And if you're too old for the clubs, don't have a family, and aren't religious or a sports fan--you're pretty much SOL in many places.
Well, there's always the local LUG. Might be worth a shot for some people -- at least you've got one interest in common.
Lots of hobby groups exist and meet regularly. RC Planes, Gaming clubs, S&M enthusiasts... If you've got an interest, I guarantee there's a club for it *somewhere*.
That's only looking at it from the spammers' point-of-view. Obviously, the cheaper the mailing costs, the better for them. But that doesn't say anything about how profitable bulk mailing is for the USPS, and that's what I'm wondering. At the absurdly low rates they charge bulk mailers, I really wonder how much money they're making there, and if it's really worth it.
You missed the point of the anecdote, it was to illustrate that higher pricxes lead to reduced demand. Higher rates == lower sales volume. Coupled with high fixed costs, it's more likely that higher prices, and reduced demand, lead to lower profits than it is to lead to higher profits.
And FYI, there are non-spammers that send bulk mail -- such as the media company that I worked for.
Well, that's hard to determine, as they don't have a complete system to test price changes on.
I will mention that when I worked for a company that regularly commissioned bulk mail... postage was the largest cost portion of the bulk mail efforts. Any increase in postage really hit that department's budget hard. Anecdotal, I'm sure, but we saw that other forms of marketing became slightly more cost-effective when postage rates went up... so more budget was allocated to telemarketing in lieu of direct mail.
Not only did we reduce the amount of bulk mail in direct response to the increased cost, but we ended up shifting budget from direct mail to telemarketing, further reducing the amount of mail we sent.
Rather than be a rotting corpse, I would rather come back sooner as pine needles in an alpine forest and affect the future through writings, or photography, or my descendents.
So at the root of things, you'd be pining for your descendants in the woods instead of your descendants pining for you in a cemetary?
Fair enough. But wouldn't you appreciate the thought of your descendants sprucing up your gravesite in memoriam?
I don't think you understand my point... if they raise the prices on the bulk mail, they will lose [even more] money on it. That will not help subsidize other services.
You're missing the concept of fixed costs, I think.
Because raising the price reduces the sales volume. Basic relationship between price & demand -- demand is not inelastic for junk mail.
They have a huge amount of fixed costs -- reducing their volume makes it even harder to cover those fixed costs.
Ex. Say I have $1000 in fixed costs weekly (rent, my salary), and I sell widgets that cost me $100 each. I sell 50 widgets a week at $120 each -- I break even (50*(120-100)-1000). But if I raise my price to $150 each, some of my buyers won't buy from me anymore. Maybe I only sell 18 of them at that price -- which means I lose $100 (18*(150-100)-1000). Sure, I'm making $50 on each widget, instead of $20 -- but that nasty overhead takes the first $1000 I clear each week. This is the situation the USPS faces. Demand for bulk mail services is very elastic. Raise the prices, and volume drops significantly.
It's not the rise in fuel prices that got them into the red. It's their high fixed costs coupled with decreasing sales volume.
Email put the first nails in the coffin for the postal service. Cell phones added some more (why send a letter to Grandma Gladys in Florida? Now you can call her from your cell phone *for free*).
The USPS is dying, and the question is whether we agree to subsidize mail service, and if so, to what extent. Currently we subsidize them by giving them below-market loans via T-bills. That's unsustainable, as they will *never* get back into the black as they currently operate -- and their pensions are going to make things even worse.
So yes, they're looking for places to cut costs. But it's more than that -- this proposed reduction in service is really more of a klaxon call to everyone who uses mail that there is a big problem in the USPS. Either rates need to go way up (further exacerbating their fixed cost vs. shrinking volume problem) or they need to be directly subsidized. By threatening to reduce service levels, they are reminding people that spending on the USPS has direct benefit to them, thus justifying some sort of subsidization as an alternative.
Long story short -- the USPS is in deep money trouble, and the threat of reduced services is a call for the people who hold the purse strings to start spending.
Or am I that clueless that I have a setting that enables such stupidity?
Yes.
But in your defense, the default configuration does this...
But really, you should know better than to schedule appointments on patch Tuesday when you run a Windows machine. What were you thinking? Don't you realize that you need to adjust your life to meet the whims of Redmond?
PS - if you had any hogs at all that "radiate[d] contentment" then wow - that's major, considering the extreme prevalence of depression among swine at farms.
We weren't a swine farm, we were a small farm with a couple dozen sheep, a few goats, up to a dozen hogs at times, a mess of chickens, and random other animals when someone wanted to (geese, emus, llamas, etc). The hog enclosures were pretty large, included about an acre of woods for them to root around in... I think that, and the attention they got from my brothers and me, made a big difference.
That won't help. It's not genetic and it's not a learned behavior. You're either born liking ICP or you're born disliking ICP
So if it's not genetic... and it's not learned... and you're born with ICP+ or ICP-...
You're saying that the ICP+/- trait is developed in utero due to either random chance or fetal environment?
Are you saying that children of drug users grow up to be fans of ICP?! If so, that's a pretty powerful disincentive for expectant mothers to do drugs... you may have hit upon a miracular sociological prevention tool... think of the countless lives you have improved and/or saved!
That vocabulary we have to describe something (especially the "how" of something) means different things to different people. To those who do understand the vocabulary, the words have real meaning and do impart understanding. To others, the words are simply labels, or even worse -- an avenue of misunderstanding.
This is why words are both powerful and dangerous.
I raised hogs as a kid. Both in a "regular" sty and in a no-mud sty with grates for waste elimination and misters for cooling.
It's not a scientific observation, but I felt like the satisfaction hogs felt rolling in the mud was palpable -- and only matched by the satisfaction they seemed to take in rubbing up against posts to scratch itches.
FWIW, the hogs in the no-mud enclosures were content to lie next to the misters (in shade, of course), but they did not radiate contentment the way the pigs that rolled in mud did.
Oh yeah, Government interference. First by creating and enforcing local monopolies rather than simply selling right of way space to anyone that wanted it
Why do you insist on repeating this as if it were truth? Do you still not recognize the existence of natural monopolies? Even the Austrians recognize the existence of natural monopolies.
and second by scooping up several billion in taxpayer money and just GIVING it to the big telcos to create and infrastructure.
That has little to do with the creation or reason for existence of the telco monopolies. They existed prior to that, and would exist even without it. Massive fixed costs for providing telco service ensure the existence of those monopolies.
If the government had just stayed the hell out, we wouldn't be having this discussion today as the Internet would likely already be far more built-out and with way more players in the market, each of them significantly smaller than the giant megacorps we have involved right now.
That is just about the funniest thing I've read today. Market actors consolidate due to economies of scale, in any market where economies of scale exist.
The BEST thing the government can do is to eliminate local monopoly legislation,(along with any other regulation making the barrier to entry so damned high)
The elephant in the middle of the room you so clumsily step around is that the massive capital required to achieve economies of scale in the telco world is a bigger barrier to market for would-be entrants than anything the government adds. Without the guaranty of monopoly, there wouldn't *be* a telco provider in a lot of areas. No one wants to sink millions in up-front costs when they can't be sure of having customers.
Unelected bureaucrats should not be allowed to create regulation and any regulation created by them should be summarily deleted from the record. PERIOD.
That's a recipe for disaster. The people writing the regs would have even less understanding of the industries they are regulating. So we'd have even MORE regulations written by lobbyists for the industries that are supposed to be regulated.
Of course, this is an incomplete metric for player worth.
How about off-ball activity that contributes? Moving across a zone or defender to clear space for someone who actually handles the ball? What about the guy who makes a brilliant cut but doesn't get served well by a teammate, so never handles the ball?
What about defense?
Never mind the fact that this metric would be biased against Italian league players, where ball control and quality opportunities is more important than number of shots. You could game this system very easily by cranking shots from 30 yards.
Soccer doesn't lend itself well to statistical analysis of players. That's one of the things that makes it a beautiful sport and fun to discuss, IMO.
Offtopic mod for your post? I guess... but the lyrics of that song actually have some relevance.
Out of the blue [blue == anonymity]
and into the black [black == data records]
They give you this, [free services]
but you pay for that [with loss of privacy]
And once you're gone, [not using their services anymore]
you can never come back [into anonymity]
When you're out of the blue
and into the black.
Of course, I think Neil Young was referring to death and fame, not services and privacy. But the man has a real way with words.
OK, so the right-wingers on slashdot may consider me a left-wing radical pinko socialist commie bastard... but even I can name five.
But that's incidental to the real problem... for this industry, are we better off with government regulation, or with service providers self-regulating through market forces? I think you'd have to be heavy on the Austrian side to think that market forces can properly regulate an industry that is dominated by local monopolies.
IMO, even IF the 'teh gubbermint' can't do anything right, it's still a better bet than having people whose interests are directly opposed to ours in charge of regulating themselves via market forces in an uncompetitive market.
Image you were locked in a cage. Now image that your wife is a hairy beast, your children don't listen to a word you say, and your best friend is fond of masturbating in public and flinging his own waste at strangers. What else are you going to do with your time?
Oh, I dunno. I'd probably pick some nits from my wife's fur, bare my teeth at the kids some, maybe masturbate, and then fling some poo (not necessarily in that order).
Watching TV is way, way down on my list -- at approximately the same level as swinging into a bunch of fellows in the gorilla enclosure and taunting them.
Sperm whales have a carbon footprint? What? From the Hummers they're driving, or all the coal-burning power plants they've built?
Dude, you're getting riled up about the wrong error in that sentence. Whales don't even have feet! How the fuck are they supposed to have footprints?
At the very least, we could say something about them offsetting their carbon tailsplash, or their carbon wake. Let's first be sensitive to the feelings of our podiacally challenged friends in the sea, before we challenge them on their wasteful use of fossil fuels.
Oh, and by the way, we don't really know what goes on at deep diving depths for sperm whales. For all we know, they could be driving massive submarines that consume ridiculous amounts of oil.
when the wind blows and nobody needs your power,you're just, well, tilting at the wind.
Just thought I'd clear up your metaphor... that should be "tilting at windmills", a reference to Don Quixote (to tilt is to joust). Perhaps you've mixed it up a bit with "pissing into the wind", which is a metaphor for avoidable self-destructive behavior.
Sorry. It just triggers my OCD when I see good metaphors gone bad.
Technically your employer is supposed to figure out the percentage of business calls vs personal calls and either bill you the difference or include it on your W-2 as a taxable benefit. Few employers actually bother to do this but it is required by the US tax code.
Actually, it's still under debate... the IRS has not issued a final ruling on inclusion of company-paid cell phone charges as taxable fringe benefits.
Companies are not required to itemize charges and bill and/or include as taxable fringe; they can instead use some flat percentage.
But in practice, the IRS doesn't pursue the cell phone issue much -- if there are a lot of other taxable fringe that is escaping tax, they may include it, but if that's your only questionable item, they'll let it go.
I'm not your tax accountant or tax lawyer, so don't take what I've written as sound advice. It's just my experience with dealing with the IRS on this issue for my past couple employers.
Is Oracle therefore forbidden to reduce its prices? Is the contract with the government null and void, allowing the government to terminate the contract earlier than they otherwise would?
No, Oracle is then required to offer the same reduced prices to the government -- it's part of the hypothetical three-year contract that Oracle agreed to. Oracle is free to cut their prices as much as they want for any customer they want -- but they are operating under a contract that guarantees the government gets the best price Oracle offers anyone else.
So, to answer your question of "Under What Authority": The authority of a party to the agreement that Oracle and the government both signed and are required to meet the terms of.
The government is not "regulating" Oracle here, they are not nationalizing Oracle, they are not seizing Oracle -- they are pursuing their rights to force Oracle to meet the terms Oracle agreed to.
Take your bogeyman somewhere else... or at least RTFA before you drag him out from under your bed.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, there's always the local LUG. Might be worth a shot for some people -- at least you've got one interest in common.
Lots of hobby groups exist and meet regularly. RC Planes, Gaming clubs, S&M enthusiasts... If you've got an interest, I guarantee there's a club for it *somewhere*.
You missed the point of the anecdote, it was to illustrate that higher pricxes lead to reduced demand. Higher rates == lower sales volume. Coupled with high fixed costs, it's more likely that higher prices, and reduced demand, lead to lower profits than it is to lead to higher profits.
And FYI, there are non-spammers that send bulk mail -- such as the media company that I worked for.
Well, that's hard to determine, as they don't have a complete system to test price changes on.
I will mention that when I worked for a company that regularly commissioned bulk mail... postage was the largest cost portion of the bulk mail efforts. Any increase in postage really hit that department's budget hard. Anecdotal, I'm sure, but we saw that other forms of marketing became slightly more cost-effective when postage rates went up... so more budget was allocated to telemarketing in lieu of direct mail.
Not only did we reduce the amount of bulk mail in direct response to the increased cost, but we ended up shifting budget from direct mail to telemarketing, further reducing the amount of mail we sent.
So at the root of things, you'd be pining for your descendants in the woods instead of your descendants pining for you in a cemetary?
Fair enough. But wouldn't you appreciate the thought of your descendants sprucing up your gravesite in memoriam?
I don't think you understand my point... if they raise the prices on the bulk mail, they will lose [even more] money on it. That will not help subsidize other services.
You're missing the concept of fixed costs, I think.
Because raising the price reduces the sales volume. Basic relationship between price & demand -- demand is not inelastic for junk mail.
They have a huge amount of fixed costs -- reducing their volume makes it even harder to cover those fixed costs.
Ex. Say I have $1000 in fixed costs weekly (rent, my salary), and I sell widgets that cost me $100 each. I sell 50 widgets a week at $120 each -- I break even (50*(120-100)-1000). But if I raise my price to $150 each, some of my buyers won't buy from me anymore. Maybe I only sell 18 of them at that price -- which means I lose $100 (18*(150-100)-1000). Sure, I'm making $50 on each widget, instead of $20 -- but that nasty overhead takes the first $1000 I clear each week. This is the situation the USPS faces. Demand for bulk mail services is very elastic. Raise the prices, and volume drops significantly.
It's not the rise in fuel prices that got them into the red. It's their high fixed costs coupled with decreasing sales volume.
Email put the first nails in the coffin for the postal service. Cell phones added some more (why send a letter to Grandma Gladys in Florida? Now you can call her from your cell phone *for free*).
The USPS is dying, and the question is whether we agree to subsidize mail service, and if so, to what extent. Currently we subsidize them by giving them below-market loans via T-bills. That's unsustainable, as they will *never* get back into the black as they currently operate -- and their pensions are going to make things even worse.
So yes, they're looking for places to cut costs. But it's more than that -- this proposed reduction in service is really more of a klaxon call to everyone who uses mail that there is a big problem in the USPS. Either rates need to go way up (further exacerbating their fixed cost vs. shrinking volume problem) or they need to be directly subsidized. By threatening to reduce service levels, they are reminding people that spending on the USPS has direct benefit to them, thus justifying some sort of subsidization as an alternative.
Long story short -- the USPS is in deep money trouble, and the threat of reduced services is a call for the people who hold the purse strings to start spending.
From where I sit, that might be better than taking advice from their current sources. At least there'd be a diversity of opinion.
Yes.
But in your defense, the default configuration does this...
But really, you should know better than to schedule appointments on patch Tuesday when you run a Windows machine. What were you thinking? Don't you realize that you need to adjust your life to meet the whims of Redmond?
We weren't a swine farm, we were a small farm with a couple dozen sheep, a few goats, up to a dozen hogs at times, a mess of chickens, and random other animals when someone wanted to (geese, emus, llamas, etc). The hog enclosures were pretty large, included about an acre of woods for them to root around in... I think that, and the attention they got from my brothers and me, made a big difference.
So if it's not genetic... and it's not learned... and you're born with ICP+ or ICP-...
You're saying that the ICP+/- trait is developed in utero due to either random chance or fetal environment?
Are you saying that children of drug users grow up to be fans of ICP?! If so, that's a pretty powerful disincentive for expectant mothers to do drugs... you may have hit upon a miracular sociological prevention tool... think of the countless lives you have improved and/or saved!
That vocabulary we have to describe something (especially the "how" of something) means different things to different people. To those who do understand the vocabulary, the words have real meaning and do impart understanding. To others, the words are simply labels, or even worse -- an avenue of misunderstanding.
This is why words are both powerful and dangerous.
I raised hogs as a kid. Both in a "regular" sty and in a no-mud sty with grates for waste elimination and misters for cooling.
It's not a scientific observation, but I felt like the satisfaction hogs felt rolling in the mud was palpable -- and only matched by the satisfaction they seemed to take in rubbing up against posts to scratch itches.
FWIW, the hogs in the no-mud enclosures were content to lie next to the misters (in shade, of course), but they did not radiate contentment the way the pigs that rolled in mud did.
Excellent rebuttal... much more succinct than what I posted below.
Why do you insist on repeating this as if it were truth? Do you still not recognize the existence of natural monopolies? Even the Austrians recognize the existence of natural monopolies.
That has little to do with the creation or reason for existence of the telco monopolies. They existed prior to that, and would exist even without it. Massive fixed costs for providing telco service ensure the existence of those monopolies.
That is just about the funniest thing I've read today. Market actors consolidate due to economies of scale, in any market where economies of scale exist.
The elephant in the middle of the room you so clumsily step around is that the massive capital required to achieve economies of scale in the telco world is a bigger barrier to market for would-be entrants than anything the government adds. Without the guaranty of monopoly, there wouldn't *be* a telco provider in a lot of areas. No one wants to sink millions in up-front costs when they can't be sure of having customers.
That's a recipe for disaster. The people writing the regs would have even less understanding of the industries they are regulating. So we'd have even MORE regulations written by lobbyists for the industries that are supposed to be regulated.
Of course, this is an incomplete metric for player worth.
How about off-ball activity that contributes? Moving across a zone or defender to clear space for someone who actually handles the ball? What about the guy who makes a brilliant cut but doesn't get served well by a teammate, so never handles the ball?
What about defense?
Never mind the fact that this metric would be biased against Italian league players, where ball control and quality opportunities is more important than number of shots. You could game this system very easily by cranking shots from 30 yards.
Soccer doesn't lend itself well to statistical analysis of players. That's one of the things that makes it a beautiful sport and fun to discuss, IMO.
My, my, hey, hey.
Offtopic mod for your post? I guess... but the lyrics of that song actually have some relevance.
Out of the blue [blue == anonymity]
and into the black [black == data records]
They give you this, [free services]
but you pay for that [with loss of privacy]
And once you're gone, [not using their services anymore]
you can never come back [into anonymity]
When you're out of the blue
and into the black.
Of course, I think Neil Young was referring to death and fame, not services and privacy. But the man has a real way with words.
You don't need to. The spinning will keep the mercury in place.
Of course, there's the issue of the scope's field of view moving as the structure spins, but surely we could figure out a way around that.
OK, so the right-wingers on slashdot may consider me a left-wing radical pinko socialist commie bastard... but even I can name five.
But that's incidental to the real problem... for this industry, are we better off with government regulation, or with service providers self-regulating through market forces? I think you'd have to be heavy on the Austrian side to think that market forces can properly regulate an industry that is dominated by local monopolies.
IMO, even IF the 'teh gubbermint' can't do anything right, it's still a better bet than having people whose interests are directly opposed to ours in charge of regulating themselves via market forces in an uncompetitive market.
Oh, I dunno. I'd probably pick some nits from my wife's fur, bare my teeth at the kids some, maybe masturbate, and then fling some poo (not necessarily in that order).
Watching TV is way, way down on my list -- at approximately the same level as swinging into a bunch of fellows in the gorilla enclosure and taunting them.
Dude, you're getting riled up about the wrong error in that sentence. Whales don't even have feet! How the fuck are they supposed to have footprints?
At the very least, we could say something about them offsetting their carbon tailsplash, or their carbon wake. Let's first be sensitive to the feelings of our podiacally challenged friends in the sea, before we challenge them on their wasteful use of fossil fuels.
Oh, and by the way, we don't really know what goes on at deep diving depths for sperm whales. For all we know, they could be driving massive submarines that consume ridiculous amounts of oil.
Just thought I'd clear up your metaphor... that should be "tilting at windmills", a reference to Don Quixote (to tilt is to joust). Perhaps you've mixed it up a bit with "pissing into the wind", which is a metaphor for avoidable self-destructive behavior.
Sorry. It just triggers my OCD when I see good metaphors gone bad.
Actually, it's still under debate... the IRS has not issued a final ruling on inclusion of company-paid cell phone charges as taxable fringe benefits.
Companies are not required to itemize charges and bill and/or include as taxable fringe; they can instead use some flat percentage.
But in practice, the IRS doesn't pursue the cell phone issue much -- if there are a lot of other taxable fringe that is escaping tax, they may include it, but if that's your only questionable item, they'll let it go.
I'm not your tax accountant or tax lawyer, so don't take what I've written as sound advice. It's just my experience with dealing with the IRS on this issue for my past couple employers.
No, Oracle is then required to offer the same reduced prices to the government -- it's part of the hypothetical three-year contract that Oracle agreed to. Oracle is free to cut their prices as much as they want for any customer they want -- but they are operating under a contract that guarantees the government gets the best price Oracle offers anyone else.
So, to answer your question of "Under What Authority": The authority of a party to the agreement that Oracle and the government both signed and are required to meet the terms of.
The government is not "regulating" Oracle here, they are not nationalizing Oracle, they are not seizing Oracle -- they are pursuing their rights to force Oracle to meet the terms Oracle agreed to.
Take your bogeyman somewhere else... or at least RTFA before you drag him out from under your bed.
Whoa... polygamy is legal in the UK? I never figured you guys would be down with that.