What you're completely ignoring is the consequences such bailouts have on the market dynamics[1]. It creates a massive morale hazard which can and will incentivize market actors to take part in risky behaviour. If you are seeking to stabilize the "free" market, you are not going to do it by rewarding the losers or picking the winners.
Failing is just as important aspect of a self-regulated system as is the price, since the government voided that mechanism since forever we have an entirely disrupted market perfectly conditioned for too-big-to-fail participants.
I think that depends entirely on whether you saw what happened as the government bailing out GM, or the government keeping an industry from collapsing, which just happened to by by taking the first major company of that industry to fail, and injecting capital. I don't think it would be wise to expect the government to bail GM or any other auto-maker out of a financial problem in all industry conditions and all market conditions. Investors that expect that will lose their money to investors that correctly assess all the preconditions required. I don't expect most investors to be so stupid as to think nothing bad can happen to their investment in a failing company because occasionally extreme measures are taken in extreme circumstances. At a bare minimum, they should recognize that even if a company is bailed out, that doesn't guarantee a positive return, just a theoretically less negative return than before.
>The media industry is so backward. I can't believe most of them still live in the 90s and these problems haven't been solved yet.
Part of the problem is the broken status of international copyright law and the many incompatible local laws and regulations.
If the international community could at least settle for an standard approach to digital distribution over the internet, the world would be a happier place for consumers.
Is it really copyright law, or is it business-driven content deals?
Content publishers make separate deals with distributors (cable & satellite) along their service-area borders, and can therefore sell the same content multiple times over to different regions, most likely charging pricing based on income levels and audience size, etc.. And no doubt a lot of these deals are exclusive, or at the very least timed exclusives..
I know this isn't news to anyone, but I feel like this whole "sell the same thing over and over" must have a much bigger impact on the very slow internationalization of media, rather than any kind of legal hurdles.
Ostensibly, this market fragmentation was forced by legislative fragmentation. However, excuses are wearing thin: the EU market, for example, is now unique, if distributors actually wanted it to be. But they don't. Because distributors are the fat middlemen without a real future in the digital economy, so they'll try to squeeze every last drop of cash before they're forced out, exploiting every monopoly and every loophole they can. It's up to productions and audiences to bypass them as much as they can.
Publishers want the status quo because they make multiples of licensing income on the same content, and established distributors want the status quo because they fend off competition (and lock in their customers) from new global competitors who have better business models.
I can see why content producers may want these new deals, to get better control, but don't count on anyone else in the gravy train media chain to do anything other than fight new models tooth and nail until the bitter end.
I'm not sure that that's really the issue. The music industry has solved all those problems long ago - I can buy a lossless version of practically any album, free of DRM and knowing that those files will be mine and forever playable.
Here in europe, and I'm assuming the US as well, there's no way to buy and own a movie or TV show in a similar way. It's either DRM or physical media, usually accompanied by long delays before the release reaches europe. Or if available on Amazon Video the film often won't be available in its original language and instead only offer german (for me). Not sure how iTunes or Google handle that but in a nutshell: It's a mess and it has led me to lose interest in film and movies in recent years since a lot of the releases I've been interested in either weren't available or put up barriers left and right.
Amazon and iTunes are after the big crowd and cater to a an audience where lossless audio probably isn't the key feature.
I buy everything in lossless format and rarely have to look very hard - the few times I had to it turned out to be a vinyl or CD-only release, which wasn't available lossy either.
I'm into rather obscure stuff, which may actually help here - I'm not sure but could imagine that it's harder to get lossless audio for the top 40.
Well, here are the stores I use:
- Bleep
- Boomkat
- Qobuz (most iTunes-like with a big selection across all genres, including classic and jazz)
- Bandcamp
- HDTracks (beware, snake oil! There's no need to go above CD quality in my opinion)
- Label / artists stores (yes, many labels or artists sell their music directly without middlemen and in a wider range of formats)
- last resort: what.cd or buy the CD and rip it yourself
"If the international community could at least settle for an standard approach to digital distribution over the internet, the world would be a happier place for consumers"
"The international community" does get together and try to hammer out frameworks of copyright and tariffs which harmonize regulation globally. That's where large chunks of things like the TPP and the TTIP come from, and all the internet-melting complaints about the harmonization of copyright laws and the ability of american corporations to enforce copyright laws on australians and the like. But that's what you're asking for - 'why can't everyone just get together and sort out international copyright law so the media industry can come out of the 90s.' They're trying, but you won't like it when they do.
That's actually, in my opinion, pretty much the only reason why Netflix doesn't offer offline viewing, and other stuff. Copyright laws, and media companies, are dinosaurs.
What I want is a messenger which has all my friends in it.
Sadly at the moment that's only WhatsApp and Telegram to some extent.
If only there would be some protocol or standard that would allow me to communicate across different providers.
But unfortunately such a standard must be technologically impossible, otherwise it would be implemented and widespread already.
Oh, they can, no doubt about that. And that's what the post is about, trying to stay relevant in a changing market. But it adds a lot of complexity, since it switches from a product to a service.
> replaced nearly nonexistent with irrelevant to make my point clearer
I'm afraid your point is still not clear. What's your metric for declaring a market irrelevant?
A conventional office suite is still the solution which is overwhelmingly dominating the market. Maybe look outside your own bubble and bias.
A lot of business will never give away there confidential documents in the hands of third party cloud hosts. (which is the sane approach).
So what's your criteria for calling that niche, irrelevant or even non-existent?
When all the major players are switching to a different market. Sure, the installed base is still conventional office suites, but that's like saying that the car market is still gas-based even if all new cars sold are electrical (hypothetical situation).
http://www.winbeta.org/news/office-365-overtakes-google-apps...Bitglass also found that the share of companies using a cloud application for their productivity suite rose from 28% last year to 48% this year. Their report shows that Microsoft has successfully capitalized on the growth in cloud based productivity suite adoption rates to take the lead from Google.
The Dark Ages never happened and are an rethorical tool used by Enlightenment thinkers to elevate their own position. Europe did not slack during the middle ages. Far from it.
stupid question. of course they are.
Islam does not know a separation of church and state and does not consider itself a private matter at all.
With that religion there comes a mandatory political and societal system, with strict rules on Kuffar and Moslems alike. Wherever Moslem settle in great numbers, Sharia will follow and they will try to implement it.
They really are not a good argument against genetic causes of heritability of lower IQ scores in other groups.
Their example (if true) only serves to proof that in their cases low IQ was cause by environment, which as partial cause for low IQ is not debated by anyone credible. It says nothing about genetic causes in other groups at all.
Fair enough. But I think it is a good reminder that the gut reaction to invoke genetics when confronted with a heritable phenotype should be met with suspicion, especially given the tendency to treat 'intrinsic' traits as excuses for continued poor treatment/disregard.
I think better yet would be to condemn discrimination (i.e. favor social fairness) even if a certain genetic group is found to be causally associated with lower IQ. I think assuming we're all equal is as crippling to science/society as genetic supremacism. Understanding nuances of ethnic and cultural groups is something we should strive for. Diversity of traits, cultures is great.
Inasmuch as it makes sense to claim one's gut has any notion of genetics, I'd say the gut reaction of the vast majority of people is to reject any suggestion that there are intelligence differences between groups caused by genetics.
I hope you're right. My experience growing up makes me believe the opposite, but I know that my adolescence is only anecdotal in the scheme of things. I think the best we can do is silently acknowledge that black people are likely to have had a different set of opportunities than white people and apply that knowledge judiciously as necessary.
I'm not sure if the vast majority of people actually believe in that. Most educated Americans probably do. But I think there are a lot of people out there who still hold the older outdated incorrect view.
My gut supports group differences in intelligence. As Heinlein once wrote, if intelligence weren't heritable, you could teach calculus to a horse. It takes the entire intellectual edifice of modern radical egalitarianism to rob people of their common sense.
>It takes the entire intellectual edifice of modern radical egalitarianism to rob people of their common sense
It's not just 'radical egalitarianism'. The seemingly obvious explanation that such and such group are poor because they are genetically low IQ does not stand up to scientific investigation on the whole.
The comment you replied to seems to be a fairly specific and verifiable criticism of uTox, which, like all security software, deserves to have its claims approached with skepticism.
Failing is just as important aspect of a self-regulated system as is the price, since the government voided that mechanism since forever we have an entirely disrupted market perfectly conditioned for too-big-to-fail participants.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_hazard