A particularly low vaccination rate, mostly. Along with Switzerland, it seems that most of the USA's trip-to-X-and-came-back-with-measles cases seem to be from France.

...well, once you've blocked the content, and once you've blocked the tracking, there's not much left to work with, yeah?

:D

Short answer: because measles is a human-only disease like smallpox and polio. We could eliminate it. In which case, the we'd have as many adverse outcomes from measles and its vaccine as we do now from smallpox and its vaccine: zero.

There are other reasons, but IMHO that's good enough. Except, perhaps, for the virus-rights movement.

Most particularly, the very young. Possibly not a trait we want to eliminate from the population.

For every family that takes unvaccinated kids to France and brings them back sick, there are scores more who are in the pediatrician's waiting room, in pulic places, etc. with a kid too young to be vaccinated. Not to mention the small percentage for whom the vaccine just doesn't work.

Unless you're advocating keeping babies and others locked up and leaving public places to the shambling hordes of carriers, perhaps?

If that were the case, you'd be seeing the new cases in people over the age of 30. Instead it's pretty much all kids.

the music is good.

but pono... doesn't really much make sense and he's been hawking the company for over a year. it's hifist shit. especially when it's only as good as the dacs on the thing anyways..

how about just better mastered cd's?

go home Sean Young, you're drunk

You pretty much got it - the core of Microsoft's argument was 100% vindicated by history. It's one of the little quirks of nature:

1. Bundling DOES help the consumer. Apple is the proving point. The users crave a unified bundled approach. Even to the level MS never envisioned, hardware, service and software.

2. An upstart competition could arrive at anytime and take MS's market share, because unlike natural monopolies on resources, the human capital needed to fight MS was readily available to competitors. Google, Apple, Blackberry, all came from nowhere to drink MS's milkshake.

3. The browser is a natural part of the operating system and it's unfair to force MS to accommodate competitors who someday would be more profitable or powerful than MS.

4. MS doesn't have the ability to set prices which is a critical part of the monopoly power. This is so obviously true. MS exerts almost no price pressure on the market these days.

Your politics are backwards. Nationally, the car dealers are associated strongly with the conservatives in the GOP. Many, many, many car dealers are owned by Republicans.

Nate Silver correlated the data nicely back when the major makers were on the verge of bankruptcy.

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com...

It's better than 8-to-1 correlation (i.e., a fairly strong correlation).

The problem is that, adjusting for inflation, it should be dramatically less. That's the trend. The major outlier is for raw materials which are more costly to extract and process for use.

In the 1950's a decent Westinghouse consolve TV cost about $1000. Inflation adjusted to today, that's about $9000. You'd be hard pressed to spend $9000 on a TV today unless it was a big theater setup or was quite exotic. That's because technology has replaced the need for many expensive raw materials, improved production (including moving it overseas), and driven out the excess.

Auto manufacturers have a problem, and they are the ones driving cost inflation, trying to convince Americans to spend more and more of their income each year on automobiles. For the last two generations this has been through fictionalization of automobiles - you are buying a payment, not a product. That has started to lessen, but record low interest rates have prevented a major crash in sales, and actually led to some good years against a trend of decline.

There is a large untapped market for a car marker who builds the same model of car, with no changes other than manufacturing refinements, for 7-15 years, direct to consumers. From a manufacturing theory perspective, there are something like 7,000-10,000 drivers in an auto production line. 10 years is about what you could expect to optimize the supply chain for each driver, maybe half that if you are very good at managing supply chain. This type of company is stymied by three things:

a. cheap credit money which makes it cheaper to buy a new car than to maintain and run older cars,
b. regulatory creep which increases requirements continually and
c. consumers willing to spend a large slice of their income on flashy cars and status symbols.

And in the end, car dealerships do deserve to undergo a radical change in their structure. They are inherently bad for customers.

For one - they make money in ways that customers are not aware of. The most insidious being "point spread". You walk in, buy a car, and they make money selling the car (fair), future service either under warranty or direct to the consumer (fair), and more importantly, on the financing. You might qualify for a certain rate, but they get a big chunk of the difference between your best qualifying rate and what they convince you to pay. So you qualify for a 3.5% rate, but they get you sign on the line for 9.9%, and they get roughly 50% of the point spread between 3.5% and 9.9%, which on many financing arrangements, is far more than the profit involved in selling the car to begin with.

Second, they do an only okay job with service. They do not typically do as a good job as independent shops, and for warranty work, face little competitive price pressure.

Finally, they are effective local monopolies and do not always respond to market pressure. Because of brand monopolies, there is not as much competition as they would have you believe. The car market is deeply segmented, and so there are not as many brand choices in a price/demographic band as you might think. On paper there are 15 manufacturers selling through dealerships in a market. But for a single random consumer, there are likely 3 or 4 options that meet the basic criteria of type and price range.

In many small towns or areas, the local car dealer is the wealthiest person in town. There is a lot of profit standing between the car maker and the consumer. And in the end, this excess is needs to be wrung out of the system. Manufacturer's should not be able to prevent car dealers from selling and servicing cars, but long-term, the concept of a franchised car dealership needs to be scaled back. Channel conflict is inevitable.

fly a gun inside