Posts by Greg 97 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Jul 2007
ahahahahah.
That's soooo good.
The author of this article shoudl have thought about it.
How could the 20th or so post be the first one to think of the obvious, that one shouldn't be able to talk of ABBA and pirates of piratebay without titling this 'Thank you for the music' (and I didn't think of it either, shame on all of us)
An enormous thank you, you brightened my day in one single sentence :D
Wow, goes a long way to show that when one wants to find reasons for a preconceived opinion, one finds them (but generally looks stupid).
"
As we're firmly ensconced in a global recession, quickly sliding into a global depression, it does lead to the question -- does a bunch of scientists spending millions of dollars/pounds to smash atoms together have any short-term benefits? If not, does delaying the smashing result in a significant rise in cost?
"
It should be obvious to you that yes, there's a VERY significant rise in cost of delaying: cost now is people whose job you have to pay for. Stop the costs, you stop the jobs. The people go somewhere else, and in three years time, you just CAN'T find experienced people again without spending years enticing them and paying them WAYYYYY more.
If you had thought about it, you could even have seen this everywhere: private companies too avoid at all costs to get rid of valuable people, even in a recession (firing blue-collars is not the same: the more qualifications you need, the more the company will try and keep you in a downturn so that you're still there when it gets better.
"Spending lots of money on things which have no immediate benefit makes little sense in a rec/depression."
Quite the opposite. In a recession, governments will often spend, spend, spend, just to get counteract the vicious circle of "recession->noone spends money->there's no reason to produce as noone buys->fire people->worsening recession -> noone spends money-> ..."
Of course, spending on something useful may be better, but actually, just spending, even for something utterly useless, actually has a very direct and useful benefit in recession times.
So if you're convinced CERN is useless, well, now is exactly the time when you should complain LESS about the spending.
"
"Now the medical imaging industry are looking at what we've done, with a view to making combined PET/MRI scanners," adds Gillies. "Of course, it won't make us any money."
Bullshit. What he meant, of course, is that it won't DIRECTLY make them any money. [...]
But like other industries, indirect is hard to measure, so we'll conveniently ignore it.
"
ahahahahah.
If you had actually read the thing with an open mind, you'd have realized the guy is actually saying EXACTLY the same as you are. He's precisely making the point that it doesn't make them any direct money, but that it's useful to society as a whole, and thus is making money indirectly. Read again, it's so funny seeing you try to prove the guy is a whiner by precisely explaining the same thing as he.
He of course doesn't "conveniently ignore it". On the opposite, he's using this as one of his main arguments to prove that the research was helpful, indirectly bringing benefits to the society, in return for the money expended.
"
Oh yes, sing it, brother! "We are the world... We are the children..." Oh, sorry, I got caught up in his "We bring harmony to the world" aura. I'm sure all the web developers out there are happy there are no incompatibilities that require them to test for and design separate code for IE6, IE7, IE8, and Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox. Yes, I know that's not CERN's fault, but it goes to refute his stupid comment about the web not having incompatibilities. In theory, it doesn't. As Tim Berners-Lee designed it, it doesn't. In reality, it does.
"
You don't know what the web is do you?
Browsers is not the web.
He's talking about the fact that the content is not specific to a private network (like Microsoft tried to do). Minor deviations in the web standards is so far from what you'd have if some private companies had each developped a web (not counting the fact it would probably have taken 10 more years, or even more, to get a critical mass to get it to take off).
It's getting really ludicrous.
And the best:
"As for whether or not the World Wide Web has helped the economy, I won't pretend to know the answer because it's not a clear yes or no. Sure, you have economic successes like amazon.com, but what impact has that had on local economies? You have social networking success stories like myspace and facebook, which at least benefit data centers and probably a small number of employees, but at what economic cost to local economies (since people "meet" on those sites instead meeting in person and frequenting local eateries, entertainment, etc)?"
Wow, that one shows a real, laughable lack of understanding of the economy.
Is life simpler with the web? Yes, there's a clear yes or no to that one. Finding an address? Booking a flight, a hotel? Looking up some obscure information? Contacting someone? Sending information fast and reliably?
All this that you now do through the web saves you hundreds of hours a year. And it also saves hundred of hours of people you'd have made work to get the same result.
At the same time, unemployment had not risen at the same time all those jobs were destroyed (cos' they were, you're right). What does it mean? Well, basically, that's the definition of growth.
If population doesn't grow significantly (and in that case there's no growth 'per head' so it doesn' teven help), how is there any growth in our society? By freeing up people's time, and destroying jobs that can be done more efficiently, so that these people can produce something else instead.
Since as many people were employed after the web revolution as before, you have to realize they just did something else instead of having hundreds of thousands of people employed at booking plane tickets and printing address books and others.
So you got the same thing as before - through the web - and all the things those people now do, which they wouldn't be doing if they still had to do the thankless tasks the web has removed the need for.
Growth, per definition.
Thinking it's not clear whether the web has helped growth because it has destroyed jobs is exactly as stupid as thinking agricultural machines has not clearly helped growth because 80% of pre-existing the jobs were eventually destroyed because of it (going from 90% of farmers to 10%). Hmmm, let me see, I can't really be sure about this. We probably would have had more economic benefits if we'd kept 90% of the population plowing the fields. That HAS to be better than destroying all those jobs, we'd surely be economically be better off...
@Charles Manning:
Before using the term "idiots" about other, one should use his brain a little bit first.
Steve Roper said it quite clearly.
Your "Don't want the wife to track you going to the shag's flat: turn it off!" is pretty stupid. There's even more chance that the wife sees what's going on if you turn it off than if you don't (if you do, she sees you disappear, that's strange, if you don't, she MAY notice you're in an odd place, but she may not).
As said above, once started, you're fucked. And you don't even need to be the one starting it: if 95% of the population does it and you don't, when the wife asks you to do it and you refuse, you're pretty much busted (same for boss, or whatever: once it's the norm, you're even worse off refusing than giving up your privacy).
Concluding comment on web browsers and mail potentially being illegal in France is stupid, as per your own above description of the law:
"enforcing a ban on platforms that CAN be used to distribute unauthorized content is certainly ripe for abuse. What else CAN be used to distribute content illegally? Oh, say, FTP, web browsers, and email. Hell, the entire Internet itself could be banned in France.."
"DADVSI copyright law, which includes an amendment barring making available software that's INTENDED to distribute unauthorized protected works."
Understood the difference?
Now we're left to see if the tribunal decides limeware is intended to distribute blablabla. And indeed, let someone try to sue browsers companies, and that day you'll see the difference between "intent" and "ability"
Did you actually read what the other guy said to you?
How can you be so clueless?
Read that:
A company CHOOSES how many shares it has. Hence, it's absolutely stupid to expect the price of a share to be $40 across a range of companies regardless of the number of shares.
To say it otherwise: I create a software company that does nothing interesting, as you say. My friend does the same. Then I IPO by making 100 shares, while my friend IPOs making 1000 shares.
According to you, it means his company, just because he DECIDED to create 1000 shares each of 0.1% of the company while I created 100 shares representing 1% of the company, will be worth 10 times as much as mine, while doing the same crap.
Do you really think the majority of investor is as stupid as that? Sorry, but they're not.
In the end, if we do the same crap, we'll be worth the same, which means MY shares might be worth $40, but then HIS will be worth $4, not $40.
Talk about doing your research...
Oh, and btw, as AC said, you can split about whenever you want, when you're heading a company. So it means if I'm not happy with the worth of my company, then according to you, I just need to say "each share is now split into two shares representing each half of the former one", and then, because every share goes to $40, the global value of my company will double. How clever, I think I'll do that every month.
The fact that the decision is good or bad should not push you into claiming absolutely false things to push your opinion through.
James Butler (and others saying the same, like MD Rackham): of course the judge can seize the domain name, he just has to ask ICANN to do it. If the domain names management was not in the US, he might have a hard time, but as it is, yes, he can very easily do it. You should avoid sentences like "does he know so little about the internet" when in fact you did not stop to think about whether he might actually know what he's doing (which does not make it wrong or right, but wrong or right has nothing to do with "being able to").
Hud Dunlap: "His comment about not seizing sites that use software to block Kentucky access is nonsense. I am not even sure it can be done."
Of course it's not nonsense, and of course it can be done.
Just open about ANY website these days. All serious websites use your IP and the corresponding database to locate you, whether to serve you targeted ads, to be in your language, to give you relevant news or weather, and so on. Oh, little flame on the way: or to make you pay more, like when you're trying to buy some game download in the UK on the US site, and the site tells you it won't accept your order because you're located in the UK and so you need to connect to another website and pay double.
It's very, very easy. Just take the IP, check it against a list of ISPs of the world and the locations they serve (you can also get the identification of the router if you want even closer localization), and then display different websites based on the location of customer.
Here, just have a few lines of code in the script that says "if IP matches Kentucky, display 'sorry mate' text, else give access to site"
Flame all you want, but do not confuse your wishes with reality. The decision may be wrong, but it's technically easily applicable, both for taking the domain names over and for having the site implement a blocking
Don't be stupid. CEOs HAVE to point out the obvious, when they're asked.
How can you complain about this, while most likely, it was a journalist at the conference who asked him the question.
What should he have said, "you're a stupid journalist, because you well know I don't have a handle on the economy and as such I'm bound to state the obvious as an answer"?
Much as I like M$ bashing, I am able to get past my dislike of M$ when there's nothing to criticize (except maybe the journalist who asked him the question).
The explanation on the difference between roman and common law is completely stupid.
The main difference certainly isn't in the fact that everything not forbidden is allowed or conversely.
In both systems, what is not forbidden is allowed.
The main difference is the role of precedent compoared to that of law litterature. One systems has the judge make the law, whereas the other has the judge understand the law (meaning things are assumed to be in there somewhere, which is probably where our clueless journalist gets mistaken).
In the end, what the text says is that the right to access everything stated in the Community is a minimum right, so one provider cannot prevent that. It doesn't mean the end-user has no right to access google.com's servers, just that nothing in the law forbids the telecom operator from forbidding its access.
What kind of journalism is this, to base an article and its title on your ignorance of the basic principles of roman law?
Yes, completely agree with you.
And indeed, the AC who replied to my first point had completely grasped the issue (and made very valid points). I was talking about all the others (I may have missed one or two towards the end though).
I mostly agree with you that the competition authority measure would be wrong and that Vodafone might be able to follow up on its threat.
If, that is, competition authority doesn't prevent that in the same package (termination charge is outright abusive, it could very well "be scraped" simply by saying you can't make it pay to anyone. Not to the caller, not to the receiver.
The cost being actually almost zero, there is no really compelling reason why a non-existent cost should be passed on to the consumer.
Still, I haveno idea what the co,petition authority would do on that, and broadly, I agree with your and AC's analysis.
"Greg's analysis is interesting. But it relies in part on the regulator being right about the market."
Yes, indeed, and I wouldn't say the regulator is right.
In fact, I have no opinion on whether the proposed restriction is a good thing.
I just have an opinion on the fact that noone here had read the article and not what they wanted to read.
Of course, once one has read the article, one can make the point that Vodafone will or will not apply his threat, and that the regulator is wrong or right, and frankly, I don't know.
It's just that here, everyone is telling pure bullshit because they're too stupid to fucking read even the title correctly ("Vodafone says...", shouldn't everyone who see that with wondering whether Vodafone is telling the truth or what fits its interest?), or the second sentence.
I'd have been interested in reading posts saying "Vodafone is actually right,such a charging will appear if competition authority passes the rule, because...". But all there was was "That charging is good, let's bring it on", or "It's bad, stupid competition authority".
Come on people, how can you conclude whether the competition authority is right or wrong just based on what VODAFONE says would happen if it did?
Since an article that speaks about some random company claiming that A will result in B leads to everyone considering that this claim is right and starting from there to say if A should be done, I have a suggestion.
I propose that theregister holds an article named "Greg says not removing taxes on him would make the world explode".
Then everyone, exactly like here, will debate on whether it's a good idea to make the world explode, without anyone ever contesting the possibility that Greg might just be lying on the link between the two and focusing on studying whether there really is a link.
Then presumably, you'll all reach the conclusion that world should not be allowed to explode, and the logical consequence will be that I shouldn't pay taxes next year.
(once again, I'm not saying Vodafone is necessarily wrong, just that they clearly have every reason to say what they say whether it's true or not, and as such validity of their claim should have been the main topic, not the crap we had here)
OK, first there are those who are just off-topic, talking about whether it's painful or not to pay for termination charges.
And second there are those almost in-topic, who actually are worse, who complain that competition authority is stupid, and that they don't understand anything and are going to f**k everyone.
Come on people, do you actually read?
Here is what the article says:
- Competition says a given practice is anti-competitive
- Vodafone answers "don't mess with that, or we'll fuck the consumers hard, and our study shows they don't like being fucked".
Excuse me all, but I don't see where competition authority has anything wrong here. You just have Vodafone who sees they would not be able to fuck everyone as they do now, so they just try to bully us by saying "if you remove my current abuse, I'lll do a worse one".
After that, you can believe them or not, but actually noone above paid attention to the fact that all this is actually very explicitly a scare tactic from Vodafone and other big telcos.
Oh, and there is even a very fun sentence, the second of the article: "Pay as you go users who make fewer outgoing calls would face big retail price hikes if operators lost revenues, the firm said.".
Which means "try and make me charge less to some people, and I'll punish you by fucking the poors. You wouldn't want me to have to do that would you?"
Nowhere is it said that apple removed the songs.
Quite the opposite: "But Chinese officials have now seemingly realized there's a defter way to eliminate digital undesirables on iTunes rather than nuking the entire store from orbit."
Which means that Austin Modine suggests that China has blocked the one part of the site that was offering that download, not Apple.
Your raving on terrorists using the list is completely and utterly stupid.
So they'd need a list of 33.000 names and addresses so they woul dknow whom to kill? Yeah, sure. It's so hard to find random people in the US, you have to like, look at a house and say "why not this one?". Very hard, so for sure, it's better to get a list, check out each address and choose from there...
Oh, and I heard someone stole a White Pages book from a telephone company! Just imagine, names and addresses of hundreds of thousands of people. Whoh, terrorrists could kill them all thanks to their addresses. Scary isn't it?
If Google finds a new way to get more people to BUY something from you, yes, you'd be happy. If they just find a way to get them on your site, you're actually quite unhappy: you pay Google for nothing, and you pay the bandwidth for someone who is not a customer, and who probably will be pissed that he was misled here.
As a consequence, I wouldn't want google to slap words that bring people to my site. If I sell bathroom equipment, like bathtub and others, I want people who typed "bathroom bathtub", not people who typed "bathroom" because they wanted to see some nude babes, or because they wanted to buy bathroom towels.
Of course, it actually MAY be beneficial, but then I should be the one to make the call, and it should not be some small print opt-out.
Exactly like Kit Temple above said: it's worth trying to see if some specific keyword combinations work well, before turning it off again. But that's all.
The day when google will get 1% of the sales triggered by their ads, then I'll be all for them to use whatever keywords they want.
As long as mine and their interest differ (they want to bring people to my site, whatever they do there, I want them to get people to buy something from me), it is "no, thank you" and should never be a tiny opt-out option.
I'm no expert, but what is the default BIOS mode?
If it's full scan, ok. But if it's not, then being in Full-scan is certainly not a workaround.
The security agency just needs to reset the BIOS.
And contrary to what has been said above by Pheet, it's futile to expect that "Hopefully the time it takes to open the machine and physically reset the BIOS means there's insufficient key material left in the RAM."
The basic hypothesis here is that the people coming it to get you have access to the computer while it's still turned on.
You can't seriously expect that they'll turn it off, then open the machine.
They will just open the machine, and when they have their screwdriver 1 inch from the BIOS reset button, ready to go, then they'll turn off, reset BIOS and turn on. 5 seconds lost, at most.
AC, as said by someone else, you obviously have decided that you could define words as you would like them and not as the dictionnary and the english language have them.
Maximisation is the process of maximising, getting the most. Optimizing is the process of getting the best, or in mathematics, of getting either the minimum or the maximum (both the minimum and the maximum are optima).
If you need to vent by posting anti-capitalist propaganda, do so, but please keep redefining the english language for another fight. One thing at a time.
> Why can't Icahn be held responsible for his actions too??
Well, you seem not to understand much about capitalism.
The board can be held responsible because it does not own Yahoo, merely manage it for its legal owner.
Icahn cannot be held responsible for his action because HE IS the owner (well, partly) so he can do whatever he wants with his shares.
In the same way that if you destroy your house (no insurance claiming) because you don't like it anymore, you can't be held responsible, the very sentence is meaningless in that case. But if you appoint someone to manage your estate and that person destroys it, then they will of course be held responsible for it.
Simple no?
And this is regardless of whether Icahn is actually morally justified in doing that, or whether it is actually the right thing even for him: it does! not! matter!
People raising the non-issue of segmentation probably never went to a foreign, different alphabet website.
Do you think that being able to type http://hi.baidu.com/baidu/ (biggest chinese portal) in your address bar helps you?
There obviously would be latin-names domains for every site that has any relevance to latin-writing people, and noone would see the difference.
Top-domain name should probably stay the same however (with a possible browser equivalence so that chinese don't have to switch back and for just to type their top level two characters). Then each country can decide what to allow and there's no phishing issue. Yes, you can get phished on yahoo.ru because of cyrillic o, but you can't on yahoo.com nor yahoo.it cos' those only allow latin, and if what the hell would you do on yahoo.ru anyway if it's all cyrillic there...
In the end, non-issue. Let half the world's population get access to their non-latin alphabet, just let it be done well.
<<Micro$oft screwed me again...
By Anonymous Coward
Posted Sunday 4th May 2008 04:23 GMT
I was planning on getting some stock in Yahoo in preparation for a buy out or takeover, but no...
>>
Poor him. He was soooo smart to have decided to buy stocks that were lower than the price proposed by Microsoft and to sell them back to Microsoft for a higher price... Really, noone else would have had such a clever idea...
Think a minute and you might realize that the precise reason the price is not aligned with the offer is the fact it isn't certain. By buying the stocks cheaper, you take the risk of the deal fumbling, and the guy who's selling the stock to you is paying you that possible premium to take over that risk.
Saying you were screwed means you considered you should be able to get that premium without taking on the risk.
Seeing as you're unknowledgeable on this, you were actually saved. If it had proceeded, you might have bought, run into the realization of the risk you couldn't even understand, and lost half your money. Then you'd have cried foul, that it was unfair, that you were so clever buying for 32 for a deal at 33 and you don't understand why you got fucked when the deal dropped and the share went down to 16.
Thank Microsoft for not inflicting that lesson in stock management on you.
<<So, where were all these "smart move Steve" folk...
By Anonymous Coward
Posted Sunday 4th May 2008 22:35 GMT
Back at the start of this thing? If it is now smart to walk away, then by implication starting on the takevoer bid was about as clever as yelling out "Chelsea!" outside Old Trafford.
>>
Did you actually read what clever people said before making such a comment.
It should be easy to understand why both moves can be smart at the same time.
You probably even did this already in your own life.
You find an antique. You give it a lot of value, but you're not willing to sell the wife for it.
You suspect that in fact it is not worth very much to anyone else than you (you can make good use of it in your house, but it's very peculiar and not many other people would use it).
The merchant asks for your price. You give him. $29
Smart move no? If you give him a price and he accepts, you get the thing for a good price (for you, probably a price too high for anyone else, but what do you care as long as it's useful for YOU? you valued it around $33).
Then imagine the merchant is cunning and tries to get you to overpay. He asks for more than you're willing to pay. $37
Then you say no. Smart move no? You refused paying more than you thought it was worth to you.
Strange how both moves are smart, one being offering $29, the other being refusing to pay $37.
Or would you say that anything you ever thought was a good thing to buy at 29 would have been a smart buy at 37? and anything that it was smart not to buy at 37 should not have been bought at 29?
Then of course, it only gets even smarter once we take into account the fact the merchant probably won't be able to do anything with the ware he kept, and won't be able to sell it to anyone else for more than 20.
You can come back the next week-end and propose $22 instead of $29 and he will probably say yes in despair.
Now, this just *might* not be smart, though it looks awfully like it.
But in any case, your own comment was anything but.
<<
By Luca
Posted Friday 2nd May 2008 19:25 GMT
>We say that New York has a right to its tax money.
And I say that you are crazy. The law is clear and NY has no right to anything. Amazon does not reside in NY nor does it hold any office/warehouse. By the same reasoning then NY should start taxing merchandise purchased by mail/net order in other countries. And then all the other 49 states should do so.
>>
Whoh, there are good points of both sides of the debate, but that one was realy the most stupid thing that could be said.
It's laughable.
You're saying NY has no right because theprevious law did not allow it? Is that right? The law NY is precisely entitled to create/change because that's what states do?
It's really, really funny reading someone who basically says "it is unlawful for lawmakers to create that law because it does not already exist".
>>The problem is that the sales tax system is way more complicated in US than it is in Europe. In Europe, there is only one sales tax system for each country, which means less than 20 different tax systems.
Actually, I'll gladly alleviate your ignorance by informing you that 27 (the number of member states of the EU) is not "less than 20".
Of course, it doesn't make the rest of your point any less valid, that was just for your information.
For once, and only on this very, very precise situation, actually Microshit is right and many people bash without even thinking, because there's "Micro$haft"named here, so they're in automatic mode.
Re-read please, many lose all credibility and do real, thought-upon Microsoft bashers harm by criticizing anything even when MS is right.
The article, for those who obviously haven't understand, says the following:
- Microsoft had Office 2007.
- They tried to make a standard out of it
- They failed
- What they did succeed is having their spec be modified in small ways and get THAT adopted as a standard.
What do you expect? What happened is that to accept that as a standard (which I fully agree they should never have done but that's something else), ISO required some changes.
What is now standard is NOT what Microsoft proposed but something "quite close".
Hence, it is obvious that it's impossible that they conform to the standard, it's a matter of definition of the word "changes". And it's not related to Microsoft at all, for once.
Please keep the bashing for when there is reasno for it. It's often enough that we don't need it when for the first time in maybe a year, Microsoft can't be reproached anything here (oh, they can about the previous process itself, just not about being non-complaint right after the spec was changed).
In fact, it would be if they WERE compliant that it would be scary. It would mean the ISO body was so corrupt they did not even ask for any change to what Microsoft had proposed (or even worse, that they asked for changes which Microsoft had suggested to them so they could keep face).
"do you HAVE an opinion you wish to share with the rest of us"
Actually I do. But does it really matter? Most posts above don't state any opinion either, they just say "they should have known those morons" (which is true but is hardly an interesting point).
I feel the congressmen who are wondering if they got gamed are wrong. They in fact did not get gamed (though it seems they've forgotten why they did this in the first place).
Congress is there to ensure the auctionning of a public ressource benefits the pubilc.
For that, it can bring money to government, or it can pave the way for nice applications that will make everyone happier, or it can do both.
Congress recognized that open access was A Good Thing for the society and that's why they required it as a clause for the auction.
They also recognized that the value of the block was lower with this clause since it would make it harder for a would-be monopoly to deep-fuck the customers, hence that would-be monopoly would be willing to pay less for a lesser privilege. And paying less is A Bad Thing.
Thus, they pondered both sides, and ended up saying that if they could still get at least 4.6 billion, they would get lots of money AND open access, and that would be better on both points.
And it worked exactly as they hoped: they got the money they wanted to ensure as well as the open access. It's good for the country for both reasons.
So in the end, the point, for me, is not "should they be upset if they didn't see it coming?", but rather "how can they have already forgotten that they got not only what they deserved, but also what they in fact conscisouly and cleverly asked for?".
I simply guess that those who are upset are not those who were at the origin of the clause, and they hadn't understood the original, now fulfilled, intent.
can you please all stop criticizing wrongly for no other reason than feeling clever?
Half of the comments above are basically "why are they upset of what happened? they got what they should have expected".
Yeah, they did. And?
Why wouldn't they be upset?
They're right to be upset. They put rules, didn't understand what would happen, and it did happen. they're upset. Normal.
That's not to say they're criticizing google (quite the opposite, the article cites the guy saying the contrary), but they're upset by their own lack of clairvoyance.
But I guess it feels really good posting here something along "morons, they should realize it's their fault". Trouble is, they do realize it, article is quite clear about that fact.
This was completely aside any opinion I might have on the actual process
High food prices for a food producer are relevant only if it's not an agriculture of subsistance, that is, if the food grown is not grown for their own cionsumption. Otherwise, whether it's worth pennies or gold ingots is moot.
Unfortunately, such is the unfortunate way of the poorest countries. Go and find third-world countries that are net exporters of food-crop. I'll bet you won't find more than one in ten (one exception was zimbabwe but it's now ruined). Even the few that are are in fact exporter to other poor countries, which means as an aggregate, they're still importers.
The reason I focus on luxury crops is simple. And it's the same as the reason those economies try to focus on it too:
In an open economy, it's all about competitive, comparative advantage.
Those countries have a competitive, comparative advantage growing coffee beans or mangos (and even then, not so much of an advantage but well), thanks to their climate.
They have a clear disadvantage for crop-food, because of their climate, of their absence of mechanical equipment and fertilizers which make the yields per worker be sometimes 1000 (yes, 1000) times lower, such as for rice for instance.
One worker produces around 550kg of rice a year in a typical poor country (with 100kg needed to seed the fields), whereas one worker produces 500,000kg of rice a year (figure for Louisiana). (of course you have to deduce tremendously higher costs for the Louisiana worker but still).
Because of that difference, it is ludicrous to imagine that whatever the food price, those small guys could ever dream of selling their production abroad. And inside the country, who would they sell anything to, since the higher the price, the less likely anyone is to be able to afford it (as you said everyone will be going back to producing food).
If as you say those economies where economies of subsistance, higher food price would not help, it would just be neutral.
As it is, they're not subsistance economies anymore (or at least, the further they went away from that, the more they improved in the last few decades). And rising food prices can at best corner them out of the world market: since they can't sell their coffee for a profit, then they're back to autarcy and producing their own food, and are all the poorer for it.
You read in my post what you want to see there, not what is actually there.
On eexample that shows it is your conclusion: "The problem is broader than you see it, and the solution is not as simple as giving the coffee producer and city dweller money to buy wheat."
Oh yeah? Can you cite any part where I said people should be given money to buy wheat?
Of course, you need to think I said such things, otherwise you might find out you don't disagree so much with my position.
Actually, what I said is "It's mathematical to see that an economy that got richer by going from food-crops to luxury-crop cannot be made richer when food-crop price increases". Unless the food-crop becomes even more expensive than luxury crop in which case they can switch back (which wouldn't guarantee anything actually but I'll spare everyone those more complex trade-offs).
Until then, the increase in food-price only erodes the gains they had a few decades by moving to luxury crops.
Gains that moved them from starve-poor (I produce just enough crop to feed myself and have nothing left after) to just dirt-poor.
Apart from that, I didn't suggest a solution, I didn't talk about ethanol (yes, the article is about the "ethanol makes food more expensive which makes poor poorer". I for one focused on the second part of that sentence), I didn't say they should be fed, I didn't say they wouldn't get overpopulated to an even worse effect if we did. In short, I didn't voice any opinion or solution. So stop assuming I did.
I only explained an almost mathematical phenomenon which some clearly did not grasp.
JonB first:
"I think they'll have to charge more for what they produce, so that their staff can be paid a living wage or their businesses will go bust. This happens rather a lot."
Whoh, you really didn't read what I wrote.
They can't charge more, it's exactly the opposite. The rest of the population, precisely because they spend double what they used to in food, don't have money left. So they can't buy.
Indeed, they "go bust". Except even talking about "going" bust shows the ignorance here. It's not companies, it's people. In those country, over 90% of people don't belong to a company, they just do what they can to make a living, on their own. And they don't "go bust", they just stop doing what they did. Trouble here is that in the extreme, there is absolutely nothing left they can do in the cities. they have to go back to farming, poor, pure subsistance farming (if they can still find land for that).
@Glen Turner.
Whoh, that's funny.
First point is, most often, people who need to use an argument of "I know, I'm in the field" are those who actually can't convince otherwise and have the weakest case.
Second point is, actually, I'm in exactly the same position as yours, except I didn't think relevant to say it before, since the logic of arguments is what counts, not the "I'm this or that, so shut up I know better". I'm a trained economist, I stopped doing it to go and work in computer sciences cos' it paid more (only difference is, two months from now, I'll have started an economist's job again cos it pays even more).
"The first world has rigged international trade with the third world, so economic arguments which assume a free market are laughably naive. One of the major reasons crops are being sold to the first world for ethanol production is simply that they can't be sold to the first world for eating. In your world of pure economic dreaming both of these uses would fetch the same price. In the real world, the market for the higher-value use is forbidden to the seller."
That's completely out of the subject. I haven't talked about ethanol (and their subsidies) but about the food price. Whether correlated or not is moot in my argument, which centered on food prices and poor countries. And to my knowledge, Ethiia does not buy ethanol, so it really is moot here (though as an other topic, I might not disagree).
"Coffee production is being held up by some postings as a high value crop? In Ethopia? WTF, the situation there is so bad there was a Sundance-screened feature documentary "Black Gold". The PR stink was so bad that Starbucks whacked a "fair trade" coffee on their menu.
Coffee growers get 1% of the retail price, because Western consumers love their brands, resulting in a monopsony of buyers (coffee is a commodity, but US consumers pretty much all purchase via Starbucks, Nestle, Sara Lee, Kraft, Proctor and Gamble giving them the power to pay bugger all of nothing). Like a monopoly of sellers, classical economics' theories of free markets fail in a monopsony. So most of the comments which focus on simple production substitutions between coffee and grain are the sheerest bunk."
The share of the price that they get is also irrelevant.
The fact is, they get more by selling coffee than by selling food-crop. And they used to be able to grow coffee and use the proceeds to buy food AND more.
The more food price raises relative to coffee's (meaning "the price THEY are paid for coffee") the poorer they get, whether it's about 1% of the final price or 300% of the final price.
Now if your argument is that if we would just give them 10% of the price, then food-crop price would not be a problem for them anymore, yes, sure. In the meantime, it is.
"The argument that increased crop-derived biofuel use in the first world will lead to deaths from starvation in the third world seems solid. This is hardly the first study to say so and instances have already been documented.
If that sits uneasily with your morals, then living in a rich country you are not short of alternatives. I ride a bicycle myself."
So, in the end you agree with what I say.
All in all, one has to be dumb to not understand the problem when it's phrased simply: For a poor coffee producer, raising wheat-prices are bad. For a poor city-dweller, raising wheat-prices are bad. The poorer they are, the bigger the part of their revenue goes into food, the worse the raising prices are
Since the reasons were already explained in a language that is not familiar to most of us, I'll focus on an example, a rough description of how rising food prices make life more difficult for poor farmers (which I agree is counter-intuitive, but follow me to the example).
Take a poor country.
Without trade, 50 or more years ago, they were all farmers.
They grew only enough to eat, cos' the soil is not yielding much, and they have no technology to improve yields.
They can produce 100 food-crop (no unit here, it's just a number for comparison
), and eat 99 if they are to survive.
99% of the population are farmers, because they just have to do that to survive. There's 1% that feeds off the small surplus and provides basic services (you can change the numbers, it doesn't matter, the results won't change, I chose those for simplification).
Come the open market. Price of crop-food is 1.
They don't have anything to trade, so for a time, it doesn't change anything. They just keep producing their food and eat it, and they don't care (that's your reasonning) about food prices.
But then someone comes and says "hey, you have a competitive advantage. We're rich, we want coffee, and you have the climate for it. Produce that instead of your food, it's worth more".
And indeed, instead of 100 food-crop, they can produce 100 of coffee.
And coffee sells for 3 while crop-food sells for 1.
So farmers there start growing coffee, sell 100 coffee for 300, and buy 100 of food. Oops, now they can feed themselves and have 200 left to buy basic goods.
There's a demand for goods growing there. As a consequence, some people can stop farming (2 thirds of them, possibly) and go live into towns, where they'll produce things to sell to the farmers for their disposable income (the 200 not used for buying 100 crop-food they stopped producing but still need to eat).
So now you have a country where many people can stop working as farmers, and can start a real economy, selling things to farmers so they can buy their own food.
You get a coffee economy.
Do you see where it leads now? What you didn't see is that raising food prices are the same as a lowering of the coffee price.
Now, crop-food prices double. Coffee prices stay put.
Now the farmers who produce coffee have to pay 200 to buy their food instead of 100.
Once they've fed themselves, they've got 100 left, when they had 200 before.
Their revenue was HALVED (food excepted). They're much, much, much poorer.
And going backto producing crop-food wouldn't help, since they'd then only make enough to feed and wouldn't even have the 100 left that they still have now.
And that's not even the worst of it.
People in the towns, what do you think they're doing now? Each farmer was supporting 2 city-dwellers with the 200 he made (he bought for 100 to each and each spent that 100 on crop-food). Those 2 city-dwellers produced things for the farmer to buy (chair, tables, roofs, electricity, not much, but still a big life improvement).
Now, farmers spend only 100. And each city dweller needs 200 to buy food.
This means instead of 2 city-dwellers supported, each farmer, with 100 he buys from cities, supports only HALF a city-dweller.
That 3 QUARTERS of the city dwellers that now don't have a livelihood anymore and are in danger of starving (at least until they go back to cro-farming).
Do you se what it can do now?
Of course, the example is simplified, the numbers are rough so that they're understandable, but whatever numbers you choose, it doesn't change the principle: because food price climbs compared to coffee (or other luxury good) prices, farmers are impoverished, have lower disposable income (what's left after feeding themselves), and worse, it completely wrecks the economy of the cities that were based on the assumption the farmers could produce enough luxury-crop to support feeding of the whole society.
Incidentally, notice how there have now been food riots in at least three countries, and those riots take place in the cities: the farmers get poorer and poorer, up to the point where they would revert to the poverty level of when they produced food-crop, but the city-dwellers can very, very quickly get to the point where they just starve.
I hope you paid attention and understood where your previous argument was wrong.
I know how difficult it is to admit we have missed something, but your previous point was not really wrong, it was just based on incomplete assumptions.
Taking into account the "luxury-crop versus food-crop" problem, it chagnes the deal.
You're dead wrong in your reasonning about food prices, though I understand that your reasonning is natural as a first thought.
I can explain why (in fact, Anonymous Coward already did so, and if you read him again, you should see that he obviously knows more about economics than you do, if only because he knows the concepts and terms), but first there's something you should realise before even entering the explanation:
The World Bank, who is paying hundreds of experts to study such things, says it's bad for the poor.
You can draw three conclusions from that without even trying to get into arguments:
- Either you think you're so clever that without any knowledge in economy (that shows in the way you describe things, no offence), you're better than hundreds of people paid for that are.
- Or you think they're bad people with a secret agenda (I have two friends who work there, and they're closer to raving ONG guys than to your usual money-comes-first guy, so if they had the impression that organisation had a "bad guy" secret agenda, they wouldn't work there, but hey, you're free to disbelive).
- Or, if both points above seem unlikely to you, then you have to conclude that though you don't yet know why (and noone can understand everything), you just have to be wrong (or at least you might be inadvertently right, but not for the reasons you think, which are way too basic to not have been considered and analyzed deeper than you ever could by appropriate people).
Here. So basically, you have the choice between saying you're arrogant stupid guys who think they know better than professionals of the field, state that there is a conspiracy, or open your mind and assume that you're wrong though you can't yet see why, which is normal.
Now, on to the explanation itself.
If indeed it never had lungs, then I agree with you of course.
But then the question is not on whether the evolution is backward or not, it's not even an evolution at all.
We just saw something that never evolved to get anything related to lungs and stayed at the primal, historical way of dealing with the need for O2.
The troublesome word is Evolution, not "backward"
"Backward" evolution is actually a well-chosen title.
Of course, it's not backward in the sense that it's bad for the frog, or ineffective in the environment.
Otherwise, it would be titled "Bad Evolution" or "Ineffective Evolution".
It is indeed a backward evolution (at least if lungs were lost), in the sense that lungs appeared at some point in time, and then a characteristic of those frogs was brought backwards to the time when animals (or frogs' ancesters) did not have lungs.
I fail to see anything wrong here except for the desire of people to grumble on something to show off how much they know.
Last time I checked, "to go backward" didn't mean "to be mean, bad, most probably completely stupid and unadapted". It just meant "to go back to a previous location". These frogs went back to having no lungs and thus, their evolution went backwards.
"by invitation only scheme google used when it rolled out gmail for testing purposes and limiting the number of invitations to maximum of one or two invites a day."
This is completely useless.
I'm a spammer. I get an invitation (I play nice on a forum and say please please, like people did for gmail accounts).
Next day, I have 2 accounts as I send myself (well, my bot does it) an invitation, being limited to 1 a day.
Next day, I have 4.
After 10 days and an hour (the hour it took to get the first invitation from a forum), I have 1000 accounts.
After 20 days, I have 1,000,000
After a 33 days, I have more accounts than human beings on the planet.
Not such a great idea. If *I* want to invite three friends, I can't.
But it does absolutely nothing else than annoy legitimate users and prevent the amount of spam worldwide from doing more than doubling each day.
"No, he doesn't have to maximise existing shareholder value. Yahoo can disperse any obstreperous lawsuit for not getting the maximum existing shareholder value by any number of means, including:
a) it's not in our charter to do that
b) it is against the stated aims
c) maximum current value means severely reduced future performance
After all, maximum EXISTING revenue can be attained by selling off EVERYTHING. Gives a huge influx of current cash. Ongoing revenue? Well, that's not EXISTING value, is it, that's future value.
Your sort of thinking is exactly what makes current corporations an extreme threat to society and is the result of accountants that know nothing but cost."
Unfortunately, you are awfully wrong on all counts.
a) It IS their charter. As a matter of fact, management of a publicly owned company are trustees of the actual owners and they are bound to do what maximises the financial returns of the owners. You may like it or not, but it is their only role, by law.
b) It is not against stated aims, see above. Stated aims are to make money. The most possible money.
c) Maximimizing current value to the detriment of future value is in general indeed an issue. Here, it is not, because there is NO future value. The shareholders cash out. As a consequence, the fact that MICROSOFT's shareholders may lose value because of their future ownership of a crippled Yahoo is not the current owners', and thus the current management's business.
Indeed, it may well be that Microsoft+Yahoo will be worth less merged than not merged. But Yahoo's shareholders will have gotten more cash than they ever could by keeping yahoo independant.
It follows that your point is moot.
On the non numbered part of your post, I never said you had to maximize CURRENT value in general. In fact I very precisely said the opposite in the previous yahoo story. What counts is maximizing the value in the future (in fact, at every point in the future).
Selling off is not always good because it is good only if the cash returned yields better future revenues than keeping the cash invested.
Here, though, it SEEMS to be the case. The offer is high enough that you could take Microsoft's money, invest it safely in low-yielding treasury bonds, and still be better off in 5 years as what Yahoo would have been worth by then (and you'd run much less risk).
As to my sort of thinking, I would ask you to avoid judging what I think when I never uttered a personal opinion in this thread.
I have only been stating facts about the duties of management of a publicly-owned firm.
I certainly didn't say I approved of these legal obligations, just that they existed, and that your not liking them didn't change a thing.
Please refrain from confusing stating something, and approving of it. I acutally don't approve, but denying the facts will not change anything.
And if you don't like me stating it, you only need to read Yang's letter. Do you think he likes the idea of selling his baby to his arch-ennemy? Not one bit. And yet, he acknowledges in his letter that the only thing he can do is fight for maximising his owner's revenues. If he had even the smallest Right to not do so, don't you think he would be more direct to Steve and would tell him exactly what he can do with his offer for the rest of eternity?
"From a legal standpoint regarding shareholders and company directors you are, of course, correct.
From a practical standpoint however, something is missing. Wealth isn't created without customers.
"
I agree on that, but what do the shareholders have to care about that as long as the loss of wealth is not on their own shoulders (since Microsoft will pay them handsomely to go out)?
It's a shame, agreed. It the way society is made today, we both agree on that too.
"What about consumer value?"
It's not Yahoo's board role to care about consumer value.
It's the consumer's role.
Yahoo's board is there to maximize the riches of the shareholders, and that's it.
They even can go to jail if they wilfully care about the interest of consumers in any way other than as a means toward maximizing shareholder value.
If the shareholders cash out, then consumers can go to Hell since they won't be able to deprive the shareholders of the money Microsoft will give them. As a logical consequence, Yahoo is legally bound not to consider consumer value, whether we like it or not.
The letter we just saw extracts of was the good thing to do if Jerry wants to avoid being put in jail.
He's legally bound to maximize EXISTING shareholder's value, so he can't just say "I don't want to give you Yahoo".
But he can say he expects more details, and can provide a valorisation of Yahoo that seems reasonnable (as in "explained, however weirdly") to ask Microsoft to give more or go to Hell.
It'll probably only postpone the inevitable though. Yahoo is probably worth less the those 44 billions, and whether it's a good deal for Microsoft or not is moot, since it's microsoft's (and the world's) problem, not Yahoo's shareholder's
I'm not saying at all that it's a beautiful thing, just stating that the law is such that they don't have a choice.
And that they shouldn't try to do anything illegal on that one (though it does not at all mean that I necessarily approve of the law, just that it needs to be respected or changed in general, not to be dismissed by Yahoo because Yahoo's board would be uniquely above it).
What you say about government intervention, whatever the views of different people on government, woudl actually, as you say, be much more acceptable than Yang rejecting the offer.
Government may be right or wrong to do something, but at least it has a right to. Yang and al do not have a right to reject Microsoft's offer, unless they can give reasons tending to prove the actual owners of the company will fare better if offer is rejected.
To say it in another way, I never intended to say that accepting the offer was good or bad for society at large, just that it's not the board's role to consider this (but it is the government's).
Those critical of the deal and saying Yahoo board is right to reject it miss the basics of public companies board duties.
And this has nothing to do with the degree of anti-microsoft they, or anyone here, may have (and I'm far from being last in microsoft-bashing and -hating)
Board members and managers of a public company have two, and only two, duties:
1- Respect the laws and ensure their company respects them
2- Maximize the value of the EXISTING shareholders investment.
They have no right to care about the future of a Microhoo company, in fact they have a duty to absolutely and completely ignore it.
What they must do is do anything they can to have their existing shareholders get richer.
Microsoft is offering $44 billion. I don't care what the future will look like for microhoo.
The only question is: will the current shareholder be richer if Yahoo stays independent for the next 5 years and he sells then, or will he be richer if the deal is done, and that shareholder cashes out and buys American Tresaury bonds with a 5-year remaining maturity with the money?
If allowing the shareholder to cash out is better for that shareholder, then the board is legally bound to accept the offer, even if it means yahoo is destroyed in the process, and 1 billion people migrate to google as a result.
It's not their problem, and if they care more about the company itself than about the owners of the said company, they will rightly end up very poor, or even in jail.
To sum this up, if Jerry Yang was the owner of yahoo, he would probably be right to reject the offer: it's his baby, he doesn't want to see it die, even if he would be richer by killing it. But he's not the owner of yahoo, nor is any boardmember, alone or collectively with the others. As a consequence, if killing yahoo brings more money, the law mandates they actively and quickly kill the company they manage.
Stuart, you said:
"2) Dispense with this complete nonsense of electronic voting - it's first past the post for heavens sake! You don't need some dodgy expensive equipment of dubious quality, reliability and veracity to count that!
Paper ballots can be very quickly counted by humans. "
That is not a very clever statement, to say the least.
Electronic counting has a lot of appeal that human counting doesn't have. Speed, no need for huge armies of volunteers, more difficult to rig for an outsider, and many other points.
On the other hand, it has, as we are all saying here, a big, big, big drawback, that is it is subject to bugs, and to possible tempering either by hacking or by corruption of the process by insiders.
The fact the latter is agreed does not mean one has to be as backwards as you are and say manual voting is the best ever.
Maybe by just taking the best of both worlds, you'd have something a little less black and white than what you say.
If for instance, you do an electronic voting with a print of your vote that falls into a ballot box, after having been duly validated by you through a glass, it has every single advantage of manual voting.
The voter has proof what he said was counted (at least in the ballot box), he can verify, the box can't be tempered with from the outside, it can be surveilled, and so on.
But it also has the advantages of electronic voting: automatic count, accurate results, easy aggregation, and so on.
And it can't be tempered with as long as the system includes manual recounts of the physical part. But then you just have to count maybe 1% taken randomly of all ballot boxes. If there are 10.000 ballot boxes, there's virtually no chance that a rigging with any kind of effect would go undetected.
Better yet, let each party designate the boxes he wants recounted, up to a certain number. It'd ensure there's always someone who will get a recount in the places where there might be a doubt. (and fo course, if you find discrepancies, then it's still time to do a count of everything)
As you see, it's not a question of electronic versus manual. It's simply a question of procedure. Here, the procedure is "we give you the results, shut the fuck up, and don't dare asking for checks and balance". THAT is the problem, not electronic voting in itself.
You said
>
You said "Both (Yahoo and Microsoft) are losing market share". In actuality they have gained market share considering the worldwide growth of desktops and the increase in broadband in the home.
Obviously you have no understanding of what a "share" is, much less a market share.
Going from half the pie to a quarter of the pie is losing share, regardless of whether the size of the pie increases, sorry.
Not that it matters, but correcting people on trivial issues when then say something perfectly true has a bit to attract ridicule.
First of all, no, once again that's not theft.
Theft is when I take something from you. That implies that you don't have it anymore.
If you syphon off some of our salary or raises or whatever off our bank account, it's theft, I don't have themoney anymore.
If I download your album, you still have it.
Worse, I would tend to ask you your name so I can commit infringement on your creation, but the thing is, if I don't get your name, there's a 99.99999% chance, at the very least, that you'll never ever get any money from me, directly or indirectly. Whereas if you give me your name and I download your album, you'll get, statistically, thousands and thousands of times more money, cos' there's the remote possibility that I might like it and go see a concert.
Still, my main point was on your:
"Obviously the industry has to change, however until we have revenue for artists taken from a tax on people's bandwidth bills or some other amicable solution people should support the artists they like by paying for music."
Oh yeah? Great. Then we agree on the end. And what are the means please?
Pay for music like people always have? And you think it will change the system?
Majors FIGHT AGAINST ANY CHANGE to the system, and every and all changes that have come in the last five years have come from the P2P and piracy putting pressure on a change of model.
So sorry, but actually, downloading is almost a social duty. It's only by doing it that there is a chance that we will have a tax on people's bandwidth, which I would welcome with open arms (and which I advocated in economy courses all of 8 years ago).
In the meantime, you'll suffer, sure. And it's a shame. But that's life, unfortunately. Change is always painful for some, especially during the time it takes to make the transition.
I look forward to the day I can pay 60 euro a year (5 a month) to get all the music in the world legally and for free. That day, I'll pay 4 times as much as the average sum I paid BEFORE there was p2p, and when you count the total revenues of the music industry, artists will get richer while people will have everything with no limit.
In the meantime, I'll DL as much as I can hoping it will accelerate the painful transition phase.
"P2P sharing is not on an average share of 10-to-1 it's a lot less."
You can even be very, very precise.
It's EXACTLY 1-to-1.
Indeed, a file is sent successfully exactly as many times as it is received successfully (or you could say, each elementary part of the file when split on networks).
Some may send more than they received, some less (less being 0), but in the end, it's exactly 1-to-1.
By Magnus
Posted Tuesday 12th February 2008 14:08 GMT
About the record industry setting up honeytrap Torrents. Is evidence gained through a honeytrap eligible as evidence?
That question is precisely why they WON'T go to the courts for evidence. They'll just get you disconnected without judgment or court.
Of course, YOU can then sue them for the disconnexion, and that's why the ISPs want to be assured the pigopolists will pay if things go wrong, but in the meantime, the fact that evidence is admissible or not is irrelevant, since you won't get a judgment.
Though not completely monolingual, you're hardly fluent in french, though your efforts have to be praised.
There are 8 mistakes in your two sentences that make them almost meaningless.
In particular, the word "execution" you boast about knowing actually can't be used the way you do. At all.
Noone really speaking french would ever mistake you for a candian-speaking french, simply because whatever their accent, they actually use the words according to their meaning and use correct grammatical constructions.
As for everyone stupidly boasting about encrypting and all, and fighting to be free and so on, that's utter crap.
The day the customs will ask you for your password, you'll give it. If you don't, they'll ask again informing you that you'll spend 2 days in jail and then be turned back from the country if you're a foreigner. At that point, you will give your password.
Maybe if you're brave you'll then try and sue them, provided you're a US citizen, but no, you won't withhold your password, that's just teenager bragging.
The only real solution is not to go there, for foreigners. Solution I try to apply as much as I can (and no, saying you wouldn't go there even at gunpoint does not qualify as a reasonnable statement: Andraž Levstik you're just as kid-like as other braggers).
precisely because the price cut was more or less announced, and they didn't repeat their previous mistake.
Last time you got a store credit cos' you could complain.
Here, how can you complain when you're told in advance that it'll get cheaper soon. If you still buy now, it means you're prepared to pay knowingly, and thus don't need a credit.
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