I like that use case, but if it works over facebook how do you notify people immediately that this cool thing is happening? Do you text them, saying "check my facebook right now", then wait for them to click the link there to notify you to start broadcasting?
I could be wrong, maybe more people do facebook notifications but I haven't met anyone that has em setup.
Ah, makes sense. But a concert is soo loud and there are so many people bumping into you that you could never get any video quality on your phone that would make me want to watch , and actually enjoy watching. Ever seen a iphone video of a friend showing you their view at a concert? Horrible lol.
Why don't you start a business that offers competitive insurance packages to people who want to use airBnB (and similar products) instead of demanding a law that obviously would have a lot of unwanted side effects on people who _do_ know about the risks they are taking by entering this business?
Protective laws have very high hidden costs. These costs are hard to quantify and routinely are neglected when discussing pros and cons of said laws.
Car insurance is different, because it also covers damages you inflict on others and other people's property.
I am speaking out against mandatory insurance of your own property. Yes, there will be cases where people are underinsured. But mandatory insurance would make some people overinsured.
There is a long argument to be made for balancing this tradeoff, but in short: Owners are in a better position to judge whether they should insure their property than lawmakers and thus it should be up to them (again: as long as their property doesn't have a high probability of damaging other people; in such cases mandatory insurance might be reasonable).
It's very easy for younger smart people to be anarcho-capitalists (which I take it you are), but IMHO becomes progressively harder as you age.
The basic problem is that a "people know what's best for themselves" policy screws over dumb people for the simple reason that they don't.
Car insurance is a very interesting thing to legislate, because although the expected value of buying insurance is slightly negative, when you factor in the economies of scale on dealing with someone else's car getting repaired (figuring out if a bill is over market, handling multiple bills, tracking any medical expenses, etc), purchasing car insurance is strongly positive EV.
I think landlord insurance is similar.
>> Car insurance is different, because it also covers damages you inflict on others and other people's property.
Landlord insurance of course also covers this (if your property catches fire while you're renting it out, you may very well be legally responsible, if a previous renter breaks in and steals the new renters belongings you are probably legally responsible, etc).
Regardless, it seems based on what you said that you might be in favor of requiring renters to buy insurance. Is this correct?
No.
I wasn't even making an argument for mandatory car insurance. I was merely pointing out the difference to mandatory property insurance and said that this difference _might_ be the basis for a convincing argument in favor of the former.
Rental property insurance is not a brand new idea.
Probably not worth to be codified as a law, after all, some may choose to bypass it, but other than that there are plenty of companies selling it (vacation properties and rentals existed long before AirBnB), and AirBnB could benefit from linking to those vendors.
Of course.
I didn't mean to say that she/he should actually start an insurance company. I wanted to point out that there are market-incentives that might motivate someone to offer such a service without the need for a law.
It doesn't really make sense to extrapolate future stock performance from past stock performance.
The market says: If you consider all publicly available information, we think that facebook will earn its shareholders the present day equivalent of 70bn dollars. Apple will earn its shareholders 330bn.
These numbers reflect expected future performance and expected growth is already priced in.
Of course that's true as an outside investor working under the efficient markets hypothesis, which is hard to beat. But it's not how a principal like Zuckerberg, who can actually affect the valuation through strategy and recruiting, should view or portray things.
And I'm not making an extrapolative prediction of Facebook's value, just reminding people that the idea of Apple as a $300B-plus behemoth is itself fairly recent, and required an at-the-time unforeseeable surge in value from its Facebook-like $70B valuation just 5 years ago.
Thus rather than Apple providing an example of a height Facebook can't reach, as the great-grandparent post seems to imply, Apple suggests the opposite, that a $70B company can become a $330B company, in less time than pure faith in the market valuations might suggest.
Finally, the $70B valuation is not a market prediction that the actual trading value of Facebook will remain $70B in the future: merely that $70B is the best consensus average from public information, weighted over all considered futures. Very roughly, maybe there's a 4/5 chance Facebook falls back to $10B, and a 1/5 chance it races forward to $310B. Voila, that risk-neutral average value is $70B. So, a Facebook of Apple's size is 'thinkable', and there's essentially no chance that $70B is its actual value after this all plays out.
I didn't mean to imply that markets were efficient or that MZ can't have information that suggests that fb will surpass Apple in market cap or otherwise.
I really just meant that historic trends don't imply future trends.
Your (and maybe also the previous poster's) point that Apple is an example of valuations changing rapidly is obviously valid.
“Then he pointed to Facebook and said that it would eventually be bigger than all of the companies he had just mentioned, and that if I joined the company, I could be a part of it all.”
Actually, "protecting" ideas as if they were property is in direct opposition to personal rights, so this should be expected.
It's weird how "intellectual property" somehow got associated with personal liberty, the free market etc., when in fact it totally goes against those ideas.
Well, I've heard that in Britain, IP is considered an inherent right just like personal property. If I own the result of my own physical labor, why wouldn't I own the result of intellectual labor as well?
Because if you physically make something and it's taken from you, you no longer have it. Information can't be taken from you - granted, a medium on which it's stored could be, but again, that would be a physical, not an intellectual loss. You can't be deprived of the knowledge that allowed you to create the item in the first place.
Unless, of course, somebody else is granted the intellectual property rights to it.
If I compose a poem or a play, and contract with a publisher to publish said poem and pay me a portion of the proceeds (or contract with a theater company to perform the play, and similarly pay me a portion of the proceeds), and some third party takes the poem/play and publishes/performs it without paying me, I have, in fact, been deprived of something, i.e., income.
And, if my reading of history is not mistaken, it is precisely from this use case that the notion of intellectual property (in the initial form of copyright) takes its foundation.
It is. Copyright is and always was designed for distributors, not authors. It's nothing more than a myth - or rather, industry propaganda - that copyright was invented by authors. Here's a nice round-up of the entire history of copyright:
Even the forced slant in that "round-up" doesn't really serve to justify the conclusion in its last sentence. There is also no coherent argument that a dubious origin necessarily implies the lack of useful premise.
The Internet and personal computing technology indeed add "roll-your-own" options to publishing and completing a work that did not exist beforehand. But, at this point, they certainly have not replaced the need for the (sometimes creative) work done to support the work of authors. Things like: editing, typesetting, music production, video post-processing etc.
What happens when the publishing model is dead? Look at poetry. Poets still write, and some of it is decent. However, big publishers won't touch a poetry book that isn't a classic or a guaranteed sale anthology. Smaller imprints will usually only bother if the book has won a prize. In a number of cases authors pay a reading fee to enter contests, and the fee pays for the publishing of the book in a near break even scenario. In the case where poems are published on the internet, there's a small but arguable respectable audience, however there's no money changing hands whatsoever. Poets have second jobs, I know some who just gave up, who went into finance and law. I'll grant that lack of market is more of an issue as copying in this case, but publishers can help make markets. It should be easy to see how the effects are related. That is to say:
What's the difference between a bitcoin and a poem? You can buy food with a bitcoin.
Not everyone wants to be a sustenance farmer for a living.
First: a third party is not bound by the contract. And if the contract cannot validly or practically secure you income, you cannot very well be said to be losing anything.
Second: the big question is: why should we make the form of such a contract a general rule/law? Just assuming it is a matter of contract is just assuming away the interesting question.
Interesting you chose the word 'deprived' instead of the more typical 'stole'. I think it's hard to justify stealing when only a copy was copied. So then 'deprived of income' in the sense of withheld income. Who is doing the withholding, and why do you think you're entitled to what they're withholding? And how much? (While the third party didn't have to write your work, they nevertheless would have to do a lot of work themselves to make a profit from it.)
Here's an economic quote but I don't remember the source: "Profit is not determined by how much value you create, it is determined by how much of that value you can capture." Edit: Ah, looks like it's an Eliezer quote not from an economics text.
(While the third party didn't have to write your work, they nevertheless would have to do a lot of work themselves to make a profit from it.)
This is both bad and wrong. I will attempt to explain why for each.
It is bad on the level that it creates an exchange of sweat of the brow work with originality. That is to say if I copied someone else's book in the more laborious way, I'm more allowed to copy it and make profit. As Justice O'Connor said in Feist, "The sine qua non of copyright is originality." Hard work does not equal good or useful work-- ask Sisyphus.
It is wrong for two reasons. The first is that roll-your-own publishing options are available to an author, and all someone would have to do to make a profit is copy your book from lulu, blurb or whatever ebook publisher you use and post it again with a lower price. The second is that, even if republishing was its own difficult endeavor, the gain a copycat has is simply waiting for success. A publisher who spends money on editing, typesetting, marketing and binding must print a number of books before turning a profit. A copycat publisher can simply wait until it appears a book will be successful before undercutting. This is a drastic reduction in cost and income risk, and it's definitely unfair.
In the example I offered, the economics are no mystery, but if it helps you to put numbers in the picture, let's go for it.
Suppose I write a book of sonnets. I negotiate with a publisher whereby he has the exclusive right to print, distribute, and sell said book of sonnets for a period of five years, and I will be paid $1 per copy sold. The book proves popular, and a pirate publisher produces, distributes, and sells an identical edition, but fails to pay me the $1 per copy sold.
In this case, I am being deprived of the income (by the pirate publisher) to the tune of $1 per copy that they have sold during the period in question.
You are being deprived of something you never had. If someone says they'll gift me a car, and then they don't, have they stole from me? No, because I never had the car in the first place.
And who's to say you are being deprived of such income? For all you know, you could have received the exact same amount even if the pirate publisher had never sold it - maybe he did all the marketing work that enabled those sales.
More: for all you know, maybe the marketing work that the pirate went through has helped sell more of your publisher's copies that it would had the pirate never copied it at all.
It's simply impossible to tell if you were deprived of any 'potential income' or not.
Not really. Why is it $1? Suppose you make a contract with one publisher who will pay you $1 per copy sold and also negotiate with a different publisher who will pay you $2 per copy sold. How much are you deprived then, $1.50? $2? You're assuming that every copy the pirate sold could have been sold by your current publisher(s) but wasn't.
Because I stipulated that the contract was exclusive and time-limited. In other words, the assumption that every copy the pirate sold would have been sold by my current publisher is accurate-- hence the simplicity of the hypothetical.
The artifacts produced from intellectual labor can often not be taken from an individual, but through copying potential income can. 'Intellectual property' is a concept invented by people to protect themselves against such loss of income.
Currently, most people who care cling to two extremes: one group sees intellectual property as physical property, and think 'theft' should be punished as physical property theft. The other group thinks that 'intellectual property' is imaginary, because the cost of copying is near-zero and copying does not take away information from the original owner.
Obviously, the first extreme is completely unacceptable. Suppose (for the sake of the argument) that someone invented a copier tomorrow that could copy any physical object. That would be a tremendous win for humanity. However, the 'intellectual property'-crowd would come in and insist that people pay nearly the same price for the copy as the original (as happens today with books, movies, and music). On the other hand, there should be some financial incentive to produce intellectual artifacts.
You do. No-one can take it away from you, except by destroying all copies and mindwiping you. Owning something doesn't mean you get to control copies of that something.
I think "intellectual property" is an excellent example to use when distinguishing between free markets and capitalism. Free markets and IP are opposed for the same reasons that free markets are opposed to any other government granted monopoly. But IP laws extend the reach of capitalism into places that might be outside it without legal assistance.
Yes, intellectual property is completely contrary to free markets and personal liberty, in its essence is a system of government-granted and government-enforced monopolies, and how anyone can think that is compatible with liberty economic or personal boggles the mind.
Maybe the number one reason is that debt forms a tax shield: Interest payments are an expense which reduces your tax base while dividend payments don't. (see the trade-off theory)
Asymmetric information is another possible reason to prefer debt: If somebody wants to sell something, it often means that he's not happy with it. So what does it tell a potential investor if management wants to sell equity? Thus, management will often prefer to issue debt as to not send a negative signal to the market. (see the pecking order theory)
It's interesting to note that Modigliani & Miller have proven that the financial structure (ratio of equity to debt) wouldn't matter in a frictionless market. There are many theories concerning many different market frictions, e.g. bankruptcy cost, agency problems, etc.
