Try-before-you-buy and shareware is all well and good, but let the author decide whether they want to use such a scheme. It's not for you to make that decision. Respect the artists wishes -- anything less is just plain rude.
Well, d'uh. Considering that there are probably more musicians nowadays than there were people in 19th century Europe, that's only to be expected.
I don't see how that follows. With more people, you'd expect a larger output of music but, I don't really see how you'll get more diversity as a result of having more people ( unless you're talking about a very small number of people )
How big a cut of CD sales are your bands getting? In my experience, small labels can be as evil as big ones
Maybe the small labels aren't "evil", and are merely doing what they can to make a modest profit ? Maybe CDs cost what they do for a reason -- that making and distributing CDs is expensive. It's absurd to claim that CDs are "overpriced" when you have no idea what the costs of manufacturing and distribution are.
so they make people want to listen to it
What ??? Your attitude is so patronising. You can't "make" people want to listen to anything.
Then explain the Spice Girls.
Have you heard the saying no one went broke underestimating public taste ? The fact that they've done well implies that at least a lot of people like their music. The fact that you don't like their music does not imply that the public are the victims of some sort of mind-control conspiracy.
Have you tried everything else? Has it been proven somewhere else that all other systems don't work as well as copyright? Have I missed something?
Yeah, you've missed the whole point. If you want to dismantle the copyright system, the onus is on you to show that something works better. The people who are pushing other systems of payment have simply not been able to demonstrate that their systems are viable. IOW, they're just blowing smoke.
Ass a matter of fact, record companies *do* determine what you listen to, if you spend most of your moments of musical appreciation listening to the radio.
Nice try. Sorry, I don't spend most of my time listening to the radio. When I do, I don't listen to the "commercial" stations, I usually listen to college/community radio or the like, and my experience has been that they play very non-mainstream music.
My advice is to turn off the radio, and head down to your local jazz club, or take the missus to a night at the opera.
I often do just that. I'm near NY, so there are a lot of good clubs.
If you're still in high school or college, take a music or art appreciation class. What? They don't offer that in your school? Then learn to play the basoon
Took classes in music and art/art history in high school. Played clarinet and percussion in the orchestra, piano in the jazz band. I've finished my undergrad degree now.
It's called playing for tips, and it's all that most musicians can expect.
I don't believe all musicians should have to live in poverty. It's true that a lot of musicians are willing to accept a life of poverty if they can focus on their music, but that doesn't mean they shouold have to.
I just want them to shut up for a moment, so I can hear some new stuff.
You don't have any decent radio stations where you live ? For the most part, I've had no problem hearing lots of very non-mainstream music on the radio.
Sure, the pro-patronage arguments have been heard, but so have the arguments against it. The main problem with it is that it just isn't very practical. If it was practical, there is nothing stopping people adopting that model, instead of using a copyright based model ( which even the underground bands use )
As for your internet distributed payment model, it might or might not work. But it will succeed or fail on its own merits, and is not in itself a reason to destroy existing models.
Insults do not substantiate your arguments ( or lack thereof ). If the labels are pricefixing, that's something that the DOJ need to handle ( it's called a "collusive oligopoly" and as such violates the free market definition ). However, my point is that market forces will (usually) tend to hold prices down. This appears to be the case -- most of the small record labels do not offer substantially better prices than the larger ones. The markup seems to occur at the several points of distribution. If you need to import the music, there are also possible import duties or other hidden taxes. Keep in mind that each markup is by a percentage, so the price increases exponentially with the number of middlemen. Sure, a CD costs about 5 times as much as it cost to press it. How much does it cost to manufacture $50- jeans ?
So music from the Classical and Romantic periods is lacking in plurality, richness and diversity. Riiiiiiiight.
(1) Note: no rebuttal offered. (2) You're comparing hundreds of years of music history to today's music. Let's compare say a 40 year window of the Romantic period and see how it compares in richness and diversity to music of the last 40 years, from bebop to cool jazz to fusion to latin jazz to hip hop to metal, etc etc etc.
As we speak, that choice is made by the marketroids in the big RIAA labels
This is outright false. I have purchased several albums from small labels. I choose what I listen to. The record companies need to produce music that people want to listen to to stay in business. There is no "thought control" conspiracy here, the record companies try to produce music that people want to hear. This doesn't mean that everything is "mainstream" either. There are a lot of niche labels that cater to niche markets.
What the original poster proposes is no more than a pay-by-worth system: one pays to support music one like.
The problem is that most of us don't have the money to feed a band, so this calls for some kind of distributed payment system. As far as distributed payment systems go, copyright works better than anything else.
Either way, by eliminating the middleman, the control over what we listen is put back into the hands of the listeners
... or at least those listeners who can afford to pay the salary of AN ENTIRE F*CKING BAND out of their disposable income. I guess under your system, I don't qualify, I can't afford to hire a band. I'd rather just buy a CD !
he way I see it, just about anything would be better than the current state of musical dictatorship.
ou state your "dictatorship" conspiracy theory as though it's an irrefutable fact, when in fact it's merely a theory and a very dubious one at best ( moreover, one which I don't accept ).
will only purchase the pre-fabricated, made-for-mass-marketing, custom-built-to-go-with-MTV music from at best three to eight "top o' the charts" different bands in each of the styles that most mainstream music seems to fall into nowadays
This is a grotesque over-generalisation. There is a lot of cheesy rubbish out there, largely because that's what most people want. There's also a lot of quality not-so-mainstream music available. You are making a lot of gross over-generalisations here.
However, amidst all of that volume, there's remarkably little musical production of quality comparable to that of even one of the least fine Mozart symphonies.
Mozart was one of the best musicians of his century. The best musicians of our century also produce quality music.
it's not Average Joe who chooses what gets played/sold/toured, it's the record company.
What a load of hogwash. If the record company don't produce music that people want to listen to, they go out of business. The record company don't dictate what we want to listen to, and no one is forced to buy anything they don't want to hear.
And as you yourself say in the next paragraph, practical and widespread micropayment technology might make it feasible for many bands to be "underwritten" by many people at once, each paying a trivial amount,
Well if that's such a good idea, why aren't people doing it today ? Is it because the copyright model is in fact vastly superior ?
Sure, such a scheme would certainly mean the ruin of most absurdly well-paid, hugely-followed mega-bands that account for today's music market. But it's nothing short of necessary.
Sounds like neo-Marxist rhetoric to me. Kill the big evil landlords/bands and take all their money.
They were supported by the aristocracy. This is why music of that era was lacking the plurality and richness, and diversity of todays music.
Musicians of the future will be supported in the same way Mozart and Beethoven were:
In short, "nonsense".
Patronage. In the modern case, it may be corporate or governmental support,
Great. So JP Morgan and Janet Reno determine what music we listen to ? I hope you're not intending to apply this model to the software industry !
Comissioned work
Again, why should the JP Morgan and the aristocracy determine what music we listen to ? I can understand why you feel that "rich people" should buy all your music for you, so you get something for nothing, but it doesn't sound terribly attractive. IMO, it would be a retrograde step.
Performances
A lot of music is not written for live performance. Not to mention the fact that nowadays, touring is expensive ( especially if you're writing orchestral music )
Not only do I find it hard to believe that we will turn the clock back seversal centuries, I do not believe that this is a desirable thing.
If you can make CDs and (a) get them to the market for a lower price, and (b) better compensate the artists, then you may have a point, otherwise you are just blowing smoke. It's not making CDs that's expensive so much as distributing them. The internet will bring with it more efficient distribution models ( that do not rely on circumventing compensating the artist )
Re:"Object Orientated Perl" LOL! It's a joke right
on
Object Oriented Perl
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· Score: 2
Perl is not the language of choice for anyone interested in doing some serious OO programming,
What do you mean by "serious OO programming" ? The OO features of perl are quite useful, even if they are "tacked on".
who wants a whole file taken up by every class no matter how small?
Sorry, you've lost me. IIRC, you can put multiple packages in one file.
which is invariably unreadable code which looks something like @foo[--$bar]=~s/$^[3ffkj3n43][[543!x-djf-2]]£jds/% fjfj3[243]fdkjr93432[] unless -e $baz
All this proves is that you have no idea how to write comprehensible code. It's not perl's fault that you're a lousy programmer. You can ( by using a flag ) put white spaces in your regular expressions in the event that you ever do get a regular expression that long and ugly. BTW, can you explain why you think python's regular expressions are more readable than perl's ? How would you do the thing you did above in python ?
Just look at the Slash code for a perfect example, and that's not even got any OO!
Well duh ! That's kind of the point. If you use OO, you can write much cleaner code in perl. Not only doesn't the slash code use OO, it's not terribly clean. You're fooling yourself if you really think that migrating to python automatically relieves you of the obligation to write decent code.
Re:If OO is so great, why is bulk of GNU/Linux in
on
Object Oriented Perl
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· Score: 1
Firstly, why do you assume that "OO" and "C" are mutually exclusive ? It is certainly possible to write object oriented C ( though it's not pretty )
Most of "GNU/Linux" is in C because there's a strong C bias in the traditional POSIX and X/Open APIs. However, OO is dominating the projects that are Linux based, such as GTK/GNOME ( which is OO even though it's predominantly in C ) and KDE.
Several posts endorse abolition of copyright which amounts to legalising piracy. Several more advocate acts of "civil disobedience" against intellectual property law ( the civil disobedience in question being redistributing it to oneself. ) Hmmmm.. kinda like "civil disobedience" against anti-theft laws. Several more posts still advocate using napster to distribute material legit or otherwise. See posts by "Wah" and "Mr Slippery" for several examples.
I would've hoped it'd be "go around gibbing bunnies". Have you seen "Santa Slayer" ? Lousy gameplay, but boy was it funny ! Maybe he's going after that genre.
The solution is to allow parents to select the best educational system for their children. Nobody knows better than the parent how the child learns best.
This is completely bogus. Parents don't know squat about child psychology, and they don't have an objective opinion on their kids ( for example, most parents believe their kids are of "better than average" intelligence, because noone wants to believe their kids are dumb ) "choice" is good, but you get all kinds of "races", ie people rushing to the "good" schools. So how do we determine who gets first choice ?
First of all its not taking away artists rights. Its simply not cedeing our own rights to the artists.
Well that depends on what you consider your rights and the artists rights to be. If you think that your right to freeload outweighs the artists right to be paid, then maybe you have a point.
Secondly...I must ask...what good does the law do when it is unenforcable?
(1) It is not completely unenforceable (2) Honest people will play by the rules even though they know they can get away with cheating the artists.
Allow anyone to share music among eachother (since it can't be stopped anyway...and has never been actually shown to have a negative impact on record sales) but only artists or authorized publishing houses can distribute for profit.
Well that idea is just fantastic ! You and all the other freeloaders get something for nothing, and the authors of creative works find that their creative labor no longer has any value, because you've just built yourself a "tragedy of commons".
I'm not clear on whether the recording industry are really as "evil" as you claim. Of course it's a good idea for artists to unionise and build independent record labels. However, these labels aren't providing much better prices to consumers or profits to the artists. Go figure.
here needs to be a stop in the stifling of creativity.
Copyright violation is the biggest threat to creativity, because when you dismiss cop-yright, you also dismiss the notion that creativity has economic value. Put simply, copyright is a means to give creativity economic punch in the marketplace. Without copyright, creativity is ( form an economic standpoint ) worthless, because it is not rewarded financially.
I don't think artists should be limited the way they have been. Give them the freedom to give a new spin to an old song,
This is another issue entirely. Getting permission to do covers is not that difficult, unless the person who you're asking for permission is a real prick. I think the artist should still have a final say on whether you're allowed to perform their songs -- this just keeps a sanity check in that it prevents one band from committing wholescale plagiarism.
BTW, I am against this idea that artists sign away their copyrights. I don't think anyone but the artist should be able to "own" their work.
There is just too much wrong with the system. Yea I favor scrapping it completely,
It's all well to make attacks on the existing sources of compensation available to the artists, but with what are you going to replace those sources ?
It makes perfect sense for artists to offer MP3s on a "demoware" basis, but dismantling copyright and allowing everyone to freeload is not such a good idea. I don't endorse taking rights away from the artist, though the artist may consider it in their interest to give some stuff away.
am not willing to accept the idea that I can not share music with a friend
You can "share music" with a friend -- you can compose your own, or you can sing a song for them. What you can't do is distribute a particular recording of a piece of music to a friend. This undermines the artist's means to compensation, because noone will buy CDs if everyone can freeload.
I should also note that every musician who I have talked to has stated that money is not their motivation for making music.
Sure, they might enjoy it, but the fact that they love doing it is not in itself a reason why we should look for clever ways to get out of paying them.
I don't know about you guys, but I'm sick of hearing "NT has C2" from the Windows crowd. If this B1 cert takes place, they'll shut up ( and I might just ask... "so -- what was that you were saying about C2 ?" )
Fair competition? I dare you to find in the Constitution where it says things must be "fair?"
The constitution might not dictate that we should have a free market , but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't.
just don't understand how everyone claims Internet/Mail Order is at such a huge advantage because of sales tax.
Well you just answered your own question. If one business is taxed and the other isn't, the government are essentially showing favoritism to the form that is not taxed. This puts the untaxed business in a better position than they would be if every was given the same treatment. You talk about how mail order has disadvantages, but those are inherent problems with that business model, not restrictions artificially imposed by the government. Should the government use taxes and/or tax exemptions to protect inefficient businesses ?
Shipping is (and always has been) much more, and it takes a day or two.
Shipping costs are actual costs, they are not artificially added by the state. When you buy from Walmart, you also pay transportation costs, namely Walmart's shipping costs and/or your gas costs. If mail order works out to be more expensive, it's because it's less efficient.
Wouldn't "fair" be that WalMarts only let me take my merchandise after a 48 hour waiting period, along with an additional 10% shipping/handling fair tax?
Well they could choose to do that, but it would be a downright stupid business strategy. And the fact that mail order takes a long time to get the product to the consumer is an inherent flaw with that business model. BTW, "Shipping and handling" is not a "tax", it is a service charge, and it relates to the weight of the item, not the price.
I mean, why should some web site have to pay UPS 10% when the local Joe's House O' Spatulas doesn't?
"Joe's House" has already transported the product(s) in question to their store by the time it's on their shelf. Somewhere, someone needs to transport the item from (a) to (b) -- this is the main service that retailers perform.
It's all about choice. Traditional retailers simply can't compete because there are a million and one places to buy from online.
Let's not use the word "compete" in the absence of fair competition. It's hardly fair to tax one industry and not tax a competing industry -- this is the kind of interventionism that is not supposed to take place in a free market. To not tax e-biz while taxing traditional businesses is inconsistent.
This has nothing to do with police accountability ( which I'm in favour of ). It has to do with "innocent until proven guilty", and not trashing an innocent person's reputation until they've had their day in court.
Here goes Timothy with a two-minutes-of-hate post. I guess we're all supposed to go red in the face, tear our hair out and express our rage at this "enemy of the slashdot way".
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see how that follows. With more people, you'd expect a larger output of music but, I don't really see how you'll get more diversity as a result of having more people ( unless you're talking about a very small number of people )
How big a cut of CD sales are your bands getting? In my experience, small labels can be as evil as big ones
Maybe the small labels aren't "evil", and are merely doing what they can to make a modest profit ? Maybe CDs cost what they do for a reason -- that making and distributing CDs is expensive. It's absurd to claim that CDs are "overpriced" when you have no idea what the costs of manufacturing and distribution are.
so they make people want to listen to it
What ??? Your attitude is so patronising. You can't "make" people want to listen to anything.
Then explain the Spice Girls.
Have you heard the saying no one went broke underestimating public taste ? The fact that they've done well implies that at least a lot of people like their music. The fact that you don't like their music does not imply that the public are the victims of some sort of mind-control conspiracy.
Have you tried everything else? Has it been proven somewhere else that all other systems don't work as well as copyright? Have I missed something?
Yeah, you've missed the whole point. If you want to dismantle the copyright system, the onus is on you to show that something works better. The people who are pushing other systems of payment have simply not been able to demonstrate that their systems are viable. IOW, they're just blowing smoke.
Nice try. Sorry, I don't spend most of my time listening to the radio. When I do, I don't listen to the "commercial" stations, I usually listen to college/community radio or the like, and my experience has been that they play very non-mainstream music.
My advice is to turn off the radio, and head down to your local jazz club, or take the missus to a night at the opera.
I often do just that. I'm near NY, so there are a lot of good clubs.
If you're still in high school or college, take a music or art appreciation class. What? They don't offer that in your school? Then learn to play the basoon
Took classes in music and art/art history in high school. Played clarinet and percussion in the orchestra, piano in the jazz band. I've finished my undergrad degree now.
It's called playing for tips, and it's all that most musicians can expect.
I don't believe all musicians should have to live in poverty. It's true that a lot of musicians are willing to accept a life of poverty if they can focus on their music, but that doesn't mean they shouold have to.
I just want them to shut up for a moment, so I can hear some new stuff.
You don't have any decent radio stations where you live ? For the most part, I've had no problem hearing lots of very non-mainstream music on the radio.
Sure, the pro-patronage arguments have been heard, but so have the arguments against it. The main problem with it is that it just isn't very practical. If it was practical, there is nothing stopping people adopting that model, instead of using a copyright based model ( which even the underground bands use )
As for your internet distributed payment model, it might or might not work. But it will succeed or fail on its own merits, and is not in itself a reason to destroy existing models.
(1) Note: no rebuttal offered.
(2) You're comparing hundreds of years of music history to today's music. Let's compare say a 40 year window of the Romantic period and see how it compares in richness and diversity to music of the last 40 years, from bebop to cool jazz to fusion to latin jazz to hip hop to metal, etc etc etc.
As we speak, that choice is made by the marketroids in the big RIAA labels
This is outright false. I have purchased several albums from small labels. I choose what I listen to. The record companies need to produce music that people want to listen to to stay in business. There is no "thought control" conspiracy here, the record companies try to produce music that people want to hear. This doesn't mean that everything is "mainstream" either. There are a lot of niche labels that cater to niche markets.
What the original poster proposes is no more than a pay-by-worth system: one pays to support music one like.
The problem is that most of us don't have the money to feed a band, so this calls for some kind of distributed payment system. As far as distributed payment systems go, copyright works better than anything else.
Either way, by eliminating the middleman, the control over what we listen is put back into the hands of the listeners
... or at least those listeners who can afford to pay the salary of AN ENTIRE F*CKING BAND out of their disposable income. I guess under your system, I don't qualify, I can't afford to hire a band. I'd rather just buy a CD !
he way I see it, just about anything would be better than the current state of musical dictatorship.
ou state your "dictatorship" conspiracy theory as though it's an irrefutable fact, when in fact it's merely a theory and a very dubious one at best ( moreover, one which I don't accept ).
This is a grotesque over-generalisation. There is a lot of cheesy rubbish out there, largely because that's what most people want. There's also a lot of quality not-so-mainstream music available. You are making a lot of gross over-generalisations here.
However, amidst all of that volume, there's remarkably little musical production of quality comparable to that of even one of the least fine Mozart symphonies.
Mozart was one of the best musicians of his century. The best musicians of our century also produce quality music.
it's not Average Joe who chooses what gets played/sold/toured, it's the record company.
What a load of hogwash. If the record company don't produce music that people want to listen to, they go out of business. The record company don't dictate what we want to listen to, and no one is forced to buy anything they don't want to hear.
And as you yourself say in the next paragraph, practical and widespread micropayment technology might make it feasible for many bands to be "underwritten" by many people at once, each paying a trivial amount,
Well if that's such a good idea, why aren't people doing it today ? Is it because the copyright model is in fact vastly superior ?
Sure, such a scheme would certainly mean the ruin of most absurdly well-paid, hugely-followed mega-bands that account for today's music market. But it's nothing short of necessary.
Sounds like neo-Marxist rhetoric to me. Kill the big evil landlords/bands and take all their money.
They were supported by the aristocracy. This is why music of that era was lacking the plurality and richness, and diversity of todays music.
Musicians of the future will be supported in the same way Mozart and Beethoven were:
In short, "nonsense".
Patronage. In the modern case, it may be corporate or governmental support,
Great. So JP Morgan and Janet Reno determine what music we listen to ? I hope you're not intending to apply this model to the software industry !
Comissioned work
Again, why should the JP Morgan and the aristocracy determine what music we listen to ? I can understand why you feel that "rich people" should buy all your music for you, so you get something for nothing, but it doesn't sound terribly attractive. IMO, it would be a retrograde step.
Performances
A lot of music is not written for live performance. Not to mention the fact that nowadays, touring is expensive ( especially if you're writing orchestral music )
Not only do I find it hard to believe that we will turn the clock back seversal centuries, I do not believe that this is a desirable thing.
What do you mean by "serious OO programming" ? The OO features of perl are quite useful, even if they are "tacked on".
who wants a whole file taken up by every class no matter how small?
Sorry, you've lost me. IIRC, you can put multiple packages in one file.
which is invariably unreadable code which looks something like @foo[--$bar]=~s/$^[3ffkj3n43][[543!x-djf-2]]£jds/% fjfj3[243]fdkjr93432[] unless -e $baz
All this proves is that you have no idea how to write comprehensible code. It's not perl's fault that you're a lousy programmer. You can ( by using a flag ) put white spaces in your regular expressions in the event that you ever do get a regular expression that long and ugly. BTW, can you explain why you think python's regular expressions are more readable than perl's ? How would you do the thing you did above in python ?
Just look at the Slash code for a perfect example, and that's not even got any OO!
Well duh ! That's kind of the point. If you use OO, you can write much cleaner code in perl. Not only doesn't the slash code use OO, it's not terribly clean. You're fooling yourself if you really think that migrating to python automatically relieves you of the obligation to write decent code.
Most of "GNU/Linux" is in C because there's a strong C bias in the traditional POSIX and X/Open APIs. However, OO is dominating the projects that are Linux based, such as GTK/GNOME ( which is OO even though it's predominantly in C ) and KDE.
I would've hoped it'd be "go around gibbing bunnies". Have you seen "Santa Slayer" ? Lousy gameplay, but boy was it funny ! Maybe he's going after that genre.
This is completely bogus. Parents don't know squat about child psychology, and they don't have an objective opinion on their kids ( for example, most parents believe their kids are of "better than average" intelligence, because noone wants to believe their kids are dumb ) "choice" is good, but you get all kinds of "races", ie people rushing to the "good" schools. So how do we determine who gets first choice ?
Well that depends on what you consider your rights and the artists rights to be. If you think that your right to freeload outweighs the artists right to be paid, then maybe you have a point.
Secondly...I must ask...what good does the law do when it is unenforcable?
(1) It is not completely unenforceable
(2) Honest people will play by the rules even though they know they can get away with cheating the artists.
Allow anyone to share music among eachother (since it can't be stopped anyway...and has never been actually shown to have a negative impact on record sales) but only artists or authorized publishing houses can distribute for profit.
Well that idea is just fantastic ! You and all the other freeloaders get something for nothing, and the authors of creative works find that their creative labor no longer has any value, because you've just built yourself a "tragedy of commons".
I'm not clear on whether the recording industry are really as "evil" as you claim. Of course it's a good idea for artists to unionise and build independent record labels. However, these labels aren't providing much better prices to consumers or profits to the artists. Go figure.
here needs to be a stop in the stifling of creativity.
Copyright violation is the biggest threat to creativity, because when you dismiss cop-yright, you also dismiss the notion that creativity has economic value. Put simply, copyright is a means to give creativity economic punch in the marketplace. Without copyright, creativity is ( form an economic standpoint ) worthless, because it is not rewarded financially.
I don't think artists should be limited the way they have been. Give them the freedom to give a new spin to an old song,
This is another issue entirely. Getting permission to do covers is not that difficult, unless the person who you're asking for permission is a real prick. I think the artist should still have a final say on whether you're allowed to perform their songs -- this just keeps a sanity check in that it prevents one band from committing wholescale plagiarism.
BTW, I am against this idea that artists sign away their copyrights. I don't think anyone but the artist should be able to "own" their work.
There is just too much wrong with the system. Yea I favor scrapping it completely,
It's all well to make attacks on the existing sources of compensation available to the artists, but with what are you going to replace those sources ?
You can "share music" with a friend -- you can compose your own, or you can sing a song for them. What you can't do is distribute a particular recording of a piece of music to a friend. This undermines the artist's means to compensation, because noone will buy CDs if everyone can freeload.
I should also note that every musician who I have talked to has stated that money is not their motivation for making music.
Sure, they might enjoy it, but the fact that they love doing it is not in itself a reason why we should look for clever ways to get out of paying them.
It's the same thing, but B1 is better than C2. IIRC, higher numbers and "lower" letters are better ( A > B > C, 1
The constitution might not dictate that we should have a free market , but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't.
just don't understand how everyone claims Internet/Mail Order is at such a huge advantage because of sales tax.
Well you just answered your own question. If one business is taxed and the other isn't, the government are essentially showing favoritism to the form that is not taxed. This puts the untaxed business in a better position than they would be if every was given the same treatment. You talk about how mail order has disadvantages, but those are inherent problems with that business model, not restrictions artificially imposed by the government. Should the government use taxes and/or tax exemptions to protect inefficient businesses ?
Shipping is (and always has been) much more, and it takes a day or two.
Shipping costs are actual costs, they are not artificially added by the state. When you buy from Walmart, you also pay transportation costs, namely Walmart's shipping costs and/or your gas costs. If mail order works out to be more expensive, it's because it's less efficient.
Wouldn't "fair" be that WalMarts only let me take my merchandise after a 48 hour waiting period, along with an additional 10% shipping/handling fair tax?
Well they could choose to do that, but it would be a downright stupid business strategy. And the fact that mail order takes a long time to get the product to the consumer is an inherent flaw with that business model. BTW, "Shipping and handling" is not a "tax", it is a service charge, and it relates to the weight of the item, not the price.
I mean, why should some web site have to pay UPS 10% when the local Joe's House O' Spatulas doesn't?
"Joe's House" has already transported the product(s) in question to their store by the time it's on their shelf. Somewhere, someone needs to transport the item from (a) to (b) -- this is the main service that retailers perform.
Let's not use the word "compete" in the absence of fair competition. It's hardly fair to tax one industry and not tax a competing industry -- this is the kind of interventionism that is not supposed to take place in a free market. To not tax e-biz while taxing traditional businesses is inconsistent.
No thanks.