While people like to focus on Blockbuster's strategic decisions, they tend to do this from a bit of a tech fetish perspective and forget that retail rental was pretty profitable until pretty reciently. What really killed Blockbuster was being spun off from its parent company with around a billion dollars in someone else's debt, which meant much of its profits went into loan payments.
Sadly, if your lawyer is good, it is perfectly legal to buy a company, take a loan out, keep the money, transfer the loan to the company, then spin them back off. That is what killed Blockbuster and if they had bought Netflix they probably would have crippled them.
If I understand correctly, the sketchy investment in this case was not just the bitcoins present on their servers, but the fiat currency put forward by various investors to get the exchange going and give it enough liquid assets to cover people converting.
Eh, it was before that even. One thing the Quakers learned the hard way is that once they allowed other faiths to immigrate and vote they were pushed out of office in favor of candidates that were more willing to give the voters blood.
No, you are not. That myth exists mostly on TV and internet forums. In the real world rape trials are notoriously difficult to prosecute with an extremely high chance of failure... in no small part due to these myths and juries believing them.
Sad thing is the whole 'treatment over punishment' thing was originally an American system that other countries copied because it was working fairly well, but then the US abandoned it favor of righteous suffering.
In all of those other cases there is some type of exchange going on. The issue here is that you have group A producing content and then group B taking that content without compensating A and then using it as the basis for making money. It can be argued (pretty easily) that the lyric generators are adding value in the process, and thus there is an exchange going on between consumer and aggregator (via advertiser), but the relationship between producer and aggregator is completely one way.
While I think the music industry is being a jackass and this will do nothing positive for them, legally and even ethically I can see their point.
I don't know, 'execute' is not that far off since the experiment involved simulating the subject being killed or at least rendered unconscious by the shocks.
Yeah.. this seems about as noteworthy as an article talking about how you should use classes and objects in programming or there is this hidden gem called version control. This is pretty 101 stuff.
Given how easy it is to get normally good people to do terrible things with a surprisingly small amount of peer pressure, I am comfortable extending sympathies even to those who one might call 'brainwashed'. While we like to think of ourselves as strong, it has been shown a disturbing number of times just how easy it is tweak someone into such behavior.
While there are significant similarities between the two shifts, they are not completely parallel. For instance the actual playback mechanism for music remained unchanged even as the source shifted. You could unplug a CD deck and drop an mp3 player in and still use the rest of the stack, with primary advantages and disadvantages being linked to the rest of the equipment. With books we are talking about both a new medium AND new way of interacting with it (though there is the possibility of producing flashable 'paper' books), which puts it a little further apart.
As for music stores, yes there are fewer, but the ones that are around seem to have found their niches and look pretty stable. Music distribution has changed, but just like radio and tape did not wipe out live performance, downloadable digital music has not wiped out physical stores.
The fate of paper books is not quite written in stone yet. eBooks have some significant advantages, but some real downsides too. I suspect long term we will just see a new equilibrium rather then a complete crushing.
Part of the problem is that the bookstore does provide value to the customer, but when they finally make their purchase they do it form Amazon instead.
It can be a very difficult thing to balance, but yeah, unregulated free markets tend to be pretty terrible for all but a select few, usually people who can afford to buy stuff from one of the healthier regulated markets.
Well, since they are unhampered by bureaucratic, at least the paperwork for the fatalities will be simple. No tedious safety analysis, no verifying that their course will not interfere or collide with other things, just shoot the rocket off and hope for the best. Adventure!
This is pretty specific. We are talking about a low cost additive with known health risks and no shortage of drop in replacements. This is really more of a food safety issue then anything else, similar to requirements around cleanliness in food manufacturing plants or not allowing lead pipes for potable water.
They have a somewhat longer shelf life, but other then that, no, they are simply cheap to manufacture with.
On the more general topic of 'but we are a free country', while the future is difficult to predict, a trans fat ban could very well result in greater consumer choice rather then less. Right now there is an industry race to the bottom, everyone uses trans fats because any company that does not will have marginally higher prices which would hurt the company. As long as ANY company is using them, they all have to in order to be competitive. Consumers do not want the stuff, they just want a slightly lower cost the the box sitting next to whatever it is.
Part of the problem is that right now consumer demand is not the dominant factor in choosing which fat source to use. By removing one option that puts the power back on consumers to demand any particular source they want, or no particular source. For the moment, we have surprisingly little choice. And half the equation in freedom is having choices in the first place.
One rather specific reason the two are different is industry has any number of drop-in replacements for trans fat, while smoking is a rather unique experience. Artificial trans fats are really more of a manufacturing process then anything else, a way to produce cheap fats for adding to processed foods. They could just as easily add other fat sources and produce something nearly identical in terms of taste and texture but at a marginally higher cost.
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Well, private ownership is a construct of government, and government is a construct of a citizenry, so both.
Actually, it probably would have killed Netflix.
While people like to focus on Blockbuster's strategic decisions, they tend to do this from a bit of a tech fetish perspective and forget that retail rental was pretty profitable until pretty reciently. What really killed Blockbuster was being spun off from its parent company with around a billion dollars in someone else's debt, which meant much of its profits went into loan payments.
Sadly, if your lawyer is good, it is perfectly legal to buy a company, take a loan out, keep the money, transfer the loan to the company, then spin them back off. That is what killed Blockbuster and if they had bought Netflix they probably would have crippled them.
Well... I am going to have nightmares tonight now....
Hrm. I wonder how much of a market there would be for an app that you can snap pictures of punch cards and run them in an VM.....
If I understand correctly, the sketchy investment in this case was not just the bitcoins present on their servers, but the fiat currency put forward by various investors to get the exchange going and give it enough liquid assets to cover people converting.
Eh, it was before that even. One thing the Quakers learned the hard way is that once they allowed other faiths to immigrate and vote they were pushed out of office in favor of candidates that were more willing to give the voters blood.
I don't know, I see a lot of people doing actual work (including content creation) on iPads.
I am assuming it is only a minority of exchanges, but doesn't this seem to be a bit of a recurring problem?
No, you are not. That myth exists mostly on TV and internet forums. In the real world rape trials are notoriously difficult to prosecute with an extremely high chance of failure... in no small part due to these myths and juries believing them.
Sad thing is the whole 'treatment over punishment' thing was originally an American system that other countries copied because it was working fairly well, but then the US abandoned it favor of righteous suffering.
In all of those other cases there is some type of exchange going on. The issue here is that you have group A producing content and then group B taking that content without compensating A and then using it as the basis for making money. It can be argued (pretty easily) that the lyric generators are adding value in the process, and thus there is an exchange going on between consumer and aggregator (via advertiser), but the relationship between producer and aggregator is completely one way.
While I think the music industry is being a jackass and this will do nothing positive for them, legally and even ethically I can see their point.
I don't know, 'execute' is not that far off since the experiment involved simulating the subject being killed or at least rendered unconscious by the shocks.
Yeah.. this seems about as noteworthy as an article talking about how you should use classes and objects in programming or there is this hidden gem called version control. This is pretty 101 stuff.
Given how easy it is to get normally good people to do terrible things with a surprisingly small amount of peer pressure, I am comfortable extending sympathies even to those who one might call 'brainwashed'. While we like to think of ourselves as strong, it has been shown a disturbing number of times just how easy it is tweak someone into such behavior.
While there are significant similarities between the two shifts, they are not completely parallel. For instance the actual playback mechanism for music remained unchanged even as the source shifted. You could unplug a CD deck and drop an mp3 player in and still use the rest of the stack, with primary advantages and disadvantages being linked to the rest of the equipment. With books we are talking about both a new medium AND new way of interacting with it (though there is the possibility of producing flashable 'paper' books), which puts it a little further apart.
As for music stores, yes there are fewer, but the ones that are around seem to have found their niches and look pretty stable. Music distribution has changed, but just like radio and tape did not wipe out live performance, downloadable digital music has not wiped out physical stores.
The fate of paper books is not quite written in stone yet. eBooks have some significant advantages, but some real downsides too. I suspect long term we will just see a new equilibrium rather then a complete crushing.
Part of the problem is that the bookstore does provide value to the customer, but when they finally make their purchase they do it form Amazon instead.
For me, that actually made it work. Sometimes the bad guy wins, sometimes the bad guy does not even realize they are bad and no lesson is learned.
It can be a very difficult thing to balance, but yeah, unregulated free markets tend to be pretty terrible for all but a select few, usually people who can afford to buy stuff from one of the healthier regulated markets.
Everything is simple until it gets complex. The current industry learned this the hard way over decades of extremely expensive things blowing up.
Well, since they are unhampered by bureaucratic, at least the paperwork for the fatalities will be simple. No tedious safety analysis, no verifying that their course will not interfere or collide with other things, just shoot the rocket off and hope for the best. Adventure!
Sadly, because the corn lobby is probably on par with defense contractors in terms of lobbying power.
This is pretty specific. We are talking about a low cost additive with known health risks and no shortage of drop in replacements. This is really more of a food safety issue then anything else, similar to requirements around cleanliness in food manufacturing plants or not allowing lead pipes for potable water.
They have a somewhat longer shelf life, but other then that, no, they are simply cheap to manufacture with.
On the more general topic of 'but we are a free country', while the future is difficult to predict, a trans fat ban could very well result in greater consumer choice rather then less. Right now there is an industry race to the bottom, everyone uses trans fats because any company that does not will have marginally higher prices which would hurt the company. As long as ANY company is using them, they all have to in order to be competitive. Consumers do not want the stuff, they just want a slightly lower cost the the box sitting next to whatever it is.
Part of the problem is that right now consumer demand is not the dominant factor in choosing which fat source to use. By removing one option that puts the power back on consumers to demand any particular source they want, or no particular source. For the moment, we have surprisingly little choice. And half the equation in freedom is having choices in the first place.
One rather specific reason the two are different is industry has any number of drop-in replacements for trans fat, while smoking is a rather unique experience. Artificial trans fats are really more of a manufacturing process then anything else, a way to produce cheap fats for adding to processed foods. They could just as easily add other fat sources and produce something nearly identical in terms of taste and texture but at a marginally higher cost.