the wording is specifically designed to make me think it's something other than a fee.
In your previous post, you specifically quoted it as "Regulatory Compliance Fee" so I'm not sure how you're being lead to believe that it's anything other than a fee. Neither does it change that it is a cost due to some law or other form of regulation with which the company is legally obligated to comply. You could certainly petition for those specific regulations to be changed, with no change to the corporate tax rates.
Given that said line item only exists due to the company being required to comply with regulations, it would seem to me that it would cease to exist if the absence of those regulations, unless you believe that they'd continue charging you a "Regulatory Compliance Fee" in the absence of any regulations with which they need comply.
A single lump sum isn't trying to trick me into a public policy that negatively impacts my life and the public commons.
I think you've done a good enough job of tricking yourself into all manner of things that negatively impact your life, but that's your own business.
How about we compromise and you can have your lump sum and throw away all of the following pages that break down the costs for you, and I or anyone else who cares about them can read through them to our heart's content.
Does it really matter whether it's a direct $X tax or fee imposed by the government or merely the internal costs of dealing with some policy (e.g., data retention) that is government law as long as the amount is truthful? If the company is ineptly managed, I still end up paying more. If I care enough about it, I can compare the rate to another provider and see if they have lower fees.
I get that at some point you have to stop breaking it down as I don't care that $0.000001 of those administrative costs were to cover paper clips or that $0.00003 of the advertising budget went to a billboard in a little league ball park, but I don't want "total: $85.73" to be the only line on the bill either.
Ultimately, consumers are only going to be sensitive to the total cost, regardless of how it is broken down, but cost of business increases due to regulations are going to hit every company and are inescapable in that the cost is passed on to consumers. If it turned out that regulations were 50% of the total cost of doing business, you might be rather curious as to whether or not they were really necessary or what value these regulations were providing. In the case of taxi services, those costs seemed to be relatively high and people were rather remiss to pay them, which is why companies like Uber and Lyft have become so popular.
I've heard this particular trick mentioned before, but one would assume that the companies would be somewhat wise to it. At least if enough people took advantage of it, though I've not actually spoken with anyone who's done it, so it may be too underutilized for the carriers to figure out how to get around it.
Here's the full text of the relevant section for anyone who doesn't want to click through:
We may change any terms, conditions, rates, fees, expenses, or charges regarding your Services at any time. We will provide you with notice of material changes (other than changes to governmental fees, proportional charges for governmental mandates, roaming rates or administrative charges) either in your monthly bill or separately. You understand and agree that State and Federal Universal Service Fees and other governmentally imposed fees, whether or not assessed directly upon you, may be increased based upon the government's or our calculations.
IF WE INCREASE THE PRICE OF ANY OF THE SERVICES TO WHICH YOU SUBSCRIBE, BEYOND THE LIMITS SET FORTH IN YOUR CUSTOMER SERVICE SUMMARY, OR IF WE MATERIALLY DECREASE THE GEOGRAPHICAL AREA IN WHICH YOUR AIRTIME RATE APPLIES (OTHER THAN A TEMPORARY DECREASE FOR REPAIRS OR MAINTENANCE), WE'LL DISCLOSE THE CHANGE AT LEAST ONE BILLING CYCLE IN ADVANCE (EITHER THROUGH A NOTICE WITH YOUR BILL, A TEXT MESSAGE TO YOUR DEVICE, OR OTHERWISE), AND YOU MAY TERMINATE THIS AGREEMENT WITHOUT PAYING AN EARLY TERMINATION FEE OR RETURNING OR PAYING FOR ANY PROMOTIONAL ITEMS, PROVIDED YOUR NOTICE OF TERMINATION IS DELIVERED TO US WITHIN THIRTY (30) DAYS AFTER THE FIRST BILL REFLECTING THE CHANGE.
If you lose your eligibility for a particular rate plan, we may change your rate plan to one for which you qualify.
It seems like there may be some lawyerly (read weasel) words in there that could get them out of this. They may have some wiggle room around the "limits set forth in your customer service summary" but I'm not an AT&T customer, so I'm not familiar with exactly how they operate.
What's wrong with making various costs individual line items? I'd rather that companies did it with everything down to the CEO's stripper and cocaine party expenses. Government regulations aren't free and your wireless carrier is going to pass any costs on to you regardless of whether they're from duly enacted laws or poor business decisions made by the company. At least you can see what the cost of those regulations are and if you don't feel as though you're getting your money's worth, petition your representatives in government for changes to those regulations.
You're paying the full bill either way. Would you really be happier if it were just a single lump sum with no additional information? Ignorance may be bliss, but it isn't particularly useful.
It's open source. If they really don't like it, they can always fork it. I will admit it's a brilliant idea on the part of the Linux Foundation to get more Platinum members and more money.
Presumably it's Cannon Lake / Whiskey Lake. Cannon Lake was the line using the 10 nm process that's been delayed and Whiskey Lake is the codename for the new generation that will be made on the (further) refined 14 nm process. I don't expect much deviation from the 8000-series (Coffee Lake) in terms of what Intel will offer.
The reason that TFA can't state which processor is being delayed is because Intel has announced any models for Whiskey Lake yet. Cannon Lake has one measly i3 that's being dumped on the Chinese market, and I wouldn't be surprised if Cannon Lake ends up getting scrapped entirely at some point and that they move right on to Ice Lake (the next 10 nm architecture) or whatever comes after that if the 10 nm is really screwed.
Put the alarm in a sealed box and add an item that is glowing/smoking (e.g. a cigarette will do). Within a minute or two, the alarm should sound.
That is how I tested my alarms to see if my previous testing had rendered them nonfunctional before mounting them.
I can understand wanting more of your favorite characters and to see the story go on just a little bit further. I've read plenty of books or watched many films where I wished for just one more chapter or another scene. However, in looking back across all of the times where that wish came true, I never found the follow up stories to be as good as whatever new story managed to grab my attention next and make me want to see more of that. What made the initial story so good was its completeness, which somewhat precludes the follow up from continuing that story in the same satisfying way.
There might be some sense is making those prequels and sequels if Lucas had planned out all of them from the beginning and the original trilogy was part of a larger narrative arc, but that wasn't the case. It wasn't intentionally built in such a way as to fit well within that larger story and so everything built up around it feels shallow and hollow by comparison.
When you've got an entire universe where plenty of stuff has happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away I think it would have been better to tell an entirely new and different story within that universe largely disconnected from the original trilogy. Part of the problem with the prequel trilogy and the sequel trilogy is that they're too beholden to a story created in the original trilogy that didn't need to imagine what exactly had occurred before or what would happen after it ended.
When writing the original Star Wars do you suppose Lucas had any real idea what the Clone Wars were other than something that sounded cool and to establish a relationship between Ben and Luke's father? Do you suppose when everyone was celebrating on Endor (or it's moon if you want to be that pedantic) that Lucas had given any thought as to the ramifications of what had just occurred to the political situation in the galaxy and what it might mean going forward? Of course he didn't, because those things were unimportant to the story being told.
However, if some time later you decide to make sequels or prequels to that story, you're beholden to offhand remarks or comments that weren't well fleshed out because you didn't sit down to write or plan out those in advance of your initial story. Tell new stories in that universe that have nothing to do with the characters or events in the original and you might be able to get something narratively satisfying. You can still drop a few references in as subtle winks to the audience if you want, but you won't be so restricted.
Look at Tolkien's work for an example of stories spanning ages and only being connected by tiny threads. You can certainly find them between the Silmarillion and Lord of the Rings, but they're largely unconcerned with one and other and enjoyment of one doesn't depend on having read the other. I suspect that this is the same reason that the Hobbit movies weren't good (apart from trying to make them tonally something that the story wasn't) as they tried to tie it to Lord of the Rings more than it needed to be.
There probably are several new medicines that will cure or alleviate symptoms for all manner of things developed each month. Sometimes the news is a bit premature as the drug hasn't even been tried in humans yet. Once further testing is done some of these are found to cause all manner of nasty side effects, some worse than what they cure. Sometimes the FDA approves it anyhow if the side effects don't appear to be life threatening, even as off-putting as they may be.
I'm not sure I necessarily agree with you on your points. Hollywood is a good example of an early 20th century industry that sprung up around avoiding patents. You could point to Jobs and Apple taking from Xerox PARC (though they weren't the innovators of many of their ideas either) as well. In both cases those groups or companies certainly enriched themselves, but at the expense of the people who did most of the original leg work and innovation.
My argument isn't that this will result in a loss of wealth, productivity, etc., merely that it will shift where the wealth is realized. You no longer reward the person who is best able to develop a new idea, but the person who is best able to execute on an idea. There were surely always be new ideas (if only because someone is good at coming up with them, but terrible at executing on them and doesn't mind someone else doing so if it means getting a concrete product for themselves) but the economic pressure will drive most innovation towards being able to execute on existing or new ideas at less expense.
I'd even buy the argument that this is preferable for those who are the least well off as it naturally means a reduction in their costs. I just don't know what it necessarily means for the pace of innovation in other sectors (especially those where once the idea exists it's trivial to understand and copy) and what that means for humanity in the long term. It's perhaps better for us to do that, but I can't say that for a certainty, hence my caution. It took thousands of years to arrive at the current social order and while there's no doubt that in another thousand years it will have improved more, I'm hesitant to go around tearing it up on supposition without some trials or empirical evidence first.
As I said, I don't think that a lack of patents necessarily changes the overall amount of innovation, merely what form that innovation takes. If you can make a new pill, there's incentive to do so as patents ensure that you can attempt to recoup investment from it. A lack of patents means that it's rather pointless to invest millions developing the pill when anyone can reproduce it as soon as they learn what's in the pill and how to make it. Maybe you could try to prevent this by only administering it to people who come to your facility and stay in it, but that's cumbersome. Instead, there will be a great pressure to find innovations in making existing pills for less money. If you're a business that can make anything you want, then your ability to profit is only constrained by your own costs relative to those of your competitors.
This isn't necessarily worse, just different. Although I also suspect that it may have problems in the long run as it could limit the ability for new competitors to emerge. We can already easily observe that success breeds success (i.e., once you've got a bit of capital, it's a lot easier to get a bit more and perpetuate the cycle further), and I'm worried that a lack of patents would lead to runaway success on the manufacturing side that creates an oligopoly that survives beyond the lifetime of a particular industry. For example, suppose someone manages to develop some kind of teleportation technology. This destroys the automotive industry just as they once destroyed the horse and buggy industry.
I understand your point that any government system invariably invites some form of corruption in order to attempt to control it and I won't dispute that's where we find the patent system now. Once again though, I don't think it's a good idea to throw the baby out with the bathwater when we haven't even attempted to fix the dysfunction in the system. If after trying that to no practical avail, then sure, why not. But let's try to fix it first.
It's not just a matter of 6% state sales tax + 2% municipal, but all manner of strange rules and regulations regarding which products are taxable and which are exempt from taxes as well as trying to keep abreast of changes, additions, and eliminations of these rules. Joe's corner store can do it, because Joe's corner store is only located in Exampleville U.S. is only subject to tax laws for one particular state, county, and city. Amazon would need to know them all.
Amazon not only needs to know what all of those tax laws are, but how they map onto the different products that they sell. What might be considered a food item exempt from sales tax in one state may not qualify as a food item exempt from tax in another state, or may be a specific type item with a tax based on quantity instead of price. And it's not just Amazon that needs to figure all of this out, but every retailer. At least until someone can figure out how to offer a service to handle this for retailers so that they're all not duplicating massive amounts of work.
I'm not opposed to instate tax collection on interstate commerce for the reasons I mentioned before, but if we're going to go down that road, we need to have a system in place (and in place before we go down this road) that makes it easy for businesses to deal with it that doesn't unfairly punish small businesses or make it disproportionately difficult for them to engage in business. Doing so effectively eliminates the ability for many entrepreneurial endeavors and consigns people to working for someone else.
I believe that in the recent supreme court ruling, they point to a necessity to have limitations put in place specifically for small businesses such that they don't need to collect tax as long as they are only doing a small amount of business. This is precisely for the reasons that you point out.
However, this has at least two major problems. The first is that if you set this as a specific dollar amount, it will not track with inflation and given enough time it will result in a box of paper clips requiring taxes being collected. Of course the law can always be amended in the future to adjust the limits, but these eventually soak up a good deal of Congress's time (perhaps not a bad thing) as they're constantly arguing over and adjusting the thresholds for these types of laws.
The second is that much like many forms of welfare payments where a person stops receiving the payment if they get a job and start supporting themselves. There's not a lot of incentive to get a job that will pay $400 a month if it means your welfare check will be $400 less. Similarly, you incentivize a business to stop doing business when it approaches that threshold as long as the cost to do more business suddenly becomes prohibitively expensive past a certain point.
I'm not convinced that this is an unsolvable problem though. Imagine a system that performed all of the tax calculations for a business (based on where the customers lives or is shipping products to) and itemizes everything nicely for them. Every month, they send one check to the federal government (or whomever is running the service) that can aggregate the payments from every other business and send a single payment to the various state, county, and city governments that have laws concerning sales taxes. It's not just a pain for hundreds of thousands of businesses to process dozens of different payments to various states, but also for states to have to accept hundreds of thousands of very small payments for which the accounting of and the transaction fees associated with will quickly destroy.
Even more so if you start needing to account for how different states and municipalities apply taxes differently. One state might apply sales tax to clothing, but not food items and another the exact opposite. Some cities may levy additional sales taxes in general or on specific products to fund the local government or some particular project. Throw in occasional tax moratoriums that crop up from time to time and it's an absolute mess.
If we're going to start asking for out of state businesses to collect taxes, the government needs to construct a system to help facilitate this as the burden it places on any business, even large ones is unnecessarily prohibitive. It's impractical, or perhaps even impossible, for someone like Amazon to get it right. At present the onus to report and pay this tax (assuming the state has a use tax, which most do in some form or another) is on the individuals who are making out of state purchases, but this is as much of a pain and half of the reason someone likely purchased online was lower cost, in part due to taxes.
Imagine a service available for free to any U.S. retailer where they simply feed the shipping address into the service along with a description of the product and it produces a total tax amount, an itemized description of all taxes being applied that can be given to the customer, and information regarding where the collected taxes should be sent. There may be some privacy concerns, but I see no reason why this service couldn't be run locally on a merchant's system and periodically pull updates from a central location.
I understand that this is not small undertaking and that there are plenty of details wherein devils may lie, but I think it might correct a certain amount of dysfunction in local governments. People who have the ability to do much of their shopping online at out of state locations won't feel as badly as voting to raise local sales taxes that aren't going to affect them as much as it does poorer people who aren't shopping online at the same rate. When the ability to avoid those taxes is removed, I suspect that they'll be more careful in their choices to enact new taxes.
Or that Google management is spineless in this regard, which I wouldn't find surprising. I suspect the direct bosses don't care or are afraid to do anything because it will piss off the bay area crowd that Google tries to fit in with. These developers will be shunted off into the corner or quietly replaced when no one is looking. The shareholders and the board don't give a shit about what anyone else thinks as long as they're making more money and no one likes dirty laundry being aired in the press.
The problem with removing them entirely is that it's going to be quite hard for any inventor to function independently. Without any protection by law, someone's ability to sell an invention for profit lasts only until some big player can take it apart and build it for far less due to their existing manufacturing capability and the scale of their operations.
This isn't entirely bad as it means that costs for existing goods and products will drop as there's nothing to stop anyone who thinks they can manufacture something for less from attempting to do so. However, these manufacturers don't have a lot of incentive to spend resources on new inventions since they only have a very short window to recoup that investment before a competitor starts producing it as well and they may figure that they can just wait for the competition to invent some new thing. Investment in reducing the cost of manufacturing is where money would be directed since it makes a company more competitive, and improvements in manufacturing techniques or tools can naturally be hidden from competitors.
The same goes for other fields as well. Creating a medicine becomes essentially worthless since it can be easily replicated once the chemical composition is discovered, but a surgical technique or procedure may be less difficult to emulate as the knowledge of precisely how it works is not disseminated so easily merely by the acquisition of it. Goods of all kinds become less valuable compared to services. You're probably only likely to see new types of goods, medicines, etc. arise as a result of crowd funding of some form or perhaps someone extremely wealthy wishing to cure themselves of some affliction. There will probably always be some people who will invent for the hell of it, simply because it excites them, but these people are rare.
I don't know if one of these worlds is better than another, but a lack of patents does suggest a certain tendency to hoard knowledge. Patents reward those individuals or companies that can create something new and novel (that in reality we fall short of this quite often is another matter) and there's less value in hoarding the knowledge since a lack of one means the competition can make your product should they figure out how. If it's really successful, they might even find different methods of achieving a similar outcome. Regardless, the patent eventually expires and anyone can produce the invention.
I'd be somewhat remiss to throw out the entire idea because the implementation has become horribly broken. Especially considering that there are several practical (and rather simple) steps that could be taken to fix a great deal of the problem with the patent system. I wouldn't necessary shed a tear to see it go either, but that would introduce massive amounts of change into a system that's grown up around a certain set of laws. Maybe you could argue that the longterm benefits outweigh the short term chaos, but that's not a pool I'd like to jump into without sticking a few toes in first in order to test the water.
I have a hard time believing that though. You can't just remove one worker without replacing them with another or bumping someone else's hours up. It really doesn't matter what score a person gets as long as it's not the worst. If everyone gets a 5.0 and you're at a 4.8, then you're the lowest scoring person. If you've got a 3.0, but everyone else is in the 2's, then you're the best person there. Management isn't going to cut hours for someone with a 4.5 unless it's worse than everyone else, in which case can you blame them? If it was your business, wouldn't you want to give more customers the best experience possible?
I don't really get the 5% time. Just pay them more and have them work two fewer hours. They make the same amount of money and can use their time for whatever they want. I'm less optimistic and more realistic. Most people's 5% time will be spend screwing around on mobile games, checking Facebook, etc. 5% time just sounds like some kind of feel good bullshit or "breaks" thrown on the euphemism treadmill.
And here's what's going to happen with this model: someone else will build a similar robot, find a way to avoid having most or all of the staff, and charge $3 a burger because they have much lower costs and this restaurant will either have to cut costs or die off. People will always try to get the best value for their money and someone else being able to have a job usually doesn't provide the same amount of value as an extra $3 in their pocket. If you think I'm wrong, go into the average flag-waving 'Murican patriot's home and 90% of their stuff is going to be from China or somewhere close to it.
But it also drives research into alternatives. When doing something is rather inexpensive, there isn't a lot of incentive to invest money into exploring other ways of doing that thing. When it becomes increasingly expensive, suddenly the investment into new technology becomes much more reasonable. You wouldn't see nearly as much investment into electric vehicles if oil were still under $20 per barrel as it was in the late 90's and there wouldn't have been as much investment into fracking technologies and the exploration of U.S. oil reserves had the price not shot up over the subsequent years.
As the cost of batteries increases, so too does the financial incentive to find a cheaper solution. There may be upward trends or sudden spikes over short periods, but the overall trend for just about any consumer good is downward.
Spectre and Meltdown predate Krzanich and it just happened to be that the grenade exploded in his lap. The stock sales just ahead of the announcement of those issues are rather suspicious though. The bigger fault is the loss of Intel's lead in fabrication processes (the delays and issues with their 10 nm node) which was solely on his watch. That alone should be reason enough to can him.
Slashdot Mirror
the wording is specifically designed to make me think it's something other than a fee.
In your previous post, you specifically quoted it as "Regulatory Compliance Fee" so I'm not sure how you're being lead to believe that it's anything other than a fee. Neither does it change that it is a cost due to some law or other form of regulation with which the company is legally obligated to comply. You could certainly petition for those specific regulations to be changed, with no change to the corporate tax rates.
Given that said line item only exists due to the company being required to comply with regulations, it would seem to me that it would cease to exist if the absence of those regulations, unless you believe that they'd continue charging you a "Regulatory Compliance Fee" in the absence of any regulations with which they need comply.
A single lump sum isn't trying to trick me into a public policy that negatively impacts my life and the public commons.
I think you've done a good enough job of tricking yourself into all manner of things that negatively impact your life, but that's your own business.
How about we compromise and you can have your lump sum and throw away all of the following pages that break down the costs for you, and I or anyone else who cares about them can read through them to our heart's content.
Does it really matter whether it's a direct $X tax or fee imposed by the government or merely the internal costs of dealing with some policy (e.g., data retention) that is government law as long as the amount is truthful? If the company is ineptly managed, I still end up paying more. If I care enough about it, I can compare the rate to another provider and see if they have lower fees.
I get that at some point you have to stop breaking it down as I don't care that $0.000001 of those administrative costs were to cover paper clips or that $0.00003 of the advertising budget went to a billboard in a little league ball park, but I don't want "total: $85.73" to be the only line on the bill either.
Ultimately, consumers are only going to be sensitive to the total cost, regardless of how it is broken down, but cost of business increases due to regulations are going to hit every company and are inescapable in that the cost is passed on to consumers. If it turned out that regulations were 50% of the total cost of doing business, you might be rather curious as to whether or not they were really necessary or what value these regulations were providing. In the case of taxi services, those costs seemed to be relatively high and people were rather remiss to pay them, which is why companies like Uber and Lyft have become so popular.
Here's the full text of the relevant section for anyone who doesn't want to click through:
We may change any terms, conditions, rates, fees, expenses, or charges regarding your Services at any time. We will provide you with notice of material changes (other than changes to governmental fees, proportional charges for governmental mandates, roaming rates or administrative charges) either in your monthly bill or separately. You understand and agree that State and Federal Universal Service Fees and other governmentally imposed fees, whether or not assessed directly upon you, may be increased based upon the government's or our calculations.
IF WE INCREASE THE PRICE OF ANY OF THE SERVICES TO WHICH YOU SUBSCRIBE, BEYOND THE LIMITS SET FORTH IN YOUR CUSTOMER SERVICE SUMMARY, OR IF WE MATERIALLY DECREASE THE GEOGRAPHICAL AREA IN WHICH YOUR AIRTIME RATE APPLIES (OTHER THAN A TEMPORARY DECREASE FOR REPAIRS OR MAINTENANCE), WE'LL DISCLOSE THE CHANGE AT LEAST ONE BILLING CYCLE IN ADVANCE (EITHER THROUGH A NOTICE WITH YOUR BILL, A TEXT MESSAGE TO YOUR DEVICE, OR OTHERWISE), AND YOU MAY TERMINATE THIS AGREEMENT WITHOUT PAYING AN EARLY TERMINATION FEE OR RETURNING OR PAYING FOR ANY PROMOTIONAL ITEMS, PROVIDED YOUR NOTICE OF TERMINATION IS DELIVERED TO US WITHIN THIRTY (30) DAYS AFTER THE FIRST BILL REFLECTING THE CHANGE.
If you lose your eligibility for a particular rate plan, we may change your rate plan to one for which you qualify.
It seems like there may be some lawyerly (read weasel) words in there that could get them out of this. They may have some wiggle room around the "limits set forth in your customer service summary" but I'm not an AT&T customer, so I'm not familiar with exactly how they operate.
What's wrong with making various costs individual line items? I'd rather that companies did it with everything down to the CEO's stripper and cocaine party expenses. Government regulations aren't free and your wireless carrier is going to pass any costs on to you regardless of whether they're from duly enacted laws or poor business decisions made by the company. At least you can see what the cost of those regulations are and if you don't feel as though you're getting your money's worth, petition your representatives in government for changes to those regulations.
You're paying the full bill either way. Would you really be happier if it were just a single lump sum with no additional information? Ignorance may be bliss, but it isn't particularly useful.
It's open source. If they really don't like it, they can always fork it. I will admit it's a brilliant idea on the part of the Linux Foundation to get more Platinum members and more money.
Presumably it's Cannon Lake / Whiskey Lake. Cannon Lake was the line using the 10 nm process that's been delayed and Whiskey Lake is the codename for the new generation that will be made on the (further) refined 14 nm process. I don't expect much deviation from the 8000-series (Coffee Lake) in terms of what Intel will offer.
The reason that TFA can't state which processor is being delayed is because Intel has announced any models for Whiskey Lake yet. Cannon Lake has one measly i3 that's being dumped on the Chinese market, and I wouldn't be surprised if Cannon Lake ends up getting scrapped entirely at some point and that they move right on to Ice Lake (the next 10 nm architecture) or whatever comes after that if the 10 nm is really screwed.
Focusing on the private prison industry (8% of total prisoners in the U.S.) is ignoring the bigger problem: prison guard unions support the same measures that increase prison population and they're much, much larger and politically more powerful. According to this article police and prison guard groups were responsible for about half of money raised to oppose legalizing recreational marijuana in California.
Put the alarm in a sealed box and add an item that is glowing/smoking (e.g. a cigarette will do). Within a minute or two, the alarm should sound.
That is how I tested my alarms to see if my previous testing had rendered them nonfunctional before mounting them.
I can understand wanting more of your favorite characters and to see the story go on just a little bit further. I've read plenty of books or watched many films where I wished for just one more chapter or another scene. However, in looking back across all of the times where that wish came true, I never found the follow up stories to be as good as whatever new story managed to grab my attention next and make me want to see more of that. What made the initial story so good was its completeness, which somewhat precludes the follow up from continuing that story in the same satisfying way.
There might be some sense is making those prequels and sequels if Lucas had planned out all of them from the beginning and the original trilogy was part of a larger narrative arc, but that wasn't the case. It wasn't intentionally built in such a way as to fit well within that larger story and so everything built up around it feels shallow and hollow by comparison.
When you've got an entire universe where plenty of stuff has happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away I think it would have been better to tell an entirely new and different story within that universe largely disconnected from the original trilogy. Part of the problem with the prequel trilogy and the sequel trilogy is that they're too beholden to a story created in the original trilogy that didn't need to imagine what exactly had occurred before or what would happen after it ended.
When writing the original Star Wars do you suppose Lucas had any real idea what the Clone Wars were other than something that sounded cool and to establish a relationship between Ben and Luke's father? Do you suppose when everyone was celebrating on Endor (or it's moon if you want to be that pedantic) that Lucas had given any thought as to the ramifications of what had just occurred to the political situation in the galaxy and what it might mean going forward? Of course he didn't, because those things were unimportant to the story being told.
However, if some time later you decide to make sequels or prequels to that story, you're beholden to offhand remarks or comments that weren't well fleshed out because you didn't sit down to write or plan out those in advance of your initial story. Tell new stories in that universe that have nothing to do with the characters or events in the original and you might be able to get something narratively satisfying. You can still drop a few references in as subtle winks to the audience if you want, but you won't be so restricted.
Look at Tolkien's work for an example of stories spanning ages and only being connected by tiny threads. You can certainly find them between the Silmarillion and Lord of the Rings, but they're largely unconcerned with one and other and enjoyment of one doesn't depend on having read the other. I suspect that this is the same reason that the Hobbit movies weren't good (apart from trying to make them tonally something that the story wasn't) as they tried to tie it to Lord of the Rings more than it needed to be.
There probably are several new medicines that will cure or alleviate symptoms for all manner of things developed each month. Sometimes the news is a bit premature as the drug hasn't even been tried in humans yet. Once further testing is done some of these are found to cause all manner of nasty side effects, some worse than what they cure. Sometimes the FDA approves it anyhow if the side effects don't appear to be life threatening, even as off-putting as they may be.
Try to make something fool proof and the universe will make a better fool.
I'm not sure I necessarily agree with you on your points. Hollywood is a good example of an early 20th century industry that sprung up around avoiding patents. You could point to Jobs and Apple taking from Xerox PARC (though they weren't the innovators of many of their ideas either) as well. In both cases those groups or companies certainly enriched themselves, but at the expense of the people who did most of the original leg work and innovation.
My argument isn't that this will result in a loss of wealth, productivity, etc., merely that it will shift where the wealth is realized. You no longer reward the person who is best able to develop a new idea, but the person who is best able to execute on an idea. There were surely always be new ideas (if only because someone is good at coming up with them, but terrible at executing on them and doesn't mind someone else doing so if it means getting a concrete product for themselves) but the economic pressure will drive most innovation towards being able to execute on existing or new ideas at less expense.
I'd even buy the argument that this is preferable for those who are the least well off as it naturally means a reduction in their costs. I just don't know what it necessarily means for the pace of innovation in other sectors (especially those where once the idea exists it's trivial to understand and copy) and what that means for humanity in the long term. It's perhaps better for us to do that, but I can't say that for a certainty, hence my caution. It took thousands of years to arrive at the current social order and while there's no doubt that in another thousand years it will have improved more, I'm hesitant to go around tearing it up on supposition without some trials or empirical evidence first.
As I said, I don't think that a lack of patents necessarily changes the overall amount of innovation, merely what form that innovation takes. If you can make a new pill, there's incentive to do so as patents ensure that you can attempt to recoup investment from it. A lack of patents means that it's rather pointless to invest millions developing the pill when anyone can reproduce it as soon as they learn what's in the pill and how to make it. Maybe you could try to prevent this by only administering it to people who come to your facility and stay in it, but that's cumbersome. Instead, there will be a great pressure to find innovations in making existing pills for less money. If you're a business that can make anything you want, then your ability to profit is only constrained by your own costs relative to those of your competitors.
This isn't necessarily worse, just different. Although I also suspect that it may have problems in the long run as it could limit the ability for new competitors to emerge. We can already easily observe that success breeds success (i.e., once you've got a bit of capital, it's a lot easier to get a bit more and perpetuate the cycle further), and I'm worried that a lack of patents would lead to runaway success on the manufacturing side that creates an oligopoly that survives beyond the lifetime of a particular industry. For example, suppose someone manages to develop some kind of teleportation technology. This destroys the automotive industry just as they once destroyed the horse and buggy industry.
I understand your point that any government system invariably invites some form of corruption in order to attempt to control it and I won't dispute that's where we find the patent system now. Once again though, I don't think it's a good idea to throw the baby out with the bathwater when we haven't even attempted to fix the dysfunction in the system. If after trying that to no practical avail, then sure, why not. But let's try to fix it first.
I'm going to assume you're just a troll, but in case you're not or more so because someone else doesn't realize it: http://openjdk.java.net/
It's not just a matter of 6% state sales tax + 2% municipal, but all manner of strange rules and regulations regarding which products are taxable and which are exempt from taxes as well as trying to keep abreast of changes, additions, and eliminations of these rules. Joe's corner store can do it, because Joe's corner store is only located in Exampleville U.S. is only subject to tax laws for one particular state, county, and city. Amazon would need to know them all.
Amazon not only needs to know what all of those tax laws are, but how they map onto the different products that they sell. What might be considered a food item exempt from sales tax in one state may not qualify as a food item exempt from tax in another state, or may be a specific type item with a tax based on quantity instead of price. And it's not just Amazon that needs to figure all of this out, but every retailer. At least until someone can figure out how to offer a service to handle this for retailers so that they're all not duplicating massive amounts of work.
I'm not opposed to instate tax collection on interstate commerce for the reasons I mentioned before, but if we're going to go down that road, we need to have a system in place (and in place before we go down this road) that makes it easy for businesses to deal with it that doesn't unfairly punish small businesses or make it disproportionately difficult for them to engage in business. Doing so effectively eliminates the ability for many entrepreneurial endeavors and consigns people to working for someone else.
I believe that in the recent supreme court ruling, they point to a necessity to have limitations put in place specifically for small businesses such that they don't need to collect tax as long as they are only doing a small amount of business. This is precisely for the reasons that you point out.
However, this has at least two major problems. The first is that if you set this as a specific dollar amount, it will not track with inflation and given enough time it will result in a box of paper clips requiring taxes being collected. Of course the law can always be amended in the future to adjust the limits, but these eventually soak up a good deal of Congress's time (perhaps not a bad thing) as they're constantly arguing over and adjusting the thresholds for these types of laws.
The second is that much like many forms of welfare payments where a person stops receiving the payment if they get a job and start supporting themselves. There's not a lot of incentive to get a job that will pay $400 a month if it means your welfare check will be $400 less. Similarly, you incentivize a business to stop doing business when it approaches that threshold as long as the cost to do more business suddenly becomes prohibitively expensive past a certain point.
I'm not convinced that this is an unsolvable problem though. Imagine a system that performed all of the tax calculations for a business (based on where the customers lives or is shipping products to) and itemizes everything nicely for them. Every month, they send one check to the federal government (or whomever is running the service) that can aggregate the payments from every other business and send a single payment to the various state, county, and city governments that have laws concerning sales taxes. It's not just a pain for hundreds of thousands of businesses to process dozens of different payments to various states, but also for states to have to accept hundreds of thousands of very small payments for which the accounting of and the transaction fees associated with will quickly destroy.
Even more so if you start needing to account for how different states and municipalities apply taxes differently. One state might apply sales tax to clothing, but not food items and another the exact opposite. Some cities may levy additional sales taxes in general or on specific products to fund the local government or some particular project. Throw in occasional tax moratoriums that crop up from time to time and it's an absolute mess.
If we're going to start asking for out of state businesses to collect taxes, the government needs to construct a system to help facilitate this as the burden it places on any business, even large ones is unnecessarily prohibitive. It's impractical, or perhaps even impossible, for someone like Amazon to get it right. At present the onus to report and pay this tax (assuming the state has a use tax, which most do in some form or another) is on the individuals who are making out of state purchases, but this is as much of a pain and half of the reason someone likely purchased online was lower cost, in part due to taxes.
Imagine a service available for free to any U.S. retailer where they simply feed the shipping address into the service along with a description of the product and it produces a total tax amount, an itemized description of all taxes being applied that can be given to the customer, and information regarding where the collected taxes should be sent. There may be some privacy concerns, but I see no reason why this service couldn't be run locally on a merchant's system and periodically pull updates from a central location.
I understand that this is not small undertaking and that there are plenty of details wherein devils may lie, but I think it might correct a certain amount of dysfunction in local governments. People who have the ability to do much of their shopping online at out of state locations won't feel as badly as voting to raise local sales taxes that aren't going to affect them as much as it does poorer people who aren't shopping online at the same rate. When the ability to avoid those taxes is removed, I suspect that they'll be more careful in their choices to enact new taxes.
Or that Google management is spineless in this regard, which I wouldn't find surprising. I suspect the direct bosses don't care or are afraid to do anything because it will piss off the bay area crowd that Google tries to fit in with. These developers will be shunted off into the corner or quietly replaced when no one is looking. The shareholders and the board don't give a shit about what anyone else thinks as long as they're making more money and no one likes dirty laundry being aired in the press.
The problem with removing them entirely is that it's going to be quite hard for any inventor to function independently. Without any protection by law, someone's ability to sell an invention for profit lasts only until some big player can take it apart and build it for far less due to their existing manufacturing capability and the scale of their operations.
This isn't entirely bad as it means that costs for existing goods and products will drop as there's nothing to stop anyone who thinks they can manufacture something for less from attempting to do so. However, these manufacturers don't have a lot of incentive to spend resources on new inventions since they only have a very short window to recoup that investment before a competitor starts producing it as well and they may figure that they can just wait for the competition to invent some new thing. Investment in reducing the cost of manufacturing is where money would be directed since it makes a company more competitive, and improvements in manufacturing techniques or tools can naturally be hidden from competitors.
The same goes for other fields as well. Creating a medicine becomes essentially worthless since it can be easily replicated once the chemical composition is discovered, but a surgical technique or procedure may be less difficult to emulate as the knowledge of precisely how it works is not disseminated so easily merely by the acquisition of it. Goods of all kinds become less valuable compared to services. You're probably only likely to see new types of goods, medicines, etc. arise as a result of crowd funding of some form or perhaps someone extremely wealthy wishing to cure themselves of some affliction. There will probably always be some people who will invent for the hell of it, simply because it excites them, but these people are rare.
I don't know if one of these worlds is better than another, but a lack of patents does suggest a certain tendency to hoard knowledge. Patents reward those individuals or companies that can create something new and novel (that in reality we fall short of this quite often is another matter) and there's less value in hoarding the knowledge since a lack of one means the competition can make your product should they figure out how. If it's really successful, they might even find different methods of achieving a similar outcome. Regardless, the patent eventually expires and anyone can produce the invention.
I'd be somewhat remiss to throw out the entire idea because the implementation has become horribly broken. Especially considering that there are several practical (and rather simple) steps that could be taken to fix a great deal of the problem with the patent system. I wouldn't necessary shed a tear to see it go either, but that would introduce massive amounts of change into a system that's grown up around a certain set of laws. Maybe you could argue that the longterm benefits outweigh the short term chaos, but that's not a pool I'd like to jump into without sticking a few toes in first in order to test the water.
Well based on your own statement, it must logically be the unintelligent, unthinking people with kids.
I have a hard time believing that though. You can't just remove one worker without replacing them with another or bumping someone else's hours up. It really doesn't matter what score a person gets as long as it's not the worst. If everyone gets a 5.0 and you're at a 4.8, then you're the lowest scoring person. If you've got a 3.0, but everyone else is in the 2's, then you're the best person there. Management isn't going to cut hours for someone with a 4.5 unless it's worse than everyone else, in which case can you blame them? If it was your business, wouldn't you want to give more customers the best experience possible?
I don't really get the 5% time. Just pay them more and have them work two fewer hours. They make the same amount of money and can use their time for whatever they want. I'm less optimistic and more realistic. Most people's 5% time will be spend screwing around on mobile games, checking Facebook, etc. 5% time just sounds like some kind of feel good bullshit or "breaks" thrown on the euphemism treadmill.
And here's what's going to happen with this model: someone else will build a similar robot, find a way to avoid having most or all of the staff, and charge $3 a burger because they have much lower costs and this restaurant will either have to cut costs or die off. People will always try to get the best value for their money and someone else being able to have a job usually doesn't provide the same amount of value as an extra $3 in their pocket. If you think I'm wrong, go into the average flag-waving 'Murican patriot's home and 90% of their stuff is going to be from China or somewhere close to it.
But it also drives research into alternatives. When doing something is rather inexpensive, there isn't a lot of incentive to invest money into exploring other ways of doing that thing. When it becomes increasingly expensive, suddenly the investment into new technology becomes much more reasonable. You wouldn't see nearly as much investment into electric vehicles if oil were still under $20 per barrel as it was in the late 90's and there wouldn't have been as much investment into fracking technologies and the exploration of U.S. oil reserves had the price not shot up over the subsequent years.
As the cost of batteries increases, so too does the financial incentive to find a cheaper solution. There may be upward trends or sudden spikes over short periods, but the overall trend for just about any consumer good is downward.
Spectre and Meltdown predate Krzanich and it just happened to be that the grenade exploded in his lap. The stock sales just ahead of the announcement of those issues are rather suspicious though. The bigger fault is the loss of Intel's lead in fabrication processes (the delays and issues with their 10 nm node) which was solely on his watch. That alone should be reason enough to can him.