If these executives didn't have to do anything to deserve this money, why aren't you one of them?

No. You're confusing digits with precision. Accuracy is a ex ante property of a statistical estimator, not ex post. Your examples are all ex post.

You weight to avoid this. So if a station has a 10% chance of getting into the sample, you multiply it's results by 10. If a station has a 100% chance (say some huge NYC station) you multiply it's results by 1. This is how estimation via sampling works. Survey methodology is a real field and it's not occupied by idiots as you seem so willing to believe.

No arguing there, and that's probably how they are paid. When the firm decides if it should make an additional album (so, this would be a low level star group, they always make as many huge star songs as they can get from them), they have to think about how much it will cost and how much money they will make. If they think it will make more money than it will cost, they probably make the album / song.

It's not really a quick buck. The music industry is contracting because there isn't enough revenue. They need more bucks or there will be less music (likely just huge stars and less midlevel groups, which is most of what I love).

The summary said it would be $500 if you make less than $1M in revenue. Doesn't seem like a ton of money.

If the huge corporate stations without jockeys fold I'm not so sure I care.

There are a lot of people besides artists who work hard to make music. There are many jobs that need to be done. It's like a movie--think of how many people you could name that work on a movie vs how many appear in the credits. Yes, the people you could name get paid more, but everyone else in the industry still would rather have that money to do that movie job than some other job.

Human's have a tendency to focus on the obvious (the star, in this case) and not to think about the everything else--but it's still there, even if we don't think about it. It's like dark matter and dark energy in that way, I guess.

The flip side of the sampling is that there is some near (but not exactly) zero play bands getting far more than their share of royalties. Basically, they face a very imprecise but accurate estimate of their payout.

Hi, can you explain what you mean by this, "Government should not be concerned with redistributing wealth (which is almost wholly unrelated to the legitimate social responsibility of caring for the poor and needy)."?

Also, progressivity has decines quite a bit in the US over the last 40 years.
  http://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/...

and there are good reasons to want a progressive system https://www.aeaweb.org/article...

Ok, when did regulation help with communication. Let's see. maybe when we all payed taxes and then funded the creations of TCP/IP and arpanet. Just throwing that one out there.

Another time government regulation was good--when we didn't allow banks to do anything but be boring with deposit accounts and loans. These rules were lifted in the late 90s and slow but steady growth was turned into an erratic economy.

In my favorite case we got a study guide with several sample essay questions on it and then the difference between the study guide and the final was that the header had been changed from "study guide" to "final exam". I had guessed this and even suggested it to several others in the class. I even went so far as to write essays for each question. Everyone else thought I was nuts but, unfortunately for them, the "curve" was to set the highest score to 100 with no care for the number of As, Bs, Cs, ... too bad for them.

I think it's debatable if income tax is a production tax. Certainly, given the individual it is, but across individuals it's more like a tax on being able to produce (being "smart" would be one way to put it, but smarts do not make one rich and all the rich are not smart).

They don't give a shit?

The problem with USB is the S for serial. The connection always has to make space for other devices on the bus to talk and that really brings down maximum bandwitdh for any individual device. So while USB 2.0 hi-speed (remember that debacle) may have high bandwidth, the amount available for, e.g. a single drive, was much lower than the theoretical max.

Can you point me to some evidence that the iPhone is invading my privacy? Again, the Android literally can record my conversations without my knowledge--and I can't turn that off in the settings without violating my agreement with the telco and rooting the machine.