igorlev

The idea that information, such as ebooks, should be priced based on consumer utility rather then marginal cost is something that is a naturally attractive viewpoint for the seller but not necessarily for the buyer. When you have a relatively high initial sunk cost and a relatively low marginal production/distribution cost, a lot of sellers will be trying to work very hard to push value based pricing since the alternative, of a small profit over marginal cost, scares a lot of them since the marginal cost is 0.

I think that consumer acceptance of this is based on a sense of fairness combined with knowledge of the sellers cost. A lot people have no problem paying 10c for a text message, because the amount is tiny and few know that the marginal cost for the carrier is practically 0. The lack of knowledge as well as the low price (even lower for bundled plans) makes it just easier to pay rather then protest. For ebooks a significant amount of people might have an intuitive (though possibly flawed) understanding of the marginal cost and have a reason to spend time protesting, because the amounts are significantly higher then 10c.

As with any such technology driven changes in the past, I think in the long run the price will still trend more towards the marginal cost, ie 0, in the long run. Given enough time, I think that publishers and authors will realize that given the ease of distribution for ebooks they can maintain or even increase their profits by lowering unit costs and making it up on volume. This will happen whether the producers want it or not, as they will be forced to lower prices by rampant piracy.

P.S. I have to give credit for a lot of the above ideas to a great book, Information Rules, that has been around for 10 years or so.

A lot of times there are jokes about the silly and overprotective American consumer culture. What a lot of people don't realize is the sheer amount of useless mental energy you need to expand in other areas of the world, double checking everyday purchases and never really trusting what you buy.

Sure sometimes it can get a little extreme (I'm looking at you McDonald's coffee) but in a lot of cases it's an efficient system that frees up your attention and focus on more important things then checking whether your milk contains poison.

Personally, I think this over protectiveness is actually a sign of an advanced economy taking specialization to it's logical extent. Not having it is an economic cost in the long term.

Tyler Cowen's essay was mentioned here before and I think it's a pretty good way to frame your thinking about the subject. The reason the prestige of science and engineering declined is because the direct and visible impact on every day life of those professions has also declined. A lot of technical areas have matured since the 1950's and are offering mostly incremental improvements.

Not to say that the 'actual' impact has declined, but people in the United States are no longer impressed by a greener plastic or a slightly newer satellite being lofted into space. Compare that to places like China or even India that are somewhat behind in bringing industrialization to the entire population and you have engineers make visible impact to every day life and therefore rationally have more importance and thereby prestige. I'm sure that in a few decades once they start catching up, engineering will also start declining as a prestigious profession.

There are lots of other intellectually demanding professions such as law, medicine and even finance that have droves of bright students signing up. I think that while they attract students, and are useful at all stages of development, they really come up to the top once you have a stable political system, and a relatively wealthy population. Once technical change stops being radical you enter a maintenance phase. If you have basic health needs met you start trying to squeeze out more and more advances in medicine to prolong the life of a relatively healthy population. Once new products become mostly enhancements of old ideas, trying to compete using the law can be more efficient in terms of effort expanded to results achieved.

I think that trying to use marketing or propaganda to try and raise the prestige of scientists can only go so far. Technology needs to offer radical and easily visible everyday impact to outshine the other intellectual professions.

Why do all of these examples always focus on physical tasks that are obviously improved by practice. Playing a musical instrument like piano or playing a physical sport like tennis takes hand eye coordination, strength, agility and endurance. These examples are so horribly one-sided. Of course practicing a repetitive, manual example for 16 hours a day will make you better at it. That's called motor control skills and luckily for these mothers it has nothing to do with interest or liking what you're doing. Yes you can force someone to develop better motor control skills. But please don't start conflating that with "life skills" and "determination". Training your kid to be the best at fine motor control and manual dexterity is not exactly the way to be successful in the 21st century. They can learn that from video games.

And don't call this Chinese parenting, my Russian-Jewish mother made me study in very similar ways when I was younger. Fortunately, for me she realized that rote memorization is not the linchpin of a successful career, but at best a tiny foundation stone in your studies.

The Kindle DX, on the other hand, has become indispensable to me for reading all kinds of technical books and pdfs. Along with the daily E-book deals from O'Reilly it has almost completely eliminated the need to buy paper technical books.

I think a good market for this is in areas with long, public transportation commutes. Those who take the car to work have fewer good use cases for e-readers.

I left the country right when it fell apart so I'm not exactly an expert on the current events, but from what I see doesn't seem like 20 years have made any difference.

I think you can trace this whole mess to Brezhnev's Zastoy(Stagnation) period of Soviet history (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brezhnev_stagnation). The upper echelons of government achieved a comfortable and stable enough level of life and pretty much froze the rest of society in time, in order to support their lifestyle. They cracked down on any dissension or change from the status quo which by definition means that they cracked down on the most entrepreneurial and dynamic members of society. They jailed the makers and made the thieves rulers.

And unfortunately you can keep this charade going for a while; in the 70's-80's you can steal technology from the West; in the 90's you can sell minerals and in the 2000s you can wait for your people to invent something and then steal it from them. When the Soviet Union fell down there was a glimmer of hope but it was silly to think anything would change. You have now 2-3 generations of people at the highest levels of power who grew up with this mentality and it's not going to change any time soon.

It's sad, I remember watching a talk show on a Russian satellite station where the discussion was whether Russia needed an "innovation economy" or whether pumping and mining is perfectly fine. An obviously liberal member of the panel was pleading and cajoling with the others that oil and timber don't last forever and they only enrich a few people. The other side, a representative of a mining concern, had an awesome reply: "They'll last long enough for me"

...and to hell with the rest of you

Yeah, I think I should've made it more clear in the post.

Mainly I was thinking commercial app support (ie payment API) and user reviews/ratings. It bothers me that, AFAIK, for the longest time no one had thought of including some sort of user feedback or ratings for software in an apt repository.

I mean of course there are difficulties with getting consistency when you have many distributed repositories, but I don't think it's an insurmountable goal.

I love the fact that I don't really need to hunt through shareware sites for downloading various apps on Linux. But I still find myself going back to Google every time I try to gauge the quality of the app I'm about to download.

I htink it depends on when someone lived in NYC and which train they took. If you were here during the late 80s early 90s, you heard a lot more of "What the fuck are you looking at!?". I saw at least 3-4 fights start that way.

Now this is a purely anecdotal correlation, but I noticed less and less of this kind of crap at the same time as crime was purportedly going down in the city. I know that there are a million ideas floating around about the reason for the drop in crime (abortion, "broken windows", etc.), but I'd like to see at least one of them incorporate the "chill out factor". Maybe for some reason NYC residents just became slightly less aggressive ?....Nah that's just crazy talk :)

Science Fiction as a genre came to life during a time when science was making enormous changes in people's everyday lives within a relatively short time. Railroads, electrification, long distance communication, mechanization, flight, etc. all either appeared or went "mass market" in a few generations.

This may well have been the first time when science and technology were brought to people's attention as something that actually had a direct effect on what they did. While before you could live in the same village for your entire life and not see much change, now everyone saw the impact of science when a railroad came through your town, or when you got an electric light.

Because of this, there developed a large market of people who were interested in both producing and consuming the "what if" scenarios and analysis provided by sci-fi. Today, the idea of change brought on by technology and science is not only an accepted idea, it's pretty much a given. Sci-fi hasn't run out of steam, it's just that the function that it provided has now diffused into every single other form of media.

It still reappears as a distinct form from time to time, accompanying major inventions such as the internet(Neuromancer, etc.) but more and more I think that it will just stop being a distinct genre and blend in with everything else.

Maybe perks don't really scale so well.

It's surprising that he said the pay is very good, I was the impression people took paycuts for the google priviledge.