To me the story here is that the police cannot be bothered for all the lesser crimes that ring doorbell would identify. When they say the doorbells have not led to a single arrest that is due to law enforcement efforts not the doorbell. Was talking with coworkers about package thieves and there were some great ring doorbell stories. One individual bought a house from a lady about a year ago. Packages started going missing and so they installed a ring doorbell. It was the lady who sold them the house, now stealing their packages and coming around in the night too. Person called police and offered the video as evidence. The police basically said no thank you and that even with the video nothing would be done.

Sounds like business as usual 4/15/14 /. post about turbo tax lobbying against simplifying the tax system

Or threefold for that matter.

Reading about economics and business on slashdot is an exercise in face palming.

Untold profits? Hiring someone new will cost money and when business slows you can just fire that person? That is not how you profit . It is not that easy.

You can hire temps perhaps but for most operations they will not be up to speed quickly enough. But wait....You could outsource to a place that does not have restrictions on the work environment and then you could keep up the low prices for Mr and Mrs while complying with some new work hour regulation!

I may complain. Actually I complain a lot. But in the end I could settle for less and find a new job. Or I could be a bum. There's a whole lot of options in between. I guess I'm saying I would prefer to have the freedom to choose to be a bum rather than have more and more regulations from the government when it's just not that easy.

on a side note, i did not rtfa, I am not sure if government regulation was mentioned at all in another comment either. That is just the endgame for ideas like this and I just hate reading about business topics on slashdot.

I am not sure if you are referring to Bastiat's Broken Window Example.. http://www.econlib.org/library/Bastiat/basEss1.html Basically, in the 1800's it was argued that burning Paris to the ground would benefit the economy because all of the people who would be employed by rebuilding the city. Bastiat gave a simple example to show the fundamental problem with ideas like that. If you are forced to part with your money to pay for something that was broken (drm, scratched xbox 360 disk, smashed window), then you buy something again, have less money but the same amount of goods. If you did not have to replace the object, then you would buy something else and have two goods instead of one.

Big Airlines are competing on low-cost because it is incredibly difficult to differentiate a plane ride from another plane ride to consumers. When people shop on the web they go for the lowest cost the majority of the time. Try picturing yourself eating a better meal and watching a movie on a plane, would you even pay 20$ more? Most people say to the hell with it Ill save money and eat whenever I get there.

http://biz.yahoo.com/p/sum_qpmd.html

Airline industry is consistently at the bottom for profit/margin, they fail if they do not have low costs. The studios make take an idea for a film, make a bunch of products based on that film, push all this shit on everyone everywhere, and are still trying to double up by not letting you even make a damn backup in the case a spec of sand finds its way onto your disc. As a secondary side note, most companies worry about customer support when they mass distribute a product. I have never got s4n74cl4wz to respond to my requests when the the frame is clipped. Think about it, how can these be "quite basic market forces" when the "competition" is distributing your product without paying you?

http://boxofficemojo.com/yearly/ No wonder profits are....higher than ever at the box office? Maybe it's the premium people pay or raised prices but apparently people are willing to consume more at the box office than ever before. Of course the numbers don't tell the whole story but was 2009 even inflationary?

heads will roll? that's typical. blame someone. why not start talking about real reform? \=

http://royaldutchshellplc.com/2008/03/15/the-truth-about-shell-in-nigeria/

believe whatever you want, but in my gut i know that this is more than just tragedy of the commons.

oil companies, cigarette companies, drug cartels, corrupt governments. most threads here talk about business decisions, and this may be the most profitable one for shell. more like rape vs a long term relationship. everyday people are getting it from every angle. only future generations will feel the pain more than us.

Why can't anyone do something? You've either got to believe marijuana should be legalized or want him in jail. You can't work with congress to "balance" rights between corporations and consumers either. Who is more of a citizen, joe or bob's Inc. ? Stop writing laws left and right that try to fix things. half the time a corporate hand is influencing the law a lot more than a real citizen. Then we've got backwards laws protecting things that dont need protection and the people who do have voting cards are the ones worse off. Just nit-picking real quick here, but come on....it IS the SAME stuff we hear from the other candidates. Seek balance? When you seek there is a chance you don't find. Every presidential candidate talks like this but when they get into the office they just play political grabass all day rather than get stuff done. When you are the president who is supposedly elected by the people, then if the people want something, you make it happen. You are the president, sure you gotta play along with the corporate congressmen but if you actually had resolve, vision blah blah etc then you'd realize that you are at the top and it's the best time to make the people's wishes come true if that is what you are about. If all candidates "seek balance" then why even talk about it? I want to know who IS going to do something and when they plan to do many things I want, I'll vote for them. This two party system is a joke. When we get presidents like the current one, it is clear they had a completely different mindset going into presidency. The people wanted a war? Eat my ass you fake clowns. BTW "national security interests, including its interests in a viable space program"... if you place a space program under the national security interests umbrella then average citizens can't hope for much. Space is not a security interest, rather it is the great beyond. It is the future and a place of dreams. Why is everyone thinking of it as a security interest? So we can write a million laws from the hand of people who never have known average, and the real average joe sits on this rock forever.