The men and women of the NYPD are once again disheartened to read another the knee-jerk reaction from ivory tower pundits who enjoy the safety provided by our police department without understanding the very real risks that we take to provide that safety. Due process is the American way of obtaining justice, not summary professional execution called for by editorial writers.
The author of this letter must have just watched A Few Good Men. Aaron Sorkin's version was longer and more dramatic, but no less tragic.
You can't handle the truth! Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who's gonna do it? You? You, Lieutenant Weinberg? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for Santiago and you curse the Marines. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know, that Santiago's death, while tragic, probably saved lives. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives! You don't want the truth, because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me on that wall. You need me on that wall. We use words like "honor", "code", "loyalty". We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it! I would rather you just said "thank you", and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a weapon, and stand a post. Either way, I don't give a damn what you think you are entitled to!
But they must have missed the remainder of the movie. Kaffee and the rest of the defense, the "editorial writers", move to put Jessup under arrest (and protect his rights) so he can get the trial he deserves.
Since when does legality define what is right or wrong? Piracy is only "wrong" because there is law that defines it as such. If there was no law, would it still be wrong?
So now not only do I have to find the right kind and brand of charging brick to charge my device, I have to find one that is keyed to my device? My Dell laptop can already not be charged by an IBM thinkpad brick, nor can my Sprint phone be charged with my Samsung cord because the device end of the cable is different. Isn't this already a form of DRM?
Yeah, word of mouth being so fast these days, the gotta-see-it-on-opening-night crowd (mostly composed of your friends or people you know, the people you trust more than the reviewers/screeners who see it ahead of time), opening night/weekend can cease to be the biggest money maker. Especially since they stop advertising movies three days after they come out if they didn't have a significant opening weekend. I bet if the film industry tried to milk the moving going experience of the long-tail, the numbers might look a little better. I know we've been clammering for getting DVD releases soon after or at the same time as the theater release, but this is to make up for the crappy theater going experience. Sometimes, we don't have time to see a movie during the opening week, before the theater gets rid of it to make room for the next blockbuster or moves it to the crappier theather in the multi-mega-plex -- at which time it's even less worth going.
Non-community driven Encyclopedias have the same problem, some articles are better researched and more detailed (longer) than others. This is driven by various constraints from article size limits, to predictions on article popularity, to limits on time. The benefit of Wikipedia is that there exists an intrinsic capability to fix this immediately, as experts become available, rather than waiting for the next edition. In the mean time, why should some experts be turned away just because there is already a saturation of information on certain topics?
Is it not the job of the experts in a field to properly document the field? If there are no experts (or experts are not available), then obviously the topics of which those experts are experts will be lacking, no matter what the medium.
I'm an inclusionist, but I wonder why experts of some things, like The Simpson television show, would rather spend time putting their data on Wikipedia than on their own site. The authority of Wikipedia for some topics, like pop culture one, is diluted when in aggregate on a single site. Wikipedia becomes its own authoritative reference, undermining the distributed nature of information on the Internet.
No one invented the camera phone. Someone from the future came back and gave us the technology, just like in Star Trek IV.
There is some question whether this transfer of technology actually results in a predestination paradox where transparent aluminum is actually never invented by anyone. Scotty, who gives the forumla to Dr. Nichols in the twentieth century, implies that it was Dr. Nichols who may have introduced transparent aluminum to the world (thus allowing Scotty to learn the formula in the twenty-third century), raising the question of where the formula originated.
Whoever you are, RandomThoughts, yes, we do agree.
Music makers can't dictate to consumers what they buy. If consumers don't buy their music, some will stop making it.
God I hope so. :) Because if not, it means that capitalism is broken and producers producing goods that can't be sold leads to an inefficient market.
Is that what we want? Do we want a nation of American Idol singers (although some would say we have already reached that point)
I hope that's not what we want, but it gets hard to tell... However, I still vote with my attention by not watching it. One could argue that these are not true artists anyway, no matter how much they cry when they aren't chosen, because a true artist doesn't need to be on television or win an award to be an artist.
Regarding the relative importance of shelf-space scarcity, I thought this was pretty straightforward: "to focus on rental shelf scarcity is to miss more important scarce goods elsewhere." To me, the scarcity of goods is much more important than the scarcity of shelf space; certainly in classic economics it occupies a far more prominent position.
Which goods? When it comes to Amazon, or any on-line retailer without a brick-and-mortar store, they save significant money by using space efficient warehouses and shipping goods rather than obtaining retail locations physically close to consumers where consumers can pick up the goods themselves. If you were to analyze how an on-line retailer can undercut brick-and-mortar, you'd look at their costs of doing business. Brick-and-mortar stores are limited by the size of their physical location, and geography. In terms of booksellers, one way to measure inventory capacity and the need for quick inventory turn-over is shelf space. Except Amazon has no shelf space to measure. If they want a bigger inventory, they obtain more warehouses. Shelf space is not a limiting factor in the economics of bookselling for Amazon, but it is for brick-and-mortar. It's that comparison that is the core of the shelf space a scarce or non-scarce resource argument.
Libraries used to put rarely accessed and large volume prints, like periodicals and newspapers, on microfiche. This allowed them to more efficiently use their storage space to store more (the same applies to digitalization of print resources: more efficient storage space, but with the added benefit of easier searching and accessing). On-line retailers have just taken that to the next level by removing the necessity for shelf space all together.
If you remove the reward, you will have less supply sooner or later. In terms of music, make the song and can create infinite copies for free, but if the music maker isn't rewarded for making that one song, what will make him make the second song?
Do other things to use the free music as a promotion? What makes you think the music maker wants to do other things?
Why is it that music and musicians have some sort of perceived value such that if they stop doing whatever it is they do, there will be some kind of great loss. Even if it has value from a cultural standpoint, someone will stand up and fill the resultant void. I would argue that music for music's sake is more valuable, culturally, than music for sale's sake, because of the implicit cultural independence that it has for not being intimately tied to economics.
Music makers can do whatever they want - make music or not make music: it is their choice. But the producer does not get to decide what consumers are willing to pay for; consumers decide that. If no one is willing to pay for the music maker's output, the music maker can make music on his own time and on his own dime, and will have to find some other way to support himself.
And to continue in that vein, James Stevens, iTMS is locked up selling the very thing that is non-scarce. The market may very well have to change to a model where the consumers are not even exposed to the music as a purchasable item at all. Musicians can still get numerous jobs related to music (are there any more jingle writers? I hear a lot of Sting's and Aerosmith's catalog to sell things these days) that do not have a goal of going platinum, and there's nothing wrong with that and it's not "selling out" -- the market for original music may not be based on trying to sell it to consumers.
But part of that problem is the teenage mindset of the rockstar lifestyle that musicians can have that has been pushed down everyone's throats for the past couple of decades. That is also a model that will eventually need to change, if music, as a marketable-to-consumers art form, is to survive.
I'm in total agreement. These companies are being forced to find new models. I'm just not quite sure why they are not willing to admit it. It's impossible to fight it, yet tremendous amounts of money and rhetoric are wasted on trying to fighting. Whoever does first, and I would argue that iTMS and Steve Jobs are not even there yet, is going to undercut everyone else initially, and as everyone else catches up, there will be an expansion in the diversity of products available that the non-scarce goods are used to promote and draw consumers in to make them customers.
That's really confusing, because those companies basically DON'T convert atoms to bits. They help move atoms. I understand that you are arguing that they help make shelf space less scarce; my point is that scarcity of shelf space is really not that big a deal!
It's not? Thanks to Amazon, you can more easily find and acquire books that your local bookstore is unable to carry solely due to inventory volume and the fixed amount of shelf space a bookstore has (thus, shelf space is a scarce resource in bookstores). Huge areas of bookstores are devoted to new releases, at the detriment of other books. Inventory is such a problem at bookstores, that large amounts of floor space is dedicated to clearance items (conveniently placed near the checkout stands where you wait in lines) to make room for newer releases.
Of course, that's not to say that with enough marketing and money, one can't CREATE a PERCEIVED NEED in consumers for your product. Coke and Pepsi do this all the time. But that takes a lot of work and time and branding, and often savvy consumers don't necessarily fall for it.
I'm struggling to figure out why (some) people think that trying to sell something that people are unwilling to pay for is a good, acceptable business model. This is just a re-wording of "non-scarce goods have a price that approaches zero", because if something is priced at zero, then there are no customers for it, because no one is willing to pay for it. Doing this is called "bad business", and it you try to do it for a long time, it's eventually called "bankruptcy".
Keep in mind that in this context, "customers" does not equal "consumers". There could still be consumers, but you can't turn them into customers trying to sell a non-scarce good.
There's no denying that, in the past, before certain levels of technological progress were reached, there were business models based on selling things that are, now, effectively non-sellable. If consumers do not want to pay for, for example, music, why is there anyone still in the business of trying to sell music? As you've been saying here, Mike, the non-scarce good can be used to turn consumers into customers for ANOTHER product or service or a value-add, but that is really marketing and selling something other than the non-scarce good.
Is it some kind association with "if you build it, they will come"? This statement is false when it comes to capitalism, which is based on a seller meeting the actual needs of buyers, not on some kind of pie-in-the-sky hoping that buyers show up to purchase whatever it is that the seller is selling. Have we gotten away from the capitalistic mentality that talks about "if you build a better mouse trap, the world will beat a path to your door"?, which means "meet a need, and people will be willing to pay to have that need satisfied".
Will rational discussion put the asses in the seats, so the speak, at Adams' blog? It does here, that's why I keep coming back, but it doesn't necessarily translate into clicks.
I disagree that an index of information is a non-scarce good -- in the case of Google's index, Google is the only one that provides Google's index -- they effectively have a monopoly on Internet search that's so good, it's not worth going to one of the few competitors without some other incentive (like which search engine is the browser's default). While anyone can make an index, it's not the index itself that has value despite the scarcity of indexes, it is the ease of use, accessibility, ubiquity, timeliness and relevance that makes Google's index scarce. Indexes of information do not have some inherent quality that makes them non-scarce. Google actively makes information indexes non-scarce (even those of competitors) by purposely making theirs perform so well and appear everywhere. I don't believe that, in the case of information indexes in general, and Google's index in particular, that it's as black and white as scarce/non-scarce.
Also, I think it's worth pointing out that reputation, specifically good reputation, can be a scarce resource, but companies like BWM that bank on their reputation actively go out to make their good reputation non-scarce by building good products that people like, talk about, and envy. Those that toil in obscurity do not have a reputation, and thus reputation is a scarce resource to them. Intangible resources like good reputation, are fickle -- one wrong move and the good reputation that you have a lot of suddenly becomes scarce. Consider what happened to the Concord - one incident made them think (wrongly, I believe) that their brand/reputation had been tarnished beyond repair.
Did Sorkin write this letter?
That last paragraph:
The author of this letter must have just watched A Few Good Men. Aaron Sorkin's version was longer and more dramatic, but no less tragic.But they must have missed the remainder of the movie. Kaffee and the rest of the defense, the "editorial writers", move to put Jessup under arrest (and protect his rights) so he can get the trial he deserves.Isn't the fact that you received a message warning of such severity a sign that it's not true?
Since when does legality define what is right or wrong? Piracy is only "wrong" because there is law that defines it as such. If there was no law, would it still be wrong?
So now not only do I have to find the right kind and brand of charging brick to charge my device, I have to find one that is keyed to my device? My Dell laptop can already not be charged by an IBM thinkpad brick, nor can my Sprint phone be charged with my Samsung cord because the device end of the cable is different. Isn't this already a form of DRM?
Yeah, word of mouth being so fast these days, the gotta-see-it-on-opening-night crowd (mostly composed of your friends or people you know, the people you trust more than the reviewers/screeners who see it ahead of time), opening night/weekend can cease to be the biggest money maker. Especially since they stop advertising movies three days after they come out if they didn't have a significant opening weekend. I bet if the film industry tried to milk the moving going experience of the long-tail, the numbers might look a little better. I know we've been clammering for getting DVD releases soon after or at the same time as the theater release, but this is to make up for the crappy theater going experience. Sometimes, we don't have time to see a movie during the opening week, before the theater gets rid of it to make room for the next blockbuster or moves it to the crappier theather in the multi-mega-plex -- at which time it's even less worth going.
Using the comment ability to question what constitutes the assumed content of of this site is getting old.
The Internet is big, go find a site that you feel more comfortable reading.
Non-community driven Encyclopedias have the same problem, some articles are better researched and more detailed (longer) than others. This is driven by various constraints from article size limits, to predictions on article popularity, to limits on time. The benefit of Wikipedia is that there exists an intrinsic capability to fix this immediately, as experts become available, rather than waiting for the next edition. In the mean time, why should some experts be turned away just because there is already a saturation of information on certain topics?
Is it not the job of the experts in a field to properly document the field? If there are no experts (or experts are not available), then obviously the topics of which those experts are experts will be lacking, no matter what the medium.
I'm an inclusionist, but I wonder why experts of some things, like The Simpson television show, would rather spend time putting their data on Wikipedia than on their own site. The authority of Wikipedia for some topics, like pop culture one, is diluted when in aggregate on a single site. Wikipedia becomes its own authoritative reference, undermining the distributed nature of information on the Internet.
no one invented it
No one invented the camera phone. Someone from the future came back and gave us the technology, just like in Star Trek IV.
-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transparent_aluminumIsn't the margin on consumer electronics already paper-thin?
Re: RandomThoughts
Whoever you are, RandomThoughts, yes, we do agree.
God I hope so. :) Because if not, it means that capitalism is broken and producers producing goods that can't be sold leads to an inefficient market.
I hope that's not what we want, but it gets hard to tell... However, I still vote with my attention by not watching it. One could argue that these are not true artists anyway, no matter how much they cry when they aren't chosen, because a true artist doesn't need to be on television or win an award to be an artist.
Which goods? When it comes to Amazon, or any on-line retailer without a brick-and-mortar store, they save significant money by using space efficient warehouses and shipping goods rather than obtaining retail locations physically close to consumers where consumers can pick up the goods themselves. If you were to analyze how an on-line retailer can undercut brick-and-mortar, you'd look at their costs of doing business. Brick-and-mortar stores are limited by the size of their physical location, and geography. In terms of booksellers, one way to measure inventory capacity and the need for quick inventory turn-over is shelf space. Except Amazon has no shelf space to measure. If they want a bigger inventory, they obtain more warehouses. Shelf space is not a limiting factor in the economics of bookselling for Amazon, but it is for brick-and-mortar. It's that comparison that is the core of the shelf space a scarce or non-scarce resource argument.
Libraries used to put rarely accessed and large volume prints, like periodicals and newspapers, on microfiche. This allowed them to more efficiently use their storage space to store more (the same applies to digitalization of print resources: more efficient storage space, but with the added benefit of easier searching and accessing). On-line retailers have just taken that to the next level by removing the necessity for shelf space all together.
Why is it that music and musicians have some sort of perceived value such that if they stop doing whatever it is they do, there will be some kind of great loss. Even if it has value from a cultural standpoint, someone will stand up and fill the resultant void. I would argue that music for music's sake is more valuable, culturally, than music for sale's sake, because of the implicit cultural independence that it has for not being intimately tied to economics.
Music makers can do whatever they want - make music or not make music: it is their choice. But the producer does not get to decide what consumers are willing to pay for; consumers decide that. If no one is willing to pay for the music maker's output, the music maker can make music on his own time and on his own dime, and will have to find some other way to support himself.
And to continue in that vein, James Stevens, iTMS is locked up selling the very thing that is non-scarce. The market may very well have to change to a model where the consumers are not even exposed to the music as a purchasable item at all. Musicians can still get numerous jobs related to music (are there any more jingle writers? I hear a lot of Sting's and Aerosmith's catalog to sell things these days) that do not have a goal of going platinum, and there's nothing wrong with that and it's not "selling out" -- the market for original music may not be based on trying to sell it to consumers.
But part of that problem is the teenage mindset of the rockstar lifestyle that musicians can have that has been pushed down everyone's throats for the past couple of decades. That is also a model that will eventually need to change, if music, as a marketable-to-consumers art form, is to survive.
James,
I'm in total agreement. These companies are being forced to find new models. I'm just not quite sure why they are not willing to admit it. It's impossible to fight it, yet tremendous amounts of money and rhetoric are wasted on trying to fighting. Whoever does first, and I would argue that iTMS and Steve Jobs are not even there yet, is going to undercut everyone else initially, and as everyone else catches up, there will be an expansion in the diversity of products available that the non-scarce goods are used to promote and draw consumers in to make them customers.
It's not? Thanks to Amazon, you can more easily find and acquire books that your local bookstore is unable to carry solely due to inventory volume and the fixed amount of shelf space a bookstore has (thus, shelf space is a scarce resource in bookstores). Huge areas of bookstores are devoted to new releases, at the detriment of other books. Inventory is such a problem at bookstores, that large amounts of floor space is dedicated to clearance items (conveniently placed near the checkout stands where you wait in lines) to make room for newer releases.
Of course, that's not to say that with enough marketing and money, one can't CREATE a PERCEIVED NEED in consumers for your product. Coke and Pepsi do this all the time. But that takes a lot of work and time and branding, and often savvy consumers don't necessarily fall for it.
I'm struggling to figure out why (some) people think that trying to sell something that people are unwilling to pay for is a good, acceptable business model. This is just a re-wording of "non-scarce goods have a price that approaches zero", because if something is priced at zero, then there are no customers for it, because no one is willing to pay for it. Doing this is called "bad business", and it you try to do it for a long time, it's eventually called "bankruptcy".
Keep in mind that in this context, "customers" does not equal "consumers". There could still be consumers, but you can't turn them into customers trying to sell a non-scarce good.
There's no denying that, in the past, before certain levels of technological progress were reached, there were business models based on selling things that are, now, effectively non-sellable. If consumers do not want to pay for, for example, music, why is there anyone still in the business of trying to sell music? As you've been saying here, Mike, the non-scarce good can be used to turn consumers into customers for ANOTHER product or service or a value-add, but that is really marketing and selling something other than the non-scarce good.
Is it some kind association with "if you build it, they will come"? This statement is false when it comes to capitalism, which is based on a seller meeting the actual needs of buyers, not on some kind of pie-in-the-sky hoping that buyers show up to purchase whatever it is that the seller is selling. Have we gotten away from the capitalistic mentality that talks about "if you build a better mouse trap, the world will beat a path to your door"?, which means "meet a need, and people will be willing to pay to have that need satisfied".
Will rational discussion put the asses in the seats, so the speak, at Adams' blog? It does here, that's why I keep coming back, but it doesn't necessarily translate into clicks.
scarce goods
I disagree that an index of information is a non-scarce good -- in the case of Google's index, Google is the only one that provides Google's index -- they effectively have a monopoly on Internet search that's so good, it's not worth going to one of the few competitors without some other incentive (like which search engine is the browser's default). While anyone can make an index, it's not the index itself that has value despite the scarcity of indexes, it is the ease of use, accessibility, ubiquity, timeliness and relevance that makes Google's index scarce. Indexes of information do not have some inherent quality that makes them non-scarce. Google actively makes information indexes non-scarce (even those of competitors) by purposely making theirs perform so well and appear everywhere. I don't believe that, in the case of information indexes in general, and Google's index in particular, that it's as black and white as scarce/non-scarce.
Also, I think it's worth pointing out that reputation, specifically good reputation, can be a scarce resource, but companies like BWM that bank on their reputation actively go out to make their good reputation non-scarce by building good products that people like, talk about, and envy. Those that toil in obscurity do not have a reputation, and thus reputation is a scarce resource to them. Intangible resources like good reputation, are fickle -- one wrong move and the good reputation that you have a lot of suddenly becomes scarce. Consider what happened to the Concord - one incident made them think (wrongly, I believe) that their brand/reputation had been tarnished beyond repair.
give this a try
http://imgseek.sourceforge.net/
It's an application, not an on-line search engine, though.