201–210 of 223 posts
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The link tax is one thing, but I would say GDPR actually aids in price discovery, because without GDPR one side of the transaction has no idea what price they're paying.
It's possible some sites will switch to paid if they feel the targeted ads model in untenable. Others will just disappear, so in that sense there will be no price discovery.
Ignoring what the laws are actually about, GDPR and copyright are similar in this: one entity gets legal control over others' use of certain information. But while the privacy law is aimed at allowing individuals to assert some control over companies, the expansion of copyright is used by companies to assert control over individuals.
Don't forget that companies are made of people and an individual is a company of 1. GDPR is pretty much DRM for an individual's personal data.
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> But that's what would happen regardless if the human worker could find another job that pays more than the one being automated. The issue is that the human worker would prefer $5/hour to unemployment, and the employer would prefer a $5/hour employee to automation but prefer automation to an $8/hour employee, so an $8 minimum wage puts the employee on the unemployment line. Putting people who perform work we can do…
> Putting people who perform work we can do cheaper with automation on the unemployment line is a side-effect of a good thing. Think of what the first wave of industrialization brought us. In that case we should be taxing wages and using the money to subsidize automation. That way it's everyone paying for the benefits of automation rather than only those at the very bottom. > People can now invest time learning skill…
Speaking from a German perspective there is such a law. They will cut your unemployment benefits if you can't prove you're hunting for a job, or just go around quitting them. Not sure about the states.
We have a minimum wage, but it's not that high (just slightly above the US "minimum wage").
> ...which hurts their low income customers.
Low income customers? We have a minimum wage now remember? If at all it's gonna hurt richer customers who are now a little less rich compared to the rest.
> How does causing them to lose their jobs lessen the burden they create on society?
I was speaking of the burden places like Walmart etc. create because of indirect government subsidies.
> At which point the higher price causes price-sensitive customers to drop out of the market and the smaller company fails for lack of volume rather than lack of margins. Either way the smaller company is more likely to be destroyed than the larger one.
There's a lack of logical connection between those two sentences, probably a third sentence missing in between?
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Livable minimum wages:
The point I seem to fail to bring across is that you're paying the higher prices for goods produced fairly RIGHT NOW. You're just not paying them at the counter, you're paying them with your taxes. They're unfair subsidies to companies who pay dumpster wages - rewards for treating their workers like shit.
These forms of subsidies are arguably even less "free market" than the alternative.
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I don’t see how that’s possible. If two regulations are in completely unrelated areas, how can they combine to destroy something? There are plenty of cases where regulation benefits all of the involved parties. My favorite example is safety equipment for race cars. Absent regulation, there’s huge pressure to not have any because it increases weight and slows you down. But if you regulate it so everyone has to have it…
> I don’t see how that’s possible. If two regulations are in completely unrelated areas, how can they combine to destroy something? Let's take three unrelated regulations. Factories can't pollute the environment, vehicles have to undergo crash testing, and buildings above a certain height are not allowed in a particular area. Now we look at a local newspaper. It has to buy newsprint from a factory, the factory's cost…
Consider the vehicle safety regulations, for example. If they’re good, then the lives saved and injuries avoided outweigh the costs. The newspaper benefits from this by paying for fewer medical and funeral bills for on-the-job crashes, and that savings will be greater than the added cost to the vehicles.
As public regulators all over the world are busy pushing regulations (what else? that is their sole job after all) maybe it is time to stop and ask: are we losing more than we are gaining? Everything has a price and free markets are the only mechanism for determining that price. But regulations overwrite that price with one determined by politics and lobby and populism. This new price is paid by all no matter if we w…
This seems like a greatly oversimplified view of things. Regulations are tools. They’re not inherently good or bad. It depends on how you use them. If the bad regulations outweigh the good, the solution isn’t to give up on regulation, it’s to cut the bad ones. It doesn’t make sense to lump together regulations on the acceptable amount of lead in drinking water, regulations on operations of a commercial airline, and r…
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> Putting people who perform work we can do cheaper with automation on the unemployment line is a side-effect of a good thing. Think of what the first wave of industrialization brought us. In that case we should be taxing wages and using the money to subsidize automation. That way it's everyone paying for the benefits of automation rather than only those at the very bottom. > People can now invest time learning skill…
> There is no law against quitting your crappy job so you can learn a new trade. > Again, if people actually believed this and unemployment is really better than a crappy job then why don't they quit? Speaking from a German perspective there is such a law. They will cut your unemployment benefits if you can't prove you're hunting for a job, or just go around quitting them. Not sure about the states. We have a minimum…
Then doesn't the same thing happen to the person who loses their job to a minimum wage increase? You can't spend all day learning a new trade if you have to spend all day chasing jobs you're not qualified to do yet.
It seems like your quarrel is with the unemployment rules, e.g. maybe they should be replaced with a UBI.
> Low income customers? We have a minimum wage now remember? If at all it's gonna hurt richer customers who are now a little less rich compared to the rest.
Your argument is that raising consumer prices hurts rich people more than poor people?
> I was speaking of the burden places like Walmart etc. create because of indirect government subsidies.
I have a hard time faulting a company for hiring people who would otherwise be unemployed. And the subsidies are ostensibly there to help the employees. Who do you expect it to hurt more if we got rid of them, the company or the workers?
> There's a lack of logical connection between those two sentences, probably a third sentence missing in between?
The premise is that regulatory overhead is increasing unit costs. In response a company can do one of two things. If they don't raise prices then they maintain their customer volume but have reduced margins. If they do raise prices then they maintain their margins but suffer reduced customer volume. In both cases they make less money and the smaller company may no longer be making enough to cover their fixed costs.
> The point I seem to fail to bring across is that you're paying the higher prices for goods produced fairly RIGHT NOW. You're just not paying them at the counter, you're paying them with your taxes.
The direct cause of that is social assistance to low income people. It makes no sense to at the same time have a policy of providing assistance to the working poor and prohibit them from working at those wages. At least one of them is wrong.
When the alternative to $5 wages isn't higher wages but higher unemployment, the company paying the $5 wages isn't a drain in society -- it's reducing by $5/hr the amount of social assistance needed to keep those people from starving.
The real source of the problem is that there are people whose labor is not worth a living wage. But minimum wage doesn't change that. If there was someone willing to pay $20/hr then they wouldn't be working for $5/hr. Prohibiting them from working for low wages just makes them unemployed and even more reliant on social assistance.
If you want an actual solution, try policies that reduce the market price of necessities like housing and medicine, so that the wages of unskilled labor are survivable without the need for social assistance.
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This seems like a greatly oversimplified view of things. Regulations are tools. They’re not inherently good or bad. It depends on how you use them. If the bad regulations outweigh the good, the solution isn’t to give up on regulation, it’s to cut the bad ones. It doesn’t make sense to lump together regulations on the acceptable amount of lead in drinking water, regulations on operations of a commercial airline, and r…
Regulations increase the cost of entry, which means less competition, which means it hurts the free market. It really is as simple as that and you can most definitely group all regulations into the same category in this case.
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It's even worse. Everyone who you link to has the right to claim damages(in case they are press). So you will have to be careful who you link to since a single link could already fall into the new legislation depending on the member state.
Does anyone know how this "press" is defined in the proposal? More and more legal entities (governments, companies,...) seem to be moving to actively blurring lines so as to induce fines and damages. Suppose instead the proposal mandated any content hoster (press or not) to include a tag so that hosting software can be configured to suppress the inclusion of links to pages that contain the tag. Without such an explic…
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It seems pretty clear that the intent is for this to cover the current linking/snippeting practices. If it wasn't covered, there is no chance of this law providing publishers a new revenue stream. And what are those current practices? On Google News it appears to literally be just the title and maybe a tiny thumbnail image. On search it's those plus less than a sentence of text. It's pretty hard to see the intent her…
What about HN, which is a link + title?
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You can just have a `robots.txt` if you don't want Google to link to your content.
The issue is that sets a black and white option of not letting people find you through Google. But the alternative is letting Google scrape your content and give it to people directly from their site instead.
No, that is not the alternative. The alternative is to allow citations as they are allowed everywhere else, i.e. small fractions of the content with attribution.
For example, google currently may list the headline of an article and link to it. The proposal, which is based on a failed German law, is that google should pay for the privilege of sending viewers to newspapers this way.
Last time they tried google simply said "no, thanks. Then we'll not list you". Newspapers immediately caved and said they will give free access. End result: monopolies get free access and smaller potential competitors have to pay. The law completely and predictably backfired.
The, misguided IMO, hope now is that if it is an EU wide law, google will have to bow down and pay for the privilege of providing a google news like service.