is, who's accuracy? Once the government steps into a quagmire like that there is no escape - we are living in the world of 1984. So clearly the US Federal Government wants no part in such a thing. There are plenty of people that would like to believe that the mention of anything beyond "theory" or "slimmest unproven theory" for things like gravity, evolution and the Earth circling the Sun constitutes in their eyes "inaccuracy". Again, who do we want judging accuracy in broadcasting or other media?
Then there is the question if not the government, then who? Who do we think should be the final arbitrator of truth in the US? For a long while various churches could have stepped into that role pretty easily. We had the early motion picture board approving and licensing movies for a long time which is almost the same thing. But the authoratative nature of those groups is pretty much gone. I do not believe you could get 10 people, much less 330 million people, to agree to any single arbitrator of truth today.
So I'd say Fox News was absolutely correct and did a job that needed doing - there is no arbitrator of truth in broadcasting and there better not be anyone that thinks they can use the courts to bludgeon someone into believing there is.
The idea behind this is that is the only way they can be sure that the information is exchanged with one and only one other device.
How else would you do it? Just broadcast the information so at a trade show someone can sit 20 feet away and pick up contacts? Yes, I think it is silly, but I understand the motivation for it and it might be hard to come up with a simplistic easy-for-managers sort of secure exchange technique.
There are lots of Bluetooth networking applications for the iPhone, but you are correct that Bump isn't one of them. I suspect it wouldn't be secure enough - other people could listen in and capture contact information. Their whole web site is about how secure it is.
I think another problem with Bump using Bluetooth is that while it is available on the iPhone the availability of it on other platforms is questionable. You can have lots of phones that are Internet-capable and run Java applications but do not support applications using Bluetooth and I suspect they would like to be able to use those phones as well.
Hence, no Bluetooth. Now, if all the people you interact with have iPhones, there might be another answer. But for me that is the whole problem with Bump to begin with - insufficient penetration. I have't had anyone, ever ask about using Bump to exchange information. Sure, I could get it and put it on my phone but until I run into someone (anyone ... just one person) that is (a) interested and (b) a user I have no use for it at all.
There are a lot of problems with Bump... Probably the biggest one for me is I have yet to talk with someone that actually has it. Then you get into the problems with getting two people to use it together when likely as not only one is really interested - the other party would rather not but if the limit of their involvement in the process is to hand over a card, well OK then.
The problem I have with QR is the information IS NOT encoded in the code itself. Instead, a QR code is a pointer to some other (commercial) entity that is holding the information hostage, usually for a fee. So yes, you can have your own personal QR code - except you have to pay someone to hold the information for you. How about a 2D bar code that actually has the information in it and is directly readable? This can easily be done, it just isn't because QR is a really great business opportunity for the QR code vendor.
I would also say that you have no idea what you are getting with a QR code. With a business card and a scanner you know what you are getting and it is all useful information.
Look, that is what insurance is for. If you can afford an iPad, then you can afford the insurance.
In reality the thief is doing someone a favor. Their iPad was older and had some wear, so they get a new one. Apple is happy because they sold another iPad. The guy that got it is happy because he didn't have one before. Everyone wins.
The problem is in the US there is a cultural mindset of "I'm getting mine!" Other cultures are far less expecting of material (and non-material) rewards. Some cultures completely reject everything in this life with their goals firmly fixed on an afterlife.
What this gets you is in the US theft is common. 1 in 10 people going into a store are going to steal stuff. If it isn't locked down, it will disappear. The idea of people in rural areas being able to leave their doors unlocked and inviting their neighbors in disappeared when the gangs moved into rural areas. The idea of people fleeing the urban inner city to reach some kind of paradise in the suburbs disappeared in the 1970s - today the suburbs are as gang and crime ridden as the inner cities.
Sure, overall as a percentage of the population violent crime is down in the US from where it was in the 1980s and early 1990s. But that doesn't mean the overall effect on people is much different. If you walk down the street in the "wrong" part of town you will likely be robbed or beaten up just for being there and not belonging. If you stick to places where "your kind" are, you will probably be alright - most cities are very territorial with different ethnic groups staking out their turf and being very protective of it. A Hispanic man walking through a White neighborhood might just get the police down on him but a White man in a Hispanic neighborhood clearly doesn't belong there and riles up a lot of feelings. The assumption seems to be that by moving out of their own territory the invader wants to take over their neighborhood as well. As this has been the history of the US, the feelings like this aren't exactly wrong.
Unfortunately the penetration of guns in the general population is low enough that it is a virtual certainity that nobody you rob is going to have a gun. When a robber confronts someone with a gun it is a big news story, usually because the robber sues the victim and wins. It is clear that outlawing guns only means the outlaws will have them and the rest will not. Since we can't keep guns out of the hands of the criminals, crazy people or anyone who wants one and doesn't care about laws against it there are many that believe the US should be a far more armed society than it is. At least then people will have some defense and support. The police openly admit that they have no interest in confronting robbers and such - they will be happy to come along later and take your report - if you are in any condition to give it.
The problem is, the US cannot survive today for very long at all without imports from China. We put ourselves into this box and basically everyone knew it was a box. Today, we can decide anything we want but the pipeline from China must remain open or there will be massive shortages of all sorts of goods.
So what happens when there is no low-price pet food on the store shelves? Do low-income people just decide to let their pets starve? Or do they start calling their Congresscritters with the message that "something needs to be done right away?" How about something silly like mops. Yes, there are US companies making devices for mopping floors, but most of the ones at WalMart are made in China and few people are actively shopping for mops at high-end stores.
Then there is the problem of commercial supplies. Grainger, which supplies almost everyone, would just run out of mops and the suggestion from the school's custodial department to buy some mops from Macy's is going to get a good laugh.
Sadly, even if we recognize the problem as a real problem and decided to rebuild the manufacturing base in the US, it will not stop the riots. Do you think your elected representative will tolerate being voted out of office because of some pets starving or a lack of mops in WalMart? Nope. The pipeline will remain open until there is a suitable replacement - and economically there is no suitable replacement as long as the pipeline is open. We got ourselves into this box and we are pretty much destined to remain here.
China? They can do whatever the heck they want. The WTO is an utterly toothless organization that cannot back up any of their "decisions" in any manner - other than to suggest the US commit economic (and civil) suicide.
In most countries the government has mandated pricing which is very low compared to pricing in the US. I do not know what their justification for these prices are, but they are dictated to the manufacturer.
The US pricing is set by the manufacturer, not the government.
Why India in this case is not simply telling Bayer to sell their drug at $175 I do not know. Perhaps they did and Bayer refused which is pretty rare.
Why do you think both the manufacturers and the US government is concerned about reimportation of drugs from Canada and Mexico? These governments set the prices for the drugs with the clear understanding that this was their price and not for distribution in the US. Clearly the US is picking up the tab for advertising, R&D and testing of drugs worldwide. I think we should stop. How about if the US government mandated pricing for all drugs at $1 for a 30 day supply?
Obviously, after six months the supply would dry up. It might take it a while, but some other country would be forced to pick up the slack and restart drug R&D and testing once again. Might take five or ten years, but then pricing would be lower in the US and we could all have cheap drugs here.
This is the 21st Century where if you do not do unto others they most certainly will do unto you.
Let's see, if some folks have so much money that they can lose a phone that is worth more than $400 (used) then someone else is going to benefit from this. It isn't like anyone is going to stop them and say "Is that your phone?" - Kitty Genovese was 50 years ago and things haven't gotten any better since then.
Sure, it sucks to be confronted with the reality of humanity but that is the way things are.