Don't punish the behavior you want to see. Would we rather they defaulted there? Sure. But it's arguably an even better signal to see that they're willing to listen to their customers even when there is no direct financial incentive for them.
Their financial incentive is negative. They were hoping to force everyone to buy new speakers, driving sales. But if the community is able to get open source firmware to run spotifyd on them, there is a non-zero (not everyone, but it's non-zero) amount of people that will just not buy new speakers from them.
> Their financial incentive is negative. They were hoping to force...
Maybe?
People stuck with Bose bricks might show a preference for non-Bose replacements.
People who thought Bose speakers would stay useful longer might prefer Bose, or be willing to pay for a more expensive Bose speaker model.
(Yes, I agree that some PHB's at Bose were almost certainly imagining that their customers would be forced to re-purchase Bose speakers. I'm questioning the validity of their initial assumptions.)
From talking to friends and family, so n=10-ish, non-computer people have not realized that sticking computers in things means they die on computer lifetimes, not appliance lifetimes. No more switches that last for the life of the house; no more speakers that your kids can do modest maintenance to and keep using.
And, if I, a non-Bose customer, hear that Bose open sourced a previous version of their speaker, which gives me some confidence that a present purchase might be somewhat future-proofed, then I am more likely to buy a new Bose product vs a competitor who does not provide sources.
If they can make this OS story go viral, then they stand to have a lot of customers defect from their competitors even people who would never really care about open source.
It's not negative, though, or at least they don't think so. The fact that they are doing this OSS release means that they believe any loss of new sales would be dwarfed by a loss of goodwill if they'd bricked the old devices.
This is why I said "direct". This is an indirect financial incentive, and there are other indirect financial incentives at play here (as others have noted).
Public interest stories are left-leaning only in that they tend to oppose the wielders of centralized power, and centralized power is generally a right-leaning construct.
Not only does the bad tutorial have an in-universe justification; the ways in which it is bad are actually significant to the worldbuilding in multiple ways.
The missing information also encourages positive interactions among the community - newer players are expected to be missing lots of key information, so teaching them is a natural and encouraged element of gameplay.
I stopped playing the game awhile ago, but the tutorial always struck me as really clever.
> I think there's a massive difference between card packs - which have been as you describe for decades - and the recent boom in sports betting.
There is, until there isn't. MTG has been leaning drastically into tiered and ultra-premium products. Increasingly, it feels like Magic design and product is focused on extracting money from the whales at the price of hollowing out their playerbase.
It's difficult to draw a hard line between wholesome collecting and lootbox gambling, but it's hard not to notice that even the bastions of the collectible industry have been aggressively moving in the direction of the latter.
I have never been sure if collecting is wholesome. I think Pohl did show it as one example of rampant consumerist addiction in one of the books(can't remember which of the ones with marketing guys).
I would guess that collecting goes beyond wholesome once finding the products comes really hard and there is very high prices and extremely low rates involved.
Alternatively: ban the instant-gratification bets. No bets on the outcomes of partial games: one pitch, one at-bat, one inning or quarter or half. If you want to get extreme with it, scorelines only (points, moneyline, over/under).
Do they, though? The vig is 10%, very transparently shown in the odds, and paid immediately. It proves very little disincentive. The tax is paid annually and only if you win; for most people, it is 0%. Are we really going to argue that the tax is a serious factor in discouraging the behavior?
Taxing something almost always decreases usage. By how much depends on the rate and the elasticity of demand. Gambling demand is probably very inelastic, much like cigarettes and alcohol. (Your argument supports this too) If the rate is low too I can see your point about not having much effect. But it still has an effect. Excessive sin taxes can be the sign of a nanny state, but otherwise I agree with it. All taxes are bad anyways, some are just less worse.
When you describe a tax that is "paid annually and only if you win", that's plain generic income tax.
That's not the gambling-activity-specific taxes that Stoller's article discusses - typically applied to gambling businesses' revenues, not bet winners specifically.
Huh? Cigarette and alcohol taxes are levied on the vendor in exactly the same way a gambling tax is. Make your own alcohol and drink it yourself, share some with your friends, and you'll never pay an alcohol tax.
Cigarette and liquor taxes are levied on the purchaser, just like gas taxes. Gambling taxes are taxes on the gambling houses/platforms not excise taxes.
Bronze-die pasta has an obvious and substantial textural difference from teflon-die pasta. The stickiness of the bronze requires more force from the extruder, but results in a rougher surface on the pasta, because it literally sticks to the die.
Bronze-cut pasta holds sauce much better, especially for thinner sauces. It also makes your pasta water more starchy, since it loses more material during cooking. These things seem very obvious to me via my observations as a cook who uses both from time to time (but mostly the bronze stuff).
Both properties can be very useful (the first to everyone, the second just to those who use their pasta water in the sauce step).
It's good to question our assumptions from time to time, but there's no reason to just deny something like this with absolutely nothing to back it up.
I don't deny that it is beneficial (it clearly is, in my direct experience as well): I doubt that it is the highest determinant of quality, and suspect that even more basic properties like thickness have been systematically neglected and may be more consequential.
Sure, it would make it cheaper. Would that result in these companies employing more doctors to perform the same amount of care at higher quality, or would it result in them retaining the standard of care they're currently providing while taking home a larger profit margin?
There are a lot of hospitals where there is an endless supply people showing up to the ER with non-emergent stuff because it is the only place required to take them, and their number is only limited by wait time due to triage; they'll just leave if it takes too long as their life isn't threatened and they have something else to do.
You could hire a whole army of doctors and they'd still be there, word gets around. If the doctors are cheap enough to cover whatever you can get from debt collection agencies to sell off the debt they'll never pay, then you could hire a lot.
They can't sell the debt for uninsured non-emergent case for enough money to cover the doctor.
Cutting doctors means only the most prioritized triage cases makes it to doctors, which skews towards people that are employed or on medicare and the money can be recouped, and thus improves profitability.
It's an end-run against the requirement they take in the hordes of people with no insurance who show up to the ER for low-income cases and no way to pay it.
If doctors were so cheap as to be covered by the sales to debt collectors, the whole thing gets flipped, as it would be profitable to just hire armies of them to cover the hordes who come in with non-emergent cases.
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