Your parents, or at least your Grandparents probably remember that at one time the biggest retail store in America was the Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company - better known as "The A&P" It was so dominant a force in the market place that it attained brand/product awareness. So like a Victrola, or a Fridgedaire you didn't go to the super market - you went to the A&P.
The government fought the monopoly they had for fifty years and eventually won. Unfortunately like with taxation and public spending things that used to be understood as critically necessary are now considered luxuries. What happened there is a clear indication of how practices that used to be illegal are now legal and such legalities are ultimately to the detriment of us all.
The A&P started in the mid 19th Century as tea and coffee importers who, like Sears and Roebuck rapidly expanded their catalog of goods. What some might see as confusing is they were disliked in many quarters not because of their high prices but because of their low prices.
Here's useful way to look at events. For instance the civil war was fought to decide whether the US would be a manufacturing/industrial country or an agrarian country of gentlemen farmers. From the beginnings of the nation the question has been essentially that - and the Jeffersonian notion is the one of the independent small businesses and farmers - but it gets a little confusing. Because manufacturing has become service industries and as well farming is mostly done by big conglomerates.
I'm glad the north won the war but nevertheless many Americans are of the Jeffersonian tradition because we were refugees from countries where all the power and wealth was in a few hands, called the nobility. You can call it class warfare if you like, I don't mind, but the question has always been "Is the wealth going to be put into a few hands of supposedly wise people or is it going to be spread out into the hands of beer drinking illiterate yahoos?
I prefer the yahoos, myself, they are less dangerous and have a better sense of humor.
A&P and the Congress were at odds for over fifty years because there were tens of thousands of grocery stores that were put out of business. The owners of said stores tended to vote as did their neighbors and friends and so although on an ideological basis A&P was just using the economies of scale and "leverage" to undercut the local stores and this is competition, on a practical basis it meant a whole people were unemployed and unemployed and payed minimum wages and never had the chance to see their own small businesses grow into bigger businesses.
Congress replied to this problem with the Sherman Anti-Trust act and sure enough without the advantage of total market domination A&P eventually became what it is today, a much smaller firm.
Now compare this with Blockbuster the video store, which also put thousands of small competitors out of business and coincidentally imposed the artistic standards of Florida on the rest of the country. The VHS product has run it's cycle and is now obsolete and Blockbuster is selling off stores and downsizing - but one could suggest that if those thousands and tens of thousands of smaller video stores had been protected and allowed to survive many of them would have evolved into the next product cycles - video games, DVD's and what have you.
Blockbuster is only one example of a virulent economic disease that in common terms is called "eating your seed corn."
The principle applies to Walmart KMart, Home Depot, and many other firms, including NewsCo and Time Warner who do the same thing in media. Local ISP's cannot compete with national chains, even if, as the law was supposed to do, the chains were made to allow access to the main trunk lines.
To repeat my central point though, fifty years ago people understood that practical considerations had to have an impact on the law. Thus NBC was broken into two networks for instance.
To ignore such common sense in the name of some imaginary hypothetical competition boggles the mind.
It would be nice if the people that did the work got the lion's share of the pay.
Competition is good, it keeps things changing and growing, but firms that have explicitly stated their goals as getting as much market share as possible are not interested in competition.
As J.P. Morgan said "I like a little competition, but I like a combination better" (- A combination was the term used for an agreement among firms to set prices at a given level.)
part two..
And now for the geek portion of our program
Can you copyright recursive search algorithms?
It seems unlikely because there's no hard and fast line between
them and simplemath.
I know many may think of us as being scatterbrained
but in actuality we are right and the doubters are wrong because fractals,
recursive data mining , schilingers method of music composition, turing's cracking enigma,
the fibonnaci cycles and Keplers ellipses are based on the same principle - the inward or outward spiral -
the only difference is we now understand it happens even without gravity
which is to say that mass follows mathematical paths as opposed to the other way around
Okay so I'm restructuring a hard drive and removing (hypothetically of course :-) a hundred movies at a gig each and replacing them with a hundred gigs of synthesizer presets at 20 k each (Eg a lot) which means that the next time I do a virus scan instead of taking a few minutes it will take a few hours because there's so many individual data locations.
So when the machine takes over the world it will have two reasons to focus on up front transactions and not back room storage.
One is obvious the cash flow return is immediate and not time dependent and the other is the absolute (meaning percentage) likelihood that stored data will become eventually become unavailable - a current transaction is verified at both ends plus, as in the movie verses preset example given the same percentage of loss, be it however small, obviously the more data you have the more will be lost and the deeper into the system it will reside which means the greater the cost of retrieval.
We're talking grocery stores and supermarkets here.
The question as to which is a better defense against an EMP can be regarded in the original Norad way - which I call the Japanese House method- Instead of making a house that won't fall in earthquake make one that can be easily replaced.
Myth is the original code of humankind.
One sometimes gets the impression that the elites still think they have all the time in the world. It reminds me of that saying about how a man goes broke slowly and then he goes broke very quickly
Tamlin
- and now after being hunted and harrassed and haunted and tortured for two years we bring you the ALF.
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http://www.megaupload.com/?d=32X3EBQG
Copy and paste please
The Lord done kicked my ass from here to kingdom come and back. Oh dat po' mule. Muley muley. Him want his props. And despite all he done to all of us he wants us to love him! What fo' dat done we axe? I axe you - what fo? But cha don know and needer do ah. Sometimes we fall from grace and descend to meer 'spect but dat no suffice for salvation. No. Is godda be lub.
And da 'leet say 'Life make all things ugly" thinkin on they can bear the weight of that knowing whereas the common folk cain't. Dey don't need 'lusions. Dey freeze of confusions. Don't need no hebben, no hellzapoppin, no nutting jus circumstance and context, yit if that so then I'm not leet. I'm just trying to find love. Forgive me lord if I fail you and I don't wanna make it up there next time and I appologize coldly like the sun in da winta.
And I'm trying. Cain't be dat hard. Some buddy must a made it out. And I hope so too. Sure nuff n' yes I do. I'm tryin'.
Peace
A
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