Wtf? Ok Who Listed This One....


I was thinking, maybe this is nintendo/Sony's way of buying out OP. Craig and team are themselves incorruptible, so instead they corrupt and remove the user base by paying inflated prices for units on eBay. Yup, it's a conspiracy i tells ya!
 
hedwards said:
Actually, I know a good deal about capitalism.
Good start, lets see what "a good deal" means...

From Slavery and indentured servitude
Ok... now you just lost me. So capitalism which is fundamentally about trade between parties agreeing on something to their mutual benefit and not based on coercion is now in support of slavery, a system that forced people to work for nothing??? That's not capitalism.

to the modern piracy of sub-living wages and illegal immigration.
What is "sub-living"? It sounds odd to me. So you are saying people are accepting less than they believe the work they are doing is worth? Why? Because no one will pay them more? Hmm.. seems odd since there are definitely jobs out there that pay more and others that pay less.

To suggest that the rich have earned what they've got by pure hardwork and intelligence is to misunderstand the whole problem.
The rich earned what they got because either A) they had parents/etc who earned it or B) they were able to convince people in mutual agreements to pay them a lot of money for what they offered. Unless any of those were done by force, I have no problems with what was earned. If they used government subsidies/etc. I have huge problems with what they have, because they stole it from others through taxation.

If you truly believe that a free market is a level playing field, then you haven't studies any legitimate books on capitalism. Capitalism is much more like high seas piracy than what you're suggesting.
Legitimate books = agrees with you apparently. There is no level playing field period. Each human has different available skills, resources, etc. We should only be equal before the law. Demanding equality of result destroys freedom, and only ensures that at best we all are equally impoverished. You create incentives that destroy peoples desire to work and cooperate.

Adam Smith for instance was very openly and very unapologetically opposed to the kind of system that we've created in America. He was deeply opposed to monopoly power and was very much of the mindset that a true free market economy would inevitably lead to a single source monopoly of everything that could be traded. But yet a couple hundred years ago, what do we have? Monopolies everywhere. A small number of corporations controlling huge portions of the economy and using their great power to screw over the workers that created the wealth in the first place.
Large industries are good at using government regulations to protect them from smaller competitors, which is largely a source of the problem you are talking about here. Monopolies (insofar as you mean large businesses with a huge market share) are not a problem if they aren't forced by any sort of government intervention. Why? Because if they are selling a product for too high a price, individuals and new businesses will come into existence to seek profit by offering the same product at lower cost. Monopolies always exist in new business areas for example (where products are new and didn't exist before). Monopolies are only able to use the supposed huge power they have when the government allows them to do so, and there are numerous examples (trade unions, licensing of certain professions, patent & copyright law, etc.)

Karl Marx, as misunderstood as he is by the conservative movement had no issues with capitalism. He did however have grave concerns about treating individuals as capital. In fact while he marveled at the accomplishments that capitalism provided, he was similarly horrified by the justification that capitalists made for abuses of the proletariat.
Karl Marx believed capitalism was a stepping stone towards a future of collectivism. In every case collectivism has been tried it's created incentives that created leaders such as Stalin and Mao. It's a perverse system. Humans are innately individual, innately have their own desires (greed), and function best when left to their own devices and decisions. You'll find few who would prefer to give up their freedom to live a life someone else demands. You don't do it either, you just think it's better for other people to do it.

Taxation is theft. It's taking from someone based on the authority of... what? Based on the authority of democracy? Since when do we give people the right to steal? How exactly can individuals grant rights to a government through voting that they don't have naturally? It's nonsense.
 
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Kicker said:
bustaballs said:
bustaballs list of Austrian economists.

If you were seeking to completely undermine any trust the historically informed might have in your opinion on economics, then mission accomplished.

If you were seeking to use trite one-liners to undermine any trust that people have in your ability to produce a cogent argument, then mission accomplished.
 
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Creature XL said:
Why is everybody talking of "Taking risks"?
If Pandora would have failed, or will fail(!) OPT makes even more debts and pay us our money back.
So, I can't see the risk.

In theory, so we are told, they would take a huge hit and pay us our money back. They have also said many other things (Two Months) which have proven to be... on the optimisitc side, rather than correct. There is risk involved in trusting that they would live up to their word, especially when they repeatedly (for whatever reason) were not living up to their word. Circumstances beyond their control? Sure - so what is preventing the possibility that there would be "circumstances beyond their control" which would prevent them paying us all back? Like having undervalued the amount of insurance? Having been late on a single insurance payment? Having not had the fine print of the insurance studied closely enough? And so on.

When you give money over to someone on The Internet on the basis of a promise, it is a risk. How much of a risk? That's really for each person to evaluate for themselves.



As for the "purity" of Pandora - Craig is a businessman. He'd love to make a ton of money off Pandora and go on to make successive replacements every 18 months, I think it was. ED seems a bit more "Open Source" oriented, but he'd be quite willing to make a ton of money too. MWeston has his own company name - not OpenPandora - emblazoned onto each motherboard, so seems definately to have made a commercial-style claim to the heart of the machine. DaveC, like ED, could well be in it MORE for "doing a good job" than for making money, but who turns money away?

There are community members who have put effort into making Pandora a success. They come in a variety of shapes and sizes, and have varying degrees of impact. At the "top" (from my perspective) we have people like notaz who throw their time and effort in for free in working on the firmware and OS. Vital. Purity of spirit right there, I guess.

Then we have people like torpor, writing and/or porting programs/applications/games. If Pickle doesn't have any financial reward he'd make a superb example of this category of community member too. Probably just as vital as OS/firmware developers, because without ported and homebrew software, this would be a very niche product with only geek appeal.

You can drill right down to the people who, with no financial incentive or programming skills, contributed wallpaper towards the graphical side of the Pandora "package" to make it all that it could be. Out of the goodness of their hearts, to make the Pandora as appealing as possible.

Those are all contributions of good spirit, all open and just and nice and lovely - and without any of them the Pandora would be a poorer experience. Yet, with only them, there would be no Pandora. Because one of the major things OpenPandora (the company) needed to get the Pandora to market was money. Lots of it. There have been times where they have looked very risky. Very risky indeed. When ED has been running around like a headless chicken trying to find his own head on a floor littered with them, because of the worry of customers cancelling due to yet another failure to deliver the Pandora, yet another delay, yet another broken "not a promise, we never said it was a promise". While OpenPandora Team members have put their own money into the pot (at the cost of some house remortgaging, I understand), that was nowhere near enough to make Pandora come true. Customers have provided that money, and they provided it basicaly on faith.

Anyone who bought more than one did so at their own risk. They almost certainly (almost because they could be rich and buying for friends and relatives) hoped to be able to sell one or more units from the get-go - but they were also doing something that OpenPandora desperately needed, and fronted up cash. At least one member - more I believe - placed more orders later on when OpenPandora was struggling financially. Think about that. It's possible that without people who placed multiple orders to try and ensure the project went through, that the Pandora project could be something that just fell on its face. Hero? No - but certainly not scum. Possibly one of a very few "saviours" of the project? Maybe. Certainly very, VERY strong supporters of the project, and NOT entirely profit-driven.

As/if OpenPandora get their act together and Pandoras start rolling off the assembly line reliably, the current situation of "low availability" will ease slightly. While early eBayed Pandoras go for near $2000, later ones will go for less. It's possibly that by the time Jumpman (was it Jumpman we're all up in arms about this week?) sells his last units, they could be going for a considerable loss, selling under retail value. I hope not, but it's a possibility. These early-order "profits" don't actually return him to profit yet, necessarily, because OpenPandora still have a chunk of his money - hundreds, possibly thousands of dollars of it. Which they've used to help make the project a reality.

Few sensible, intelligent people do things for one reason and one reason alone. If Jumpman had bought all those Pandoras purely and simply out of the desire to help OpenPandora, IMHO he'd have been an idiot. Of course he should want to sell them, and of course if at all possible there should be some profit involved - as much as possible, in fact! But if profit were all the motivation he had, OpenPandora have been a very unwise looking investment opportunity from the start, and have been looking worse every month.

Jumpman. Not a hero, and not a douche. He's just this guy...
 
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Monk said:
-----Snip------
Jumpman. Not a hero, and not a douche. He's just this guy...
+1 and everything you said I totally agreed with
 
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DaveC said:
I bet all of those early first batchers that cancelled are pissed now :p

BTW: Where are all of those vaporware twats now?

Nah. Not pissed at all. We're just feeling sorry for people you know that want one that'll be waiting 3+ months. Or they can pay £1000+ to get one now :lol:

I really hope they'll fix the batch ordering problem at some point in the near future. The gp2x and Wiz were never an issue to get hold of.
 
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Iorgy77 said:
He is still a scalper though.

And scalpers are douches.

Ah! the "So nerr" argument. Yes - I hadn't thought of a counter to that well thought-out position.

But... doesn't "scalping" rather rely on not only "buying cheap" but also then turning around and "selling expensive" rather quickly, as in minutes if not seconds, OR when the amount of demand exceeds the supply? At the time Jumpman placed his orders, neither of those conditions were met. He left his money with OpenPandora for months and months - in fact, I beleive they still have some! Hardly the "fast turnaround" of the first type of scalper. In the USA the term is also supplied to touts, people who buy at the "sale price" when demand is higher than supply. However, although there was a strict limit on the number of Pandoras in batch one (a strict limit which was quickly raised to another strict limit when demand approached supply) the "demand" bit was not actually met until recently - until after, in fact, Jumpman ordered his units. So when he placed his orders, he wasn't buying from a pool of product too small to meet demand in order to push up the price and make a killing.

AFAICS he doesn't actually meet any definition of "scalper" I've come across (except the "because he is" or "So Nerr" version). OpenPandora welcomed his orders because they provided money that they needed. Money that other customers were NOT offering at the time. That isn't how scalping works. If Jumpman is a scalper of Pandoras, he seems not to be very good at it :(

I wonder. I have a hypothetical. Let's imagine that each Pandora he sells is sold for progressively less, until overall he makes no profit at all. Let's go further - let's imagine that, overall, he makes a loss compared with just keeping his money in a bank. Will he then have been a glorious supporter and free-love financier of the Pandora project, or would he still be a douche?
 
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I am not saying "So nerr" I just don't agree with your point of view. Is there room for an alternative point of view here?

I disagree with all of your above post except this bit: "But... doesn't "scalping" rather rely on not only "buying cheap" but also then turning around and "selling expensive""
The rather quickly as in seconds isn't true at all as concert or sports tickets go on sale months before the event.

Scalpers or "touts" buy the tickets while there is still availability and then sell later when they aren't available.

He bought the pandoras when there were orders available and he is selling them now when there aren't more available and there is a delay on receiving them.

In my eyes this is exactly the same thing.

You say he was supporting the OP team? The OP team is not making anything on the first batch as they have told us many times. They also told us they are making as many as people ordered, they raised the original pre order over the 3000 limit because there were more than 3000 orders. So however many Jumpman ordered he isn't supporting the team at all, if he didn't buy them, they wouldn't have made them.

If he makes a loss he is still a scalper. Scalpers take the same risk, concerts might not be popular, sports events might be on days with bad weather etc...

In my eyes it is exactly the same thing. I have said my point of view, if you want to insult me for it go ahead, I am not using the "so nerr" defence, I actually do not agree with your point of view. Shocking as it may be to you.
 
Ah, I see people are begrudging people with money in this thread as well. I already posted my two cents in another thread. I'll just link it here.


XxionxX said:
<rant>

I don't get what the big deal about people selling their Pandora on eBay is. Some people seem to be really upset with the eBay sellers and the OP team. Why? OP has every right to sell as many units they want to whom ever they want. Moreover when the fundraising started I would bet the team was HOPING people would buy extras and sell them on eBay. Why? Because it's good publicity, and it would raise more funds in the beginning when they were needed most. Our little project isn't exactly an Xbox360 media shitstorm clusterfuck, with so much money coming in trough the door we had investors begging to take their money. I for one am glad the eBay sellers do what they do, it has helped me get my Pandora. The Pandora is the first computer I have ever bought. I have no job, and no money. The money I used for my Pandora was from my last job before I was laid off. I would give more if I could but I have this problem where I need to eat at least twice a day, I hear it's called life. I know every last order helped the OPT pay off their debts and give life to a wholly unique and different machine. I know I worked hard for my money and I bet the sellers and buyers did too. Are you trying to say their investments weren't theirs to keep? Did they not earn their money in a righteous fashion? Or are you upset that YOU did not invest in such a fashion? Is there something wrong with a transaction above your pay grade? Don't you want your Pandora now, and if you had the money to spend wouldn't you speed up the process?

</rant>

Edit: Grammar
 
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Monk said:
Creature XL said:
Why is everybody talking of "Taking risks"?
If Pandora would have failed, or will fail(!) OPT makes even more debts and pay us our money back.
So, I can't see the risk.

In theory, so we are told, they would take a huge hit and pay us our money back.

[...lots of good writing...]

Jumpman. Not a hero, and not a douche. He's just this guy...

Indeed. Excellently put. Applause!
 
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Xanas said:
If you were seeking to use trite one-liners to undermine any trust that people have in your ability to produce a cogent argument, then mission accomplished.

The hard thing about being a Keynesian nowadays is that you don't feel much like arguing theory when you could instead as gesture about broadly and say "See?! What did I tell you?"

But the hard thing about pushing something educational through asynchronous casual public text-based group conversation is that they're far more useful for publishing opinions. "I think these books are good books" and "I disagree" are equally opinionated and groundless, but no one should mind that we don't instead deliver dueling economic theory in between discussions of hobby electronics being sold on Ebay.

Which is not to say I don't appreciate the people who are doing just that. But while I care about my reputation here as an at least occasional non-idiot and non-jerk, I don't really care about my reputation as a teacher, and I'm not concerned overmuch by folks here being mistaken on academic matters they take pretty seriously. If they were close friends, or people that I saw regularly, I would have a chance to change their minds, and would endeavor to. But they have no reason to really listen to me, so I just register disapproval, adding very slightly to the social pressures...while at the same time encouraging their persecution complex and strengthening their delusions, but that's the price I pay for being a social nervous wreck.

...And yet! Look at that! You got me trying to be all informative and crap. Very clever.

ACTUALLY TALKING ABOUT THREAD NOW

Ebay sales are going to happen, regardless of people's theories or preferences, and their effects will not be immediately predictable. Eventually, we'll be able to say whether they hurt or helped (or made no difference), and one side can proudly say "What did I tell you?"
 
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Kicker said:
Ebay sales are going to happen, regardless of people's theories or preferences, and their effects will not be immediately predictable. Eventually, we'll be able to say whether they hurt or helped (or made no difference), and one side can proudly say "What did I tell you?"


Nah - if watching politics on telly has taught me nothing else, it's that all sides will be able to say "See? Told you so!" with equal vigour, regardless of any outcome.
 
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Kicker, thanks for the reply. It was my intention to get you to elaborate a bit, because your words were such that you felt you were so absolutely right, but didn't explain why.

I have a better understanding of the why now (you feel history, current history even, gives credence to your view in an obvious way). What I can't agree with however is your view of the matter. On the contrary, the Keynesian analysis of the current problems with the economy is in my view fundamentally flawed.

Krugman for example called for Greenspan to create another bubble a few years ago. He believed the low interest rate set by the Fed at the time was a good policy to get us out of the slump created by the DotCom bust.

Well, he got his wish. We had a bubble, and it burst, and the effects were bad, and still being felt today. The effects were almost certainly worse than the slump that would have been created had the Fed not cut interest rates to such a low level, and had Congress not passed bills designed to get people into housing they couldn't afford.

I'm not sure if you are a fan of Krugman or not, but he is a premier Keynesian analyst. He did not predict or even come close to predicting the current problems. Only the Austrians came close, and while they have been wrong about some things this is in their view because the market has too many factors to accurately predict the timing of events.

Keynesian believe that you should control the market by making fiscal & monetary policy changes, so it's far more important that they be right in their predictions and assessments every time, and they have failed epically on this.
 
God Ginrai said:
Mjlink said:
So you want to take more money from poor people popping out kids doing nothing? How about giving them a job, rather than outsourcing EVERYTHING?

Oh yes, because they are all just innocent people who haven't been able to get a job. -_- ' You know, some of them are just lazy asses as well. (not all of them obviously) And also, outsourcing tends to create more jobs, it is only bad media that makes it look like it takes them away.

-God Ginrai
My argument was based on the taxes. Considering the unemployment rate and state of our infrastructure, we could pull out of the 2 wars we're in to give out of work American's jobs. Outsourcing tends to create more jobs? WTF are you smoking? Media schmedia, I like customer service that can understand my problem and fix it. Our media sucks, bought and paid for just like the politicians.

As far as unemployment, its not like you can just collect, there are laws and regulations. You can't collect unemployment unless you've worked a job for a long enough time to be able to qualify as well as earn enough money to qualify. Just remember that the military industrial complex controls welfare in America and they make a profit on poor people. The military industrial complex also controls our media.

So suck on that for a minute and come back with something clever telling me that I'm wrong.

Link

EDIT: TYPO
 
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Mjlink said:
Considering the unemployment rate and state of our infrastructure, we could pull out of the 2 wars we're in to give out of work American's jobs.
I agree with you, but not for your reasons. A lot of Americans now involved in the military would get out of the military with less need for it (I'm not for just getting out of the 2 wars, but removing the bases abroad that do nothing for us but drain our coffers). Initially, this lower size military would mean... less jobs, not more. But, the jobs that the military personnel would move in would be productive jobs, producing consumer goods or supplying services that actually do what consumers want rather than wasting resources on blowing things up or flying around from place to place using ammunition/etc. which we have to pay for and produce.

Outsourcing tends to create more jobs? WTF are you smoking?
You are right to question the reasoning. In truth, outsourcing does a lot of things, and it's an oversimplification to state it creates more jobs. What it does do is rearrange the structures of production in a way that's designed by the business to achieve lower costs. The business uses the saved funds to expand their operations elsewhere, implying in most cases that they do end up employing people in the new areas.

Now if they were over-leveraged (had too much debt burden or not enough sales) then the outsourcing may streamline the business and not result in any jobs at all, it may really be a net loss, but in general most businesses are streamlining production in order to decide how to expand their business into another area.

Regardless of the reasoning outsourcing can be a good thing to do. It's also done "in country" in many cases (you outsource to a business that is also in the US, but is able to achieve your goals cheaper than you can). In a lot of cases it's done to eliminate overpriced union jobs.

Sometimes outsourcing is done poorly as well, when businesses underestimate the costs or disadvantages of going with the new workers. I'd argue Dell's customer service has tanked and it's probably lost money on India more than it ever gained.

Our media sucks, bought and paid for just like the politicians.
Everything is bought and paid for. It's just a question of how. If it were directly under the control of government, that'd be worse in my view. The government exists to use force to attain ends, it is the "military" part of the military-industrial complex. One thing it should never have is the media on it's side. Unfortunately, because many media personalities support welfare policies that can only exist with big government, you get a combination of bad systems. Nevertheless, I think it's still better than a directly state-run media.

One reason for this is if people don't like it, it fails. A lot of the traditional media companies are dying right now, like newspapers, etc. I'd argue the reason for this is people are tired of listening to them.

Just remember that the military industrial complex controls welfare in America and they make a profit on poor people.
Solution: get rid of the welfare system. It's a system of slavery, dependency, and can lead to nothing but bad on the whole. The few cases it actually helps are the exception. It provides disincentive to work and incentive to game the system.
 
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