Probably the same kind of person that thought to try merchandising a simple mobile game with some cartoon birds and pigs. I wonder how much money Angry Birds merchandise has made. Sometimes big cultural phenomenon pay off, other times not.
I'm fine with having an agency composed of specialists who focus on a particular area. However, they don't get to make rules, merely provide suggestions and guidelines to Congress. You know, the elected officials who have the constitutional authority to make laws. If you don't like that, or think there's a better way, the Constitution has provisions for how it can be amended.
Also, you should start to question why you're so deeply opposed to bureaucracy.
Are you going to question why you think it's such a good thing? Did someone, somewhere invest a lot of time and effort into eliciting this responses from you, or are you exempt from having your own bullshit covered lens directed at you?
I'm not even sure what you're trying to convey with your post, since it's that idiotic. The clerk at the DMV doesn't make any laws or rules related to driving, nor are they involved in law enforcement (as is the cop) which is another thing itself.
I'm all for cutting down on pollution, but is the headline actually correct? The summary seems to imply that it isn't:
President Trump's new proposal does not repeal the regulation, known as the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, but it would lay the groundwork for doing so by weakening a key legal justification for the measure. The long-term impact would be significant: It would weaken the ability of the E.P.A. to impose new regulations in the future by adjusting the way the agency measures the benefits of curbing pollutants, giving less weight to the potential health gains.
Either the headline is incorrect or the summary is wrong. Either way, once again I'll simply suggest that this is a good reason why bureaucracy shouldn't govern and that Congress should ultimately put forth all laws. Anything less is ultimately too susceptible to change and puts far too much power into the hands of the administration. We did away with kings for a reason.
I don't disagree with most of what you posted, just the bit that "Amazon was an upstart who came late enough that the "DRM doesn't help" mantra was starting to sink in for the execs" since I don't think the execs ever really understood that. They were faced with a single company that supplied almost the entirety of their digital product and could therefor dictate terms. The only thing they could do to try to break the hold that Apple had was to let Amazon sell DRM-free MP3s.
If they hadn't have done that, maybe it would have hastened streaming services, but who knows for sure. I don't use streaming services for exactly the reason you point out. I'd rather own something outright than jump through the hoops that other accommodations might entail.
15% already makes it seem as though they were getting a discount. Unless Apple changed, I recall the old cut used to be around 30% which was considered pretty standard across platforms like Apple's store. Sure they could go down to 5%, but that just means that everyone else is going to want that same 5% as well and right now it may be better for Apple to lose Netflix entirely than offer even lower rates. If enough companies start to jump ship, I do expect Apple to lower their rate though.
I don't think it ever made sense for Netflix to use iTunes billing to start with though. They already are capable of handling billing for many of their other customers and are large enough where they can achieve effective cost scaling while doing this so Netflix isn't saying anything. I also doubt that not being able to sign-up through the app is going to turn away many (if any) potential customers.
Do you have ANY numbers to back up your ridiculous claims?
He never does. He just makes outrageous claims that read well to people looking to buy into some outrage he's peddling. There was one some months ago where he was complaining about how much money Jeff Bezos made each day and if you bothered to do the math, it came out to some impossible yearly figure where Amazon would need to more than double value each year for it to work out. Either the figures were completely pulled from his ass, or he grabbed something he'd read and tried to extrapolate in a completely inappropriate way.
If you stop to think about the idea that he's proposing, you'd realize it's pretty stupid. Why spend a lot of money to acquire something in order to ruin it to squeeze a little bit of profit out of it. You're better off just not spending your money on it to begin with, never mind that it makes everyone else pretty hesitant to do business with you in the future and the next buyout would be vastly more expensive simply because the sellers won't trust you. If you actually look at Eddie Lampert's net worth it's estimated to have gone down considerably since he took over Sears, so it's pretty hard to say that even if he's some nefarious vulture capitalist that he's had any success. In 2006 when Sears and K-Mart merged, he was estimated to be worth $4 billion. As of earlier this year, he was only estimated to be worth $1.6 billion. The same Forbes article indicates he was worth twice as much in 2013 when he took over as chairman of Sears.
I think we can trust him at least as far as we can shoot him out of a cannon. I'm not exactly sure how far that is, but I'm certainly willing to find out.
The music executives needed to ditch DRM (and did so with Amazon) because to their dismay, Apple had become pretty much the only supplier of digital music (there were others, but Apple had some ridiculous amount of the overall share) that it was Apple that started dictating terms to the labels. Amazon using yet another DRM scheme would've been a non-starter since the iPod wouldn't support Amazon's DRM and Apple wouldn't license their DRM scheme.
If Apple hadn't gained such a dominant market position, we'd still have all kinds of small petty DRM kingdoms in music. Maybe that would have hastened the move to streaming since those aren't tied to any particular device or manufacturer unless they want to be.
How is the U.S. any different in that regard then? We have the same types of social programs (social security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc.) as well as government organizations that regulate businesses or markets (FTC, FCC, etc.) and many other similar qualities. You might argue that the various implementations and institutions are better/worse for some metric, but to argue that the U.S. is somehow an unfettered free market libertarian dream state while Europe is a glorious bastion of socialistic thinking is ignorant.
I have a feeling it isn’t that simple. The people at Sears had experience and expertise in running stores and managing the logistics of such an enterprise. Whether they were the best people at that job or not, I would no more expect them to succeed at transitioning to an online retailer than I would expect an ENT to start performing heart surgeries. You might do it in a pinch if absolutely necessary, but you’d rather find the correct specialist.
The U.S. is not necessarily more capitalist than Europe. If you look at commonrankingsof economic freedom, you will find that there are many European countries with as much or more economic freedom than the United States.
There is this pervasive and pernicious notion that the United States is somehow the bastion of free market capitalism and that Europe (particularly the Scandinavian countries) are immensely socialist. If you start looking at very specific parts of each, you can find plenty of examples where there is a sharp contrast, but taken as a whole, they are very similar.
It doesn't look like there's any real change if you're already using lambda expressions. Java 10 hasn't been out long enough for most people to absorb those changes (which is what this modification to lambdas is about) so you can probably just continue on as usual.
Because you don't see any young college kids advocating for feudalism. Almost any form of economic policy ends up falling into the Marxist or free market buckets or exists as a blend of those ideas.
France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Canada are all capitalist countries. I'm not really sure what point you were trying to make.
I do agree with you that we should just stay the fuck out of other countries business though. If they want to try to build their own little socialist utopias, let them.
Perhaps the government should quit propping up failed companies to the point that they become too big to fail. In the case of GM or other U.S. automakers, I'm not particularly worried since people will still need cars. You won't disrupt society so much as a few thousand workers, some of whom will get jobs at Tesla, Honda, or whatever company needs to increase their production to pick up for the company exiting that market.
I recall reading a study that looked at flowery language in quarterly reports. The authors found that the more flowery language that was used, the more the company was trying to pull the wool over the eyes of investors to hide looming issues. I would suggest using this to plan your investment strategies.
Quit subsidizing water and people will use it more consciously. When you remove the real cost of something from people, they act more wastefully than they otherwise would if they bore the cost of their actions. Yes, that means you can't grow almonds in California or Pecans in Arizona, or that they'll be a lot more expensive, but that's what needs to happen.
If the climate and soil in those areas results in better crop yields, it may be far more efficient to divert water to those locations. If existing pipelines can be used, that already saves a lot on the upfront costs. If they can find another state willing to sell them excess water, let them work out a fair amount and rate.
If the sales weren't abysmal, there wouldn't be a sale. I don't see Rockstar, Nintendo, or Activision discounting their game as much as 42% less than two weeks after it was released. It's on sale because it's a complete cash grab on the part of Bethesda and they can't get people to keep sinking money into in-game purchases if no one buys the base game to begin with.
Hopefully consumers continue to reject this crap so that publishers go back to making a decent product.
GOG has no DRM at all, and Steam has sales all the damn time. They've got one going on right now and there's a whole page of games that are pretty heavily marked down.
Game stores aren't going to affect the prices you see though, since they don't set the prices themselves and are only dealing with digital merchandise so there's never really old inventory to clear out. At best they'll forestall price increases, which has happened to some degree since once you factor in inflation, the Playstation games you bought for $50 back in the day would cost much more than $60 now. Part of the reason that costs to consumers aren't going up is because the developers can get a much larger cut since these stores have to offer better rates than the existing competition to attract business.
The only way to get cheaper games is for increased competition among the various titles that are available. Both the new Fallout and Battlefield games are being heavily discounted because there are a lot of other options available and they couldn't hit their sales targets.
I'm not really sure what your issue with this actually is. If you're trying to complain that the company cafeteria jobs harm the food service jobs outside of the company, I'm not sure how that works. If the company just moved in and brought all of those employees, the extra mouths to feed weren't there previously and unless the company captures 100% of employee meals, the outside providers get some added business. Even if the company does capture 100% of employee meals, they still need to hire additional food service job positions to supply all of those meals, which does create some additional low skill positions.
Now, unless the company set up shop in a wheat field, abandoned lot, or something similar they probably replaced some people who were previously patronizing local food providers, so there is a chance for them to see decreased business. However, in order to provide food services (whether in a cafeteria, or other form) the company has to hire people to fill those positions. If someone previously working at Lou's Diner moves over to the kitchen at Mega Corp. does anything really change from their perspective? They might even see a pay bump if Mega Corp. wants to staff the positions quickly.
Also, if the jobs are closer to where the workers are, how is that a bad thing either. That means less driving (and the traffic and pollution that accompany it) and doesn't necessarily mean that local business has to suffer either. I've seen a few companies that have local restaurants do catering once in a while. Even with all of that, there's nothing that prevents employees from going out for lunch either. This overwrought concern just comes across as you looking for some way to construe this a problem when there isn't one there.
I'm not sure that it's serious so much as a troll post. Anyone who felt that strongly about a headphone port wouldn't have purchased a phone without one. Judging by the amount of shit it's already stirring up, I'd say it's a pretty successful troll at that.
There's a part of the tech press (or perhaps just the press in general) that is merely content to complain about anything as clickbait sees just as much (if not more) consumption than anything requiring significant journalistic undertaking while consuming far less effort to produce. You can almost rest assured that if Apple had not included a cafeteria (or other form of food service) that the same writers would be complaining about the added traffic or how the tech employees are overcrowding the local eateries and pushing locals out.
Occasionally you can even find articles from one of those perpetuate whiners that are at complete odds with each other and argue the opposite sides of some problem. It's almost as though they start with the conclusion and then fill in the remaining bits of their articles.
Slashdot Mirror
1) Yes, they have the internet there.
2) You don't have to wear them, but you probably should.
3) Yes, as of earlier this year.
Probably the same kind of person that thought to try merchandising a simple mobile game with some cartoon birds and pigs. I wonder how much money Angry Birds merchandise has made. Sometimes big cultural phenomenon pay off, other times not.
Also, you should start to question why you're so deeply opposed to bureaucracy.
Are you going to question why you think it's such a good thing? Did someone, somewhere invest a lot of time and effort into eliciting this responses from you, or are you exempt from having your own bullshit covered lens directed at you?
I'm not even sure what you're trying to convey with your post, since it's that idiotic. The clerk at the DMV doesn't make any laws or rules related to driving, nor are they involved in law enforcement (as is the cop) which is another thing itself.
President Trump's new proposal does not repeal the regulation, known as the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, but it would lay the groundwork for doing so by weakening a key legal justification for the measure. The long-term impact would be significant: It would weaken the ability of the E.P.A. to impose new regulations in the future by adjusting the way the agency measures the benefits of curbing pollutants, giving less weight to the potential health gains.
Either the headline is incorrect or the summary is wrong. Either way, once again I'll simply suggest that this is a good reason why bureaucracy shouldn't govern and that Congress should ultimately put forth all laws. Anything less is ultimately too susceptible to change and puts far too much power into the hands of the administration. We did away with kings for a reason.
I don't disagree with most of what you posted, just the bit that "Amazon was an upstart who came late enough that the "DRM doesn't help" mantra was starting to sink in for the execs" since I don't think the execs ever really understood that. They were faced with a single company that supplied almost the entirety of their digital product and could therefor dictate terms. The only thing they could do to try to break the hold that Apple had was to let Amazon sell DRM-free MP3s.
If they hadn't have done that, maybe it would have hastened streaming services, but who knows for sure. I don't use streaming services for exactly the reason you point out. I'd rather own something outright than jump through the hoops that other accommodations might entail.
At least they killed it early before people started using and liking it.
15% already makes it seem as though they were getting a discount. Unless Apple changed, I recall the old cut used to be around 30% which was considered pretty standard across platforms like Apple's store. Sure they could go down to 5%, but that just means that everyone else is going to want that same 5% as well and right now it may be better for Apple to lose Netflix entirely than offer even lower rates. If enough companies start to jump ship, I do expect Apple to lower their rate though.
I don't think it ever made sense for Netflix to use iTunes billing to start with though. They already are capable of handling billing for many of their other customers and are large enough where they can achieve effective cost scaling while doing this so Netflix isn't saying anything. I also doubt that not being able to sign-up through the app is going to turn away many (if any) potential customers.
Do you have ANY numbers to back up your ridiculous claims?
He never does. He just makes outrageous claims that read well to people looking to buy into some outrage he's peddling. There was one some months ago where he was complaining about how much money Jeff Bezos made each day and if you bothered to do the math, it came out to some impossible yearly figure where Amazon would need to more than double value each year for it to work out. Either the figures were completely pulled from his ass, or he grabbed something he'd read and tried to extrapolate in a completely inappropriate way.
If you stop to think about the idea that he's proposing, you'd realize it's pretty stupid. Why spend a lot of money to acquire something in order to ruin it to squeeze a little bit of profit out of it. You're better off just not spending your money on it to begin with, never mind that it makes everyone else pretty hesitant to do business with you in the future and the next buyout would be vastly more expensive simply because the sellers won't trust you. If you actually look at Eddie Lampert's net worth it's estimated to have gone down considerably since he took over Sears, so it's pretty hard to say that even if he's some nefarious vulture capitalist that he's had any success. In 2006 when Sears and K-Mart merged, he was estimated to be worth $4 billion. As of earlier this year, he was only estimated to be worth $1.6 billion. The same Forbes article indicates he was worth twice as much in 2013 when he took over as chairman of Sears.
I think we can trust him at least as far as we can shoot him out of a cannon. I'm not exactly sure how far that is, but I'm certainly willing to find out.
The music executives needed to ditch DRM (and did so with Amazon) because to their dismay, Apple had become pretty much the only supplier of digital music (there were others, but Apple had some ridiculous amount of the overall share) that it was Apple that started dictating terms to the labels. Amazon using yet another DRM scheme would've been a non-starter since the iPod wouldn't support Amazon's DRM and Apple wouldn't license their DRM scheme.
If Apple hadn't gained such a dominant market position, we'd still have all kinds of small petty DRM kingdoms in music. Maybe that would have hastened the move to streaming since those aren't tied to any particular device or manufacturer unless they want to be.
How is the U.S. any different in that regard then? We have the same types of social programs (social security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc.) as well as government organizations that regulate businesses or markets (FTC, FCC, etc.) and many other similar qualities. You might argue that the various implementations and institutions are better/worse for some metric, but to argue that the U.S. is somehow an unfettered free market libertarian dream state while Europe is a glorious bastion of socialistic thinking is ignorant.
I have a feeling it isn’t that simple. The people at Sears had experience and expertise in running stores and managing the logistics of such an enterprise. Whether they were the best people at that job or not, I would no more expect them to succeed at transitioning to an online retailer than I would expect an ENT to start performing heart surgeries. You might do it in a pinch if absolutely necessary, but you’d rather find the correct specialist.
The U.S. is not necessarily more capitalist than Europe. If you look at common rankings of economic freedom, you will find that there are many European countries with as much or more economic freedom than the United States.
There is this pervasive and pernicious notion that the United States is somehow the bastion of free market capitalism and that Europe (particularly the Scandinavian countries) are immensely socialist. If you start looking at very specific parts of each, you can find plenty of examples where there is a sharp contrast, but taken as a whole, they are very similar.
It doesn't look like there's any real change if you're already using lambda expressions. Java 10 hasn't been out long enough for most people to absorb those changes (which is what this modification to lambdas is about) so you can probably just continue on as usual.
Because you don't see any young college kids advocating for feudalism. Almost any form of economic policy ends up falling into the Marxist or free market buckets or exists as a blend of those ideas.
France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Canada are all capitalist countries. I'm not really sure what point you were trying to make.
I do agree with you that we should just stay the fuck out of other countries business though. If they want to try to build their own little socialist utopias, let them.
Perhaps the government should quit propping up failed companies to the point that they become too big to fail. In the case of GM or other U.S. automakers, I'm not particularly worried since people will still need cars. You won't disrupt society so much as a few thousand workers, some of whom will get jobs at Tesla, Honda, or whatever company needs to increase their production to pick up for the company exiting that market.
I recall reading a study that looked at flowery language in quarterly reports. The authors found that the more flowery language that was used, the more the company was trying to pull the wool over the eyes of investors to hide looming issues. I would suggest using this to plan your investment strategies.
Quit subsidizing water and people will use it more consciously. When you remove the real cost of something from people, they act more wastefully than they otherwise would if they bore the cost of their actions. Yes, that means you can't grow almonds in California or Pecans in Arizona, or that they'll be a lot more expensive, but that's what needs to happen.
If the climate and soil in those areas results in better crop yields, it may be far more efficient to divert water to those locations. If existing pipelines can be used, that already saves a lot on the upfront costs. If they can find another state willing to sell them excess water, let them work out a fair amount and rate.
If the sales weren't abysmal, there wouldn't be a sale. I don't see Rockstar, Nintendo, or Activision discounting their game as much as 42% less than two weeks after it was released. It's on sale because it's a complete cash grab on the part of Bethesda and they can't get people to keep sinking money into in-game purchases if no one buys the base game to begin with.
Hopefully consumers continue to reject this crap so that publishers go back to making a decent product.
GOG has no DRM at all, and Steam has sales all the damn time. They've got one going on right now and there's a whole page of games that are pretty heavily marked down.
Game stores aren't going to affect the prices you see though, since they don't set the prices themselves and are only dealing with digital merchandise so there's never really old inventory to clear out. At best they'll forestall price increases, which has happened to some degree since once you factor in inflation, the Playstation games you bought for $50 back in the day would cost much more than $60 now. Part of the reason that costs to consumers aren't going up is because the developers can get a much larger cut since these stores have to offer better rates than the existing competition to attract business.
The only way to get cheaper games is for increased competition among the various titles that are available. Both the new Fallout and Battlefield games are being heavily discounted because there are a lot of other options available and they couldn't hit their sales targets.
I'm not really sure what your issue with this actually is. If you're trying to complain that the company cafeteria jobs harm the food service jobs outside of the company, I'm not sure how that works. If the company just moved in and brought all of those employees, the extra mouths to feed weren't there previously and unless the company captures 100% of employee meals, the outside providers get some added business. Even if the company does capture 100% of employee meals, they still need to hire additional food service job positions to supply all of those meals, which does create some additional low skill positions.
Now, unless the company set up shop in a wheat field, abandoned lot, or something similar they probably replaced some people who were previously patronizing local food providers, so there is a chance for them to see decreased business. However, in order to provide food services (whether in a cafeteria, or other form) the company has to hire people to fill those positions. If someone previously working at Lou's Diner moves over to the kitchen at Mega Corp. does anything really change from their perspective? They might even see a pay bump if Mega Corp. wants to staff the positions quickly.
Also, if the jobs are closer to where the workers are, how is that a bad thing either. That means less driving (and the traffic and pollution that accompany it) and doesn't necessarily mean that local business has to suffer either. I've seen a few companies that have local restaurants do catering once in a while. Even with all of that, there's nothing that prevents employees from going out for lunch either. This overwrought concern just comes across as you looking for some way to construe this a problem when there isn't one there.
I'm not sure that it's serious so much as a troll post. Anyone who felt that strongly about a headphone port wouldn't have purchased a phone without one. Judging by the amount of shit it's already stirring up, I'd say it's a pretty successful troll at that.
There's a part of the tech press (or perhaps just the press in general) that is merely content to complain about anything as clickbait sees just as much (if not more) consumption than anything requiring significant journalistic undertaking while consuming far less effort to produce. You can almost rest assured that if Apple had not included a cafeteria (or other form of food service) that the same writers would be complaining about the added traffic or how the tech employees are overcrowding the local eateries and pushing locals out.
Occasionally you can even find articles from one of those perpetuate whiners that are at complete odds with each other and argue the opposite sides of some problem. It's almost as though they start with the conclusion and then fill in the remaining bits of their articles.