Crowdfunding albums has been done before. I'm pretty sure RadioHead tried this with a recent album, as did Nine Inch Nails. David Bowie may have done so too? (Just going by memory here ...)

In any case, I think the concern with going this route is that once the novelty of doing it wears off, you'll quickly have little more than a "race to the bottom", where artists everywhere are releasing works this way, and people won't contribute much money at all to any one project. (The early adopters of the model did well with it, primarily because people were paying them the "going rate" for albums, or more in some cases, as a show of support for trying the new business model and taking risks.)

Again, I'm not really sure what the answer is with all of this? Many, many years ago, musicians were "professionals for hire" -- LONG before it was even possible to record audio. The wealthy paid them to do live gigs at their parties and what-not, and that was pretty much the extent of how profit was made from it. Maybe we're headed back that way, where live concerts are the only practical way to profit from making music -- and anything else is simply done to market your music and get your "brand" out there?

Truthfully, I don't even know that I care? I love music and I used to even play guitar in a local band for a couple years (long time ago). Part of me thinks our society is poorer for eliminating the possibility (however faint) that some teens jamming together in a garage can aspire to become stars, making millions, if they just believe in themselves and doggedly keep practicing and playing, playing, playing. But another part of me knows that's exactly why I got out of the music scene too. The writing was on the wall that this wasn't going to be a good living for many people at all, as technology progressed and things changed. (First, we saw the decline of the radio DJ who was allowed to run his/her own show, playing whatever he/she liked. Then we saw the major labels implode (deservedly, basically). And just as the indie labels and individual entrepreneurs were picking up the pieces and going DYI -- things went to digital streaming for "all you want to listen to for $10 a month" services.

I see you posted anonymous. Nice.... so you can't even sign your name to your opinion on this topic?

The "flat earth" debate has long ceased to be a debate because it's essentially PROVEN at this point that the planet is, indeed, a sphere. (The only people still denying it are a very SMALL portion of the population who may well do so just to be contrary, vs. having a true belief in it.)

I'm not whining and fussing about a few dollars coming from my pocket, at all. I *am*, however, saying, there's a LOT of B.S. going around, especially in areas like "alternative energy solutions" right now.

I actually HAVE a PV solar system I purchased for our house, outright -- and that cost me more than "a few dollars". Even so, I'd happily tell anyone who asks how much total B.S. and nonsense is promised by the "Eco Green, pro solar" crowd and adjust their expectations before they commit to a solar loan or purchase.

It's *only* via artificially manufactured govt. subsidies that this stuff makes good financial sense for most customers. It's NOT cost effective on its own, especially when you consider the costs they don't like to talk about -- such as labor to disassemble a whole solar system from your roof, in order to replace roofing shingles that are at the end of their useful life, or the cost to replace a dying inverter outside of the warranty period (typically less than HALF the warranty length offered on your panels themselves).

A serious change would involve building new, safer nuclear power plants and using those to generate all of our energy needs where options like hydroelectric weren't viable options. Guess what though? That's not really profitable for the special interests getting big payouts from technologies like solar right now, so that's not up for so much real discussion.....

One of the current issues for music recording artists is that we've essentially removed the traditional method of getting paid for producing a new album. A painter hopes to initially make $'s on the first sale of a new painting. So he/she doesn't really concern him/herself with the concept of "pay per view" after the fact.

These days, most musicians either invest their own money into production and distribution of a new album, or they sign with a record label who may loan them some money as part of a contract, but it's subject to being repaid by selling enough albums to pay the loan off.

Unfortunately, music streaming services severely cut into the number of people interested in buying the album, yet the streaming is apparently barely paying the artists anything.

So how do we fix it? I'm not necessarily arguing that we need to pay more for streaming, or in turn those companies should pay the artists more of a "cut". But I'm saying there's a transition in progress away from people actually buying new music that's released, and towards an expectation of being able to listen to it, on demand, via the Internet.

If the current music situation was more equivalent to how a da Vinci type would get compensated, we'd have a system in place where anyone providing the music streaming (equivalent to "public viewing of the painting") would have to pay thousands of dollars, up front, first, to own each song. (Perhaps that would mean each service would have "exclusives" on individual songs or whole albums they purchased.)

Honestly? I probably have a whole list of people who it would be interesting to introduce to your uncle, then.

I've almost lost count of the number of times I've watched someone with no real scientific background in the field make a blanket statement declaring anyone who doesn't believe in climate change/global warming is clearly an idiot.

The fact is, things are much different than that. Quite a few folks who are FAR from being idiots think it's fear-mongering, misplaced nonsense. (I'm certainly no climate expert myself, but I think I fall someplace on the spectrum far from "clueless idiot" -- and I've read enough compelling information from both sides of the argument to feel like the "best stance" to take is one of questioning everything. If we're talking about pretty painless changes we can do, such as substitution of one chemical for another in a product, to reduce the ozone layer depletion - great. Why not? But demanding people spend billions of dollars to try to "fix" the whole climate situation? That just seems like a REALLY tall order for something that reeks of special interest agendas, right now, especially when we don't even have a consensus on a solution that would definitely reverse the claimed problem and revert it to "normal" in a useful time-frame.
 

I'm a fairly satisfied T-Mobile customer, but one thing I've found with them consistently is ANY time they offer a new feature, service plan or offer - the customer service folks are untrained on it for months and the handling of it is very inconsistent.

I'm actually on wi-fi often enough so I never use that much LTE data in a month. For me, the "data stash" offer wasn't worth paying for a more expensive plan to get it. But yes, it would follow the trend I've seen with T-Mobile for them to have bugs in tracking it properly, phone reps who don't understand how their own web site works with regards to it, etc.

When they first started offering those "pay only x$ down and make interest free payments over 24 months for your new device" offers, they were all mixed up too. People were going in or buying online and getting wildly different results as to how much money (if any) had to be put down for the initial purchase. (Eventually, they seemed to iron that out, with some kind of internal credit score based system that still keeps you guessing a bit until you get final word -- but is fairly consistent.) When my workplace signed on so employees buying T-Mobile for personal devices could qualify for a corporate discount, they had that all mixed up too. The retail T-Mobile stores couldn't tell me if I'd get the discount or not when adding a new iPad to a data plan, etc.

I've just learned with T-Mobile to "go with the flow" basically. Pay your bill on time and if they hype up anything new that involves a plan change -- give it 2-3 months before you do it for the least amount of hassle and confusion. All in all, they've saved me a lot of money over using AT&T or Verizon, and gave me better phone handset options and more "extras" than Sprint ever did. They just rolled out LTE service in my town too, which I've been waiting and hoping for, for about a year now. (I mainly use my LTE data at work or on the commute, so it hasn't been a really big issue ... but it's nice to finally have the same level of service at home.)

I can't disagree with the above statement enough!

Sorry, but there are *always* alternatives. We have enough technology to perform most farming with automation anyway.

The PhD who has to apply at McDonalds? Sure, that happens... but that's a result of education not automatically equating to value in the marketplace. Quite a few PhD's and folks with Masters' degrees I've met are chronically underemployed or unemployed. The reason? They believe people "owe" them a high paying job because they completed the education. They aren't necessarily very good with people skills, or motivated to accept anything in the way of a career position outside of a very narrow, specific thing they think they want to do.

Our educational system is happy to provide an education that's largely only useful in the "work world" as a way to become a teacher .

That may be true, but there's a reason people are running AWAY from the farms in droves. People aspired to do other things besides working the land, and modern society made that possible.

I think we'd be moving backwards as a society if we essentially forced everyone to go back to agriculture in order to survive.

I read an interview a while back with a tattoo artist who said he really disliked and discouraged anyone asking for a non-permanent tattoo, despite the technology allowing it now.

From his viewpoint, he was an artist, like any other artist -- and felt like his art should be designed to stick around. (Sort of like asking a famous painter to only use water-soluble markers or chalk so whoever buys the art could choose to wash it off the canvas at will.)

Except you could do what retailers have done for eons.... Open ONE box and put a sample product on display next to all of the boxes, so you can see and even touch/handle the sample product to know what you're getting.

Except usually, it requires someone who ALREADY HAD a profit motive and was successful in some way, to be in the position to opt to do these "costly, but for the good of everyone" things.

And really, they do happen all the time. Most big businesses I can think of sponsor all sorts of things for their communities. The entire tax code is designed to encourage you to make charitable contributions.

The alternative to this is the classic "big government" advocate, who wishes government to act as forced charity, taking enough money from everyone else to spend it on various projects it believes benefit the whole. (As you might have guessed, I'm not exactly sold on that being the optimal way to handle it.)

There might be "2 basic types of advertising" but there are also two basic types of investors. The short-term people are just chasing after a quick return. A given company doesn't produce double digit percentage increases in profits or sales in a given quarter or year, and they're complaining and predicting it's time to get out and invest elsewhere. The long-term investor, by contrast. invests in what he/she believes in. Does the company generally build good things... come up with great ideas? Are they taking steps that show they'll be a contender for many years to come? If so, good. That's where to park some of your money!

So Google wants to expand its reach, getting away from a business model that loses money on everything it does except for advertising? Good for them! If they can pull it off, they stand to be FAR more useful to society with self-driving cars than with delivering "immersive marketing" to people about brand-names of products.

The comparison to Microsoft is uncalled for too, IMO. Microsoft always had an agenda of tying everything back to the Windows platform in some way. While Google was hooking homes up with the fastest Internet connections anyone in American ever had, Microsoft was still trying to find ways to get you to accept a cellphone with their OS on top of it, instead of the competition's.

Yeah, except all he's *really* asking for here is an additional way to get notified if something's wrong, so he could take a look for himself via an internet connected camera.

This wouldn't (shouldn't) be about trying to use a 2 year old as a caretaker. The way I'm reading this, he just wants an extra fail-safe in place. (I think even a 2 year old is mentally functional enough to realize something's wrong with mom if she suddenly falls to the floor, flails around and acts generally unresponsive. It would probably make the kid feel better, not worse, if he or she knew simply pressing a button would be a way to communicate "help!".)

One of our kids used to have seizures (he's been free of them for a couple of years now while taking medication), and his younger sister, around age 2-3, was able to come tell us when it happened to him, if he was up in his room and we didn't notice it immediately.

The direct health benefits of earlier alcoholic drinks don't apply today. That's true. (Historically, that stuff tasted terrible too and nobody was really drinking it for pleasure/social reasons.) And yeah, maybe those studies about red wine having beneficial anti-oxidant properties is over-blown too?

But there's little doubt in my mind that a beer or two helps people reduce their stress levels, which is certainly a positive. Like all things, I think the bottom line is that alcohol in moderation is going to be just fine. Too much of it and then yeah, it's detrimental to health.

I've heard it said that when you get right down to it, there really are no "Fundamental rights" -- because every single "right" you have is only due to others' willingness to respect that boundary, or your ability to keep it that way through threat of violence.

(You can speak of your "basic human rights" all you want, but if I have no respect for them and I have the power to trample on them that's greater than your power to resist -- how much good is that doing you?)

At the end of the day, it all seems to just be about philosophy and artificial constructs. (Even if you insist your right is "God given", I'm not really convinced your God is going to strike me down and keep me from preventing you from exercising that right.)

So no, the real question is probably whether allowing people to remain anonymous (or as much so as is possible) is a net benefit or a net loss for society as a whole. I think *most* of us do have a concept of ethics and/or morality that causes us to take interest in trying to protect some of these concepts -- simply because it stands to do us more good than harm if we do so. And yes, I happen to believe it is a net benefit. I see no real good that comes from trying to legislate away actions so basic and really, so unenforceable to TRY legislating away.

Honestly though, I suspect it rarely plays out quite that way.

What REALLY happens is a drug dealer (like everyone else) wants to hang out with a group of friends and have fun sometimes. Of course, being addicted to a substance means he/she only stands a chance of keeping friends around who partake in the same activity. So people who are already drawn to that lifestyle for whatever reason spend time with the dealer, getting some drugs free and other times probably being asked to "chip in" for their cost. Once they become addicted themselves -- then they've got to have the stuff often enough so they gotta start dealing themselves or doing illegal things to pay for the habit, so it's moved past the stage of just fun spare time activities for them.

The cliche of the sneaky drug dealer coming out from the shadows and giving out free drugs to young or naive people to trick them into becoming a new customer is kind of ridiculous.