So why isn't anyone making a big deal about Microsoft any more? The big issue at their trial was bundling the browser with the OS. They are still doing that.
That was the American anti-trust trial, and America ultimately fell on its face when it came to enforcing the antitrust issues it was pursuing.
On the other hand, for better or for worse, The Windows "N" editions available in Europe actually do not come with Windows Media Player, in compliance with EU law, as a result of the antitrust case that took place in Europe.
So you are saying that private companies should build and conduct business the way society tells them to, for the benefit of society. That's pretty much the view of economics fascism advocated. It doesn't work.
That's a pretty simpleminded view of it. Next you'll be telling me that consumers shouldn't be able to regulate companies to prevent them from using lead paint in toys because: fascism.
When did Google ever start forcing users to sign up just to search?
You are missing the point. The point is not whether google is illegally tying products, because they are not. The point is that as a society we deemed that tying products was harmful.
Just as we could deem that a search engine company providing other services is harmful. Not because its a form of illegal tying, but because its harmful in similar ways.
. Bundling isn't harmful unless it is exploited, period.
And that's a great study you just did. I mean, you searched for "email" and you searched for "cloud" and you looked at the first 3 results in no less than 2 different search engines. Because clearly if google was going to manipulate the results they would ONLY do in the most blatantly obvious evil with a capital E way possible.
Well, I'm convinced.
It often leads to a greater overall benefit, as products are more likely to be able to interconnect.
What needs to interconnect with a "search" engine?
If there is evidence of exploitation, that's different, and the EU should drop the hammer on them.
Because it would be wrong for society to proactively decide what the rules it lives by are? It can only react to abuse?
But there isn't any evidence that that is going on here that I've seen,
And you've clearly settled the matter there, right?;)
so this is almost certainly just politicians being dickweeds at the behest of people who paid them a lot of money.
Who benefits financially from search engines being decoupled from other commercial pursuits and thus paid these politicians lots of money to make it happen. I'm in agreement with you that "follow the money" is a good maxim to have when looking at politics... so where does it lead us here? That's a good question.
Your "analogy" fails.Because there's money involved.
As there is in search.
. Google forces nothing of that nature.
Ultimately every search engine controls what pages i see when i search for something.
As a society its reasonable proposition that we would want our search engines to be competing on simply being the best search engine, without risk of it quietly subverting its integrety to push any other agenda / product / viewpoint / etc.
Unbundling them from commercial interests would be a part of that goal.
I'm not saying we should necessarily do this, or that simply un-bundling them would solve all the potential problems either. I'm just saying that its a valid argument.
If you're displeased with their service, pop another browser.
And that solves what exactly? It neither corrects the behaviour you don't want from google, nor assures you the 'next browser' isn't engaging in precisely the same thing.
Why don't the Europeans start their own search and ad engine?
Because that would be entirely beside the point.
What I don't understand here is Google does not have a monopoly on search services.
This actually doesn't have THAT much to do with monopoly at all. Even in a highly competitive market with many search engine participants the argument to unbundle search engines from other products makes a lot of sense.
Just as unbundling internet access from other network services makes a lot of sense.
The search engines effectively are the gateways to the internet. To operate effectively it's best if they simply compete at being the best search engine, instead of being crippled by constantly being subverted by the other commerical interests of the parent company that wishes to drive consumers to particular pages they have interests in rather than merely being the best at return the pages the consumer wants.
I'm not sure I see what's wrong with that.
Because your fixated on whether there is competition. Whether or not there is competition is beside the point. If your bank forces you to open savings accounts and credit cards with them to have a mortage that bundling is anti-consumer and illegal... period. Because that sort of product tying has been deemed harmful.
Competition isn't the issue. It doesn't matter if there are 5 or 10 other banks to choose from. (Especially if they all do it too.)
This however is a feature of the duckduckgo search engine. So its not browser dependent. Not a firefox feature. And doesn't require any customization at your end to use.
The fact that its just *there* is what makes it interesting and useful -- I don't have to do anything to use it.
. Only problem is, in 46 days we will have to deal with double the number of cases which will make it twice as hard as now to contain the spread.
Is -that- what the data is saying though?
Those charts show "cumulative cases", so they can never do anything but go up. If 1000 people a year get ebola, that's not an outbreak, but the cumulative cases will still hit 30,000 in 2030. That's not showing a doubling of the problem relative to today.
To see how close the problem is to being under control we need to trend NEW cases week by week... and see if that's going up or down. Cumulative cases ALWAYS goes up.
Yeah, there's a lot of potentially great outcomes.
When I worked downtown I generally drove, because the nearest trainstation was driving distance (5-10 minutes by car), and parking there plus taking the train cost as much or more than just driving downtown.
But if the car could drop me off at the station and go home again, that might make sense to me.
But -- its not all sunshine and rainbows. How do I get home -- its quite a bit more complicated for the car to pick me up, especially at rush hour with thousands of other people doing the same thing.
And even though its an self-driving car, driving home empty after dropping me off is a much greater challenge. What if there is a road closure or accident and police are directing traffic.
When I was in the car, the car could pull over and say "Hey, I need some help for just a minute." -- but it can't do that if its empty.
That nixes dropping the kids off at school. Unmanned Package delivery. Well... not nixes... but it pushes it much further into the future I think.
I'm also not quite sure how unmanned courier trucks would work. The courier does more than just drive. He's also the gatekeeper to the packages, collects signatures, provides a level of security by just *being* there.
If the truck is unmanned anyone can just walk up to it and rob it blind. If its moving, they just need someone to step into the road to bring it to a halt. Sure trucks can be hijacked and robbed now... but theres always an element of unpredictability and risk since a human driver is present. But robbing an unmanned vehicle? It will always behave predictably and safely. We're going to have to think hard about security.
And how does even the intended recipient get their package and just their package. Can you imagine being called down by the truck, it flips its back door open, and you root around in it for your package... that's asking for all kinds of trouble.
Sure there are solutions, individual locked compartments, or some other system... but then that will dramatically reduce the overall delivery capacity of the vehicle.
I don't think its going to be a driverless car utopia; and certainly not by 2030. But changes are definitely coming.
Such an offer can be completely legitimate, and is not fraudulent. Sorry for your lack of reading skills, keep trying.
Sure its a legitimate offer. It's a legitimate offer to sell a Playstation for $500.
And by the way, offering a free or $1 Playstation with purchase of a $499 potato and sales avoiding taxes would land you in trouble. Practically everywhere has clauses like:
âIf various elements of a bundled service are not naturally bundled in the ordinary course of business, it shall be treated as provision of a service which attracts the highest amount of service tax.â(TM)
And the 'ordinary course of business' is not the ordinary course of -your- business, it looks at the entire market.They can also look at your own books and records to establish taxable amounts -- just because you wrote $499 potatoe, $1 ps4 doesn't mean they won't decide $499.80 ps4 $0.20 potato based on your own accounting records.
I see what you did there - completely avoided the point.
What was your point? That playing transparent games to shift the value of the transaction to another 'line item' in the transaction isn't going to fool anybody with half a brain?
Because you could offer "Buy this potato for $499 and then get a Playstation for $1 too."
Should a price matching policy be therefore bound to sell anyone of those people $1 Playstations also? Or do they get to force you to match the whole deal... 1 potato, plus 1 playsation for $500?
Hell... buy one get one half off deals. Same thing... you don't get to look at the get one half off part, separate that as its own thing and then ask someone to price match at 50% off.
What's the difference?
Either way its always super discounted price on X is contingent on you paying X + Y. And price X only available in that arrangement. Therefore the price is X+Y. Not X.
Oh and the potatoe idea is a great tax dodge too! because basic food stuffs are usually exempt and/or zero-rated. So buyers only owe tax on the 1$ potatoe. I bet the local tax collection authority will be helpless against this. Helpless... or they'll string you up for tax evasion. Probably the latter.
Right. Sums it up. Online or otherwise, two local stores or otherwise.
You can check things like technology, spring count, spring gauge, coil counts, meterials, dimensions, etc but at the end of the day your right... you still just don't know if what you are getting online is the same as the bed your lay on at the store.
And even if the specs seem to line up, it may or may not be the same thing.The building materials (fabric quality), general construction / craftsmanship, and QA still may not be the same. Whether you care or not is a separate question.
It may be just as comfortable and just as good in every way. Or the online version may have cheaped out some other place you didn't think to look, perhaps they skipped a QA step so you may or may not get a good unit, or even worse... maybe your getting the stuff that didn't quite meet the store brand's standards. So they slap a different model number and off-name brand badge on it and unload it somewhere else.
I used to recall it said that generic film and fuji film were made in the same plant and were the same thing. Technically they were or at least could be the same some of the time. But the QA and acceptance standards on the stuff that got sent out with the fuji brand conformed to markedly higher standards.
So upshot was the off brand stuff was just as good, except when it wasn't.
So online pricing being lower vs shops is not completely a scam, nor is it 'just mattresses'... nearly all furniture is like this.
An assertion 'Whether people "may" not want to own them' as a logical argument is all but meaningless. If even a handful of people on the face of the earth sees a self driving car and decides based on that not to own one, then the proposition is true. But that is CLEARLY not the argument the author is making. He is arguing with respect to a much much larger class of people.
The presumed argument per the slashdot article is that given self driving cars then as a society was are going to largely move away from owning them. Not everyone, of course, but a large number of us, precisely because they are self driving.
"Whether people "may" not want to own them has no bearing on whether you would."
Quite. But 'whether or not *I* would own a car' was just an introduction to the argument, introducing the very large class of people, for whom, like myself, self-driving cars is simply neither here nor there in the decision to own one.
The majority of people are going to take the least expensive option. If companies form to operate massive fleets of self driving cars that can reach you In a timely fashion and charge fees below the cost of owning a car, owning a car will suddenly become a luxury.
Precisely. Its cost driven. The fact of whether or not a car is self driving really isn't part of the equation one way or the other. Admittedly self driving cars DO allow potentially for the cost of using a fleet subscription to drop since its easier to get the cars to and from where you want them inexpensively -- they can now potentially drive themselves -- at least that's the dream.
And see that just it... we're much closer to self driving cars with at least a human in the backseat taking a nap "just in case" then we are to self driving cars, that shuttle about completely empty -- because if ANYTHING happens... say a road closure and police are directing traffic, we're still miles away from self driving cars beign able to cope with that. So if it needs to pull over, wake the driver up, and say... "Hey buddy you need to drive a minute" that's fine... but that kills the "car shows up to pick me up and then then goes back to the depot after it drops me off" scenario.
This conversation reminds of one here about HDTV years ago when they were hitting the market. Most of the comments were along the lines of "my tube TV is great, those new fangled overpriced HD sets will never catch on".
I think you are mis remembering. Nobody thought HDTV wasn't going to go gangbusters. There was TONS of HDTV content available just begging for TVs to catch up. DVDs were 720p for years before the average person had an HDTV to get the most out of them. Sports networks were starting to do 720p. When 42" HDTVs dropped under 3K the writing for tube TVs was on the wall.
We shit all over 3DTV and were right about it. We're not convinced 4K is going to be a must have anytime soon. (due to relatively low gain in visuals and tv viewing distances, and the dearth of 4k content. Long term sure we'll get there... but there's no real urgency for it.
But HDTV? We all knew that was going to go big the minute it was affordable.
He didn't say they wouldn't be self driving, he said the people in them would want to own them.
If self driving cars become a thing, I'll still own a car. I don't live downtown, parking is not a problem, and there isn't ever going to be a zip car depot within 5 minutes of me.
So I'll own my car. I'll probably drive it some because i like driving, but sure if I go downtown, I might have it drop me off someplace convenience and then send it off to find a place to park on its own, and have it pick me up later.
Lots of people will still own cars. The only people who shifting away from car ownership are people downtown who don't strictly need one, can get along without one, and for whom owning one would be a huge expense especially because down town you pay for the car, the insurance, and then you have to park it somewhere too... and the parking alone can be less than a rental if you don't drive much.
So its not self driving that's pushing people away from ownership... its "exorbitant parking costs.
People in the suburbs though? People who a rural? People who use a car FOR work or as a daily commuter... they'll continue to own, whether the car can drive itself or not.
How about a legitimate offer - Playstation for $1, with $499 shipping?
I'll take 50, don't bother shipping them I'll send a van to pick them up.
If you can supply in bulk, I'll take 100,000 and will handle all arrangements to have a container and loading crew sent over.
Seriously, unless shipping is separately negotiable or there is an option to let me pick it up myself, how about we just recognize it as a legitimate offer to sell a playstation 4 for $500.
I've heard the argument that this is what Snowden should have done. So... It would have meant us not knowing about the programs
Pretty much. This. Its just further vindication of Snowden's actions.
The NSA asserts he should have gone through channells. Snowden asserts he did... at the moment its he said/she said. But this really moots the argument entirely. Other people DID go through internal channels, and it didn't fix the problem.
Therefor leaking/whistle blowing really is the ONLY way that would have worked.
The ISS is a huge drain of money that could have been better spend on a large number of unmanned probes to do actual science.
Studying the effects of living in space on humans and solving those problems is actual science; with lots of practical applications in medicine etc that will have real benefits even for us earthbound people.
Longer term we will want to know and solve those problems as well, for actually getting people somewhere else, even if its not am immediate plan to put anyone permanently anywhere else.
just with a different label and SKU, was of no help to the consumer.
Except that you could just buy foo at sears or bar at Wards. I mean its a price matching policy...so if the Foo at Sears is cheaper than the bar at wards, and you think its the same thing and Wards is like 'uh uh different sku' then just drive to Sears. Big deal.
Worst case its a meaningless price matching offer. They are still competing with eachother. Its just slightly harder for the consumer to compare pricing since they have to look at features and specs instead of just SKUs.
FWIW i don't really blame companies for doing this. You call it a "trick" they view it as product differentiation... the carrying case at home depot vs without at walmart... its not really at all about dodging the price matching policy. Its about being able to offer the consumer something different... because if everyone has exactly the same box with the same sku on a shelf, then its just a cutthroat race to the lowest price because there is nothing else to compete on.
Similarly if you have a game with a ton of "gear sets" and I've found 2 of 3 pieces of a legendary set, I might consider buying the third from the cash shop (or buying premium currency to then trade with a player in the AH) rather than grinding for it because the gear is a means to an end, and I'd rather spend time it would take to get that last item exploring different areas of the game rather than repeating the same one I've already done ad nausium
In which case, the game is defective by design and the AH work around is a ridiculous scam.
What purpose is there to making getting the complete set of gear a "repetitive grind ad nauseum" in the first place?
To motivate you to LITERALLY pay the developer extra money so that you don't actually have to play the game anymore.
Is that what "engaging, compelling, and fun gameplay" is? Where you'll pay not to have to do it anymore?
But its being misrepresented as real price, in a real offer to sell real playstations to the real public.
Walmarts price matching policies apply to genuine offers made on the same product by another party to the public. It doesn't apply to fake listings that were never evem intended to be seen, nevermind honored, by the public.
Walmart, should probably demand to see the listing showing a PS4. If the customer can't find it, it its not an offer to the public. If the crook leaves it up so walmart CAN find, it (and just plans to blow off anyone who tries to order one in the meantime) then Walmart should order up 50,000 units. That's "get the full attention of the FBI" money when you don't honor the shipment.
And there's no hiding behind "limited quantity available", or limited time and its already expired offers... because price matching policies tend to exclude that sort of thing too.
Because the objective of price matching policies is to convert a competitors sale to your sale. If the competitor can't fulfill the order then you haven't lost a customer to them and don't need to price match.
n the real world, I do have something you or your friends value - my labor.
That's just it. No you don't. Labor isn't all that valuable. There is a reason why those guys standing on the corner every day as day laborers aren't getting anywhere in life. There is more labor available than there is demand for labor. Raw unskilled labor is not the limiting factor to more production in the 21st century. And as the market value of ad hoc unskilled labor drops to less than the cost of the resources (food / shelter / health care, etc) to sustain people a negative cycle is created.
Second, if you and your friends have all that power and no interest in helping me, then who will impose on your freedom for me? If society universally decides not to support me, then I don't get that support
Truth.
But time and again, society rejects that position -- we abolished the work houses, and debtors prisons. We abolished indentured servitude. We abolished slavery in all its forms. We've instituted support systems for the elderly, and so forth. Its not efficient, its not always effective, but my observation is that when society is empowered enough (e.g. via democracy) it seems to consistently embrace the idea that people should not be allowed to fall into ruin, and that when they do society collectively has an obligation to them. That we don't just turn them into slaves or let them die of starvation.
In that case, they could just help me directly and cut out the very expensive middle man.
A parallel argument could be made for anything. Why should we pay taxes to support an army? Lets just have the people who want one pay for it themselves. Sure I'm rich and will benefit most from it being there, but there's no reason I should actually feel compelled to contribute to it? Let someone else contribute it to its maintenance, so that I may further my maximize profits under its protection.
If we get invaded, then I'll contribute... maybe... if not enough other people do, and the Huns are camping on my driveway. This will not work out well.
We all benefit from it therefore we should all help pay for it. The idea of building one ad hoc by just those individuals interested in it would be far more disorganized and ineffective than anything the government has ever done.
A safety net is different but not much different. We all benefit from it, even when we aren't on it. Not catching them in a safety net doesn't make them go away... they aren't going to just generally roll over and die... so they'll still extract resources from the rest of us, one way or another. And crime is lessened in a world where people aren't robbing each other at gunpoint just to survive. We trade the pseudo-force of a taxation for the very real force of being robbed at gunpoint for food... and since they're already robbing us for food, they might as well take everything else of value they can carry. In for a penny in for a pound right?:)
But funding a financial safety net is even more perverse, because anyone who can afford to pay for it, by definition, doesn't need it. And anyone who needs it, by definition, can't pay for it. Further, should those who needed it once be allowed not to support it once they can pay for it? What of those who chose not to pay for it when they could but now need it?
And what if those who would voluntarily support do not fund it enough... and its inadequate and people are falling through the cracks... we're back to being robbed again. In the 17th century there was charity for the poor... but the workhouses and debtors prisons were still populated. There's ample historical evidence that "those who would volunteer charity" do not meet the needs of those who needed it. If it were, those houses and prisons would have been all but empty.
Better and fairer by far to make it a collective expense.
Slashdot Mirror
So why isn't anyone making a big deal about Microsoft any more? The big issue at their trial was bundling the browser with the OS. They are still doing that.
That was the American anti-trust trial, and America ultimately fell on its face when it came to enforcing the antitrust issues it was pursuing.
On the other hand, for better or for worse, The Windows "N" editions available in Europe actually do not come with Windows Media Player, in compliance with EU law, as a result of the antitrust case that took place in Europe.
So you are saying that private companies should build and conduct business the way society tells them to, for the benefit of society. That's pretty much the view of economics fascism advocated. It doesn't work.
That's a pretty simpleminded view of it. Next you'll be telling me that consumers shouldn't be able to regulate companies to prevent them from using lead paint in toys because: fascism.
What does Google bundle with its search engine?
You missed the point. The point was simply to note that once upon a time society decided "bundling is harmful" so we made it illegal.
And now, once upon another time, there are some in society speculating that "search engines tied to other commercial interests" may be harmful.
When did Google ever start forcing users to sign up just to search?
You are missing the point. The point is not whether google is illegally tying products, because they are not. The point is that as a society we deemed that tying products was harmful.
Just as we could deem that a search engine company providing other services is harmful. Not because its a form of illegal tying, but because its harmful in similar ways.
. Bundling isn't harmful unless it is exploited, period.
And that's a great study you just did. I mean, you searched for "email" and you searched for "cloud" and you looked at the first 3 results in no less than 2 different search engines. Because clearly if google was going to manipulate the results they would ONLY do in the most blatantly obvious evil with a capital E way possible.
Well, I'm convinced.
It often leads to a greater overall benefit, as products are more likely to be able to interconnect.
What needs to interconnect with a "search" engine?
If there is evidence of exploitation, that's different, and the EU should drop the hammer on them.
Because it would be wrong for society to proactively decide what the rules it lives by are? It can only react to abuse?
But there isn't any evidence that that is going on here that I've seen,
And you've clearly settled the matter there, right? ;)
so this is almost certainly just politicians being dickweeds at the behest of people who paid them a lot of money.
Who benefits financially from search engines being decoupled from other commercial pursuits and thus paid these politicians lots of money to make it happen. I'm in agreement with you that "follow the money" is a good maxim to have when looking at politics ... so where does it lead us here? That's a good question.
Your "analogy" fails.Because there's money involved.
As there is in search.
. Google forces nothing of that nature.
Ultimately every search engine controls what pages i see when i search for something.
As a society its reasonable proposition that we would want our search engines to be competing on simply being the best search engine, without risk of it quietly subverting its integrety to push any other agenda / product / viewpoint / etc.
Unbundling them from commercial interests would be a part of that goal.
I'm not saying we should necessarily do this, or that simply un-bundling them would solve all the potential problems either. I'm just saying that its a valid argument.
If you're displeased with their service, pop another browser.
And that solves what exactly? It neither corrects the behaviour you don't want from google, nor assures you the 'next browser' isn't engaging in precisely the same thing.
Why don't the Europeans start their own search and ad engine?
Because that would be entirely beside the point.
What I don't understand here is Google does not have a monopoly on search services.
This actually doesn't have THAT much to do with monopoly at all. Even in a highly competitive market with many search engine participants the argument to unbundle search engines from other products makes a lot of sense.
Just as unbundling internet access from other network services makes a lot of sense.
The search engines effectively are the gateways to the internet. To operate effectively it's best if they simply compete at being the best search engine, instead of being crippled by constantly being subverted by the other commerical interests of the parent company that wishes to drive consumers to particular pages they have interests in rather than merely being the best at return the pages the consumer wants.
I'm not sure I see what's wrong with that.
Because your fixated on whether there is competition. Whether or not there is competition is beside the point. If your bank forces you to open savings accounts and credit cards with them to have a mortage that bundling is anti-consumer and illegal... period. Because that sort of product tying has been deemed harmful.
Competition isn't the issue. It doesn't matter if there are 5 or 10 other banks to choose from. (Especially if they all do it too.)
This however is a feature of the duckduckgo search engine. So its not browser dependent. Not a firefox feature. And doesn't require any customization at your end to use.
The fact that its just *there* is what makes it interesting and useful -- I don't have to do anything to use it.
. Only problem is, in 46 days we will have to deal with double the number of cases which will make it twice as hard as now to contain the spread.
Is -that- what the data is saying though?
Those charts show "cumulative cases", so they can never do anything but go up. If 1000 people a year get ebola, that's not an outbreak, but the cumulative cases will still hit 30,000 in 2030. That's not showing a doubling of the problem relative to today.
To see how close the problem is to being under control we need to trend NEW cases week by week... and see if that's going up or down. Cumulative cases ALWAYS goes up.
You've pretty much just manually replicated the bang feature of duckduckgo.
default search duckduckgo
g! google
gi! google images
w! wikipedia
d! free dictionary
yt! youtube
iarchive! archive.org
not quite as brief as your system; but you don't need to reset it up and there's thousands of them
https://duckduckgo.com/bang.ht...
Yeah, there's a lot of potentially great outcomes.
When I worked downtown I generally drove, because the nearest trainstation was driving distance (5-10 minutes by car), and parking there plus taking the train cost as much or more than just driving downtown.
But if the car could drop me off at the station and go home again, that might make sense to me.
But -- its not all sunshine and rainbows. How do I get home -- its quite a bit more complicated for the car to pick me up, especially at rush hour with thousands of other people doing the same thing.
And even though its an self-driving car, driving home empty after dropping me off is a much greater challenge. What if there is a road closure or accident and police are directing traffic.
When I was in the car, the car could pull over and say "Hey, I need some help for just a minute." -- but it can't do that if its empty.
That nixes dropping the kids off at school. Unmanned Package delivery. Well... not nixes... but it pushes it much further into the future I think.
I'm also not quite sure how unmanned courier trucks would work. The courier does more than just drive. He's also the gatekeeper to the packages, collects signatures, provides a level of security by just *being* there.
If the truck is unmanned anyone can just walk up to it and rob it blind. If its moving, they just need someone to step into the road to bring it to a halt. Sure trucks can be hijacked and robbed now... but theres always an element of unpredictability and risk since a human driver is present. But robbing an unmanned vehicle? It will always behave predictably and safely. We're going to have to think hard about security.
And how does even the intended recipient get their package and just their package. Can you imagine being called down by the truck, it flips its back door open, and you root around in it for your package... that's asking for all kinds of trouble.
Sure there are solutions, individual locked compartments, or some other system... but then that will dramatically reduce the overall delivery capacity of the vehicle.
I don't think its going to be a driverless car utopia; and certainly not by 2030. But changes are definitely coming.
Such an offer can be completely legitimate, and is not fraudulent. Sorry for your lack of reading skills, keep trying.
Sure its a legitimate offer. It's a legitimate offer to sell a Playstation for $500.
And by the way, offering a free or $1 Playstation with purchase of a $499 potato and sales avoiding taxes would land you in trouble. Practically everywhere has clauses like:
âIf various elements of a bundled service are not naturally bundled in the ordinary course of business, it shall be treated as provision of a service which attracts the highest amount of service tax.â(TM)
And the 'ordinary course of business' is not the ordinary course of -your- business, it looks at the entire market.They can also look at your own books and records to establish taxable amounts -- just because you wrote $499 potatoe, $1 ps4 doesn't mean they won't decide $499.80 ps4 $0.20 potato based on your own accounting records.
I see what you did there - completely avoided the point.
What was your point? That playing transparent games to shift the value of the transaction to another 'line item' in the transaction isn't going to fool anybody with half a brain?
Because you could offer "Buy this potato for $499 and then get a Playstation for $1 too."
Should a price matching policy be therefore bound to sell anyone of those people $1 Playstations also? Or do they get to force you to match the whole deal... 1 potato, plus 1 playsation for $500?
Hell... buy one get one half off deals. Same thing... you don't get to look at the get one half off part, separate that as its own thing and then ask someone to price match at 50% off.
What's the difference?
Either way its always super discounted price on X is contingent on you paying X + Y. And price X only available in that arrangement. Therefore the price is X+Y. Not X.
Oh and the potatoe idea is a great tax dodge too! because basic food stuffs are usually exempt and/or zero-rated. So buyers only owe tax on the 1$ potatoe. I bet the local tax collection authority will be helpless against this. Helpless... or they'll string you up for tax evasion. Probably the latter.
makes price comparisons hard.
Right. Sums it up. Online or otherwise, two local stores or otherwise.
You can check things like technology, spring count, spring gauge, coil counts, meterials, dimensions, etc but at the end of the day your right... you still just don't know if what you are getting online is the same as the bed your lay on at the store.
And even if the specs seem to line up, it may or may not be the same thing.The building materials (fabric quality), general construction / craftsmanship, and QA still may not be the same. Whether you care or not is a separate question.
It may be just as comfortable and just as good in every way. Or the online version may have cheaped out some other place you didn't think to look, perhaps they skipped a QA step so you may or may not get a good unit, or even worse... maybe your getting the stuff that didn't quite meet the store brand's standards. So they slap a different model number and off-name brand badge on it and unload it somewhere else.
I used to recall it said that generic film and fuji film were made in the same plant and were the same thing. Technically they were or at least could be the same some of the time. But the QA and acceptance standards on the stuff that got sent out with the fuji brand conformed to markedly higher standards.
So upshot was the off brand stuff was just as good, except when it wasn't.
So online pricing being lower vs shops is not completely a scam, nor is it 'just mattresses'... nearly all furniture is like this.
An assertion 'Whether people "may" not want to own them' as a logical argument is all but meaningless. If even a handful of people on the face of the earth sees a self driving car and decides based on that not to own one, then the proposition is true. But that is CLEARLY not the argument the author is making. He is arguing with respect to a much much larger class of people.
The presumed argument per the slashdot article is that given self driving cars then as a society was are going to largely move away from owning them. Not everyone, of course, but a large number of us, precisely because they are self driving.
"Whether people "may" not want to own them has no bearing on whether you would."
Quite. But 'whether or not *I* would own a car' was just an introduction to the argument, introducing the very large class of people, for whom, like myself, self-driving cars is simply neither here nor there in the decision to own one.
The majority of people are going to take the least expensive option. If companies form to operate massive fleets of self driving cars that can reach you In a timely fashion and charge fees below the cost of owning a car, owning a car will suddenly become a luxury.
Precisely. Its cost driven. The fact of whether or not a car is self driving really isn't part of the equation one way or the other. Admittedly self driving cars DO allow potentially for the cost of using a fleet subscription to drop since its easier to get the cars to and from where you want them inexpensively -- they can now potentially drive themselves -- at least that's the dream.
And see that just it... we're much closer to self driving cars with at least a human in the backseat taking a nap "just in case" then we are to self driving cars, that shuttle about completely empty -- because if ANYTHING happens ... say a road closure and police are directing traffic, we're still miles away from self driving cars beign able to cope with that. So if it needs to pull over, wake the driver up, and say... "Hey buddy you need to drive a minute" that's fine... but that kills the "car shows up to pick me up and then then goes back to the depot after it drops me off" scenario.
This conversation reminds of one here about HDTV years ago when they were hitting the market. Most of the comments were along the lines of "my tube TV is great, those new fangled overpriced HD sets will never catch on".
I think you are mis remembering. Nobody thought HDTV wasn't going to go gangbusters. There was TONS of HDTV content available just begging for TVs to catch up. DVDs were 720p for years before the average person had an HDTV to get the most out of them. Sports networks were starting to do 720p. When 42" HDTVs dropped under 3K the writing for tube TVs was on the wall.
We shit all over 3DTV and were right about it. We're not convinced 4K is going to be a must have anytime soon. (due to relatively low gain in visuals and tv viewing distances, and the dearth of 4k content. Long term sure we'll get there... but there's no real urgency for it.
But HDTV? We all knew that was going to go big the minute it was affordable.
Nothing anyone said ever even hinted at anything that would contradict that
ORLY?
http://tech.slashdot.org/story...
"In a Self-Driving Future, We May Not Even Want To Own Cars"
This entire thread is in THAT context. The original responder was addressing THAT claim. Please re-read the thread top to bottom.
That you go there shows you are looking for a fight. Why?
Lol, because "Someone on the internet was wrong!" ;-)
Maybe there is no Sears near you.
Maybe they are out of stock.
Maybe their service sucks.
etc..
Maybe. But then why should Wards price match for you?
You clearly can't or won't go to Sears, so if you want a mattress you'll pay Ward's asking price.
The trucks and vans can be self driving too.
He didn't say they wouldn't be self driving, he said the people in them would want to own them.
If self driving cars become a thing, I'll still own a car. I don't live downtown, parking is not a problem, and there isn't ever going to be a zip car depot within 5 minutes of me.
So I'll own my car. I'll probably drive it some because i like driving, but sure if I go downtown, I might have it drop me off someplace convenience and then send it off to find a place to park on its own, and have it pick me up later.
Lots of people will still own cars. The only people who shifting away from car ownership are people downtown who don't strictly need one, can get along without one, and for whom owning one would be a huge expense especially because down town you pay for the car, the insurance, and then you have to park it somewhere too... and the parking alone can be less than a rental if you don't drive much.
So its not self driving that's pushing people away from ownership... its "exorbitant parking costs.
People in the suburbs though? People who a rural? People who use a car FOR work or as a daily commuter ... they'll continue to own, whether the car can drive itself or not.
How about a legitimate offer - Playstation for $1, with $499 shipping?
I'll take 50, don't bother shipping them I'll send a van to pick them up.
If you can supply in bulk, I'll take 100,000 and will handle all arrangements to have a container and loading crew sent over.
Seriously, unless shipping is separately negotiable or there is an option to let me pick it up myself, how about we just recognize it as a legitimate offer to sell a playstation 4 for $500.
I've heard the argument that this is what Snowden should have done. So... It would have meant us not knowing about the programs
Pretty much. This. Its just further vindication of Snowden's actions.
The NSA asserts he should have gone through channells. Snowden asserts he did... at the moment its he said/she said. But this really moots the argument entirely. Other people DID go through internal channels, and it didn't fix the problem.
Therefor leaking/whistle blowing really is the ONLY way that would have worked.
The ISS is a huge drain of money that could have been better spend on a large number of unmanned probes to do actual science.
Studying the effects of living in space on humans and solving those problems is actual science; with lots of practical applications in medicine etc that will have real benefits even for us earthbound people.
Longer term we will want to know and solve those problems as well, for actually getting people somewhere else, even if its not am immediate plan to put anyone permanently anywhere else.
maybe they still do.
Yes. They still do.
just with a different label and SKU, was of no help to the consumer.
Except that you could just buy foo at sears or bar at Wards. I mean its a price matching policy...so if the Foo at Sears is cheaper than the bar at wards, and you think its the same thing and Wards is like 'uh uh different sku' then just drive to Sears. Big deal.
Worst case its a meaningless price matching offer. They are still competing with eachother. Its just slightly harder for the consumer to compare pricing since they have to look at features and specs instead of just SKUs.
FWIW i don't really blame companies for doing this. You call it a "trick" they view it as product differentiation... the carrying case at home depot vs without at walmart... its not really at all about dodging the price matching policy. Its about being able to offer the consumer something different... because if everyone has exactly the same box with the same sku on a shelf, then its just a cutthroat race to the lowest price because there is nothing else to compete on.
Similarly if you have a game with a ton of "gear sets" and I've found 2 of 3 pieces of a legendary set, I might consider buying the third from the cash shop (or buying premium currency to then trade with a player in the AH) rather than grinding for it because the gear is a means to an end, and I'd rather spend time it would take to get that last item exploring different areas of the game rather than repeating the same one I've already done ad nausium
In which case, the game is defective by design and the AH work around is a ridiculous scam.
What purpose is there to making getting the complete set of gear a "repetitive grind ad nauseum" in the first place?
To motivate you to LITERALLY pay the developer extra money so that you don't actually have to play the game anymore.
Is that what "engaging, compelling, and fun gameplay" is? Where you'll pay not to have to do it anymore?
I don't get why you think they are crooks?
Probably because its textbook case of fraud.
A fake price is still a price.
But its being misrepresented as real price, in a real offer to sell real playstations to the real public.
Walmarts price matching policies apply to genuine offers made on the same product by another party to the public. It doesn't apply to fake listings that were never evem intended to be seen, nevermind honored, by the public.
Walmart, should probably demand to see the listing showing a PS4. If the customer can't find it, it its not an offer to the public. If the crook leaves it up so walmart CAN find, it (and just plans to blow off anyone who tries to order one in the meantime) then Walmart should order up 50,000 units. That's "get the full attention of the FBI" money when you don't honor the shipment.
And there's no hiding behind "limited quantity available", or limited time and its already expired offers... because price matching policies tend to exclude that sort of thing too.
Because the objective of price matching policies is to convert a competitors sale to your sale. If the competitor can't fulfill the order then you haven't lost a customer to them and don't need to price match.
n the real world, I do have something you or your friends value - my labor.
That's just it. No you don't. Labor isn't all that valuable. There is a reason why those guys standing on the corner every day as day laborers aren't getting anywhere in life. There is more labor available than there is demand for labor. Raw unskilled labor is not the limiting factor to more production in the 21st century. And as the market value of ad hoc unskilled labor drops to less than the cost of the resources (food / shelter / health care, etc) to sustain people a negative cycle is created.
Second, if you and your friends have all that power and no interest in helping me, then who will impose on your freedom for me? If society universally decides not to support me, then I don't get that support
Truth.
But time and again, society rejects that position -- we abolished the work houses, and debtors prisons. We abolished indentured servitude. We abolished slavery in all its forms. We've instituted support systems for the elderly, and so forth. Its not efficient, its not always effective, but my observation is that when society is empowered enough (e.g. via democracy) it seems to consistently embrace the idea that people should not be allowed to fall into ruin, and that when they do society collectively has an obligation to them. That we don't just turn them into slaves or let them die of starvation.
In that case, they could just help me directly and cut out the very expensive middle man.
A parallel argument could be made for anything. Why should we pay taxes to support an army? Lets just have the people who want one pay for it themselves. Sure I'm rich and will benefit most from it being there, but there's no reason I should actually feel compelled to contribute to it? Let someone else contribute it to its maintenance, so that I may further my maximize profits under its protection.
If we get invaded, then I'll contribute... maybe... if not enough other people do, and the Huns are camping on my driveway. This will not work out well.
We all benefit from it therefore we should all help pay for it. The idea of building one ad hoc by just those individuals interested in it would be far more disorganized and ineffective than anything the government has ever done.
A safety net is different but not much different. We all benefit from it, even when we aren't on it. Not catching them in a safety net doesn't make them go away... they aren't going to just generally roll over and die... so they'll still extract resources from the rest of us, one way or another. And crime is lessened in a world where people aren't robbing each other at gunpoint just to survive. We trade the pseudo-force of a taxation for the very real force of being robbed at gunpoint for food... and since they're already robbing us for food, they might as well take everything else of value they can carry. In for a penny in for a pound right? :)
But funding a financial safety net is even more perverse, because anyone who can afford to pay for it, by definition, doesn't need it. And anyone who needs it, by definition, can't pay for it. Further, should those who needed it once be allowed not to support it once they can pay for it? What of those who chose not to pay for it when they could but now need it?
And what if those who would voluntarily support do not fund it enough... and its inadequate and people are falling through the cracks... we're back to being robbed again. In the 17th century there was charity for the poor... but the workhouses and debtors prisons were still populated. There's ample historical evidence that "those who would volunteer charity" do not meet the needs of those who needed it. If it were, those houses and prisons would have been all but empty.
Better and fairer by far to make it a collective expense.