What's your definition of "unreasonable margins", though? I would expect counterfeit goods to exist wherever the sale price is above the marginal cost of production; but since the marginal cost of production excludes things like design costs, that would suggest that anything where significant effort has gone into design would be vulnerable to counterfeiting. Does that mean they all have "unreasonable margins"?
1. As to your first point, I've already addressed why competition is a viable means of quality control in private education.
I'm not sure that you have - would you mind summarising or copy-pasting it? My point here is that the positive effects of competition are only felt where certain assumptions apply. These are largely common sense: lack of lock-in, availability of other suppliers, substitutability etc. I think there are good reasons to think that these don't apply, or apply only weakly, to a private school: "Moving your child is disruptive, so there is strong lock-in. There may not be another good school nearby, or not in the same price range, or not with the same extra-curriculars. Add that together and you have a situation where the school knows that there is very little chance that a pupil will leave."
2. Rewards and penalties are inherent and indivisible from free enterprise. The consequences of bad performance are often not immediate. An oil company for example that slacks off and stops producing oil might not actually see a decline in their bottom line for months given that most refineries keep on hand a large inventory that can be sold off over a longer period of time.
Likewise, you'll find throughout business countless examples where the consequences of bad behavior would not be met immediately.
And yet the system works. Which means immediate consequences are not essential. What is important is that they happen without a period of years and that they be inevitable. Private schools like any other service provider, market themselves on the quality of their service. If that service is substandard then it impacts their ability to retain and attract customers. Eventually, that is fatal.
Let's take this example of oil companies. From what you say, one would assume that the oil companies could rely on the future consequences of reduced production to keep production high. It couldn't be further from the truth; oil companies in fact use subsidiaries and single purpose vehicles to exploit each oil deposit, from which they purchase the oil, usually on an INCOTERMS model contract, which will give a minimum monthly provision with immediate financial penalties, and termination rights, if it is not delivered. Clearly they do not appreciate your point that they can rely on the threat of eventual financial ruin to motivate people to keep standards high. If oil companies - which are often publicly-traded companies accountable to their shareholders, producing a fungible commodity that is itself publicly traded (which I think you will agree might make them marginally more susceptible to competitive pressures than the average private school) - cannot rely on the competitive pressure you describe, how much less can you rely on it to keep standards high at a private school?
And you still haven't found that example of a private school actually going out of business because its standards slipped.
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt one last time. If you actually want to engage with the arguments, start with the two numbered points in this comment. Over the course of my replies I have tried putting my points in a numbered list, putting them in bold, linking back to them and summarising them. I cannot put them more clearly, but you have never replied to them and now deny that they even exist. I don't want to assume that you are trolling if you aren't, but if you don't intend to answer any of the points in your reply, don't post one for my benefit because I won't reply to another non-post.
You car company analysis doesn't take into account my point.
If a company goes down, the market for that service is otherwise healthy, and its competitors thrive, then that company failed to compete.
Technically true, I suppose, in the same way that anyone who dies failed to stay alive. But you can't say that because someone is dead they must have made worse decisions than someone who survived, and you can't say that because a company went insolvent it made worse products than its surviving competitors. Any one of the twelve alternative reasons that I gave in my comment could lead to a good company making good products going insolvent.
You seem to think you can invalidate the last 400 years of economic history by being obtuse. It is not a viable rhetorical strategy.
No, I want to apply economic theory, which says that things like exit barriers, transaction costs and a lack of suppliers can hinder or inhibit competition. I gave a list of reasons to think that these things might apply in my first reply You have never responded to any of these points or engaged with these issues at all.
I'm sorry if I am misjudging you, but I begin to wonder if you are just trolling by refusing to meaningfully consider or reply to anything. If not (in which case I apologise) and you do want to engage with the issues, I have set my points out time and again. A good place to start would be the two numbered points in this comment.
As to schools closing down due to low standards, actually its redundent in most cases.
Lets say a car company goes out of business. Why would a car company go out of business when other car companies do not? Because other companies provided a superior product or had a superior price which is really the same thing since the cost is a variable of the product or service.
This analysis is not accurate. A car company could go insolvent because they are out-competed; but they could also go insolvent because there is a recession or a spike in oil prices and they have less cash reserves than their competitors - we have seen examples of car companies going insolvent in both of those situations in recent years. Or they could go out of business because they can't afford the costs of an expensive piece of litigation, or because of regulatory problems or labour disputes. They could have expanded too aggressively, or a merger could go sour. A natural disaster could damage an essential factory. They could go bankrupt because of corporate crime, or even regular crime. Vulture capitalists could try to wind up the business to sell its assets. A good, sensible and prudent decision could turn out to be disastrous because of something completely unpredictable. It is not correct to say that the fact that a company has gone out of business shows that it was offering an inferior product.
A private school that closes due to poor attendance is a school that customers decided did not offer a competitive product/service.
The only situation where such a school would not be held as at fault would be schools in low population areas where there is a decline in the actual number of possible customers. So all rural NON-boarding schools can be removed from the search or urban schools in neighborhoods with significant population declines. Everything else is customers choosing a different provider which leads to the closure of those schools.
This is not true for the reasons set out in relation to your car company analogy above. Even if it were, that would not show that teaching standards are kept high by the fear of closing down.
As to your assertion that supply and demand doesn't work in private education or that competition doesn't work in private education, you've offered no logic to justify that private education alone is immune a fairly basic and universal law of both economics and human psychology.
That a mistake that many people make in these matters. They think its an economic argument and they get their little ideologies tied up in things that they think opinions can touch. They can't. You're dealing with the way the human mind works. Its not a matter of opinion. Its a matter of basic human psychology which ultimately defines the behavior and sustains the principle.
I find the first of these two paragraphs baffling. I have never made the assertion that you attribute to me. The comment that you were replying to sets out, partially in bold, my actual assertion: "in the specific example of private school teaching, the reason for high standards is not the fear that if standards drop, students will leave." Equally baffling is the suggestion that I have "offered no logic to justify" my claims; every one of my posts sets out reasons, and I summarised those reasons and linked back to them in the very post that you were replying to. I suppose that if you thought that I was claiming that "supply and demand doesn't work in private education" you would find no arguments supporting that, but that's just symptomatic of the fact that I have never made that suggestion. You have so far not engaged with any of my arguments or offered any reasons to contradict them; nor have you actually come up with an example of what you predict coming to pass and the school closing, which a cynic might consider rather telling.
In relation to the second paragraph, could you explain? Your argument is financial, and based on market competition and consumer choice. If you don't accept that economics is relevant, what is left to support your argument? What does it mean to get your "little ideology" tied up in "something opinions [can't] touch"?
Look for private school closures. You'll see that there are lots that close due to poor enrollment.
That is how they die.
Maybe I am bad at searching, but first let's be clear what we need to find. Your argument is that private schools are motivated to keep quality high because they are scared that if they don't, student numbers will drop and they will have to close. It is not, therefore, enough to find private schools that closed - lots of schools have closed over the years, that's not controversial - you need to find schools that (i) closed down, (ii) due to low student numbers, (iii) caused by falling standards. You need all three elements.
I've tried searching for "private school closures", "private school insolvency" and a few other terms, and I can't find any. I've found a couple of state schools that went bust and closed, a private school that went bust when the headmaster absconded with lots of school money, and lots of schools temporarily closed due to poor weather. Can I find any schools that went downhill and eventually went bust, though? I cannot. If you can find any then please do help me out. (Note that the third point is rather important - you need the falling standards - although I accept that articles may only imply these, not give direct figures. I mention this because I'm sure there were schools that were doing fine and suddenly went under during the recession, and those obviously don't provide any useful evidence.)
As to your claim that competition for business has no impact on quality, the reality of the last 300 years of capitalism disproves that notion.
That's not my claim - it's not even nearly my claim. What I have been arguing is that, in the specific example of private school teaching, the reason for high standards is not the fear that if standards drop, students will leave. I set that out pretty clearly, with reasons, in my first reply to you. In my second reply I set out a hypothetical example to illustrate my point. I won't set them out again here.
I'll just make two quick points: 1. Economic theory says that competition is good when certain assumptions are true. I set out reasons (in my first reply, linked above) to suggest that those assumptions cannot be taken for granted here. Unless they apply, whether there can be useful competition is not clear. 2. Rewards and penalties are more motivational if they are certain and will happen soon. If a good teacher decides to let standards slip to only average level, there is a chance that the school might close, after a number of years. Everything we know about motivation says that it is pretty unlikely that that is the reason that they decide to try harder and do better.
I'm not interested in your redefinitions of the word "is" or other rhetorical nonsense.
Can you point to that redefinition? I'm not sure what you are referring to.
The fact of the matter is that private organizations can and are fired. If they preform badly they tend to go out of business.
I assume you mean that they go out of business. But even then it's not true; they go out of business if they can't make money, which is rather different. Do you have any examples of a private school that went out of business because its quality declined? I can't find any.
Government organizations compel resources by force. They do not require the consentual cooperation of students or parents to fund themselves or even to get attendence.
In such a situation, a failing school is sustainable as a public entity because it is subsidized and compels membership. private organizations can neither force people to buy their goods/services or force people to exclusively use their goods/services.
Public entities can do that and do use that ability with impunity. As such, they can remain solvent despite being horrible at their jobs.
End of argument.
Rook takes king, Good game.
Your argument was that the threat of the school going out of business keeps teaching standards at private schools high. How state schools are funded is irrelevant to that argument. If we remove that, what is left is this: private organizations can neither force people to buy their goods/services or force people to exclusively use their goods/services. Assuming this is true, the question is whether this is sufficient to mean that the goods or services will necessarily be good - and the answer is clearly that it is not. There are innumerable examples of bad businesses managing to limp on for years or decades, without doing anything well. It is not enough simply to shout "capitalism is great" and assume that you have made a convincing argument.
actually it is pretty acute because if the school were actually bad then it would die.
Yes, making just ONE parent unhappy is unlikely to be a threat to the school. however, making a sizable majority unhappy would be an existential threat.
Public schools can and do survive for DECADES with a sizable majority of their student population failing and a sizable majority of their parent's unhappy.
Private schools die in those situations.
I'm not sure that I would agree with your description of that situation as "acute". If I told you that your job would be on the line if a sizable majority of your clients were unhappy, would that motivate you to do a great job? I know it wouldn't have that effect on me. It would only work for someone whose natural work ethic is so weak that they would otherwise be happy if a sizable majority of people were unhappy with their performance; I don't think that there is any reason to think that those people are particularly numerous in private education.
To illustrate my point, here's a thought experiment. Image that: i. You are a teacher in an average school. ii. You are a terrible teacher and only want to do the absolute minimum to keep the school afloat (so that the motivation that you set out above applies). iii. You have been told that the school will close if a sizable majority of parents are unhappy with the school.
A child comes to you and asks for extra help with the subject. What do you do? Helping this one pupil with their work is not going to make the difference between the school closing or not closing. Since you have no other work ethic, you tell them to go away. The same would apply if the question were whether you did more than the bare minimum to teach your class, spend more time preparing lessons, give detailed feedback or any of the other things that mark out a good teacher. So the threat of the school losing too many pupils and closing down won't work on a terrible teacher. What about on a better teacher? I would suggest that it simply won't be relevant, because only the worst teacher would be happy with a sizable majority of parents being unhappy. Your motivation can, essentially by definition, only apply to very poor teachers. (This would also suggest that if you think this is the motivating force behind private schools' success, you must think that they are staffed by below-average staff)
As I said before, most people want to do a good job. Great teachers put effort in to help their students even when they are at the top of their salary band, and they can literally be certain that they will get no reward from the school. The idea that the different between a great school and a poor school is that the staff at the great school are motivated by a fear of closing down is difficult to accept.
Fuck no. Use email for work - we want a trace for fucks sake.
Surely the point here should be to use whichever is appropriate? If you need an immediate reply, use the phone; if not, send an email. Also, calling someone and talking things through can often avoid a long exchange of emails and save a lot of time. The call can always be followed up by an email if you want a record of what was discussed. Either saying "use the phone" or "use email" is a bit too black-and-white.
Return email etiquette: When you receive an email from a Baby Boomer, reply using a similar format. If they begin with “Hi Joe” in every email, then you return every email with “Hello Eric”. If they end every email with a letter-like ending such as “Best wishes”, “Best”, “Thanks”, or another equivalent, return your emails with the same courtesy.
Oh fuck, I bet this guy top-posts.
Do you disagree with the advice? Seems a pretty easy way to make sure your 'formality-level' is about as expected. I don't know about you, but that's what I aim for - I'm happy to format and sign-off my emails in whatever way, if it means that the recipient isn't thinking about my tone when I want them to think about my points.
Technology has nothing to do with farming. Because smartphones didn't exist in huge quantities 10 years ago. Internet was new and novel 15 years ago. VIdeo games at least in popularity is barely 35 years old, and home computing is barely over 40.
And we've had agriculture and have been farming for thousands of years. The industrial age (or really what we'd call modern life) is close to 150 years old. And the electronic distractions are barely a third of that.
Technology has changed things, even if you wish it hadn't and even if you don't want it to. Good parenting means doing what is needed to raise your child to be as happy and healthy as they can be and giving them as many opportunities as you can, and that means embracing all the means at your disposal, not harking back to some golden era of lego and innocent games of cowboys and indians. If a specific piece of technology can help a good parent will use it.
Computers and televisions and smartphones and other electronics are a fact of life now. This technology - and this, I think, is what the GP was saying - is designed to help manage your kids' use of technology. It would let them have their smartphone and let you limit their use without having to keep taking it away and giving it back. Based on what you've said above, I would have thought you would welcome the prospect.
I think you might be finding the virtues of competition because you want to see them here. Many - most? - private and charter schools are oversubscribed. Moving your child is disruptive, so there is strong lock-in. There may not be another good school nearby, or not in the same price range, or not with the same extra-curriculars. Add that together and you have a situation where the school knows that there is very little chance that a pupil will leave - and if they do, they will probably be able to fill that place at the end of this (prepaid) semester. Eventually, if the school declined people would stop enrolling their kids - but that is far from the sort of acute pressure that your comment describes.
I think the point that people often miss is that (in every field) most people want to do a good job. Private schools make it easier to do a good job, by removing the really disruptive children and providing the resources and infrastructure the teachers want, and they have a bit more ability to avoid hiring the small minority who don't care about doing a good job. I don't think, though, that you will find the stark contrast in mentalities that you are expecting.
This story just isn't true. There was a rash of speed camera vandalisms here a few years ago, which has dissipated. They still get vandalised (of course, like everything) but not in any widespread systematic way. Driving around it's rare to see vandalised cameras. I tried to find some figures for what proportion of speed cameras were destroyed at the height of the vandalism - I couldn't find anything exact, but there were a few news stories giving figures of 700 cameras destroyed in 2007 (which apparently was the worst year for it), out of 5,500 total cameras. That's quite a lot of destroyed cameras, but nothing like the picture you are painting and it hasn't lead to the cameras being removed or a majority being destroyed.
No, it isn't. Harassment isn't ever deserved. That's almost part of the definition.
Think of something much more serious, like a crooked cop. There are lots of responses that would be reasonable and deserved: complaints, prosecutions, suing them. But making abusive phone calls, or egging them every morning, would not be reasonable or deserved, even though they actually do much less harm to the cop.
The same is true here. If you hate the game, don't buy it. Tell your friends not to buy it. Write a letter of complaint, or a petition. Write an op-ed for your local paper. But don't send abuse to the developers, or write threats on the forum. That achieves nothing, except to make the people who work on the game miserable.
I suspect that there won't be an interesting judgment to read. This, from the sound of things, is a temporary injunction before the actual hearing. The companies are presumably claiming that there is some reason for which they are entitled to prevent publication (perhaps they are claiming that the scientists obtained confidential information - we don't know). Whether they win or lose, they are entitled to a hearing; and it would defeat the point of the hearing if the scientists could release the information now and therefore be injunction-proof. The court therefore issues an injunction temporarily to preserve the status quo. If the scientists now go on to win, the injunction will have an impact on the costs that they can recover from the car companies.
Hopefully the judge will also have ordered a speedy trial (which might mean a hearing within 6 weeks), so that the injunction doesn't need to last long.
If a single drunk driver is able to stop your production and that production is critical you are doing something wrong to begin with. While the cloud might (and probably will) offer better HA and DR it will not fix a bad design by itself.
This seems a bit harsh. I would say that in general, if you're running a small business and you think a single drunk driver can't potentially stop your production for eight hours (as happened here), you're either kidding yourself or paranoid.
If you read the article, the driver hit the shop next-door, severing the gas main and filling the buildings with gas. At some point during either the crash or the firefighters' entry their internet access was knocked out. Now, migrating all their services online protects them against the specific problem they had this time; but it wouldn't protect them against an actual gas explosion, which could easily have occurred. Nor against a key employee having been hit in the actual hit and run, or the driver hitting your delivery truck, or crashing into your actual building and damaging your workplace. Any of those - and a thousand other scenarios about as likely as the one that actually took place - could easily cost you eight hours of production, and anyone who protects against all of them is wasting an enormous amount of money.
Moving services to the cloud probably makes sense, because it protects against a whole load of problems. But saying of a small business that "if a single drunk driver is able to stop your production and that production is critical you are doing something wrong" is unrealistic.
Banks make virtually nothing on current accounts - that's why they want to charge the fees, and why there's no interest in real terms on the current accounts. If you put your money into a savings account without easy access they won't charge you fees for using it, and you'll get a real return.
The difference is due to compliance requirements - since money in a current account is likely to be withdrawn suddenly, banks' internal compliance rules mean that they can only lend out a small amount of it. The possibility of making money by taking deposits into a current account and lending it out or investing it are therefore limited. If you agree not to withdraw it, or put it in an account where withdrawing it is less convenient, they won't charge you the fees because they can make money from your deposit.
That's not quite the point. I'm not arguing that musicians deserve pay because they work particularly hard. But you have to work extremely hard to become a great musician. If you take the money out of music then people can't spend all day practicing. They may still play, but they can never get to the heights that they could if they didn't have to work another job. In my opinion that would be a tremendous shame.
What you say is probably true for mass-appeal pop music. It's not true for highly trained classical musicians. I appreciate that the figure of 10,000 hours was my number (picked because it sounded big - clearly I should have thought a bit harder), but you must see that the amount of work that you describe is just a world away from the work that goes into top-level music (which generally amounts to playing all day, every day for years). My point isn't that they therefore deserve to be remunerated; it's simply not possible for people to spend enough time to get really good if they aren't remunerated for it, because you can't practice enough and work a separate job.
Similarly, when it comes to highly skilled musicians, helping the organisation means helping the musicians. The organisations are almost always charities (I've just looked up Britain's permanent orchestras, and of the five orchestras that Wikipedia lists as the most prestigious all five are charities). A large amount of their money goes on their musicians (I've looked up one at random (since charities' accounts are available online) - the London Philharmonic - which spends 60% of its income on paying its musicians. Almost all the rest goes on paying for a venue). And they aren't comfortably off - in 4 out of the past 5 years, deducting their profit from CD distribution would leave them well into the red. CD sales may represent a small part of an orchestra's turnover (for the LPO just a little over 10%), but the low cost of it means that it has a disproportionate impact on financial viability.
How many of the best doctors today spend all day doing something other than medicine? I suspect none - I'm sure that it's true that the best doctors are motivated by more than just a desire for money, but to be the best they need to spend all day, day-in, day-out improving their skills, and that's just not possible if they have to spend most of their time working somewhere else to make money.
Art is no different. To be really good at something you have to spend tens of thousands of hours practicing. If you can't make a living through art then I'm sure many people will still create it - but if they can't spend those tens of thousands of hours on practice they'll never hit the high notes that make for something exceptional.
Copying my reply to a comment above: "If you have ever known a trained professional musician you'll know that great musicians work incredibly hard, practicing all week and giving concerts on top of that. If you go to see a great orchestra you are seeing the result of tens of thousands of hours of work - per person. There can easily be 50 person-years of diligent practice to get to the result you hear. Part-time or hobbyist players are simply not even close to being a substitute for great professional musicians."
The same is true of other forms of art. The amount of work it takes to become a great artist is huge (not to mention often expensive to the artist). This isn't a case of saying that they deserve remuneration because they work hard; it is simply impossible to spend ten hours a day practicing an instrument (for example) and also carry on a second job. If you make it impossible to earn a living from art you kill off the best artists - who are surely the ones that we should be keen to encourage.
Art isn't different to any other intellectual activity in this respect. I am a lawyer, and I love my job; if I couldn't make a living from it I would still want to carry it on in some capacity. But if I had to work another job I could never spend enough time on it to be really good. I'm sure that the same is true of things like programming or other technical roles.
If you have ever known a trained professional musician you'll know that great musicians work incredibly hard, practicing all week and giving concerts on top of that. If you go to see a great orchestra you are seeing the result of tens of thousands of hours of work - per person. There can easily be 50 person-years of diligent practice to get to the result you hear. Part-time or hobbyist players are simply not even close to being a substitute for great professional musicians.
I'm not convinced by either their data or their analysis. Data from the Eighteenth Century Collection Online (and compiled in Joel Mokyr the Enlightened Economy) puts publishing in England in 1800 at 3,000 books per year - it's difficult to believe that this fell to 1,000 per year in 1843. They don't cite their sources so it's impossible to check the numbers they give; they also seemingly rely only on data from one particular year, which tends to suggest that they chose not to look more widely because it would undermine their point.
Moreover, the argument is not a sensible one. The claims are outlandish, and incoherent: the establishment of copyright in 1710, we're told, "crippled the world of knowledge in the United Kingdom"; but in just the previous paragraph the author is claiming that it is impressive that Germany managed to catch up with the UK by 1900, and in the penultimate paragraph we find out that this is even more impressive as it took place in spite of copyright being introduced in Germany in the 19th century! Not one of the points supports the conclusion. And the claims about publishing and development rely on ignoring the historical context: the time period (the second half of the 19th century) is after the English industrial revolution but contains the German equivalent. One wonders how many of that impressive quantity of books were translations of books published in England a half-century earlier.
Slashdot Mirror
What's your definition of "unreasonable margins", though? I would expect counterfeit goods to exist wherever the sale price is above the marginal cost of production; but since the marginal cost of production excludes things like design costs, that would suggest that anything where significant effort has gone into design would be vulnerable to counterfeiting. Does that mean they all have "unreasonable margins"?
1. As to your first point, I've already addressed why competition is a viable means of quality control in private education.
I'm not sure that you have - would you mind summarising or copy-pasting it? My point here is that the positive effects of competition are only felt where certain assumptions apply. These are largely common sense: lack of lock-in, availability of other suppliers, substitutability etc. I think there are good reasons to think that these don't apply, or apply only weakly, to a private school: "Moving your child is disruptive, so there is strong lock-in. There may not be another good school nearby, or not in the same price range, or not with the same extra-curriculars. Add that together and you have a situation where the school knows that there is very little chance that a pupil will leave."
2. Rewards and penalties are inherent and indivisible from free enterprise. The consequences of bad performance are often not immediate. An oil company for example that slacks off and stops producing oil might not actually see a decline in their bottom line for months given that most refineries keep on hand a large inventory that can be sold off over a longer period of time.
Likewise, you'll find throughout business countless examples where the consequences of bad behavior would not be met immediately.
And yet the system works. Which means immediate consequences are not essential. What is important is that they happen without a period of years and that they be inevitable. Private schools like any other service provider, market themselves on the quality of their service. If that service is substandard then it impacts their ability to retain and attract customers. Eventually, that is fatal.
Let's take this example of oil companies. From what you say, one would assume that the oil companies could rely on the future consequences of reduced production to keep production high. It couldn't be further from the truth; oil companies in fact use subsidiaries and single purpose vehicles to exploit each oil deposit, from which they purchase the oil, usually on an INCOTERMS model contract, which will give a minimum monthly provision with immediate financial penalties, and termination rights, if it is not delivered. Clearly they do not appreciate your point that they can rely on the threat of eventual financial ruin to motivate people to keep standards high. If oil companies - which are often publicly-traded companies accountable to their shareholders, producing a fungible commodity that is itself publicly traded (which I think you will agree might make them marginally more susceptible to competitive pressures than the average private school) - cannot rely on the competitive pressure you describe, how much less can you rely on it to keep standards high at a private school?
And you still haven't found that example of a private school actually going out of business because its standards slipped.
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt one last time. If you actually want to engage with the arguments, start with the two numbered points in this comment. Over the course of my replies I have tried putting my points in a numbered list, putting them in bold, linking back to them and summarising them. I cannot put them more clearly, but you have never replied to them and now deny that they even exist. I don't want to assume that you are trolling if you aren't, but if you don't intend to answer any of the points in your reply, don't post one for my benefit because I won't reply to another non-post.
Presumably reading the twelve examples I gave was also beneath you, as was reading the two short arguments I specifically linked you to.
You steadfastly refuse to justify your position or respond to my arguments. The most obvious reason for that would be that you cannot do so.
You car company analysis doesn't take into account my point.
If a company goes down, the market for that service is otherwise healthy, and its competitors thrive, then that company failed to compete.
Technically true, I suppose, in the same way that anyone who dies failed to stay alive. But you can't say that because someone is dead they must have made worse decisions than someone who survived, and you can't say that because a company went insolvent it made worse products than its surviving competitors. Any one of the twelve alternative reasons that I gave in my comment could lead to a good company making good products going insolvent.
You seem to think you can invalidate the last 400 years of economic history by being obtuse. It is not a viable rhetorical strategy.
No, I want to apply economic theory, which says that things like exit barriers, transaction costs and a lack of suppliers can hinder or inhibit competition. I gave a list of reasons to think that these things might apply in my first reply You have never responded to any of these points or engaged with these issues at all.
I'm sorry if I am misjudging you, but I begin to wonder if you are just trolling by refusing to meaningfully consider or reply to anything. If not (in which case I apologise) and you do want to engage with the issues, I have set my points out time and again. A good place to start would be the two numbered points in this comment.
As to schools closing down due to low standards, actually its redundent in most cases.
Lets say a car company goes out of business. Why would a car company go out of business when other car companies do not? Because other companies provided a superior product or had a superior price which is really the same thing since the cost is a variable of the product or service.
This analysis is not accurate. A car company could go insolvent because they are out-competed; but they could also go insolvent because there is a recession or a spike in oil prices and they have less cash reserves than their competitors - we have seen examples of car companies going insolvent in both of those situations in recent years. Or they could go out of business because they can't afford the costs of an expensive piece of litigation, or because of regulatory problems or labour disputes. They could have expanded too aggressively, or a merger could go sour. A natural disaster could damage an essential factory. They could go bankrupt because of corporate crime, or even regular crime. Vulture capitalists could try to wind up the business to sell its assets. A good, sensible and prudent decision could turn out to be disastrous because of something completely unpredictable. It is not correct to say that the fact that a company has gone out of business shows that it was offering an inferior product.
A private school that closes due to poor attendance is a school that customers decided did not offer a competitive product/service.
The only situation where such a school would not be held as at fault would be schools in low population areas where there is a decline in the actual number of possible customers. So all rural NON-boarding schools can be removed from the search or urban schools in neighborhoods with significant population declines. Everything else is customers choosing a different provider which leads to the closure of those schools.
This is not true for the reasons set out in relation to your car company analogy above. Even if it were, that would not show that teaching standards are kept high by the fear of closing down.
As to your assertion that supply and demand doesn't work in private education or that competition doesn't work in private education, you've offered no logic to justify that private education alone is immune a fairly basic and universal law of both economics and human psychology.
That a mistake that many people make in these matters. They think its an economic argument and they get their little ideologies tied up in things that they think opinions can touch. They can't. You're dealing with the way the human mind works. Its not a matter of opinion. Its a matter of basic human psychology which ultimately defines the behavior and sustains the principle.
I find the first of these two paragraphs baffling. I have never made the assertion that you attribute to me. The comment that you were replying to sets out, partially in bold, my actual assertion: "in the specific example of private school teaching, the reason for high standards is not the fear that if standards drop, students will leave." Equally baffling is the suggestion that I have "offered no logic to justify" my claims; every one of my posts sets out reasons, and I summarised those reasons and linked back to them in the very post that you were replying to. I suppose that if you thought that I was claiming that "supply and demand doesn't work in private education" you would find no arguments supporting that, but that's just symptomatic of the fact that I have never made that suggestion. You have so far not engaged with any of my arguments or offered any reasons to contradict them; nor have you actually come up with an example of what you predict coming to pass and the school closing, which a cynic might consider rather telling.
In relation to the second paragraph, could you explain? Your argument is financial, and based on market competition and consumer choice. If you don't accept that economics is relevant, what is left to support your argument? What does it mean to get your "little ideology" tied up in "something opinions [can't] touch"?
You're bad at searching things on the internet.
Look for private school closures. You'll see that there are lots that close due to poor enrollment.
That is how they die.
Maybe I am bad at searching, but first let's be clear what we need to find. Your argument is that private schools are motivated to keep quality high because they are scared that if they don't, student numbers will drop and they will have to close. It is not, therefore, enough to find private schools that closed - lots of schools have closed over the years, that's not controversial - you need to find schools that (i) closed down, (ii) due to low student numbers, (iii) caused by falling standards. You need all three elements.
I've tried searching for "private school closures", "private school insolvency" and a few other terms, and I can't find any. I've found a couple of state schools that went bust and closed, a private school that went bust when the headmaster absconded with lots of school money, and lots of schools temporarily closed due to poor weather. Can I find any schools that went downhill and eventually went bust, though? I cannot. If you can find any then please do help me out. (Note that the third point is rather important - you need the falling standards - although I accept that articles may only imply these, not give direct figures. I mention this because I'm sure there were schools that were doing fine and suddenly went under during the recession, and those obviously don't provide any useful evidence.)
As to your claim that competition for business has no impact on quality, the reality of the last 300 years of capitalism disproves that notion.
That's not my claim - it's not even nearly my claim. What I have been arguing is that, in the specific example of private school teaching, the reason for high standards is not the fear that if standards drop, students will leave. I set that out pretty clearly, with reasons, in my first reply to you. In my second reply I set out a hypothetical example to illustrate my point. I won't set them out again here.
I'll just make two quick points:
1. Economic theory says that competition is good when certain assumptions are true. I set out reasons (in my first reply, linked above) to suggest that those assumptions cannot be taken for granted here. Unless they apply, whether there can be useful competition is not clear.
2. Rewards and penalties are more motivational if they are certain and will happen soon. If a good teacher decides to let standards slip to only average level, there is a chance that the school might close, after a number of years. Everything we know about motivation says that it is pretty unlikely that that is the reason that they decide to try harder and do better.
I'm not interested in your redefinitions of the word "is" or other rhetorical nonsense.
Can you point to that redefinition? I'm not sure what you are referring to.
The fact of the matter is that private organizations can and are fired. If they preform badly they tend to go out of business.
I assume you mean that they go out of business. But even then it's not true; they go out of business if they can't make money, which is rather different. Do you have any examples of a private school that went out of business because its quality declined? I can't find any.
Government organizations compel resources by force. They do not require the consentual cooperation of students or parents to fund themselves or even to get attendence.
In such a situation, a failing school is sustainable as a public entity because it is subsidized and compels membership. private organizations can neither force people to buy their goods/services or force people to exclusively use their goods/services.
Public entities can do that and do use that ability with impunity. As such, they can remain solvent despite being horrible at their jobs.
End of argument.
Rook takes king, Good game.
Your argument was that the threat of the school going out of business keeps teaching standards at private schools high. How state schools are funded is irrelevant to that argument. If we remove that, what is left is this: private organizations can neither force people to buy their goods/services or force people to exclusively use their goods/services. Assuming this is true, the question is whether this is sufficient to mean that the goods or services will necessarily be good - and the answer is clearly that it is not. There are innumerable examples of bad businesses managing to limp on for years or decades, without doing anything well. It is not enough simply to shout "capitalism is great" and assume that you have made a convincing argument.
actually it is pretty acute because if the school were actually bad then it would die.
Yes, making just ONE parent unhappy is unlikely to be a threat to the school. however, making a sizable majority unhappy would be an existential threat.
Public schools can and do survive for DECADES with a sizable majority of their student population failing and a sizable majority of their parent's unhappy.
Private schools die in those situations.
I'm not sure that I would agree with your description of that situation as "acute". If I told you that your job would be on the line if a sizable majority of your clients were unhappy, would that motivate you to do a great job? I know it wouldn't have that effect on me. It would only work for someone whose natural work ethic is so weak that they would otherwise be happy if a sizable majority of people were unhappy with their performance; I don't think that there is any reason to think that those people are particularly numerous in private education.
To illustrate my point, here's a thought experiment. Image that:
i. You are a teacher in an average school.
ii. You are a terrible teacher and only want to do the absolute minimum to keep the school afloat (so that the motivation that you set out above applies).
iii. You have been told that the school will close if a sizable majority of parents are unhappy with the school.
A child comes to you and asks for extra help with the subject. What do you do? Helping this one pupil with their work is not going to make the difference between the school closing or not closing. Since you have no other work ethic, you tell them to go away. The same would apply if the question were whether you did more than the bare minimum to teach your class, spend more time preparing lessons, give detailed feedback or any of the other things that mark out a good teacher.
So the threat of the school losing too many pupils and closing down won't work on a terrible teacher. What about on a better teacher? I would suggest that it simply won't be relevant, because only the worst teacher would be happy with a sizable majority of parents being unhappy. Your motivation can, essentially by definition, only apply to very poor teachers. (This would also suggest that if you think this is the motivating force behind private schools' success, you must think that they are staffed by below-average staff)
As I said before, most people want to do a good job. Great teachers put effort in to help their students even when they are at the top of their salary band, and they can literally be certain that they will get no reward from the school. The idea that the different between a great school and a poor school is that the staff at the great school are motivated by a fear of closing down is difficult to accept.
Fuck no. Use email for work - we want a trace for fucks sake.
Surely the point here should be to use whichever is appropriate? If you need an immediate reply, use the phone; if not, send an email. Also, calling someone and talking things through can often avoid a long exchange of emails and save a lot of time. The call can always be followed up by an email if you want a record of what was discussed. Either saying "use the phone" or "use email" is a bit too black-and-white.
Return email etiquette: When you receive an email from a Baby Boomer, reply using a similar format. If they begin with “Hi Joe” in every email, then you return every email with “Hello Eric”. If they end every email with a letter-like ending such as “Best wishes”, “Best”, “Thanks”, or another equivalent, return your emails with the same courtesy.
Oh fuck, I bet this guy top-posts.
Do you disagree with the advice? Seems a pretty easy way to make sure your 'formality-level' is about as expected. I don't know about you, but that's what I aim for - I'm happy to format and sign-off my emails in whatever way, if it means that the recipient isn't thinking about my tone when I want them to think about my points.
You could just as easily say
Technology has nothing to do with farming. Because smartphones didn't exist in huge quantities 10 years ago. Internet was new and novel 15 years ago. VIdeo games at least in popularity is barely 35 years old, and home computing is barely over 40.
And we've had agriculture and have been farming for thousands of years. The industrial age (or really what we'd call modern life) is close to 150 years old. And the electronic distractions are barely a third of that.
Technology has changed things, even if you wish it hadn't and even if you don't want it to. Good parenting means doing what is needed to raise your child to be as happy and healthy as they can be and giving them as many opportunities as you can, and that means embracing all the means at your disposal, not harking back to some golden era of lego and innocent games of cowboys and indians. If a specific piece of technology can help a good parent will use it.
Computers and televisions and smartphones and other electronics are a fact of life now. This technology - and this, I think, is what the GP was saying - is designed to help manage your kids' use of technology. It would let them have their smartphone and let you limit their use without having to keep taking it away and giving it back. Based on what you've said above, I would have thought you would welcome the prospect.
I think you might be finding the virtues of competition because you want to see them here. Many - most? - private and charter schools are oversubscribed. Moving your child is disruptive, so there is strong lock-in. There may not be another good school nearby, or not in the same price range, or not with the same extra-curriculars. Add that together and you have a situation where the school knows that there is very little chance that a pupil will leave - and if they do, they will probably be able to fill that place at the end of this (prepaid) semester. Eventually, if the school declined people would stop enrolling their kids - but that is far from the sort of acute pressure that your comment describes.
I think the point that people often miss is that (in every field) most people want to do a good job. Private schools make it easier to do a good job, by removing the really disruptive children and providing the resources and infrastructure the teachers want, and they have a bit more ability to avoid hiring the small minority who don't care about doing a good job. I don't think, though, that you will find the stark contrast in mentalities that you are expecting.
"Last time" one shot at you? Meaning this has happened more than once? What on earth do you do when you go shopping?
Which is precisely what happened in the UK.
This story just isn't true. There was a rash of speed camera vandalisms here a few years ago, which has dissipated. They still get vandalised (of course, like everything) but not in any widespread systematic way. Driving around it's rare to see vandalised cameras.
I tried to find some figures for what proportion of speed cameras were destroyed at the height of the vandalism - I couldn't find anything exact, but there were a few news stories giving figures of 700 cameras destroyed in 2007 (which apparently was the worst year for it), out of 5,500 total cameras. That's quite a lot of destroyed cameras, but nothing like the picture you are painting and it hasn't lead to the cameras being removed or a majority being destroyed.
No, it isn't. Harassment isn't ever deserved. That's almost part of the definition.
Think of something much more serious, like a crooked cop. There are lots of responses that would be reasonable and deserved: complaints, prosecutions, suing them. But making abusive phone calls, or egging them every morning, would not be reasonable or deserved, even though they actually do much less harm to the cop.
The same is true here. If you hate the game, don't buy it. Tell your friends not to buy it. Write a letter of complaint, or a petition. Write an op-ed for your local paper. But don't send abuse to the developers, or write threats on the forum. That achieves nothing, except to make the people who work on the game miserable.
I suspect that there won't be an interesting judgment to read. This, from the sound of things, is a temporary injunction before the actual hearing. The companies are presumably claiming that there is some reason for which they are entitled to prevent publication (perhaps they are claiming that the scientists obtained confidential information - we don't know). Whether they win or lose, they are entitled to a hearing; and it would defeat the point of the hearing if the scientists could release the information now and therefore be injunction-proof. The court therefore issues an injunction temporarily to preserve the status quo. If the scientists now go on to win, the injunction will have an impact on the costs that they can recover from the car companies.
Hopefully the judge will also have ordered a speedy trial (which might mean a hearing within 6 weeks), so that the injunction doesn't need to last long.
If a single drunk driver is able to stop your production and that production is critical you are doing something wrong to begin with. While the cloud might (and probably will) offer better HA and DR it will not fix a bad design by itself.
This seems a bit harsh. I would say that in general, if you're running a small business and you think a single drunk driver can't potentially stop your production for eight hours (as happened here), you're either kidding yourself or paranoid.
If you read the article, the driver hit the shop next-door, severing the gas main and filling the buildings with gas. At some point during either the crash or the firefighters' entry their internet access was knocked out. Now, migrating all their services online protects them against the specific problem they had this time; but it wouldn't protect them against an actual gas explosion, which could easily have occurred. Nor against a key employee having been hit in the actual hit and run, or the driver hitting your delivery truck, or crashing into your actual building and damaging your workplace. Any of those - and a thousand other scenarios about as likely as the one that actually took place - could easily cost you eight hours of production, and anyone who protects against all of them is wasting an enormous amount of money.
Moving services to the cloud probably makes sense, because it protects against a whole load of problems. But saying of a small business that "if a single drunk driver is able to stop your production and that production is critical you are doing something wrong" is unrealistic.
Banks make virtually nothing on current accounts - that's why they want to charge the fees, and why there's no interest in real terms on the current accounts. If you put your money into a savings account without easy access they won't charge you fees for using it, and you'll get a real return.
The difference is due to compliance requirements - since money in a current account is likely to be withdrawn suddenly, banks' internal compliance rules mean that they can only lend out a small amount of it. The possibility of making money by taking deposits into a current account and lending it out or investing it are therefore limited. If you agree not to withdraw it, or put it in an account where withdrawing it is less convenient, they won't charge you the fees because they can make money from your deposit.
Given the context, it's a fair guess that the person who wrote that is Spanish. Was it really necessary to be nasty about their English?
That's not quite the point. I'm not arguing that musicians deserve pay because they work particularly hard. But you have to work extremely hard to become a great musician. If you take the money out of music then people can't spend all day practicing. They may still play, but they can never get to the heights that they could if they didn't have to work another job. In my opinion that would be a tremendous shame.
What you say is probably true for mass-appeal pop music. It's not true for highly trained classical musicians. I appreciate that the figure of 10,000 hours was my number (picked because it sounded big - clearly I should have thought a bit harder), but you must see that the amount of work that you describe is just a world away from the work that goes into top-level music (which generally amounts to playing all day, every day for years). My point isn't that they therefore deserve to be remunerated; it's simply not possible for people to spend enough time to get really good if they aren't remunerated for it, because you can't practice enough and work a separate job.
Similarly, when it comes to highly skilled musicians, helping the organisation means helping the musicians. The organisations are almost always charities (I've just looked up Britain's permanent orchestras, and of the five orchestras that Wikipedia lists as the most prestigious all five are charities). A large amount of their money goes on their musicians (I've looked up one at random (since charities' accounts are available online) - the London Philharmonic - which spends 60% of its income on paying its musicians. Almost all the rest goes on paying for a venue). And they aren't comfortably off - in 4 out of the past 5 years, deducting their profit from CD distribution would leave them well into the red. CD sales may represent a small part of an orchestra's turnover (for the LPO just a little over 10%), but the low cost of it means that it has a disproportionate impact on financial viability.
How many of the best doctors today spend all day doing something other than medicine? I suspect none - I'm sure that it's true that the best doctors are motivated by more than just a desire for money, but to be the best they need to spend all day, day-in, day-out improving their skills, and that's just not possible if they have to spend most of their time working somewhere else to make money.
Art is no different. To be really good at something you have to spend tens of thousands of hours practicing. If you can't make a living through art then I'm sure many people will still create it - but if they can't spend those tens of thousands of hours on practice they'll never hit the high notes that make for something exceptional.
Copying my reply to a comment above: "If you have ever known a trained professional musician you'll know that great musicians work incredibly hard, practicing all week and giving concerts on top of that. If you go to see a great orchestra you are seeing the result of tens of thousands of hours of work - per person. There can easily be 50 person-years of diligent practice to get to the result you hear. Part-time or hobbyist players are simply not even close to being a substitute for great professional musicians."
The same is true of other forms of art. The amount of work it takes to become a great artist is huge (not to mention often expensive to the artist). This isn't a case of saying that they deserve remuneration because they work hard; it is simply impossible to spend ten hours a day practicing an instrument (for example) and also carry on a second job. If you make it impossible to earn a living from art you kill off the best artists - who are surely the ones that we should be keen to encourage.
Art isn't different to any other intellectual activity in this respect. I am a lawyer, and I love my job; if I couldn't make a living from it I would still want to carry it on in some capacity. But if I had to work another job I could never spend enough time on it to be really good. I'm sure that the same is true of things like programming or other technical roles.
If you have ever known a trained professional musician you'll know that great musicians work incredibly hard, practicing all week and giving concerts on top of that. If you go to see a great orchestra you are seeing the result of tens of thousands of hours of work - per person. There can easily be 50 person-years of diligent practice to get to the result you hear. Part-time or hobbyist players are simply not even close to being a substitute for great professional musicians.
I'm not convinced by either their data or their analysis. Data from the Eighteenth Century Collection Online (and compiled in Joel Mokyr the Enlightened Economy) puts publishing in England in 1800 at 3,000 books per year - it's difficult to believe that this fell to 1,000 per year in 1843. They don't cite their sources so it's impossible to check the numbers they give; they also seemingly rely only on data from one particular year, which tends to suggest that they chose not to look more widely because it would undermine their point.
Moreover, the argument is not a sensible one. The claims are outlandish, and incoherent: the establishment of copyright in 1710, we're told, "crippled the world of knowledge in the United Kingdom"; but in just the previous paragraph the author is claiming that it is impressive that Germany managed to catch up with the UK by 1900, and in the penultimate paragraph we find out that this is even more impressive as it took place in spite of copyright being introduced in Germany in the 19th century! Not one of the points supports the conclusion. And the claims about publishing and development rely on ignoring the historical context: the time period (the second half of the 19th century) is after the English industrial revolution but contains the German equivalent. One wonders how many of that impressive quantity of books were translations of books published in England a half-century earlier.