Heh. It is kinda like how pure capitalist and pure communist systems become indistinguishable over time as natural pressures moved them into certain patterns. The modern system developed over time for various reasons, and one can already see those same pressures shaping active areas of BTC into the same patterns. Financial institutions did not just appear one day after a bunch of people sat down and said 'hey, I know what we need, we need this horribly complicated and corrupt systems because we hate people and wish them to suffer!'.
Problem is, just like deflationary currencies, there are people who disagree with the reasoning, or at minimal do not believe it. Something to keep in mind, the gold standard was great for individuals but bad for the economy, and many of the core BTC backers are very cult of individual so they weigh things that help a small number of people (like them) much greater then overall economic health. Deflation is a good example of this... deflationary currencies are wonderful for a certain pattern of investment, but retard the whole economy. People who want that specific investment style (and can't make it with the more complex ones) can benefit even if it drags everyone (including them, but not as fast) down. The irony of course being that depending on the rate of deflation vs economic growth, BTC can still experience inflation.
Thing is, you can't always just sorta hope it works out in the end, not on the macro scale. While people criticize the resistance to change in the past, it generally served to smooth the transition for the general public. Unemployment and disruption might sound like someone else's problem if one feels they are on the winning side of the curve, but it can lead to economic collapse that WILL impact other people. If automation reduces a workforce to 10% of its original size for a region, that is a lot of people who no longer have the money to support the economy, which means those 10% jobs also start to vanish due to lack of customer base. Some people will transition to other jobs, but that transition usually means less income (which, again, means fewer consumers) and there are usually limited paths.
Generally, historically, the people who feel that the luddites should just suck it up and adapt do not realize how much of their new lifestyle depends on programs slowing the transition or how likely they would be poor too if the shift was left purely to its own schedule.
Eh, the 'real reason' for Kodak's demise had little to do with Apple or consumer products in general. Kodak was killed by corporate raiding, a corrupt CEO got stock payoffs for short term gains due to selling off one profitable division after another, leading to long term failure of the company. We tend to focus on Kodak's consumer products on sites like this because, well, we are average consumers and our world revolves around us, but we are not the only market and the lion's share of Kodak's revenue did NOT come from retail products.
Well, they could potentially use something similar to compulsory licensing. Take some common or critical part of the internet (say, backbone traffic) and associate a fee or tax on that with distribution based off some kind of centralized usage statistics. Abstract it away from the end consumer so they are not directly aware of it.
That is how it could work, though historical examples of such systems have not been all that helpful to industries, so I do not think it would be a very good solution.
I guess it depends on which narrative you read into it. I rather agree with the AC, I didn't see it as a 'X replaced Y' example but instead one of what kind of workforce highly valued companies require using two examples that the audience is likely to be familiar with.
Making it even worse, different languages are not only designed to solve different technical problems, but they are designed to solve different HR problems. How easily one can get developers who are both familiar with the domain AND the language, or know a language so close that transitioning is easy (i.e. why most languages looks like C) is just as critical as in how well a language fits a project as the technical aspects.
Which is why language wars can get so flamey.. each one is heavily tangled up in culture.
It will be a tricky thing to balance, and it is questionable how much incentive or background they have for striking that balance. The oversight and regulation that makes sense when you are dealing with multiple well funded parties with significant domain knowledge may or may not make sense when you are dealing with small parties who are not part of the existing wall street game. Much of the current regulation essentially tries to protect those big players from each other but probably applies poorly to this new crowd, who will likely need a very different type of protections and regulations.
Unfortunately, the regulators live in that big player world. Their lobbyists are big players, their buddies are big players, their social circles are big players, and the jobs waiting for them when they leave are probably also at big players. Shifting your perspective is hard enough to do when you have an incentive to do so, but in this case, they do not even have that really.
Listing yourself as having a masters in finance and being a certified accountant actually does not lend any additional credibility to you other then having completed a higher degree. While there is some overlap between those skillsets and economics, they are actually pretty divergent. You would be just as qualified if you had a masters of philosophy. But anyway.
First, I will put my cards on the table with regard to BTC in that I am not a supporter, I personally think it will fade into obscurity in a few years. However, part of looking at economic issues involves getting outside one's personal views and looking at something in a larger context.
There is a real chicken and egg problem with BTC. Both utility to average consumers and stability are dependent on having a large and active ecosystem. Right now bitcoin is unstable because the volumes are very low, and it is of little use because not many places work in it natively. However its distributed nature does provide utility in that it is low cost for both sides of a transaction and mechanically behaves much like other electronic payment systems, which gives it an practical advantage over current centralized methods. So if the volume gets large enough to counter the stability and utility issues it does have a meaningful advantage over centralized payment systems.
Of course with any chicken and egg problem, it is a tossup if it can ever see critical mass, and it is questionable if its advantages are advantageous enough to push past existing systems, but there is a big gap between unlikely and no scenario.
This highlights one of the reasons I do not like PETA.... they are kinda like NAMBLA, it does not matter what your point is, if PETA is for it then you just drew a big bullseye on your back and, more importantly, pretty much anything you do will get support. PETA adds a nice hated target to get laws like this passed, but a lot of much more rational groups are going to get caught up in the precedent.
Or at minimal it could potentially work really well. Right now, while the mechanics indeed can fill that gap, pragmatically the ecosystem is just too unstable, resulting in BTC not actually being able to fill that role all that well.
Well, stability is relative. Something can have built-in deflation (or inflation) and still be stable enough for use as a currency. Right now BTC is not, but it is quite possible that even with a steady increase in value it could be stable enough to plan with. In a way that is, in theory, one of its advantages. Since the rate of increase of supply is known ahead of time it should be possible to plan accordingly just like today long term contracts take USD's estimated rate of inflation into account.
However, the ecosystem around BTC is way too unstable for that kind of planning.
Or *gasp* I have interacted with hunters who complain about problems with ATVs driving around during hunting season, including complaining about other hunters doing it. Even when it is illegal, it often goes unenforced depending on the local hunting community and often class divides within it. I have also watched businesses trying to stir up more popular support for cracking down on watchdog groups who have tried to use drones. Laws designed to help expensive private hunting parks and industrial sites are less likely to be popular compared to 'think of the poor average hunter being harassed by PETA' ones.
Well, one question is, is PETA infringing on rights? Their stated goal is to monitor for violations since in many areas enforcement of hunting and environmental regulations is pretty much non existent. While I am no fan of PETA, there is something to be said for citizens steeping up when local governments refuse to implement the laws or are so budget starved that they do not have the resources to actually do any monitoring or enforcement of their own.
So in a way, what this law has done is made it illegal for a group with a weak lobby to determine how badly a group with a strong lobby is breaking the law.
Sad thing is, I suspect the push behind this law is not coming from hunters but from private industry. There has been a lot of grumbling at how it is increasingly easy for local watchdog groups to catch environmental violations via drones after farms and factories spent so much time making sure the local police and regulators don't come looking, so there have been pushes to make such things illegal. Activists are a lot harder to pay off or threaten then local officials, so making it illegal for activists to aid in enforcing the law is a high priority for some.
I am a little skeptical of the stated concern. There are plenty of other things that will scare off game that have not had laws passed against them such at driving ATVs round..... no.. I suspect this has more to do with the various cases of eco monitoring groups that have caught businesses and clubs violating the law and the 'wink and nod' part of the community does not want their violations spotted.
That is actually a rather disturbing but realistic possibility. It does not help that the TSA has "cover your ass" at its core, so even if the people responding were not involved in theft, they are still likely to play along with the "destroyed" story.
Enough of the population is still scared enough of terrorists or secure enough in their "stuff like this doesn:t happen to middle class WASPs" bubble that the TSA does not worry them.
This is not even the first time this has happened. There have been a small but published number of other instances of musical instruments being destroyed without appeal. It is a flaw in the TSA`s procedures and a problem with how its authority is structured. If they were law enforcement they could not simply destroy things, but they are not.
Heh. In all seriousness, one of the biggest issues we face is the mythology that someone else`s problem is just someone else`s problem, and how often other people`s problems become our own in subtle ways.
Since breaking out of their walled garden is as easy as buying a competing device, and even still have access to the same phone network, calling it totalitarian is kinda out there.
True, it is hardly the largest factor, esp at these small scales, but it is a good one to keep an eye on since, as you say, they such kids already have it tough, and the school should be giving them the best chance it can with the best resources available. Explicitly taking low cost resources out of the pool works counter to that goal.
It can vary wildly. For instance in the region I grew up in, the school library was pretty much it unless your parents were willing to buy you stuff or drive you down to the 1000 square foot public library. There were no busses, used bookstores were few and far between (and, last time I looked, are completely gone now). School libraries are a bit of a last resort, there are all sorts of better options IF those options are available.
Privilege is a complex and scaled topic. In this context, yes, if you are asserting that kids can just go to their parents and get the books then that is a privileged assumption since that is not a viable option to large percentage of the of the population. And this is an important part of the argument since the point is that many children really do rely on public institutions for obtaining such works, and thus removing them from public access puts up a significant barrier that children of more middle class parents do not experience.
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Heh. It is kinda like how pure capitalist and pure communist systems become indistinguishable over time as natural pressures moved them into certain patterns. The modern system developed over time for various reasons, and one can already see those same pressures shaping active areas of BTC into the same patterns. Financial institutions did not just appear one day after a bunch of people sat down and said 'hey, I know what we need, we need this horribly complicated and corrupt systems because we hate people and wish them to suffer!'.
Problem is, just like deflationary currencies, there are people who disagree with the reasoning, or at minimal do not believe it. Something to keep in mind, the gold standard was great for individuals but bad for the economy, and many of the core BTC backers are very cult of individual so they weigh things that help a small number of people (like them) much greater then overall economic health. Deflation is a good example of this... deflationary currencies are wonderful for a certain pattern of investment, but retard the whole economy. People who want that specific investment style (and can't make it with the more complex ones) can benefit even if it drags everyone (including them, but not as fast) down. The irony of course being that depending on the rate of deflation vs economic growth, BTC can still experience inflation.
Thing is, you can't always just sorta hope it works out in the end, not on the macro scale. While people criticize the resistance to change in the past, it generally served to smooth the transition for the general public. Unemployment and disruption might sound like someone else's problem if one feels they are on the winning side of the curve, but it can lead to economic collapse that WILL impact other people. If automation reduces a workforce to 10% of its original size for a region, that is a lot of people who no longer have the money to support the economy, which means those 10% jobs also start to vanish due to lack of customer base. Some people will transition to other jobs, but that transition usually means less income (which, again, means fewer consumers) and there are usually limited paths.
Generally, historically, the people who feel that the luddites should just suck it up and adapt do not realize how much of their new lifestyle depends on programs slowing the transition or how likely they would be poor too if the shift was left purely to its own schedule.
I don't know, sounds like just another variant of 'blame the upper class' to me.
Eh, the 'real reason' for Kodak's demise had little to do with Apple or consumer products in general. Kodak was killed by corporate raiding, a corrupt CEO got stock payoffs for short term gains due to selling off one profitable division after another, leading to long term failure of the company. We tend to focus on Kodak's consumer products on sites like this because, well, we are average consumers and our world revolves around us, but we are not the only market and the lion's share of Kodak's revenue did NOT come from retail products.
Well, they could potentially use something similar to compulsory licensing. Take some common or critical part of the internet (say, backbone traffic) and associate a fee or tax on that with distribution based off some kind of centralized usage statistics. Abstract it away from the end consumer so they are not directly aware of it.
That is how it could work, though historical examples of such systems have not been all that helpful to industries, so I do not think it would be a very good solution.
I guess it depends on which narrative you read into it. I rather agree with the AC, I didn't see it as a 'X replaced Y' example but instead one of what kind of workforce highly valued companies require using two examples that the audience is likely to be familiar with.
Making it even worse, different languages are not only designed to solve different technical problems, but they are designed to solve different HR problems. How easily one can get developers who are both familiar with the domain AND the language, or know a language so close that transitioning is easy (i.e. why most languages looks like C) is just as critical as in how well a language fits a project as the technical aspects.
Which is why language wars can get so flamey.. each one is heavily tangled up in culture.
I would admire that kind of dedication, and the flamewars we would be treated to every week as people switch sides would be delicious.
It will be a tricky thing to balance, and it is questionable how much incentive or background they have for striking that balance. The oversight and regulation that makes sense when you are dealing with multiple well funded parties with significant domain knowledge may or may not make sense when you are dealing with small parties who are not part of the existing wall street game. Much of the current regulation essentially tries to protect those big players from each other but probably applies poorly to this new crowd, who will likely need a very different type of protections and regulations.
Unfortunately, the regulators live in that big player world. Their lobbyists are big players, their buddies are big players, their social circles are big players, and the jobs waiting for them when they leave are probably also at big players. Shifting your perspective is hard enough to do when you have an incentive to do so, but in this case, they do not even have that really.
Listing yourself as having a masters in finance and being a certified accountant actually does not lend any additional credibility to you other then having completed a higher degree. While there is some overlap between those skillsets and economics, they are actually pretty divergent. You would be just as qualified if you had a masters of philosophy. But anyway.
First, I will put my cards on the table with regard to BTC in that I am not a supporter, I personally think it will fade into obscurity in a few years. However, part of looking at economic issues involves getting outside one's personal views and looking at something in a larger context.
There is a real chicken and egg problem with BTC. Both utility to average consumers and stability are dependent on having a large and active ecosystem. Right now bitcoin is unstable because the volumes are very low, and it is of little use because not many places work in it natively. However its distributed nature does provide utility in that it is low cost for both sides of a transaction and mechanically behaves much like other electronic payment systems, which gives it an practical advantage over current centralized methods. So if the volume gets large enough to counter the stability and utility issues it does have a meaningful advantage over centralized payment systems.
Of course with any chicken and egg problem, it is a tossup if it can ever see critical mass, and it is questionable if its advantages are advantageous enough to push past existing systems, but there is a big gap between unlikely and no scenario.
This highlights one of the reasons I do not like PETA.... they are kinda like NAMBLA, it does not matter what your point is, if PETA is for it then you just drew a big bullseye on your back and, more importantly, pretty much anything you do will get support. PETA adds a nice hated target to get laws like this passed, but a lot of much more rational groups are going to get caught up in the precedent.
Or at minimal it could potentially work really well. Right now, while the mechanics indeed can fill that gap, pragmatically the ecosystem is just too unstable, resulting in BTC not actually being able to fill that role all that well.
Well, stability is relative. Something can have built-in deflation (or inflation) and still be stable enough for use as a currency. Right now BTC is not, but it is quite possible that even with a steady increase in value it could be stable enough to plan with. In a way that is, in theory, one of its advantages. Since the rate of increase of supply is known ahead of time it should be possible to plan accordingly just like today long term contracts take USD's estimated rate of inflation into account.
However, the ecosystem around BTC is way too unstable for that kind of planning.
Or *gasp* I have interacted with hunters who complain about problems with ATVs driving around during hunting season, including complaining about other hunters doing it. Even when it is illegal, it often goes unenforced depending on the local hunting community and often class divides within it. I have also watched businesses trying to stir up more popular support for cracking down on watchdog groups who have tried to use drones. Laws designed to help expensive private hunting parks and industrial sites are less likely to be popular compared to 'think of the poor average hunter being harassed by PETA' ones.
Well, one question is, is PETA infringing on rights? Their stated goal is to monitor for violations since in many areas enforcement of hunting and environmental regulations is pretty much non existent. While I am no fan of PETA, there is something to be said for citizens steeping up when local governments refuse to implement the laws or are so budget starved that they do not have the resources to actually do any monitoring or enforcement of their own.
So in a way, what this law has done is made it illegal for a group with a weak lobby to determine how badly a group with a strong lobby is breaking the law.
Sad thing is, I suspect the push behind this law is not coming from hunters but from private industry. There has been a lot of grumbling at how it is increasingly easy for local watchdog groups to catch environmental violations via drones after farms and factories spent so much time making sure the local police and regulators don't come looking, so there have been pushes to make such things illegal. Activists are a lot harder to pay off or threaten then local officials, so making it illegal for activists to aid in enforcing the law is a high priority for some.
I am a little skeptical of the stated concern. There are plenty of other things that will scare off game that have not had laws passed against them such at driving ATVs round..... no.. I suspect this has more to do with the various cases of eco monitoring groups that have caught businesses and clubs violating the law and the 'wink and nod' part of the community does not want their violations spotted.
That is actually a rather disturbing but realistic possibility. It does not help that the TSA has "cover your ass" at its core, so even if the people responding were not involved in theft, they are still likely to play along with the "destroyed" story.
Enough of the population is still scared enough of terrorists or secure enough in their "stuff like this doesn:t happen to middle class WASPs" bubble that the TSA does not worry them.
This is not even the first time this has happened. There have been a small but published number of other instances of musical instruments being destroyed without appeal. It is a flaw in the TSA`s procedures and a problem with how its authority is structured. If they were law enforcement they could not simply destroy things, but they are not.
Heh. In all seriousness, one of the biggest issues we face is the mythology that someone else`s problem is just someone else`s problem, and how often other people`s problems become our own in subtle ways.
Since breaking out of their walled garden is as easy as buying a competing device, and even still have access to the same phone network, calling it totalitarian is kinda out there.
True, it is hardly the largest factor, esp at these small scales, but it is a good one to keep an eye on since, as you say, they such kids already have it tough, and the school should be giving them the best chance it can with the best resources available. Explicitly taking low cost resources out of the pool works counter to that goal.
It can vary wildly. For instance in the region I grew up in, the school library was pretty much it unless your parents were willing to buy you stuff or drive you down to the 1000 square foot public library. There were no busses, used bookstores were few and far between (and, last time I looked, are completely gone now). School libraries are a bit of a last resort, there are all sorts of better options IF those options are available.
Privilege is a complex and scaled topic. In this context, yes, if you are asserting that kids can just go to their parents and get the books then that is a privileged assumption since that is not a viable option to large percentage of the of the population. And this is an important part of the argument since the point is that many children really do rely on public institutions for obtaining such works, and thus removing them from public access puts up a significant barrier that children of more middle class parents do not experience.