some say that the future will be app-based and that domain-names and tlds will be a thing of the past, we'll see.
I know a lot of people who say they hate squatters, then they have an "awesome idea" for a project, they'll register 10 domains, the project is never finished and they put their page on sedo in the hope someone clicks on an ad or buys the domain and they won't let go because it's just $10 a year and maybe they'll someday finish their page.
I honestly don't get the hate for squatters, they registered the domain, they were quicker than others and why should they sell their domainname just because someone else wants it badly? that's not how business works.
if you really want or even need a domainname then offer $3k and you'll get it, otherwise look for alternatives, but stop whining
"It's how business works" isn't a justification. A business model being legal and profitable does not make it ethical.
My understanding is, the intention behind society's laws and social norms is for all legal and profitable business models to serve the common good in some small way. What good do squatters do the world, in any way, shape, or form, whatsoever? The effect they have on the world is for good projects to be harder for people to use, by taking up all the good domains. That makes this a bug in our society, that I, at least, would appreciate being addressed.
If you register 10 domains and your project doesn't happen, don't put it on Sedo, let the domain expire like your project did. If you put the domain up for sale, you're already committing to not use the domain to "someday" finish your project.
I've registered a healthy number of domains over the years for projects that didn't go anywhere, including most recently a brandable two-syllable domain that contained two search terms that described the business. I didn't park it, and if after it became obvious I didn't need it if anyone genuine had approached, I would have let them have it. I let it go when it expired, and it immediately got snapped up by a domainer who is now asking $K for it. I don't think your suggested approach solves the problem.
Domain camping is scummy because it rewards specialization in a skill that adds no discernable value whatsoever to society. It is the definition of leeching off of other people's work. That it's legal and "how business works" is irrelevant to whether it's worthwhile. In cases where they hop on accidentally expired domains (this is popular) are effectively legal forms of blackmail.
Yes, speculating in general is a zero-value-add activity except in that it sometimes makes markets more efficient/liquid. I would argue that domain squatters don't even make the domain market more liquid at all, because ICANN is an extremely-easily-accessible seller, and the squatters rarely provide the service of buying a domain from someone who has improved it/made it popular/etc.
But in general, I have little respect for most people who make their money via speculation due entirely to demand outstripping supply as in the case of event tickets and boom real estate markets. Basically, anytime someone is extracting money from the economy en masse without providing much/anything in return, is when you should be mad. Scalpers and people who buy a ton of land in a high-demand market just to sit on it rather than developing it definitely qualify, so yeah, I'd be mad at both.
It's not much, but domain squatters do provide 1 value.
By selling the domains closer to their true market value it means when a domain do get bought, it'll be because the domain will be part of a more profitable business.
Imagine if when thefacebook.com wanted to purchase "Facebook.com" domain because their business is expanding quickly and profitably. They ask the owner of "Facebook.com" for the domain.
One of the following two things might happen:
1. The owner is a domain squatter and sells it to thefacebook.com for $5000.
2. The owner is a 13 year old kid who bought the domain and put a couple of pictures of his cat's faces on it. as well a couple of adsense ads. Refuses to sell for anything less than 0.5 million dollars because he really likes the domain name.
Arguably in this case the domain squatter did provide some value to society. The thing with squatters is they are always willing to sell for the right price. Other types of domain owners are not so predictable. In particular, domains with established businesses are unlikely (I'm guessing) to sell for anything less than the value of the entire business, even though that business may be less profitable and less value-adding than a business proposed by a potential acquirer of the domain. If the domain was squatted instead, the less profitable business may not have bought it at all, leaving it for the more profitable business.
Whether this value is significant enough to be respected is another question, but I have no doubt that it does exist.
Heh interesting idea, but I'm pretty sure the kid could be convinced to sell for $5000, probably much less - there aren't many kids out there that would scoff at multiple years' worth of allowance and lawn mowing money just falling in their lap. I think a market composed of people actually using the resource can set fair market pricing without the involvement of speculators. Domain speculators/squatters literally only drive the price of doing real things up.
why should it be worthwhile and why should it add value to society? if registering were free i'd see your point or if not everybody were allowed to register
how would you play football? for every goal a team scores you have to score an own-goal or let the others score because it would be unfair otherwise?
Football is a competitive zero-sum game. Someone wins, someone loses.
The world isn't like that at all. Everyone having enough to eat is strictly better than some people starving and some people having twice as much to eat.
Football is not an end in itself. People play it because it's a fun social activity. You can easily play football in a vicious way which, while still entirely within the rules and increases your chance of winning, diminishes the enjoyment and social connection which brought people together for the game in the first place.
Similarly, economic activity is not an end in itself, and economic strategies should be critically examined for what they contribute and diminish in the communities where they're adopted.
Kickstarter let's you basically preorder a product that lacks investors.
Being a startup investor has become the game rich people love to play. There are people who'll fund anything in return for a small percentage of the company in the hopes it might be the next Google/Facebook/Paypal ...
Billionaires don't want to be in the smallprinted section of the forbes-list, they want to be "legends" like Peter Thiel or Andy Bechtolsheim and want their name in the history books
This has nothing to do with their politics, it is simply the fact that they offer an alternative, people will vote for them because they don't feel represented by the other parties.
They are new, they are cool, they have an "anti-authoritarian" vibe, they will achieve nothing and be forgotten in a couple of years.
The funny thing is, the "Greens" are considered old, they have achieved nothing (there's still a massive oil dependency, there are still nuclear reactors, ...) and now they panic :)
Edit: the Pirates can gain traction by promising people "if we only had the power, we could do this or that" and they can increase their popularity by simply critisizing the current parties in power ("we would have it done some other way, we would have [insert popular opinion]") but in the end they will change nothing, just read up on the history of the Greens and just replace the name with Pirates
Claiming that the Greens achieved nothing is rather ridiculous. They achieved a lot of things (most importantly that protecting the environment has become an issue none of the other parties can simply ignore). That they did not achieve everything they wanted at some point is the nature of democracy (and reality).
It's true that the Pirate Party is right now getting attention and votes through hype and protest voters, and that they choose their stances based on ideals rather than realism. They'll have all kinds of problems when these things change (as they will have to).
But the Greens are a perfect example for a new party that pulled through all this and became firmly established because their core issue is important enough.
Disclaimer: I voted for the Pirates last time I could.
It sounds you are with the Greens from your statement (Disclaimer 2: I voted for them in the years before).
Saying that the Pirates are basing their stances on idealistic views might be fine. Using that as a contrast to a party that more or less embodied idealistic (and sometimes unrealistic) positions for as long as I followed their way seems awkward to me.
Yes, the Greens matured. I .. think one of the reasons is that there's a generational gap now. Around me, Greens are represented by people in their 40s-50s that - while still believing in the core environmental values - gave up a little and made peace with a more realistic (as you put it) stance.
The Pirates, for me, are what the Greens probably (wasn't there, in my early 30s here) were for my parents generation..
My bottom line: I agree that the Greens are/were important. But it doesn't make sense to ignore the similarities in 'idealism', the youth factor etc. - the Pirates are what the Greens couldn't be. It's a failure of the Greens that they couldn't capture the young generation. In spirit they are similar. In practice, the Greens grew up. Became mature, parents (or grand parents) and (Disclaimer 3: obviously this whole piece is one big opinionated mess) old and boring.
I actually have the same voting history as you and agree perfectly with most of what you wrote, except for one thing:
The Pirates are very similar to what the Greens were. They may "mature" in the same way, or in a different way, or they may disintegrate, but just like the Greens, they definitelly will not forever be the hip, rebellious party that voters flock to who are disillusioned by established parties.
I disagree that greens did not achieve much.
They have completely changed the political discourse in germany.
After 30 years of the greens being in the Bundestag, we now have the largest percentage of renewable energy in europe (>20% of our energy already comes from it), even the most conservative of parties now subscribe to quitting nuclear energy altogether (7 reactors have been shut down already, the rest is to follow until 2021) , we have the strictest environmental laws in europe, and on and on.
I would say the greens have been very successful by any measure.
> I disagree that greens did not achieve much. They have completely changed the political discourse in germany.
Yes and that's what the Pirates will do. Some ideas will no longer be expressible in mainstream politics, because it will be political suicide to do so, such as: support for disconnecting people from the internet, prosecuting file sharers, paywalled academic journals, software patents, pervasive internet surveillance, etc.
Well it is certainly true that there are countries in europe that have even more renewable energy than we have.
The other countries in europe that have more renewables than we have are mostly smaller countries that don't have the population or industrial output that germany has.
As you can see there germany has made BIG advances in the amount of renewable energy produced, as well as its overall share of energy consumed.
My point was:
* Germany was 20years ago pretty conservative about energy, relying mainly on coal, gas and nuclear.
Then the green party came into the political landscape and now
* We are on the forefront of converting our highly industrous economy completely to renewable energies. No other country in europe has increased the amount of renewabled energy produced by 5x in the last 10 years alone. At this rate, we will be overtaking even the smaller countries that may have more renewables than we have now.
* We are the only country of this size and economic gravitas that is fully committed to quiting nuclear.
* We have very strict environmental protection laws, with environmental protection even enshrined in the national constitution , more so than in other industrous european countries (yes there's always switzerland or other small countries that are nominally "better" at this but you can not compare their impact or structure with large countries such as germany) See also: http://www.goethe.de/ges/umw/ein/en5099932.htm
* Gas is more expensive in germany than elsewhere in europe (again there might be exceptions) because of "ecological taxing" that was proposed by the green party
So, in all what i wanted to say was:
Germany has changed a great deal due to the green party in the last decades. Where once we were very conservative about ecological ideas, we are now at the forefront, if not the sole leader, in many of these areas.
And that is,to a large degree, thanks to the greens because they have put those issues on the agenda again and again - and that way changed the political discourse at large.
The Greens are also relatively vocal about Verbraucherschutz ("consumer protection"). I think that's where they could keep scoring even when people stop caring about energy.
Are you sure that you have the larges amount of renewable energy in europe? Austria seams to have more and I think Switzerland too. I cant really find good numbers atm.
I think it is a little bit more than that: the feeling is that the established parties are completely detached from the problems of normal people, and certainly don't represent their interests anymore. One comparatively harmless recent example: one politician got caught for cheating on her PhD (copying stuff). So she lost her job in parliament, but next she was offered a job as "science relations adviser" for the European parliament (especially her who had just betrayed the institutions of science) - a slap in the face of the honest population.
The pirate party promised to represent the real people, it is written in their genes that they want to prevent politicians being politicians just for the sake of power. For example the discussions sometimes go so far that they think their representatives in parliament should only act like puppets executing the decisions made by online votes.
Whether they'll manage to deliver is another question, but they don't claim to have all the answers and their intentions are pure.
The thing is, that lack of answers is often held against them. But if you think about it, the other parties don't have the answers either. They just stumble through blunder upon blunder (for example dealing with the financial crisis). It's just a human fallacy to assume somebody who takes a firm stance is also competent (this was even shown in psychological experiments).
I will vote for them, because in some important areas of politics they have the better offer.
And because say don't try to say things in a "politically correct" way, but just say it. No professional spokes persons, media professionals, image professionals, etc. They are (for now) just people with an option.
I disagree. I would vote for the Pirate Party if I could just for their stance on internet freedom. I'd like to see media monoliths destroyed by having their control on distribution taken away from them.
I can't stand the "good enough" crowd, I hate it when people aim for mediocrity.
It takes the same amount of time and energy to go from zero to "OK" as from "OK" to "good". From "good" to "very good" is even harder.
So a lot of people (I see this a lot with artists, I'm sure it's the same with startups) stop at "OK", then see how hard it is to stand out from the crowd and how much more effort it takes and hope to being discovered (=someone doing the work and taking them to the next level and making them rich)
And then they start whining because everybody tells them how talented they are.
Exactly!
Good record labels book venues, organize travel, handle the legal stuff like insurance etc, they are well connected and know people at the radio stations and know the bloggers, they can introduce them to other bands/producers/video editors, ... in short: they make sure that the band can concentrate on their music and that the target audience knows about them
So record labels won't go away, they should maybe rename themselves because of the automatic negative response you get when you hear the word "record label"
"Exactly! Good record labels book venues, organize travel, handle the legal stuff like insurance etc, they are well connected advertising and know people at the radio stations advertising and know the bloggers,advertising they can introduce them to other bands/producers/video editors,advertising ... in short: they make sure that the band can concentrate on their music and that the target audience knows about them advertising"
Edit: If your promoters don't consider such things advertising find someone better that understands the industry.
PS: 'book venues' is easy, it's filling them that's hard and that take advertising. Don't forget bands also have an agent often handles a lot of this stuff a well.
The technology is awesome but the commercial I saw yesterday doesn't do it justice.
Show someone repairing a car and the glasses display vital information while both hands are somewhere on the engine or show someone cooking a meal while a chef from the other part of the world is watching and giving advice.
You are on holiday in a country you don't speak the langugage of and the car breaks down, you say "find me the nearest mechanic" and you stream live to a garage where someone sees what you are seeing and sends help with minimal "conversation"
I know a lot of people who say they hate squatters, then they have an "awesome idea" for a project, they'll register 10 domains, the project is never finished and they put their page on sedo in the hope someone clicks on an ad or buys the domain and they won't let go because it's just $10 a year and maybe they'll someday finish their page.
I honestly don't get the hate for squatters, they registered the domain, they were quicker than others and why should they sell their domainname just because someone else wants it badly? that's not how business works.
if you really want or even need a domainname then offer $3k and you'll get it, otherwise look for alternatives, but stop whining