Ironchefpython

Netflix was massively popular because the price was anchored against the price of cable. Americans were used to paying $100/mo or more for a collection of channels of which the majority were never watched. (because... ESPN? I never understood that) So $10/mo looked like a bargain.

Currently, online journalism is anchored against the price of free. So if I want to sit down with my coffee and read an article from the New York Times, another from Washington Post, and a counter-point from the Wall Street Journal and the Economist, and follow that up with a long-form piece from the New Yorker, I can either pay $500/yr, or remember to right click each article and open in incognito mode.

> the problem turns out to be, people don't want to pay, not even that tiny amount.

No, the problem is it didn't work with adblockers. I really want to pay for the content I read, I just am not willing to risk being outbid on the chance to view a page without spam by someone trying to deliver malware.

My current solution is to buy pre-paid visa cards to pay for online news subscriptions, which is a huge pain, but necessary after finding out that newspapers will continue to charge even expired or cancelled credit cards. Even after I explicitly cancelled a credit card to try to stop recurring billing, the credit card company will helpfully keep accepting those charges.

I'm desperately looking for a solution to support journalism that simply lets me pay to read articles for exactly what advertisers would pay to bombard me with crap.

Google Contributor was SO close to being a solution. All it had to do was work with ad blockers.

> the websites I frequented the most frequently [...] still received only pennies.

And what I don't understand is when I decide I want to subscribe to a newspaper, it's hundreds of dollars a year. They take pennies to serve me spam and malware, but if I want to pay them, it's 1000x the price.

And don't get me started on how the Washington Post gives a $70 annual discount on a digital subscription if you agree to receive a print copy of the Sunday edition. It sounds incredibly stupid and backward until you remember, advertising.

> Distribute industry content with DRM, distribute their own content without, and see what the results are.

The industry content will show up on the Pirate Bay, and Netflix original content will show up on the Pirate Bay.

Were you expecting another outcome?

Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. Tolerance in the face of tyranny is no virtue.

> Treason is the alternative?

Correct. It is the rational and moral choice. Just as you must defy the orders of your superior officer if ordered to commit war crimes prohibited by the Geneva Convention, so must you defy the President to preserve the aims of liberty and equality expressed in the US Constitution.

> This is too general (and likely obvious to a skilled practitioner) an idea to be patented.

I think you mean that this is too obvious an idea to NOT have been patented.

> I don't expect it will go that far at all. Surely a company will test the idea of having an AI give executive-level guidance, but when it does so, it will be hastily dismantled.

No, the AI won't be in charge. It won't set the overall goals. But it will be the truck drivers, the call center workers, the customer service specialists, the personal banking advisers.

When humans are told by the CEO of Wells Fargo, "you need to open 8 new banking accounts per day (because 8 rhymes with great) and we totally don't want you to cram unwanted products into existing customer portfolios, because that would be wrong wink-wink-nudge-nudge", most Wells Fargo employees are going understand what's being said (especially when they are disciplined for not acting illegally), and do the thing that their CEO tells them to do.

An AI given a fitness function to "open the maximum number of accounts, with a minimum probably of being caught performing illegal activity" is going to fuck over banking customers with a far more ruthless efficiency.

> Sure, dramatically lower the corporate income tax rate and substantially reduce the massive over-regulation in the US economy.

That's a great way to destroy the environment and increase corporate profits, but I was asking about how to get companies to ignore the profit of offshoring; how to convince them to act in direct opposition to their shareholder's interests, and not take advantage of the subsidies provided by state capitalist systems and locate manufacturing overseas.

All cutting the tax rate is going to to is make offshoring more profitable. At no time in US history has a tax cut been correlated with business growth and job growth. Quite the contrary, The Bush tax repatriation holiday gave many businesses the working capital to invest in closing plants and moving factories overseas, resulting in the net job losses in many industries. But if you have hard data on examples of cutting taxes below a top marginal rate of 40% in western countries having any effect other than increasing income inequality, I'd love to see your peer reviewed study.

And is there a particular regulation that you can think of cutting that would have more of lure for for domestic manufacturing than China dumping trillions of dollars into currency manipulation and building infrastructure and manufacturing subsidies?

> how did we go from a faulty code

The code in the example isn't faulty. The goals are faulty in an non-obvious way, and drives the AI to optimize a solution to a fitness function in a way that humans might consider pathological behavior.

> to Comcast paving the future of the AI?

Comcast's goals are faulty in a non-obvious way. Comcast's goals are to maximize shareholder profit, and in doing so creates a culture of fraudulent billing and a horrifying gauntlet of a cancellation process that humans might consider pathological behavior. And AI is the next logical step to optimizing those corporate values.

> In the meantime, let's bring the manufacturing chain back here so we can build up the automation expertise ourselves

How? There's obvious long term financial value in having local supply chains and manufacturing expertise. Therefore state capitalist systems will subsidize local manufacturing in the short term, while anarcho-capitalist systems will flock to set up shop there to capture convert those short-term subsidies into short-term profit.

Do you have a solution that will work to build high-tech manufacturing infrastructure in the United States with no corporate incentives and no US government intervention? (I mean besides tweeting brags about job creation)

> metric-driven companies can go off the rails

Any publicly traded corporation (save a small handful with a non-traditional governance model) are metric-driven companies.

Modern corporations are paperclip maximizer functions executing on a network general-purpose biological computational engines tied together with powerpoint and email and excel spreadsheets.

Want to know what the AI of the future will look like? It will be a lot like Comcast, because it will be built by Comcast and harnessed to the corporate goals of Comcast and thus will have the same value system as Comcast.

The only thing it will lack is Comcast's institutional incompetence, as it will be Comcast's goals executing on dedicated hardware and not semi-autonomous employees. And it will build a dedicated model of every man and woman on the planet, and use that information to build a personalized profile that will determine exactly how many illegitimate charges it can cram on your bill before you'll suffer through a customized cancellation service that is calibrated to your personality and mental state to be just painful enough to drive you to the brink of suicide. And the only reason it's merely to be brink, is because a dead customer is an unprofitable one. (and if you think that's hyperbole, you have a far brighter view of the future than I do)

> How about a suggestion that can make both of use happy? We keep the FDA, they do everything the do now, only that other products can still be sold, but they need to have a reasonably BIG label on it, that they are not FDA approved. We put a tiny tax on all products actually approved by the FDA to fund the FDA.

Sure, with two small changes. One, we make the FDA tax progressive. Use whatever argument you like to justify this, like rich people's lives are more valuable, and therefore they can pay more to stay alive, but the key is that everyone will buy into the system in a way that they can both afford, AND be emotionally invested in.

Second, all non-FDA labeled products will have a MASSIVE tax applied, to pay for the externalized costs of bad food, such as emergency room visits, death, sickness, etc.

Of course we need a state to enforce this system, and it won't work any better than the existing one, but hey, it's a market solution!

> diamonds being "non-negotiable" seems like a huge, glowing, neon warning sign

It's deeply ingrained in Western culture. Think about it like eating dogs. There's no rational reason not to use dogs for meat, but most Westerners would throw a hissy fit rather than eat dog meat.

So don't assume the prospective bride is unreasonable. In fact, assume the opposite, as she was able to read a rational explanation of the issues with diamonds, and change her mind.

This basically glorifies being a white programmer in California. It's just going to push up rents as people give up on being a black salesman in Wisconsin or a latina nurse in Texas to move to California.

> but a cursory Google of who you're talking to

Right, there's more than one person on the planet with that name, and surely the actual inventor of the D language has better things to do with his time than go all Liberatard on the Internet arguing economics with strangers.

>> it's unusable (to the customers that buy a service contract) without a service contract

> You're making quite a vast assumption that service contracts mean the software is unusable without them. Red Hat Linux is just one counterexample.

No. I'm not. I'm basing that on the tautology that consumers of "free" software who purchase expensive service contracts spend their money purchasing expensive service contracts.

Software is free in the same way that air conditioning at the mall is free, the hugs handed out by the "free hugs" guy are free, the way that the privilege of watching advertisements on TV are free. Somebody is spending time and money making this software, because they think they are going to get more out of it than they put into it (either tangibly or intangibly (except for that TempleOS guy, who does it for the voices in his head))

And this still doesn't change anything about the EpiPen. There's a consumer surplus, and the price is increased to maximize capture of consumer surplus regardless of the cost in human lives. I don't care how free software is, the price on EpiPens is going up to maximize profit.

To frame this as a simple dichotomy, would you rather live in a world where people die to maximize profit, or a world where regulation is applied to reduce human suffering and death?

> selling service contracts, [...] The price is still $0 and there are still no regulations on it.

I assume at this point that you're being paid to shill some political viewpoint on the internet, because you just explained that the price of software isn't actually zero, because it's unusable (to the customers that buy a service contract) without a service contract, and creating a company that employs the developers that wrote the software to support that software has a high barrier to entry. (because those developers are already employed)

To pick at company at random, HortonWorks. I pick on them because I recently saw an invoice. $20,000 for 16 hours of training. So by your argument, there must be some kind of regulation there, right?

> It is quite a remarkable coincidence that medical costs angled steeply upward immediately after heavy regulation and government involvement in it began.

Regulation didn't give people more money to spend on medicine. Offshoring jobs to China drive down prices of consumer goods to make more money available as a consumer surplus that could be captured by healthcare.

If the price of food increased, the price of housing, education, and medical care would decrease. Because the demand curve would change.

> A small competitor would have the capability to ruin your business with a small investment on their part. I bet they could finance it by shorting your stock.

That's a nice hypothetical that completely ignores all of financial theory AND history. If you ever start a company, let me know so I can short YOUR stock.

> In the software business, with pretty much zero regulations, competition has run the price literally to $0 for broad swaths of products.

That's like saying that price competition is alive and well because banks will give you a free toaster when they charge fees to loan your money back to you.

But to address the specifics of the software industry, software is a complementary good.

This has been the driving force in the price of software for decades: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html

And it's true today. The biggest contributor to Linux is... Intel. Because it sells hardware. Google gives you a free browser so it can sell ad space.

> Medical costs started angling up steeply in the 1960s with the advent of heavy regulation

Broadly, to a first approximation: Medical costs, real-estate, and education have increased in price to capture the consumer surplus created by the decline in food. clothing, and fuel costs.

> Isn't dumping competing on price?

Nope, dumping is used to drive new entrants out of a market. It also acts as a signal to prevent new market entrants.

If I sell 2 million widgets per year at a price of $10 over a cost of $1, after $4 million in capital costs, I can maintain a monopoly if I'm willing to drop my sale price to 50 cents every time someone enters my market, and I raise the price when they exit it.

This creates a Nash Equilibrium were no rational actor will spend $4 million to build a factory to compete with me.

> You can view the high price as the free-market finding the intersection of supply and demand given the regulatory and legal constraints but that seems like a less than useful way of understanding 'free-market'.

Stop using regulation as a stalking horse for your argument. Everything you need to know about the price of epi pens you can derive from inelastic demand (people don't want to die), and barriers to entry (copyrighted brand, network of doctors writing prescriptions, and yes, FDA approval so these things don't kill people).

The price is high because people will pay almost anything to not die. This drives the price point up to capture consumer surplus. It's easy to understand.

The Free Market isn't a magic bullet that will drive down these prices. For one simple reason. Rational actors don't compete on price. I'm going to repeat this, because so many people don't get it.

Rational actors don't compete on price. Rational actors will spend up to their expected monopoly profits to create a Nash Equilibrium where new entrants into a market will be unprofitable. The simplest way to do this is through dumping. (see "competition" in the generic drug market for example) Why doesn't this happen in every market? Regulation.

Maybe you don't like that in unregulated markets, people starve, are poisoned, are denied treatment, and worked like slaves. Because that's how you maximize profit, by minimizing your own costs by maximizing externalized costs. So you'll think anything to avoid that realization. Like blame 'regulation' for what's obviously rationally maximizing profits.

And if you want to know how exactly the 'free-market' for medical supplies would work without regulation, just look at the 1800s. Demand was still inelastic, so prices were high, quality was low (for obvious reasons), and competition was still stupid, because price fixing and dumping were still more profitable than competing on price.

> The only sectors of the economy where significant, lasting shortages occur are the ones most heavily regulated.

So you're saying that Petroleum Exporting Countries would never say... create an Organization intended to increase the price of oil?

Or the DeBeers wouldn't collude with diamond producers to limit the availability of diamonds to increase the price?

Or that manufacturers and distributors of light bulbs, lysine, copper, cleaning powder, vitamins, glass, milk and machinery would never, ever engage in price fixing?

I want to live on your planet, where capitalism is so nice and perfect that companies rush to give away all their profit by competing the marginal cost down to zero without any of those pesky regulations.

> The price hikes would immediately attract lower-cost competitors if this were truly a free market.

Any participants in a free market for a product with inelastic demand (e.g. something you need to stay alive) and non-trivial entry costs immediately implements price fixing in the absence of regulation.

When life-saving devices that require a significant supply chain to manufacture capture the bulk of consumer surplus from the majority of potential customers (and the poorest are left to die), the free market is working as intended, efficiently allocating resources to maximize profits.

> how do people actually suggest securing exchange wallets?

Why bother? It's much more profitable to pretend to secure the wallet, and then take the money and run.

If you outlaw gun emoji, only outlaws will have gun emoji.

Hypothetical question:

Would you rather the city had to pay $22 million in damages, and take active steps to prevent their city police from engaging in kidnapping, assault, and false imprisonment?

Or, would you rather the city paid only $220k, and it became the new normal?

> On the other hand, there should be criminal charges against the cops.

In this country, the judicial system cannot police itself. Asking police to police police is an exercise in futility, and civilian oversight is nearly always subject to regulatory capture, as the oversight boards will eventually be composed of people who have a strong incentive to side with the police rather than "criminals".

That's an opinion that is perfectly valid for an individual to have.

However, when you express this opinion in an expressly negative way, it makes it sound like you are attempting to invalidate the opinions of people who might hold contrasting beliefs. And history has shown this to be one of the top 10 causes for conflict and wars.

Perhaps you might find a more positive way to express your personal beliefs? Perhaps you could say, "I wish we lived in a world without pain or terminal illness, so nobody would have to make the choice between pointless suffering and death".

If you find some way to contribute to the conversation without calling a man dying of cancer "revolting", you would have a better chance of finding common ground and reaching consensus.

> Sets a bad precedent.

Uh... you know they can already lock you in a cage for days or draw your blood or forcibly probe your anus, right? I think that it's a little too late for precedent.

> Ironically UberEATS launched officially today.

"If they cut off one head, two more shall take it's place"

It's the "Anti-Pattern Tour", with "Inappropriate Metaphor" being joined on stage by the techno-rock band "Impedance Mismatch", followed by the soulful sounds of "Leaky Abstraction".

"I hope they play their old stuff like 'You Ain't Gonna Need It", and 'Now You Have Two Problems'. Their new album, 'Second-Systems Syndrome', took forever to be released, and doesn't have the same simple sounds".