Now I didn't do anything as dramatic as RTFA. However, how has the internet changed anything to do with how government should operate? Some things are, and have always been, the jurisdiction of local governments. And other things are, and always will be, the jurisdiction of the federal government. National defense, intrastate transportation, inter and intra national trade regulations, all things that are just as much the job of the Federal government today as they ever were. Are there overlaps and gray areas and give and take? Absolutely, and each level of government's responsibilities shift with time, technology and politics. But how has more information changed the basic breakdown? The Federal government handles the "big picture" and State and local governments handle whatever's left out of that (hazy) definition. I don't see why twitter or facebook or even data.gov are going to change that.
And as the article also says, the price of fuels increased 63% over the period while electricity prices increased only 43%. Also note that it was this increase that spurred the creation of new capacity, including wind farms, which would undoubtedly have been restricted to some degree in a more regulated system. Given that, it is hard to imagine how the price would not have increased more under a regulated system, unless the changes were hidden with subsidies (ie electricity bought with tax or debt) or the operators took reduced profits. And of course now that natural gas prices are back below $4/btu, prices are lower.
Quebec is a completely different situation because 98% of its electricity is generated by hydro-dams - hydro-dams with minimal operating costs but which required massive capital investments over decades that came largely from taxpayers. Even with capital costs factored in, however, hydro power is one of the cheapest ways to generate electricity, and if there were as many rivers in Texas as there are in Quebec you could be sure that electricity prices would reflect that (it is certainly reflected in the prices in other hydro-dominated places, such as British Columbia). It makes no sense to compare Texas to a system dominated by a completely different power regime. Comparing it to something more similar, like, say, California, is a much fairer comparison, and reflects much more favourably on Texas.
California's troubles were caused by botched partial deregulation that provided the opportunity for companies to manipulate the market. Texas, on the other hand, has had much more success deregulating their market, as have other places, such as Alberta. Texan electrical policy is the most successful in the country, particularly when it comes to encouraging wind power. That you would use California's convoluted, more regulated and historically disastrous system to argue against it is quite surprising, as is the fact that some people tagged your logic "insightful".
Further, there is no place in the world with tighter drilling regulations than the Gulf of Mexico, and the rig that exploded and sank was the most advanced you'll find anywhere. Consequently, you're not talking about "regulating" offshore oil, you're talking about banning it, because no amount of regulation would have prevented the current situation. That's an option that I'm sure will be explored going forward, but it does not really apply to your argument, since you're presumably not arguing for an outright banning of windpower anywhere.
But really this is a story you can spin however you like. The loans likely required that the money be spent on a reputable engineering company, of which the country (being a backwards shithole) had none. The big construction companies they do have were likely impossibly ineffective stooges in the government's pocket. If I were handing over a huge wad of money for, say, an improved sewage system, I would feel much more confident that the job was going to get done if it was entrusted to an international company with a track record than some local yahoos that helped get the country's infrastructure in the situation it's in in the first place.
I also think it's unfair to portray the IMF and World Bank as groups out to take advantage of third world countries. Those institutions exist to help those places. They have had a "tough love" attitude in many cases, and they have been advocates of privatization of many government industries as well as balancing government budgets by raising taxes, but only because they ultimately believed these things were better for those countries. Are they wrong? Many people think so. But if you believe so and you're president of some third world country, you obviously have the option of not taking a loan from the IMF. There lies the rub, of course, these countries are usually so sketchy that they can't borrow money from private sources at anything near a reasonable rate. Unfortunately, in international development finance as well as life, beggars can't be choosers.
Sorry, yes I meant companies. I hadn't heard of this story about Bechtel here is the article I found on it. After reading it, I would still put Bechtel in the category of good operators. They made a proper deal and were looking to carry it out properly. Absolutely they were operating with a morally bankrupt regime. But they were going to fulfill their end of the bargain, and I don't think that makes them complicit in the unrelated actions of their employer in any way.
There are a lot of unsavory places in the world. American companies continue to do business there regardless, and I don't see why Bechtel doing business in Iraq should be differentiated from all the many businesses operating in China or Saudi Arabia or the former USSR. Those authoritarian states are likely killing at least as many people as Saddam did Kurds, but they never developed as political opportunities for American politicians to make hay by taking the moral high ground, like Saddam's Iraq did, along with a few others like Cuba and Syria. The "moral justice" meted out by the US federal government is very unevenly distributed, and it seems unfair to vilify Bechtel for finding itself on the wrong side of that often arbitrary distribution with millions of dollars on the line.
Microsoft getting fined $800 million for bundling Windows Media Player and not having a decent API for its server programs is the example I'm looking for? Forgive me, but that decision has always struck me as being overkill.
Well I'm not sure I follow your argument entirely. But I think you're saying you should only get taxed for where you live or operate a business, and people that come and visit you shouldn't be taxed. That would work as a system overall if there was an equal flow into and out of a city and set of suburbs. But what happens in practice, as I see it, is that far more people come into cities from suburbs and use city services (be they roads, public transit, emergency services, municipal courts, parks or whatever) to a far greater degree than the taxes they pay to that city, or that they pay to their own suburb since the cost of running a suburb is so much lower than a full blown city. As individuals, they are taking more from the local government than they are paying (which is somewhat ironic since that is exactly how many suburbanites view low income people within city limits).
It's fine to say that the businesses they work for or use in the city should pay the taxes and then pass it on to these customers or employees in higher prices or lower wages. But is that really going to happen? More likely, I'd say, is that the city is either going to collect less tax and reduce its services (often to bare-bones levels) or the company is going to move to somewhere just outside of city limits where they can operate without subsidizing the city services of all the suburbanites visiting the city. Both of these outcomes (poorer services and businesses moving out) would seem, to me, to fuel the urban decay that is visible in the core of so many US cities. The system works fine for suburbanites, and that's great. But the basic unfairness of who pays for vs who uses the infrastructure leads, or at least helps to lead, to some tricky problems within the cities.
Well I was specifically thinking about the EU case, which I suppose is a little unfair for this US-centric conversation. But in summary, Microsoft was fined 500 million Euros ($800 million) which was I believe the largest fine anywhere ever at the time, certainly the largest ever in Europe. They were also forced to change some of the things in Windows, to offer competitors products when installing and so on. People will argue about how much this really "hurt" Microsoft, but it seems a fairly significant ruling to me, certainly more than a slap on the wrist.
go read about south America, where several nations (bolivia comes to mind) have "sold" the exclusive rights to make drinking water to a private, profit driven company. Make sure you read about the riots, protests, cost increases, and even how some protesters were killed. Meanwhile, we take it for granted here.
You are aware that many industrial nations have private profit driven (hence evil?) companies run their water systems? The problem, typically, is that the private (western) company takes on the concession to operate a formerly state run utility. Typically, they're a company that has performed at least reasonably well in their home countries as utilities, and they're experienced operators that know what's involved in running a proper system. It's a bidding process, so they go as low as they think they can while still making a profit. Then they get there and they find the infrastructure is much worse than the government led them to believe, and that huge amounts of money are necessary to fix everything. At the same time, they are unable to collect (sometimes under the table) subsidies from the government the way their predecessor did, and they find they are losing money and are forced to raise prices. Insert peasant rage, particularly if many have been receiving free water, electricity or whatever from their vote-buying politicians since time immemorial.
The fact that otherwise stand-up countries have failed in countries like Bolivia seems to me more an indictment of Bolivian politics and society than the companies themselves. If their government had been as competent and the deal as well planned and executed as those that first world nations deliver, there wouldn't have been these problems.
You're right that there are unquantifiable but very real benefits to road systems, to a point. The problem, to me, is that people look at other things, like, say, trains, and they say "that's retarded! these will never pay for themselves!" apparently completely oblivious to the fact that the roads don't "pay for themselves either", not under the current system.
Under the current system you also get some people taking an unfair amount of the burden. Typically, cities subsidize their roads heavily with property taxes. But then you end up with all the people that live in the cities paying for the roads that the suburbanites (just out of reach of the cities taxing hands) use to get to their jobs or bars or friends' houses. I would argue that this has compounded urban decay in many American cities: municipalities are unable to maintain their infrastructure as more and more residents and businesses move to the suburbs to get on the right side of this unbalanced equation, taking their property tax dollars with them. A gas tax is very elegant in that the more you use the roads, the more you pay. Is it perfect? No, but in my opinion it's a lot fairer than the current system spelled out above.
As for electric cars screwing up the idea of a gas tax, I agree entirely. But for the moment that's a hypothetical.
What do you base that on? From what I've seen legal systems have been unduly rough with some companies, like Microsoft, to the degree that they appear to be using law suits as cash grabs. I see no motivation for judges "tending" on the side of companies. Perhaps you have some examples to the contrary?
Some interesting points, but I think some of them need some perspective:
1. Exxon "owns" 1% of the world's reserves and produces only 3% of the world's oil. Astonishing as it may seem, they are really bit players compared to the big national oil companies. Even if they wanted to, Exxon couldn't have lowered the price of oil in the market overall. As far as showing interest in green energy, my opinion is that it's their choice on what they want to support, what they consider a good investment for their money. Many oil companies (most notably Shell, Chevron and BP) made a big deal about their investments in "green energy", but if you actually look at it most people come to the conclusion it's just greenwashing. Would you rather Exxon tried to deflect criticism similarly, or that they stick to reality: they are an oil company, their competitive advantage in the world is producing oil and that is what they should continue do, in the interest of their stake holders and everyone that uses oil and gas products?
2. See point 1. regarding green energy. Regarding OPEC, I'm not sure that means what you think it means.
3. This looks like an internal squabble between gas stations and their franchise owner. I'm sure this sort of thing happens to companies all the time, and I'm sure Exxon and its lawyers will sort it out correctly.
4. and 5. I don't believe Exxon executives are convinced global warming is actually caused by the burning of fossil fuels. And they're certainly not alone in that, and they certainly have more motivation to be skeptical than any other private company in the world. That said, I agree that their efforts to spread their skepticism were clumsy and in some cases not particularly honest.
6. That does not seem to be what the article you link says. It says that Exxon told its service stations not to use MTBE in areas where their are drinking water wells. The service stations used it in some of those areas anyway. Those areas are found to have MTBE contamination. Exxon says that, while their stations used MTBE, that they were not the source of the contamination (or at least not all of it) and they shouldn't have to pay to clean up other peoples' mess just because they have the deepest pockets.
7. and 8. Big business make campaign contributions to friendly American politicians all the time. It's unfortunate for democracy, I agree, but you I don't see how you can take big oil to task without looking at all the others: pharmaceuticals, agriculture, manufacturing and so on.
Well there lies the rub I suppose. To publish through one of these online sources, perhaps you wouldn't be paid anything upfront, but you would likely get a better cut from the sales, which would, admittedly, probably be lower if it's only offered as an ebook (not such a problem with music). I think you'd also be getting royalties immediately, you wouldn't necessarily have to wait for your book to "break even" for the publisher, since the publisher has such low costs. And is there a particular reason you don't think Amazon or Google could pay an advance to a promising author for exclusive rights to selling their book through their service? For example: a John Irving book (or whatever) available only on the Kindle through Amazon. You don't think Amazon would be willing to pay an advance for something like that?
I believe the financial risks of publishing an ebook in such a way would be much less than of a typical book. I don't know all that much about the publishing industry, but it seems to me the primary service that publishers provide to authors is distribution and access to tens of thousands of bookstores around the world. If ebooks were to become sufficiently popular (which they may never do) this would become increasingly redundant, and I think the traditional publishers would be in a much less powerful position over authors.
I'm not saying that the traditional publishers are evil. But their method is incredibly inefficient when compared to e-books. What they do is simply way more expensive than serving up pdfs (or whatever) on the internet. It seems to me, therefore, that if people grew to accept e-books as willingly as they accept books, there is no way regular publishers could offer authors as good a deal as digital distributors could. How could a traditional publisher, who has to pay for printing, distribution, paper advertising etc, possibly offer to give more of the pie to the author than Google or Amazon, who can do all of those things electronically for (practically) nothing?
I think it would be really interesting if these services were able to start signing their own authors. Then they could charge lower prices while still paying the authors fairly but ignoring their publishers, who seem to me costly, useless, vestigial middle men in any of these online distribution processes. I also wonder if iTunes will ever fill a similar role for music. I suspect it is more likely there, since most money made on music is likely to be through digital distribution long before books (which people continue to overwhelmingly buy on paper in brick and mortar stores) and the publishing industry collects an even more egregious percentage of the proceeds. The issue, I suppose, is whether these online distributors can recognise, advertise and grow talent as well as the traditional players. I think that's quite possible with iTunes, I don't know so much about these book outlets.
To me, it seems transportation by trains has benefits that extend well beyond how much energy they use. For example, being able to use electricity generated in any way, rather than being dependent on av-gas, provides a stability and flexibility that planes just can't. While coal may be an ugly way to make power, for America, its supply is certainly more dependable than oil looking forward. Also, being able to reach into the centre of big cities provides a big convenience factor, in my opinion. And trains would seem to be safer (at least in properly made and maintained, grade separated systems).
Slashdot Mirror
Compare this to this.
Now I didn't do anything as dramatic as RTFA. However, how has the internet changed anything to do with how government should operate? Some things are, and have always been, the jurisdiction of local governments. And other things are, and always will be, the jurisdiction of the federal government. National defense, intrastate transportation, inter and intra national trade regulations, all things that are just as much the job of the Federal government today as they ever were. Are there overlaps and gray areas and give and take? Absolutely, and each level of government's responsibilities shift with time, technology and politics. But how has more information changed the basic breakdown? The Federal government handles the "big picture" and State and local governments handle whatever's left out of that (hazy) definition. I don't see why twitter or facebook or even data.gov are going to change that.
And as the article also says, the price of fuels increased 63% over the period while electricity prices increased only 43%. Also note that it was this increase that spurred the creation of new capacity, including wind farms, which would undoubtedly have been restricted to some degree in a more regulated system. Given that, it is hard to imagine how the price would not have increased more under a regulated system, unless the changes were hidden with subsidies (ie electricity bought with tax or debt) or the operators took reduced profits. And of course now that natural gas prices are back below $4/btu, prices are lower.
Quebec is a completely different situation because 98% of its electricity is generated by hydro-dams - hydro-dams with minimal operating costs but which required massive capital investments over decades that came largely from taxpayers. Even with capital costs factored in, however, hydro power is one of the cheapest ways to generate electricity, and if there were as many rivers in Texas as there are in Quebec you could be sure that electricity prices would reflect that (it is certainly reflected in the prices in other hydro-dominated places, such as British Columbia). It makes no sense to compare Texas to a system dominated by a completely different power regime. Comparing it to something more similar, like, say, California, is a much fairer comparison, and reflects much more favourably on Texas.
California's troubles were caused by botched partial deregulation that provided the opportunity for companies to manipulate the market. Texas, on the other hand, has had much more success deregulating their market, as have other places, such as Alberta. Texan electrical policy is the most successful in the country, particularly when it comes to encouraging wind power. That you would use California's convoluted, more regulated and historically disastrous system to argue against it is quite surprising, as is the fact that some people tagged your logic "insightful".
Further, there is no place in the world with tighter drilling regulations than the Gulf of Mexico, and the rig that exploded and sank was the most advanced you'll find anywhere. Consequently, you're not talking about "regulating" offshore oil, you're talking about banning it, because no amount of regulation would have prevented the current situation. That's an option that I'm sure will be explored going forward, but it does not really apply to your argument, since you're presumably not arguing for an outright banning of windpower anywhere.
But really this is a story you can spin however you like. The loans likely required that the money be spent on a reputable engineering company, of which the country (being a backwards shithole) had none. The big construction companies they do have were likely impossibly ineffective stooges in the government's pocket. If I were handing over a huge wad of money for, say, an improved sewage system, I would feel much more confident that the job was going to get done if it was entrusted to an international company with a track record than some local yahoos that helped get the country's infrastructure in the situation it's in in the first place.
I also think it's unfair to portray the IMF and World Bank as groups out to take advantage of third world countries. Those institutions exist to help those places. They have had a "tough love" attitude in many cases, and they have been advocates of privatization of many government industries as well as balancing government budgets by raising taxes, but only because they ultimately believed these things were better for those countries. Are they wrong? Many people think so. But if you believe so and you're president of some third world country, you obviously have the option of not taking a loan from the IMF. There lies the rub, of course, these countries are usually so sketchy that they can't borrow money from private sources at anything near a reasonable rate. Unfortunately, in international development finance as well as life, beggars can't be choosers.
Sorry, yes I meant companies. I hadn't heard of this story about Bechtel here is the article I found on it. After reading it, I would still put Bechtel in the category of good operators. They made a proper deal and were looking to carry it out properly. Absolutely they were operating with a morally bankrupt regime. But they were going to fulfill their end of the bargain, and I don't think that makes them complicit in the unrelated actions of their employer in any way.
There are a lot of unsavory places in the world. American companies continue to do business there regardless, and I don't see why Bechtel doing business in Iraq should be differentiated from all the many businesses operating in China or Saudi Arabia or the former USSR. Those authoritarian states are likely killing at least as many people as Saddam did Kurds, but they never developed as political opportunities for American politicians to make hay by taking the moral high ground, like Saddam's Iraq did, along with a few others like Cuba and Syria. The "moral justice" meted out by the US federal government is very unevenly distributed, and it seems unfair to vilify Bechtel for finding itself on the wrong side of that often arbitrary distribution with millions of dollars on the line.
Microsoft getting fined $800 million for bundling Windows Media Player and not having a decent API for its server programs is the example I'm looking for? Forgive me, but that decision has always struck me as being overkill.
Well I'm not sure I follow your argument entirely. But I think you're saying you should only get taxed for where you live or operate a business, and people that come and visit you shouldn't be taxed. That would work as a system overall if there was an equal flow into and out of a city and set of suburbs. But what happens in practice, as I see it, is that far more people come into cities from suburbs and use city services (be they roads, public transit, emergency services, municipal courts, parks or whatever) to a far greater degree than the taxes they pay to that city, or that they pay to their own suburb since the cost of running a suburb is so much lower than a full blown city. As individuals, they are taking more from the local government than they are paying (which is somewhat ironic since that is exactly how many suburbanites view low income people within city limits).
It's fine to say that the businesses they work for or use in the city should pay the taxes and then pass it on to these customers or employees in higher prices or lower wages. But is that really going to happen? More likely, I'd say, is that the city is either going to collect less tax and reduce its services (often to bare-bones levels) or the company is going to move to somewhere just outside of city limits where they can operate without subsidizing the city services of all the suburbanites visiting the city. Both of these outcomes (poorer services and businesses moving out) would seem, to me, to fuel the urban decay that is visible in the core of so many US cities. The system works fine for suburbanites, and that's great. But the basic unfairness of who pays for vs who uses the infrastructure leads, or at least helps to lead, to some tricky problems within the cities.
That may be, but it apparently didn't stop the US federal government from suing them, with some success.
Well I was specifically thinking about the EU case, which I suppose is a little unfair for this US-centric conversation. But in summary, Microsoft was fined 500 million Euros ($800 million) which was I believe the largest fine anywhere ever at the time, certainly the largest ever in Europe. They were also forced to change some of the things in Windows, to offer competitors products when installing and so on. People will argue about how much this really "hurt" Microsoft, but it seems a fairly significant ruling to me, certainly more than a slap on the wrist.
go read about south America, where several nations (bolivia comes to mind) have "sold" the exclusive rights to make drinking water to a private, profit driven company. Make sure you read about the riots, protests, cost increases, and even how some protesters were killed. Meanwhile, we take it for granted here.
You are aware that many industrial nations have private profit driven (hence evil?) companies run their water systems? The problem, typically, is that the private (western) company takes on the concession to operate a formerly state run utility. Typically, they're a company that has performed at least reasonably well in their home countries as utilities, and they're experienced operators that know what's involved in running a proper system. It's a bidding process, so they go as low as they think they can while still making a profit. Then they get there and they find the infrastructure is much worse than the government led them to believe, and that huge amounts of money are necessary to fix everything. At the same time, they are unable to collect (sometimes under the table) subsidies from the government the way their predecessor did, and they find they are losing money and are forced to raise prices. Insert peasant rage, particularly if many have been receiving free water, electricity or whatever from their vote-buying politicians since time immemorial.
The fact that otherwise stand-up countries have failed in countries like Bolivia seems to me more an indictment of Bolivian politics and society than the companies themselves. If their government had been as competent and the deal as well planned and executed as those that first world nations deliver, there wouldn't have been these problems.
Actually it usually rhymes with "roperty tacks"
Exactly, and in most cases I would imagine capital costs for roads to hugely exceed operating costs when amortized.
You're right that there are unquantifiable but very real benefits to road systems, to a point. The problem, to me, is that people look at other things, like, say, trains, and they say "that's retarded! these will never pay for themselves!" apparently completely oblivious to the fact that the roads don't "pay for themselves either", not under the current system.
Under the current system you also get some people taking an unfair amount of the burden. Typically, cities subsidize their roads heavily with property taxes. But then you end up with all the people that live in the cities paying for the roads that the suburbanites (just out of reach of the cities taxing hands) use to get to their jobs or bars or friends' houses. I would argue that this has compounded urban decay in many American cities: municipalities are unable to maintain their infrastructure as more and more residents and businesses move to the suburbs to get on the right side of this unbalanced equation, taking their property tax dollars with them. A gas tax is very elegant in that the more you use the roads, the more you pay. Is it perfect? No, but in my opinion it's a lot fairer than the current system spelled out above.
As for electric cars screwing up the idea of a gas tax, I agree entirely. But for the moment that's a hypothetical.
What do you base that on? From what I've seen legal systems have been unduly rough with some companies, like Microsoft, to the degree that they appear to be using law suits as cash grabs. I see no motivation for judges "tending" on the side of companies. Perhaps you have some examples to the contrary?
You mean the technicians that are going to be made redundant by this?
Some interesting points, but I think some of them need some perspective:
1. Exxon "owns" 1% of the world's reserves and produces only 3% of the world's oil. Astonishing as it may seem, they are really bit players compared to the big national oil companies. Even if they wanted to, Exxon couldn't have lowered the price of oil in the market overall. As far as showing interest in green energy, my opinion is that it's their choice on what they want to support, what they consider a good investment for their money. Many oil companies (most notably Shell, Chevron and BP) made a big deal about their investments in "green energy", but if you actually look at it most people come to the conclusion it's just greenwashing. Would you rather Exxon tried to deflect criticism similarly, or that they stick to reality: they are an oil company, their competitive advantage in the world is producing oil and that is what they should continue do, in the interest of their stake holders and everyone that uses oil and gas products?
2. See point 1. regarding green energy. Regarding OPEC, I'm not sure that means what you think it means.
3. This looks like an internal squabble between gas stations and their franchise owner. I'm sure this sort of thing happens to companies all the time, and I'm sure Exxon and its lawyers will sort it out correctly.
4. and 5. I don't believe Exxon executives are convinced global warming is actually caused by the burning of fossil fuels. And they're certainly not alone in that, and they certainly have more motivation to be skeptical than any other private company in the world. That said, I agree that their efforts to spread their skepticism were clumsy and in some cases not particularly honest.
6. That does not seem to be what the article you link says. It says that Exxon told its service stations not to use MTBE in areas where their are drinking water wells. The service stations used it in some of those areas anyway. Those areas are found to have MTBE contamination. Exxon says that, while their stations used MTBE, that they were not the source of the contamination (or at least not all of it) and they shouldn't have to pay to clean up other peoples' mess just because they have the deepest pockets.
7. and 8. Big business make campaign contributions to friendly American politicians all the time. It's unfortunate for democracy, I agree, but you I don't see how you can take big oil to task without looking at all the others: pharmaceuticals, agriculture, manufacturing and so on.
Well there lies the rub I suppose. To publish through one of these online sources, perhaps you wouldn't be paid anything upfront, but you would likely get a better cut from the sales, which would, admittedly, probably be lower if it's only offered as an ebook (not such a problem with music). I think you'd also be getting royalties immediately, you wouldn't necessarily have to wait for your book to "break even" for the publisher, since the publisher has such low costs. And is there a particular reason you don't think Amazon or Google could pay an advance to a promising author for exclusive rights to selling their book through their service? For example: a John Irving book (or whatever) available only on the Kindle through Amazon. You don't think Amazon would be willing to pay an advance for something like that?
I believe the financial risks of publishing an ebook in such a way would be much less than of a typical book. I don't know all that much about the publishing industry, but it seems to me the primary service that publishers provide to authors is distribution and access to tens of thousands of bookstores around the world. If ebooks were to become sufficiently popular (which they may never do) this would become increasingly redundant, and I think the traditional publishers would be in a much less powerful position over authors.
I'm not saying that the traditional publishers are evil. But their method is incredibly inefficient when compared to e-books. What they do is simply way more expensive than serving up pdfs (or whatever) on the internet. It seems to me, therefore, that if people grew to accept e-books as willingly as they accept books, there is no way regular publishers could offer authors as good a deal as digital distributors could. How could a traditional publisher, who has to pay for printing, distribution, paper advertising etc, possibly offer to give more of the pie to the author than Google or Amazon, who can do all of those things electronically for (practically) nothing?
I think it would be really interesting if these services were able to start signing their own authors. Then they could charge lower prices while still paying the authors fairly but ignoring their publishers, who seem to me costly, useless, vestigial middle men in any of these online distribution processes. I also wonder if iTunes will ever fill a similar role for music. I suspect it is more likely there, since most money made on music is likely to be through digital distribution long before books (which people continue to overwhelmingly buy on paper in brick and mortar stores) and the publishing industry collects an even more egregious percentage of the proceeds. The issue, I suppose, is whether these online distributors can recognise, advertise and grow talent as well as the traditional players. I think that's quite possible with iTunes, I don't know so much about these book outlets.
To me, it seems transportation by trains has benefits that extend well beyond how much energy they use. For example, being able to use electricity generated in any way, rather than being dependent on av-gas, provides a stability and flexibility that planes just can't. While coal may be an ugly way to make power, for America, its supply is certainly more dependable than oil looking forward. Also, being able to reach into the centre of big cities provides a big convenience factor, in my opinion. And trains would seem to be safer (at least in properly made and maintained, grade separated systems).
Would that be this one? Because that would seem to be 1/30th the size of Texas.
But what would we use for bait? Garbage? Oh wait..
Not alarmed? Don't these fish know anything about the uncanny valley?
Ah, well that's a relief.
Sorry, I mean I wouldn't hear a message and wouldn't know who was calling.