What aspect of current IP law do you believe creates this situation (i.e. the ease of free-riding on open source), and how should they be reformed?

This looks like a classic tragedy of the commons problem, in which case assigning ownership (i.e. eliminating the free-as-in-beer aspects of FOSS) is the relevant solution.

"Create a Basic Income (financed by the Fed at zero cost to taxpayers),"

How, out of curiosity, will this miracle be achieved? What magic wand will the Fed wave in order to create these resources from midair?

Now, there's a pretty decent argument for a basic income (from economists across the political spectrum, including Friedman, not generally known as a soft-headed liberal), but the money would have to be transferred from elsewhere in the economy via taxes.

Got any actual evidence for this claim? I see your unsupported assertion, and raise you a page of peer-reviewed studies.

http://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/q...

Yes, absolutely. That's why I made the "back in February" comment. They need to make a judgment call then about the most likely strains, and manufacture to that.

I've spent the last couple of days wishing for sweet, sweet death, and I did get my flu shot. Still 100% glad I got my flu shot, though. Basically, I was wearing a bulletproof vest, but got shot in the leg. Not the vest's fault. A group of very highly trained professionals made a judgment call back in February about what strains this year's flu shot should protect against, and they got it wrong. C'est la vie.

Yeah, because employees totally stopped using email because employers can and do archive it and read it when/if they want to.

So, your argument is that someone:

1. Created a page at Amazon listing a $400 game console at $80, which would net them maybe $70, after fees.
2. Went into Walmart, and used that page to get the console for $80, plus tax.
3. Planned to sell that same console to whoever bought it through the Amazon link, losing $20 or so on each console.

Yes, that's theoretically possible.

It's also theoretically possible that they were purchasing test units for the Archons of Centauri 7, who will then gift us with their technology for unlimited clean energy, but have a religious objection to paying more than $80 for a PS4.

Retailers have the right to correct pricing errors, if they were clearly errors (i.e. Xbox for $40 rather than $400). This was no pricing error - there's no way the Amazon seller/Walmart buyer can argue that he made a pricing error on his webpage, but at the same time demand that Walmart match the pricing error.

Very good point. Was trying to keep it simple. If I recall, the expected relocation costs are in the range of $6B for this spectrum.

Just because you can't believe it, doesn't mean it's not true. 65MHz, covering 315 million people. Spectrum's usually priced per MHz-POP (i.e. 10MHz of spectrum covering 1 million people is 10 million MHz-POPs).

There's a huge amount of variation in pricing, though. The most expensive license right now (on a MHz-POP basis) is for 10MHz covering the Chicago area (8.3M people) - $5.50 per MHz-POP. The most expensive license on an absolute basis is for 20MHz covering the NY Metro Area (27M people): $2 billion.

On the other hand, there are some licenses in rural Louisiana and South Dakota going for under $2k, or less than $0.01 per MHz-POP.

True, but in this case, the top bids, combined, are $34B. In other words, if the auction ended today, the government would receive $34 billion.

Hey, a deal's a deal. We didn't get Sun 2, the aliens don't get Europa as their private playground.

Walmart's cost of goods sold (i.e. the % of revenue that gets spent on the products they sell, doesn't include cost of labor, rent, light, etc.) is 75%, slightly above Amazon's 73%. So, WalMart is, on average, charging a SMALLER markup than Amazon.

Quite a number of states (Cali and Wisconsin come to mind) have laws prohibiting loss leaders, usually only if they're viewed as predatory pricing (i.e. trying to drive competitors out of business).

Wisconsin has a law that sets a minimum margin for gasoline. Idea is to prevent large operators with other revenue streams (i.e. a supermarket with a couple of gas pumps) from selling below cost to bring in shoppers, thereby driving out small operators

"they talk about people with amazon seller accounts creating sales in order to have them matched"

No, they're not creating "sales." They're creating sales pages they have no intention of actually delivering. Unless you think that the people pulling this scam would have happily shipped out hundreds of PS4s at $80 each, when the orders came in.

Oops, forgot link: http://www.dol.gov/minwage/cha...