It looks like that because both the supply and demand curves are very inelastic, especially over the short term, so a small change in either results in huge swings in price. The investors do make money off of this, but they are making it off the backs of your retirement funds rather than off the back of your transportation budget.

IIRC, Human Genome Project didn't really kick it into gear until there was a risk that someone else would actually finish the project, though.

Here is wiki entry about a citation. The Wealth of Nations.

My experience is that they try to move you to streaming if you search for disks, but I have both for my account. They really push the streaming service, which I understand is because their profit is way higher without the physical disk overhead.

I would totally switch, too, if 99% of everything wasn't missing from the streaming service....

I get a lot of "suggestions" for things I've already watched (they love the "watch it again" recommendation under the assumption I'll probably like it because I liked it...), and they don't let you filter out things you've already watched, or things you never want to watch. Instead all you can do is try to train their recommendation system and hope that it actually has some kind of meaning.

Worse, their "new releases" section provides a list of everything released in the last $@#NNNANAS ago, instead of whatever was added in the past several weeks, sorted by week. They are deliberately making discovery difficult, which gives the impression that they are trying to disguise a shallow pool of movies.

Still, they are one of the few services that provides the kind of streaming service that I'm actually willing to pay for - a service in which I pay them, and they show me movies. This is far superior to the BS system that hulu has in which they show stupid ads on the free service, which is fine because you pay with your attention, or you can pay them and watch the stupid ads on your phone or TV, too. There is no option where you are the customer instead of the product.

I'm not suggesting it should read the bills themselves (although, when dispensing, it should probably read/scan them as a sanity check), but that it should read the cartridges, which should have encrypted IDs, moving the problem to the facility where the cartridges themselves are packed, but that's more manageable.

Yeah, the support for windows games really needed to be better than, "and you can stream them from a windows machine that you also own"

Sure, if it's cheaper, great, but is the "imperishability" of steel really a problem? Iron is the most recycled material on the planet....

Why is this possible? You can hardly by a $50 printer that doesn't know exactly what ink cartridge has been placed, but ATM's need to be told by the operator?

We have a solution to CO2. The environmentalists, acting as useful idiots for the coal industry, have layered defenses against implementing it.

These particular coral are quite doomed. They are, after all, scheduled to be dredged...

The language is a bit suspicious, though,

instead of "[to make way for] larger, more efficient cargo ships." or something more neutral.

Shipping companies don't want bigger ships just for the heck of it, after all, they want bigger ships because they can move cargo at lower cost per ton.

He doesn't owe us anything. He already gave us the art, and it was great. And it's still around.

Contrast this with other artists who have altered their work so that you can only get bootleg copies of the original anymore, and who we pray will not alter it further.

Personally, I think there ought to be a copyright exemption for a work that an author refuses to publish. Copyright is supposed to encourage publishing.

Because the new artists are ditching poorly-inked shredded forest syndication in favor of mediums where they have real control. For instance web and self-published books. (the latter really needs the former, I suspect, in order to get enough exposure to be viable, though.)

Interestingly, there is a lot more specialization. For example, I suspect that a lot of people won't find Dr McNinja amusing, but those who do will not be able to avoid archive binging. There is something for everyone, and everyone's something isn't necessarily the same thing. The flavors are more intense.

If you want to read good daily comics again, just find some ten lists and pick out a few, then plug them into your favorite rss reader.

It's true that you can't get it by waiting. The question is how can we create the conditions which would result in it happening.

You also have fairly constant water usage from year-to-year, as has anyone previously living at your address, probably for the last hundred years (if you address has been around that long). In fact, there's a good chance that your water usage is less than previous occupants (assuming any), due to water-saving technologies that have been adopted over time.

Water delivery is a mature product. Data delivery is not yet one. There are still services an applications being developed that would not be possible at previous levels of supply. Current services are not yet at the level, I think, where most people would say, "yeah, that's enough, freeze it here and keep roughly that level of service forever"

Moreover, data delivery is unlike water delivery in another fundamental way - the data is an unlimited resource. There is no reason why anyone would be interested conservation projects. The only limitation to your usage of data is the network's ability to deliver it.

That said, if we want data delivery to behave like a competitive market, then we need to have a competitive market. I'm pretty sure that a condition where the companies serving the market are local monopolies separated by geography, "competing" only in the sense that residents may move to another service provider's area if they are dissatisfied with their service (and how bad would it need to be, really, for people to consider moving halfway across a continent....) does not constitute a properly competitive market.

Nah, food and nukes are the same. On paper there is plenty to go around, and then some. In practice, logistics and politics and local resistance get in the way of the distribution. We have been fortunate not to see this demonstrated with nukes, though.