Your comment is so isolated from the real world, and the very fundamentals of humanity, that I have to wonder how old you are and if you even have a girlfriend. Let alone kids.
The comment you wrote is something I would have written 17 years ago on a Prodigy bulletin board forum after I just finished reading some selected essays of Ayn Rand.
Well to plays devil's advocate, the coal miner is working in a coal mine because he did not get a superior education.
You can argue about why, but I am willing to bet (I don't know anyone working at Zynga) that many of these employees still have tens of thousands of dollars in college loans and seeing the sacrifices they made to get into a position in order to pay them off, erased in a matter of weeks, makes them feel like trapped rats.
I never really like these comparison though because why is a ditch digger better or worse than a computer programmer? Both hold basically the same desires. Why should one's misfortune be less important than another? They both work just as hard?
No it is sent to Soundexchange, and is split 50/50 with artist and label. It is the performance royalty.
It is a different royalty than publishing royalty which is BMI/ASCAP and those monies are sent directly to the label and they decide how to dole it out.
FYI terrestrial radio pay's 0% of revenue for performance royalties, Satellite Radio pays about 8% of revenue and Pandora pays around 50%
This unfair system of royalty payments were set up by the RIAA mafia in the mid 90's to discourage Internet radio since it would be a direct competitor to the old guard.
That is why there is current legislation introduced 4 weeks ago to bring parity to the royalty system. Why should a song that is played on FM radio pay a different set of royalties than one played on Satellite or one streamed on the Internet?
I personally have received several checks from internet streaming, for some big hit songs I played on as a session musician, yet those same songs, which were played tens of millions of times on terrestrial radio, paid me NOTHING, because terrestrial radio does not pay performance royalties.
"But, I just fail to see how they are going to get a strong user base"
Why not some integration with Pandora, where you can create user specific radio stations based off of the band's Myspace profile, that is also linked to their tour schedule etc etc?
Then all Pandora users who have a station created from that band can be notified either though a push notification or e-mail when they are playing a club within a 30 mi radius?
Integrating with the current Pandora userbase would fix the "how will they build a userbase?" and then Pandora would have another venue to access unsigned bands that they can promote through their Music Genome Project.
The NYTimes is the official mouthpiece for the US government, no matter who is in the White House. They will never be allowed to fail. (until some other mouthpiece for the White House emerges)
Before you 'junk' me, why not read the words the editor of the NYTimes, Bill Keller, spoke 2 years ago:
That was required reading at the conservatory I went to years ago. (Not by the teachers, among us classmates. We made everyone read that we interacted with)
Got to play with Kenny at a jam thing a decade ago. Absolutely amazing experience.
There is so much that I can extrapolate on this subject, but I believe the greatest hurdle for a serious musician is that after you master all the dexterity, independence and music theory, the biggest hurdle is your own fucking self.
All those things are great, but I stopped using them when I realized they can freeze my money, or remove money from a linked checking account for whatever reason they decide and I have almost no recourse except to hire a very expensive lawyer or hope I can start a viral campaign about my money being stolen by Pay Pal.
And since they are not a "bank" they are not regulated by the same laws as other banks, and credit cards.
Bottom line, they lost my trust, and nothing that you have listed regains that trust for me.
I'm not a criminal, I am a a pretty mundane guy actually, but of course we live in a society that every single one of us breaks some small law every day.
Which is why I stopped using Facebook.
I also stopped using Twitter to tweet. I still use it to follow news sources, I just don't actively tweet. I did that after the NYPD won a court case to see all the private messages you send on Twitter.
I also don't comment much at all on blogs, and social sites like this one or Reddit anymore. (I use to be a top 10 contributor over at Reddit. At least that is what some metric said a few years ago when someone listed the top ten most popular usernames. That account is deleted now)
I am slowly pulling out. I have a deep distrust of the current surveillance state in the United States. I remember reading a story about a guy who posted a quote from fight club on his Facebook status and a few hours later in the middle of the night the NYPD was busting in his door and he spent 3 years in legal limbo over it. (Might have been NJ police anyways, red flags)
You start piecing together these things, and you start to realize that your thoughts and ruminations about life, the universe, and the mundane, can be used against you at any moment and can completely strip you of your liberty and freedom, and any happiness you may have had.
I am gonna be completely honest, I am scared to express myself any longer on the Internet in any fashion. I don't trust it any longer. I don't trust the police, I don't trust the FBI, I don't trust the federal government, and I also don't trust, nor have faith, in the justice system in the United States.
Well the credit card example is not new. I remember reading, in the NYTimes, about several people who had their credit limits reduced significantly after the 2008 crash, and the reasoning they were told was the type of places they used their credit cards, and usually it had to do with certain bars in certain neighborhoods where many others who used those establishments defaulted on their credit card bills. I believe the other method employed by these banks were to increase the minimum payment substantially as well.
This article does not really reveal anything that has not been already well documented, and most likely on the NYTImes.
I sold a car on Craiglist once, and I will never do it again. You open yourself up to some potentially dangerous (life threatening) situations.
To me a "potential" loss of 2 grand that I would incur by trading my car in at a dealer is worth the time saved, and safety saved. Also all the paper work is done correctly. To me that is another potential "come back to bite you in the you know what" problem averted.
I also live in the East Bay CA, and there have been a huge increase in violence and theft associated with selling cars on Craigslist. It is also not just cars, I have had a few bad experiences on both Craigslist and Ebay in the last 12 months and as a result I have not used either in months.
To me, I am willing to pay a perceived premium from a retailer (like Amazon with free shipping and no hassle return policy) than deal with the BS I have had to deal with on Craiglsit and Ebay.
4 year to vest for most companies here so if you were hired in winter of 2008 into spring of 09 all of those shares will be vested by time the lock up expires.
That is assuming they file next week go through the 3-4 month quiet period and revisions to their S-1 and then IPO late spring, maybe June and then the lock up expires in December 2012.
livefyre does that. If you go to TalkingPointsMemo.com and check out their comment section you can see it in action.
In my opinion it is a little messy only because when you load a page only the top few comments load, but as you scroll down to read more comments, comments that are replies to earlier comments start popping up, and it gets a bit overwhelming trying to follow a comment thread.
I like the idea, I jut think the execution need work.
Twitter did not exist then, so I think it is obvious to the people who read this website how a tag like that would be there now.