Yes, this is one reason the U.S. is generally considered to have the best post-secondary system in the world. Other schools which often qualify as "best," like Cambridge, enforce breadth requirements as well.

It's not like music is a new industry. The correlation between tour success and album sales is pretty well understood, and now it is changing. For instance, a label or band might see tour crowds go up year over year but album sales do not go up as fast as they used to (or at all). Conclusion: something is affecting the relationship.

You're making a common mistake which is to try to argue from first principles and common sense. But business, like science, is an exercise in inductive reasoning. Years of observation of sales are showing real changes in the business model recently. Any mid-size band or label can tell you that, if you'd ask them. Most people don't. Have you?

BTW my brother has been at this place in the music industry for well over a decade and my info comes from him.

Here's an example of the mindset I'm talking about from NOFX, a band that needs no further promotion in its genre (punk):

Source: http://www.nofxofficialwebsite.com/qa/qa_read.php3?page=7

They don't want to fight their fans, but there's no question that the business impact is real.

Lady Gaga and the giant companies behind her will be just fine. And, so will the brand new tiny band who needs exposure--piracy is free advertising to them.

The people who piracy really hurts are the middle-class artists, who are well-enough known within their genre to make a decent living, but not huge marketing forces like Lady Gaga. They will play audiences of several hundred to several thousand, relying on a combination of show gate, merch, and album sales to make a middle-class living as artists.

Piracy is truly hurting these kinds of bands right now. If you don't believe me, go to a show and talk to the band. They have no interest in suing anyone because they like their fans and do not want to alienate them. But if you ask if piracy is affecting their livelihood, the answer is clearly yes.

It's emotionally satisfying to hate on Lady Gaga and industry fat cats, but music and movies are just like any other industry--most people are not super rich, they are just regular folks trying to make a living at their chosen profession. Yes, real middle class people are getting hurt by piracy.

I disagree with you on economics, yet my own purchasing power has also increased in the last decade. It seems we have reached stalemate. :-)

If you understand economics so much better than everyone else, why are posting on Slashdot instead of becoming fabulously rich?

You're welcome to your own definitions of economic terms, but don't expect to be able to hold rational conversations with economists.

Inflation is defined by a rise in prices, not the exchange rates with foreign currencies. Money supply is only one input into inflation, not its definition. An economy can experience inflation during a falling money supply, if demand increases faster than the decrease in available currency. Conversely if demand is falling quickly, an economy will see little inflation even if the money supply is increasing (see: the U.S. for the past 3 years).

Switzerland currently has a positive rate of inflation, and with the exception of 2010, has for decades.

I think you're just risk-averse, and attempting to imagine an economic system in which everyone is like you.

You cannot have a capitalism without gambling; in fact you cannot have growth or human advances at all without gambling. It was a gamble for hominids to leave Africa. It was a gamble to travel the Silk Road. It was a gamble to leave Europe for the Americas. It was a gamble to give two grad school dropouts millions of dollars to create a new search engine. Etc.

The argument for deflation comes down to an argument for a distinction between investments that are "good" or "bad" from a macroeconomic perspective. Your example is to distinguish between a business loan (you say good) and a car loan (you say bad).

This is simply a disguised argument for a centrally planned economy, as it assumes that is there is some authoritative way to tell, ahead of time, whether an investment will raise overall productivity or not. In fact there is no way to tell this in advance.

Capitalism depends on a lot of spaghetti being thrown at a lot of walls, and seeing what sticks. Mild, predictable inflation encourages spaghetti throwing.

Because the alternative--holding onto a currency that devalues--is even less desirable. Inflation is the stick that keeps people from sitting on cash for years, just waiting for that one perfect, guaranteed investment (which does not exist).

Your numbers fail to take into account wealth like real estate or commodities, which are neither debt or credit. For instance my home loan is a huge debt but it is balanced by the asset value of my house, for a net positive on my balance sheet. If you only look at the debt side it does indeed look hopeless.

Music from iTunes does not have DRM anymore, but your iTunes account name is embedded in each file you buy. If that is also true of iTunes Match music files, I think you are onto something.

I might upload a fully anonymous MP3, and get back from Apple a 256kbps AAC with my iTunes name embedded in it. From the perspective of the labels this is a win. If they start seeing this file with my name in it all over the piracy services, they know exactly who to sue. Whereas the MP3 would have been untraceable.

True? I don't know. We'll just have to wait and see if the names are embedded in the files iTunes Match sends back.

Even if we nuked the whole news establishment there would still be a need to establish societal consensus around facts and truth. The news media used to help us do that, and maybe they've made too many mistakes and bad decisions to do that anymore. But what if that process is breaking down in general? How can a society self-organize to solve hard problems if we cannot even establish and agree on basic facts? Anything remotely tough seems to tie us in endless knots these days as people bring up the same arguments again and again and again.

Because in the market, sellers can choose the price they wish to charge, even if most other people think it is too high. After all, many more people want Ferraris than can afford them. That doesn't mean auto theft is a "market failure."

Piracy provides copies of content for free; there is no way the content creator can compete with that and make money. So it is necessary to create legal remedies, which create a "price" for pirated content against which the content creators can legitimately compete.

It is currently against federal law for any union or corporation to contribute money from their organizational budget to a federal political campaign. This has been the law for decades, but it is striking how few people know that, including people like yourself who are clearly passionate about the subject.

Only individual U.S. citizens and PACs can give to federal political campaigns. And PACs can only collect money for federal political contributions from individual U.S. citizens. Corporations and unions can fund an attached PAC's operating expenses, but none of that money may pass through to any federal political campaign.

I have other comments on what you posted, but I'll hold back on so that this message comes through clearly.