StrangeSox

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Jan 24, 2012 -> 08:58 AM) From what they are saying now, he is likely to regain 100% of his mental abilities. But there is a good chance he won't ever be back to normal physically, probably losing some use of his left arm and/or leg. Jeez, this guy is only 52. And he's one of the few national or high level politicians in Illinois I actually respect. Hopefully he recovers as much as is possible. They were covering this on Chicago Tonight, which I had on in the background yesterday. Sounds like a completely freak occurrence, kinda like an aneurysm in that it can be completely unpredictable. They've had to remove several inches of his skull to alleviate pressure.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Jan 24, 2012 -> 08:31 AM) I was just thinking, I wonder how Oney would have handled that situation... Oney is too much of a failure to ever be in a position that important.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jan 24, 2012 -> 08:20 AM) You gave away the game right there. I'm going to play the same game and not count taxes paid on investment income. Thus, Mitt Romney pays 0% tax rates and is part of those lazy bums you whine about constantly. It's equally fair. LOL "if you exclude the vast majority of millionaires' incomes, the part that features a heavily regressive tax, why, it's hardly regressive at all!"

I thought it was pretty bizarre that the candidates were still strongly behind all the Terry Schaivo dumbness.

LUCKY DUCKIES!

QUOTE (Athomeboy_2000 @ Jan 24, 2012 -> 07:37 AM) If it doesnt burn him in the primaries, which I think it will, it will scorch him in the general. It's now way to easy to paint him as an elitist tax dodger. Why would a low tax rate for the wealthy be a negative in the GOP primaries? Every single one of their tax plans would dramatically slash the tax rates Romney pays. Many of them would slash it to zero.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jan 23, 2012 -> 07:48 PM) I don't want to put this is the Paterno death thread for some reason, but I really wanted to share it. Link. expect profanity. +1

QUOTE (iamshack @ Jan 23, 2012 -> 05:22 PM) First of all how do we arrive at that 80% figure? Secondly, that 20% loss seems like it would equate to a huge loss of revenue. It's referenced in several of the links up thread. That 20% is the number of pirating downloads that represents otherwise-paying customers, not 20% of all customers. There's a huge difference there as pirating still represents only a fraction of annual revenues. It's a simple hypothetical based on simple economic models. There are some goods that you will consume if they are free (disregarding ethical concerns that may apply) but would not pay anything for them. If you now consume an illegal digital copy of this good, it has not cost anyone to produce said copy and it doesn't represent any potential lost sales. I know what you're driving at, and it's that people might internally justify their own downloads on this basis, even if it isn't necessarily true. That's a fair point, but it doesn't counter basic economic S&D models. And, again, I am not defending or advocating piracy. I'm explaining why it is not quite the issue that RIAA/MPAA makes it out to be economically. Because higher prices lead to less demand and, counter-productively, would lead to increased pirating.

QUOTE (iamshack @ Jan 23, 2012 -> 05:15 PM) Because the product I am pirating can be enjoyed so much more easily and conveniently now? Fair enough, I was thinking of the iTunes store front. It'd be interesting to see if the iPod has really increased piracy. I might try to find a breakdown of music piracy rates by year later, but it may be hard to separate out "iPod effect" vs. higher bandwidth, more internet connectivity etc.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Jan 23, 2012 -> 05:06 PM) Little to do with the availability of music and 100% due to the little proprietary device called the Ipod that was crazy successful. From that point forward Apple locked in customers to Itunes because it is/was too much of a pain to transfer music to any non-Ipod device (and for a while you couldn't at all). Edit: and it was also after all of the Napster/Livewire file-sharing court cases were in the news and/or decided. You can very easily import pirated music into iTunes. Yet iTunes still remains very, very successful. This indicates that, had the music industry not stupidly fought against the trends in the late 90's and early 00's, they'd be doing even better than they are now. Piracy was and is extremely easy in a post-Napster world. Napster was a giant PITA compared to what you can do now.

QUOTE (iamshack @ Jan 23, 2012 -> 05:03 PM) How many people own iPods and iTunes worldwide? I'd say your assertion is very debatable, considering the ease of which music can now be enjoyed. ??? How would iTunes increase piracy? Of course if no one pirated anything they'd have more revenue. No one is arguing against that. What we're arguing against is that the impact is not that great, certainly compared to what they're proposing, and that they already have robust enforcement mechanisms.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Jan 23, 2012 -> 04:51 PM) Come on.... assume the recording industry came up with it's own digital distribution system and charged X amount for content. It'd be competing against Napster/Limewire and torrenting sites which offered all of the same content for FREE (and without criminal or civil penalties since everyone thought it was still legal and legit file sharing). Who would have won? iTunes seems amazingly successful even though it was years behind Napster.

QUOTE (iamshack @ Jan 23, 2012 -> 04:56 PM) You're only looking at the actual production costs for that particular unit you stole. An album or movie or a novel is not like a brick, or a computer, or a physical cd even, as you mention. It's a creative work that required effort and talent and lots of work to create. How do your basic economics value that? What is it worth? The time the artist took to create it? You're still talking about two different things here. There is no cost associated with producing an additional digital copy. This is different from the cost for producing the goods in the first place. The argument is that the ~80% of piracy that's deadweight loss does not represent any cost or loss whatsoever because those people would not otherwise have purchased the goods and there was no cost associated with them copying the goods. If I would never pay anything at all for a Batman DVD, regardless of the availability of pirated copies, what is the cost associated with me making a copy?

QUOTE (iamshack @ Jan 23, 2012 -> 04:51 PM) However, on iTunes, nearly every song can be purchased as a single, rather than 10-40% of the album. At best, this is more evidence of the record industry dragging its feet and refusing to give consumers the options that they want. They were forced to give consumers more choice by piracy.

QUOTE (iamshack @ Jan 23, 2012 -> 04:49 PM) A 2004 study that occurred before the advent of iTunes. This is a bit outdated for purposes of this discussion. iTunes would decrease the likelihood of piracy.

Here's a 2004 study that investigated the impact of pirating.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jan 23, 2012 -> 04:27 PM) Depending on the album, between 1-5 ish. I worked at a record store in high school (2000-2002). We had a whole wall of singles.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Jan 23, 2012 -> 04:19 PM) The problem is you really can't say one way or the other because of the way it all worked out. Pirating was/is huge for the college crowd, and it was especially big back in the early 00's. The advent of Itunes and the cheap .99 per song price point probably saved the music industry a ton of money (and they knew this) because people were willing to part with a few bucks for a few of their favorite songs and not make the illegal/immoral decision to take it for free. And as for the bolded, there is a movement towards paying more for premium/high demand content. Itunes just recently (last year or two) upped the price for new releases/popular releases to 1.29 and even 1.99 per song instead of the standard .99. Unfortunately, they realized this far too late and after fighting against digitization. If they had realized this years earlier and implemented their own digital distribution systems, they may have headed off a good portion of the piracy. As it is, consumers wanted easy, instant access to their entertainment options and it was provided by Napster, Limewire, torrenting etc.

QUOTE (iamshack @ Jan 23, 2012 -> 03:49 PM) There sure as f*** is...I'm not sure how someone so intelligent can continue to insist this is true. No, there isn't. This is basic economics and is separate from a free-rider issue. The act of me making a digital copy of something does not cost anyone anything, discounting the negligible electricity costs. This is a distinctly different situation than me stealing a physical CD from a store, as someone had to manufacture, ship and retail that physical good. This is only true to some extent. I've linked to numerous studies in this thread that examine the actual impact of piracy, and it's found to be relatively minimal. Somewhere around 80% of illegal downloads are "deadweight loss" people, or, in other words, people who wouldn't be paying for the item if it wasn't available for free. They don't represent losses to anyone since their demand for the item at any price > $0.00 is zero. Now, the other 20% does represent some loss. Demand is less in this case, but I don't see a compelling reason for retailers and producers to suddenly start dropping prices due to increased demand for a digital good. There's essentially zero marginal costs for producing more, so additional sales represent pure profits. Please take note that I have said several times in this thread that I am not advocating for pirating or saying that there should be no copyright protections. I clearly stated that I have no issue with The Mega Conspiracy arrests.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Jan 23, 2012 -> 10:16 AM) Hunstman is around the spot where Reagan was on the scale, in my view. So he'd have been a center-right President. He's moderate when compared to the rest of the field he was in. He was a very conservative governor. His tax plan was right in line with the rest of the GOP field. The only thing that got him the "moderate" label from the media were those couple of tweets about evolution and climate change, and he later backtracked on the climate change one. I don't think he's the same as the other candidates in their radical proposals or apocalyptic statements about Obama, but he's still very conservative. That's he more sane than the rest of the nuts in this current crop doesn't change the nature of his policies. I don't know what he gains from a 3rd party run and, as you said, it'd really damage his son's standing with the party.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jan 23, 2012 -> 08:15 AM) Whoever "Insider Advantage" is, they're first in line for having a post-Carolina poll out for Florida (for the Republican magazine Newsmax). They polled Newt with a 34-25 lead over Mittens. Rasmussen is showing the same 9-point Gingrich lead.

Jon Huntsman is not a moderate. I don't know why the media kept that narrative going. I really don't see Paul running 3rd party. He's been a loyal ® for decades now.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Jan 23, 2012 -> 08:46 AM) Not really, no. They don't get the protection of unions going to bat for them in things like arbitration, so there isn't that. They have benefits and stuff like that, but those structures are already in place. Like I said earlier the negotiations are taking place regardless of the number of employees. These two items are very similar. The political parties being on opposite sides of them is funny. The laws may vary from state-to-state, but unions are generally required to represent all people working under a contract regardless of whether they are dues-paying members. Reduced funding also impacts their ability to negotiate. The key difference here is that piracy mostly recovers deadweight loss while right-to-work does not. I'm also not sure why you're breaking SOPA/PIPA down on partisan lines. Initial support was bipartisan and the massive backlash has been bipartisan. There's also some pretty fundamental differences on the impacts of right-to-work laws and the burdens they place (or remove) from individuals and organizations and what it requires the state to do and what SOPA/PIPA would have done.

QUOTE (LittleHurt05 @ Jan 22, 2012 -> 08:32 PM) No you won't, let's be honest. It's the Super Bowl If someone is having a party, I'll go. If I'm not doing anything around the house, I'll watch. But I won't let it keep me from doing something else. I had the same attitude towards the last Pats/Giants game, but luckily I had the opportunity to watch the last quarter.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Jan 23, 2012 -> 08:37 AM) In both music/movies and unions. There is no cost associated with me downloading a pirated copy of a movie. There are costs associated with unions being required to represent non-union members. This is why digital copyright issues are distinct from numerous other "free rider" problems; digital piracy does not actually pose a direct burden on the copyright holders.