Comment Re:wealth generation by industry (Score 1) 362
br/
What sucks hard core is that the reason this is impossible is because everyone is either way too self interested or they are stuck hanging on a vision that is flawed and lacking all touch with reality. It will probably take 5 years to be able to safely use HTML 5, and maybe by then someone will have the balls to make the web the universal platform it ought to be.
And if anyone says that I'm totally missing the point on the web and that if I want to develop apps, I should choose an application platform and not a document platform, I swear I will go ballistic. I mean really, I hope no one really believes that. The web wants to be both an information platform and application platform. I wish we would stop fighting that. The web is more than information and porn.
br/
Nobody owes you anything. If you decide you want to be an artist and only record albums, then YOU have to figure out how to make that work. Society is not responsible for your financial well being--that is YOUR responsibility. Just because you want things to be a certain way, it doesn't mean that society is responsible for making that work out for you.
br/
I'd be really interested how you put together your chair. I had the same thought a couple months ago about a car seat being almost ideal for the reason you mentioned. I didn't find any one selling chairs like that from searching, though my co-worker did send me this link:
http://i.gizmodo.com/5132451/emperor-workstation-priced-at-40000
Maybe one day...
br/
Here in Utah in many places they have replaced the road sensors at intersections with cameras. They seem to more able to accurately detect that I am there over the in pavement kind. And they don't use them for red light violations.
br/
IANAVC, but know a few things about venture capital and private equity.
To state it plainly, the goal of venture capitalists is to invest money and make a return. There's nothing that they are "supposed to do." This isn't bad or good any more than buying bonds is bad or good. VCs specialize in looking at ideas and funding the promising ones. They put together a pool of money from people that believe in their skill to choose winners. After they put that pool together, they have to get the money out and invest it. After they invest it, sometimes they step in and provide additional assistance to make sure that they get a return for the people that invested the money. This behavior has the effect of stimulating innovation.
VCs are often painted as bad buys because of the changes they make to companies that are disagreeable. They have also received more scrutiny lately because they have been able to operate in a tax loophole that allowed their earnings to be taxed at a lower rate (iirc, their income from gains were taxed as investments at the capital gains rate and not as regular income). Not renewing the Bush tax cuts has the effect of removing this loophole.
I think you're on the right track on not having blockbusters to invest in. In a general sense, I think that investment opportunities began to become more scarce. There were more dollars following fewer investments. This caused the price of the investments to rise and which caused the value on the investments to kind of rise like inflation. Since there was more demand for real estate for investment, the prices rose.
Just my 2 cents.
What needs to happen is the one that provides the connection to the house should not provide the service. The government then regulates the infrastructure provider/maintainers. The service providers then sit on that infrastructure.
For example, here in Utah we have UTOPIA (Utah Telecommunication Open Infrastructure Agency, http://www.utopianet.org/). UTOPIA themselves provide the fiber to the premise. Then you sign up with the providers on the network. There are a handful of different ISPs that provide service over it (including Qwest!). You can choose based on whatever meets your fancy. ISP too oversubscribed? Choose another one.
The fiber delivers internet, phone, and tv. Here at my office we have a symmetric 30Mbs connection for about $110. Makes me hate to go home to my Comcast connection...
The problem is the only motivation for the infrastructure provider is to keep the ISPs and governments to off their backs. The government should own the infrastructure and then private companies should compete for the maintenance contracts. Hopefully somebody in the city knows something about an SLA...
Would they call it SunHat or RedSun?
HOLY MACRO!