I pay for my music because it's more cost-effective than wasting time fixing ID3 tags created by bittorrent people and their "Jim Van Morrison" or "John Lennon Camp" mp3s.
Very easy, 1/5 the cost, no shitty attitudes, etc. etc.
Are you living in the past? IT jobs are no longer moving to India, now instead IT workers are imported.
This business model has many pros:
1) It's easier to schedule conference calls when you don't have to worry about Bangalore timezone 2) You can squeeze 5 of them into a "corporate condo" and make them pay the mortgage out of the shit salary you pay them to manage your Exchange server 3) You can get them to get your mocha at Starbucks, wait in line to get the new iPhone, or to receive your Amazon packages while you're fooling around with high-end prostitutes that you couldn't afford when you had to pay those expensive white sysadmins
Easy to say when you live in a small town. Try to live by that credo in NYC or Hong-Kong, where most people couldn't afford to buy a tiny flat even if they were to sell their organs on the black market.
he was a shyster that built an empire off of slave labour, his karma came to get him for it too.
Is this how karma works? I thought you had to die first then you got rewarded or punished in your next life... Dang it, this could derail my plans of having a lifetime of selfish behavior paid for by a future me that I will never know.
Most of us, with some exceptions, only see a given show or movie once. That's not how most of us consume music.
Music is now disposable. Do you really think people will still listen to their Taylor Swift or Ellie Goulding albums three years from now? No way, there will be more new stuff. Always more. Some will last a season, some a year, but then it will be replaced by something else.
With a streaming service you can listen to music that becomes a great temporary soundtrack for your life. I remember a few years ago, it was all about Katy Perry and Pink and Lykke Li on Pandora. Then there was that hilarious Selfie song. Then the Ting Tings and whatnot. When I hear one of those songs it brings back general memories of a time in my life, but there's no way I'd go out and buy those albums now.
Sure, sometimes I discover an artist on a streaming service, then I go buy their albums on iTunes, and I still have my vinyls and CDs. But for the most part, music is now like a landscape that goes by during a train ride. It's there for a while, then it's something else, and overall I find the experience more enjoyable than a 12-CD changer or a Winamp playlist.
When I saw that they were making an action movie called San Andreas, I was hoping it was based on "GTA San Andreas", but no, it's about the earthquake thing. How unfortunate. Would have been a terrific movie.
"tens of cents". Ha ha ha ha ha!!! Hilarious. Regardless of how cheap they are to make, does anyone have any doubt that, when these things reach the marketplace, the bare minimum one will cost is $20. More likely $50+.
The price difference is for the hotline where people can call to ask if there's gluten in it or to know if part of it was made in Israel. And the liability insurance. And the salary of a a has-been tv star that promotes it on daytime tv. You know - the cost of doing business with the public.
I don't see why you have a problem with this. There was a business, it had certain known obligations to employees, it defaulted on those obligations, failed, and the investors lost their stake.
There's nothing in the article (or anywhere in the news) that says that. All that is known is that they were sued by ex-employees, not why. So where exactly did you take that information that they defaulted on any obligation? Guesswork ain't facts.
That's like the Tina Fey / Sarah Palin thing. So many people now think that Sarah Palin did claim to see Russia from her kitchen window, it says lots about how people are misinformed.
God dammit, tard. Quit defending douchebaggery and read the fucking article! We aren't talking about a Kenny Rogers record collection. Severance is well defined with its own specific law. Those asshats ignored it plain and simple!
Please point out the exact part of said article that mentions that the lawsuit was related to severance pay. Guess what - you won't find it, because it's not there.
You don't know what the lawsuit was about, yet you pretend to know that the laws involved are well defined. Bravo.
Did you read the article? Nowhere does it say that the employees sued because they hadn't been paid.
What the article says is that the former employees sued the company and won - not why or how. Following that lawsuit, the company was ordered to pay the awarded amounts immediately, and this lead to the company going out of business.
THERE NO FUCKING MENTION OF EMPLOYEES NOT BEING PAID WAGES OR SEVERANCE PAY - for all we know, they could have sued the company because its name starts with the letter M or because Obama got re-elected in the USA. The parent is just one of many in this entire story that jumped to wrong conclusions and built idiotic theories on top of those, so yes, he is just like the moron I used to work with.
B.S. There are so many American businesses which claim to be 'hanging on by a thread' even though the owner drives around in an expensive car, owns several expensive houses, and has has a wad of cash 1 inch thick in his wallet. Tougher labor laws are needed in America. With tougher labor laws, maybe businesses will become more robust and won't whine that they are on the threshold of going out of business.
A.C. by design.
I don't think you understand how capitalism work. Basically, the people who put the capital to fund a business venture own it, and people who don't risk their own money but merely work on an hourly or weekly basis are paid wages. If the business doesn't succeed, the investors lose their stake in it, but that doesn't mean they have to sell their kidneys on the black market to finance it further. The company has to sustain itself; its entire purpose is to generate profit, not to provide employment opportunities to citizen.
Labor laws are there to ensure that wages are paid and that workers are treated fairly, but when it's all said and done, the risk taker in this situation is the owner, not the employee. In countries like France they lost track of this because for centuries they've been sucking up the resources of their colonies and this led them to develop a huge culture of entitlement. They will learn.
I don't think it was a grammar error. I think saying "where?" is a middle school teacher gimmick used to teach people not to use "there" instead of "their".
As for the Republicans/Democrats thing I tend to agree. Democrats did enslave people and fought back when Republicans tried to abolish slavery, and to this day they still try to enslave people by raising taxes and piling up more laws (like Roosevelt who jailed a dry cleaner because he was charging 35 cents instead of the federally-controlled price of 40 cents to press a pair of pants).
and..... why did they sue the company? it was because they were due severance by law and the company did not provide it. so yeah, it had everything to do with the severance package.
Please provide a quote from the article or from any other source that confirms your statement. Voices in your head don't count.
If they had been paid, I don't think they could have won a lawsuit asking to be paid.
You remind me of a guy I used to work with. Someone would ask: where is Tom? and this guy would reply: he's late because he has car troubles. But if you pushed further you always found out that he did not, in fact, have information about Tom having car troubles, it was just his best guess. He somehow couldn't see the difference between facts and guesswork. Quite annoying.
Had the company had compensated the employees according to law it would not have had to pay lawyers and probably court costs and may have survived.
It's not that simple. The "law" in this instance is very much subject to interpretation. It's like a divorce. There are parameters but who the fuck gets the kenny rogers record collection is not something that is clearly stated in the law, there are arguments to be heard and if the two parties can't get to a compromise a judge will decide. Doesn't mean that the losing party broke the law - there's always at least one losing party in every lawsuit.
No. The dot come bubble was all about public markets and demented IPOs and insane stock price. Now the game is different. In most of these startups you couldn't invest even if you wanted. Call your broker and tell him you want to buy shares of Dropbox, you'll see.
Well there's crowdfunding also but then you don't get equity, you basically prepay for a product you may never get.
Swapping debt assets seem stupid like the children's hot potato game where as long as you are not holding the potato when the bill is due you gain.
I don't know. Have you seen those savings circles in poor areas like Central America or Africa? Basically people pool a small amount of money each month and one member gets the whole pool each month. It may look like a zero sum game, but the people who get the big sum of money can invest in farming or cooking equipment, and the productivity of the whole group increases each month a lot more than if they just kept their small savings.
A dollar is not always just a dollar. It depends on the context.
The house of cards is different now. The bulk of the investment market is moving towards private equity, where things are less regulated and more difficult to game.
It's almost universally acknowledged that the GFC was caused by a LACK of regulation in the US mortgage market making it impossible for financial institutions to trust each others financial instruments ( ie: easier to game).
This reminds me of that joke about two guys driving downhill in a car with no brakes; one of them is not nervous at all so the other one asks him why he is so calm in such a dangerous situation. The first guy replies: it's ok, there's a stop sign at the bottom of the hill.
That's why people believe aliens build the pyramids.
I'm surprised that this hasn't made the list of common misconceptions on Wikipedia yet.
Of course it's people that built the pyramids. But the pyramid scheme itself was designed by aliens posing as gods. They came to Egypt for cheap labor and sure, they exploited people for a while, but then there was the Arab spring when people used Facebook and the Stargate to get rid of the corrupt alien leaders. People, get your facts straight!
I'd like to hear what the Slashdot economists think should be done about Greece.
Nothing at all. Greece is like Venezuela, but without the oil. There's nothing to be done until they decide to stop their social experiment. The world shouldn't subsidize that.
What's the real downside? Migrants? Western Europe is already experienced at stopping poor people on their borders, and it's not like Greece has a direct migration path. A Greek that wants to sneak into Europe has to cross the land of the vodka people, or try to swim to the south-east part of Italy. That's quite a convenient buffer, just like Mexico is a convenient buffer for the USA.
Europe managed to survive two world wars, plenty of civil wars, the plague, three Inquisitions, etc. I think they will survive the bankruptcy of a country that hasn't played a significant role in history since before the first edition of the bible.
Slashdot Mirror
I pay for my music because it's more cost-effective than wasting time fixing ID3 tags created by bittorrent people and their "Jim Van Morrison" or "John Lennon Camp" mp3s.
That's why IT jobs are moving to India.
Very easy, 1/5 the cost, no shitty attitudes, etc. etc.
Are you living in the past? IT jobs are no longer moving to India, now instead IT workers are imported.
This business model has many pros:
1) It's easier to schedule conference calls when you don't have to worry about Bangalore timezone
2) You can squeeze 5 of them into a "corporate condo" and make them pay the mortgage out of the shit salary you pay them to manage your Exchange server
3) You can get them to get your mocha at Starbucks, wait in line to get the new iPhone, or to receive your Amazon packages while you're fooling around with high-end prostitutes that you couldn't afford when you had to pay those expensive white sysadmins
Keep up the good fight, Zuckerberg!
Easy to say when you live in a small town. Try to live by that credo in NYC or Hong-Kong, where most people couldn't afford to buy a tiny flat even if they were to sell their organs on the black market.
If my biggest problem is choosing which pair of beats headphones to use, what difference is it how we label the problem?
Talk about one-percenter problems...
I just wish Dell, HP, or IBM didn't keep people buying their even more over priced crap.
Don't forget Gateway! Their laptops are a complete rip-off, especially when one could get a Macbook with comparable hardware for only 3x the price.
he was a shyster that built an empire off of slave labour, his karma came to get him for it too.
Is this how karma works? I thought you had to die first then you got rewarded or punished in your next life... Dang it, this could derail my plans of having a lifetime of selfish behavior paid for by a future me that I will never know.
Most of us, with some exceptions, only see a given show or movie once. That's not how most of us consume music.
Music is now disposable. Do you really think people will still listen to their Taylor Swift or Ellie Goulding albums three years from now? No way, there will be more new stuff. Always more. Some will last a season, some a year, but then it will be replaced by something else.
With a streaming service you can listen to music that becomes a great temporary soundtrack for your life. I remember a few years ago, it was all about Katy Perry and Pink and Lykke Li on Pandora. Then there was that hilarious Selfie song. Then the Ting Tings and whatnot. When I hear one of those songs it brings back general memories of a time in my life, but there's no way I'd go out and buy those albums now.
Sure, sometimes I discover an artist on a streaming service, then I go buy their albums on iTunes, and I still have my vinyls and CDs. But for the most part, music is now like a landscape that goes by during a train ride. It's there for a while, then it's something else, and overall I find the experience more enjoyable than a 12-CD changer or a Winamp playlist.
The company has decided instead to focus on three major parts of its business: search, communications, and digital content.
So that's what Yahoo does. I wondered what was their business besides unreliable email and annoying CEOs.
San Andreas
When I saw that they were making an action movie called San Andreas, I was hoping it was based on "GTA San Andreas", but no, it's about the earthquake thing. How unfortunate. Would have been a terrific movie.
"tens of cents". Ha ha ha ha ha!!! Hilarious. Regardless of how cheap they are to make, does anyone have any doubt that, when these things reach the marketplace, the bare minimum one will cost is $20. More likely $50+.
The price difference is for the hotline where people can call to ask if there's gluten in it or to know if part of it was made in Israel. And the liability insurance. And the salary of a a has-been tv star that promotes it on daytime tv. You know - the cost of doing business with the public.
The real "Streisand effect" is me getting nauseous when I hear "The way we were".
I don't see why you have a problem with this. There was a business, it had certain known obligations to employees, it defaulted on those obligations, failed, and the investors lost their stake.
There's nothing in the article (or anywhere in the news) that says that. All that is known is that they were sued by ex-employees, not why. So where exactly did you take that information that they defaulted on any obligation? Guesswork ain't facts.
That's like the Tina Fey / Sarah Palin thing. So many people now think that Sarah Palin did claim to see Russia from her kitchen window, it says lots about how people are misinformed.
God dammit, tard. Quit defending douchebaggery and read the fucking article! We aren't talking about a Kenny Rogers record collection. Severance is well defined with its own specific law. Those asshats ignored it plain and simple!
Please point out the exact part of said article that mentions that the lawsuit was related to severance pay. Guess what - you won't find it, because it's not there.
You don't know what the lawsuit was about, yet you pretend to know that the laws involved are well defined. Bravo.
Did you read the article? Nowhere does it say that the employees sued because they hadn't been paid.
What the article says is that the former employees sued the company and won - not why or how. Following that lawsuit, the company was ordered to pay the awarded amounts immediately, and this lead to the company going out of business.
THERE NO FUCKING MENTION OF EMPLOYEES NOT BEING PAID WAGES OR SEVERANCE PAY - for all we know, they could have sued the company because its name starts with the letter M or because Obama got re-elected in the USA. The parent is just one of many in this entire story that jumped to wrong conclusions and built idiotic theories on top of those, so yes, he is just like the moron I used to work with.
B.S. There are so many American businesses which claim to be 'hanging on by a thread' even though the owner drives around in an expensive car, owns several expensive houses, and has has a wad of cash 1 inch thick in his wallet. Tougher labor laws are needed in America. With tougher labor laws, maybe businesses will become more robust and won't whine that they are on the threshold of going out of business.
A.C. by design.
I don't think you understand how capitalism work. Basically, the people who put the capital to fund a business venture own it, and people who don't risk their own money but merely work on an hourly or weekly basis are paid wages. If the business doesn't succeed, the investors lose their stake in it, but that doesn't mean they have to sell their kidneys on the black market to finance it further. The company has to sustain itself; its entire purpose is to generate profit, not to provide employment opportunities to citizen.
Labor laws are there to ensure that wages are paid and that workers are treated fairly, but when it's all said and done, the risk taker in this situation is the owner, not the employee. In countries like France they lost track of this because for centuries they've been sucking up the resources of their colonies and this led them to develop a huge culture of entitlement. They will learn.
I don't think it was a grammar error. I think saying "where?" is a middle school teacher gimmick used to teach people not to use "there" instead of "their".
As for the Republicans/Democrats thing I tend to agree. Democrats did enslave people and fought back when Republicans tried to abolish slavery, and to this day they still try to enslave people by raising taxes and piling up more laws (like Roosevelt who jailed a dry cleaner because he was charging 35 cents instead of the federally-controlled price of 40 cents to press a pair of pants).
and ..... why did they sue the company? it was because they were due severance by law and the company did not provide it. so yeah, it had everything to do with the severance package.
Please provide a quote from the article or from any other source that confirms your statement. Voices in your head don't count.
If they had been paid, I don't think they could have won a lawsuit asking to be paid.
You remind me of a guy I used to work with. Someone would ask: where is Tom? and this guy would reply: he's late because he has car troubles. But if you pushed further you always found out that he did not, in fact, have information about Tom having car troubles, it was just his best guess. He somehow couldn't see the difference between facts and guesswork. Quite annoying.
Had the company had compensated the employees according to law it would not have had to pay lawyers and probably court costs and may have survived.
It's not that simple. The "law" in this instance is very much subject to interpretation. It's like a divorce. There are parameters but who the fuck gets the kenny rogers record collection is not something that is clearly stated in the law, there are arguments to be heard and if the two parties can't get to a compromise a judge will decide. Doesn't mean that the losing party broke the law - there's always at least one losing party in every lawsuit.
No. The dot come bubble was all about public markets and demented IPOs and insane stock price. Now the game is different. In most of these startups you couldn't invest even if you wanted. Call your broker and tell him you want to buy shares of Dropbox, you'll see.
Well there's crowdfunding also but then you don't get equity, you basically prepay for a product you may never get.
Swapping debt assets seem stupid like the children's hot potato game where as long as you are not holding the potato when the bill is due you gain.
I don't know. Have you seen those savings circles in poor areas like Central America or Africa? Basically people pool a small amount of money each month and one member gets the whole pool each month. It may look like a zero sum game, but the people who get the big sum of money can invest in farming or cooking equipment, and the productivity of the whole group increases each month a lot more than if they just kept their small savings.
A dollar is not always just a dollar. It depends on the context.
The matter is settled, then. Thanks for your valuable input!
The house of cards is different now. The bulk of the investment market is moving towards private equity, where things are less regulated and more difficult to game.
It's almost universally acknowledged that the GFC was caused by a LACK of regulation in the US mortgage market making it impossible for financial institutions to trust each others financial instruments ( ie: easier to game).
This reminds me of that joke about two guys driving downhill in a car with no brakes; one of them is not nervous at all so the other one asks him why he is so calm in such a dangerous situation. The first guy replies: it's ok, there's a stop sign at the bottom of the hill.
That's why people believe aliens build the pyramids.
I'm surprised that this hasn't made the list of common misconceptions on Wikipedia yet.
Of course it's people that built the pyramids. But the pyramid scheme itself was designed by aliens posing as gods. They came to Egypt for cheap labor and sure, they exploited people for a while, but then there was the Arab spring when people used Facebook and the Stargate to get rid of the corrupt alien leaders. People, get your facts straight!
I'd like to hear what the Slashdot economists think should be done about Greece.
Nothing at all. Greece is like Venezuela, but without the oil. There's nothing to be done until they decide to stop their social experiment. The world shouldn't subsidize that.
What's the real downside? Migrants? Western Europe is already experienced at stopping poor people on their borders, and it's not like Greece has a direct migration path. A Greek that wants to sneak into Europe has to cross the land of the vodka people, or try to swim to the south-east part of Italy. That's quite a convenient buffer, just like Mexico is a convenient buffer for the USA.
Europe managed to survive two world wars, plenty of civil wars, the plague, three Inquisitions, etc. I think they will survive the bankruptcy of a country that hasn't played a significant role in history since before the first edition of the bible.