artsrc

* Everything was free phone at the low end and $199 at the top end

One of my friends bought a Palm Phone.

* Apps were pre-loaded onto phones

This may be true.

* Carriers drove handset manufacturers choice of OS

Maybe handset manufacturers, Palm, Blackberry, Nokia had their own OS.

* No one ever waited for a phone

This may be true.

* Manufacturers did not care about UI/UX

I read lots of reviews where people praised the Nokia UI over the alternatives.

* Phones sold on spec sheets

Spec Sheets?

I really don't think this was true for people I knew. People I knew bought phones as Jewelery. They wanted small size, and long battery life.

http://livingwage.mit.edu/places/3606151000

There is quite clearly an asymmetry in information and market power between Wal-Mart and individual employees.

This will inevitably lead to artificially low wages.

So raising them with a law will return them to a free market level, where free market implies complete information, interchangeable goods and services, and lack of market power

In Australia in the past there was a national industrial court that did this. In Germany regular courts did something similar. Courts are expensive, so why not use a computer program from MIT:

http://livingwage.mit.edu

> most of the Wal-Mart jobs would not exist at all if they were forced to pay an artificially high wage to their employees

People would still buy things. Something like this happens:

> With minimum wage laws, the increased costs are passed to employers who in turn charge consumers higher prices if possible. Faced with higher prices, consumers purchase fewer goods thus leading to a redistribution ....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_wage#Impact

> forced to pay an artificially high wage

And who says the wage is artificially high? Maybe it would be the market rate if market power was more equal.

Dropping support for the OEM's in the Phone and PC space would be an interesting move, which I think they could carry off quite quickly. I don't think they are headed in that direction myself.

Unless there are other foods they can buy which are cheaper. Then they benefit from the higher prices and don't pay them.

As the parent of a less rambunctious boy, I believe that discrimination should be on the basis of behavior, not gender.

> The classroom dynamic was an absolute necessity to the healthy social upbringing of each.

I think that it is great to have everyone learn to work together, but I don't think it has to be all the time.

Our family buys DVD's and watch them.

DVD's are a pretty costly way to sell movies. Retailers take a big slice. You have to create packaging, deal with inventory, distribution costs etc.

In my mind I think of some things e.g.: google search, as a function not a resource. Trying to think about what the resource might be seems tangential to what I am trying to do.

However I think what this whole discussing is missing is the properties that you derive by adhering to a REST design.

I think there should be some tests of a design to see if you are actually getting the benefits of REST.

For example in a REST design you can re-arrange the internal URL's in a server and the site is still usable to clients because they are following links from the root.

Why do we want this ability to rearrange URLs?

You can't execute an estimate and make money with it, so they are waste in a lean sense of waste.

There are usually cheaper* ways of dealing with the problem than producing estimates.

Where I work now I don't think I have ever provided a written estimate (and no one else has) for my work.

Who does estimates for the time to produce all these estimates?

* Estimates have subtle costs and benefits apart from the time to produce them.

Sometimes hookers, expensive lunches, tickets to sporting events and being golf buddies with managers are what counts. And if those are what counts, then those are the lead bullets.

How about: "Kids are frequently bullied because they are placed in an stupid environment which does not adequately protect them."

http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/122/7/743.full#ref-1

Edit: sorry someone else had a better link:

http://www.epi.umn.edu/cvdepi/study.asp?id=13

I can't see any significant way that it is worse for Google for people to have their software rather than Samsung's.

Although neither S4 justifies the price jump from a cheap Nexus 4 for me.

And assuming some people want a high end "Nexus Experience" phone, Samsung gets more customers this way, than if Google went with HTC.

I am guessing that you might be American. Do you think you have adequately considered health care else where in the world?

Looking at health care around the western world, the country where the government regulates and subsidises health care the least is the US. And in that country health care costs twice what it does anywhere else in the world.

On another topic effective markets require good regulation. For example in Australia phones work on all networks (government mandated GSM), and you can take your phone number between carriers (required by regulation) etc. This created a more effective market. One barrier to an effective market is complex pricing (deliberately introduced to avoid market forces). Regulations to limit pricing complexity would improve the workings of the market.

Similarly in health care, requiring publicly available prices and quality reporting is what enables comparisons made, and make competition possible. Economic entities don't want competitive markets, they want excess profits.

In summary markets are not an alternative to regulation. Regulation and markets work together to form a system of management.

For example if you increase the tax on cigarettes you increase life expectancy.

And if you increase immigration, and therefore decrease the average age of your population, you will decrease per capita costs.

Just like health care works better when it is provided by a single payer.

* In the case of shelter, temporary shelter for those who need it is also provided free of charge, but that is not the normal situation for most people.

In fact you can do that before the need for care is even known, and you can call it insurance.

And I live on the other side of the world, where house prices are too high, it causes massive problems, and nobody complains about it.

In fact prices in my suburb are about twice what they seem to be in parts of SF where it is quite safe to live:

http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/720-722-34th-Ave-San-Franc...

Here a big fall in house prices is seen as a risk rather than a good thing.

I studied ATM's at Uni, and they have been like that for over 26 years.

As someone else on the thread pointed out, they do authenticate you, and record the transaction in a aci(Durable!) database before they give you money. But the system clearly has a degraded mode when the exact balance is unavailable.

Also why do you need a balance to process a deposit?

> Other theories exist - such as that people resent being taxed

That part is a fact in my experience. Some people resent being taxed. I think all people seem to resent some tax or another.

> with reduces their utility more than what they paid, or that people resent being given underserved money, which raises their utility less than what they received.

I inferred that kind of thing from the grandparent comment.

Perhaps the solution to this problem is just in better marketing, rather than in not doing the transfer.

Convincing/structuring payment so that people think they are deserving can't be that hard.

>Maybe there comes a point where, instead of finding Kaldor Hicks optimums of Pareto efficiency, one cares more about fairness, and see this redistribution as unfair. And Kaldor Hicks is about redistribution as can be.

Thanks for this reference. I just looked up Kaldor Hicks and think it is an interesting tool.

Your study looks at a different effect than the one they are discussing.

How long do trade secrets legitimately last in your view?

There is room for people to have different views on this.

> that is why judges exist

The law is not equal when the parties have very different levels of resources. The existence of judges does not change this.