I'm not sure vertical integration is something to be inspired by. In fact, it tends to create a variety of conflicts of interests, and anti competitive environments. Both effects are generally bad for competition and consumer choice.
Having grown up in the States and lived in London for nearly seven years, I have to agree.
It's not that UK supermarkets don't have choice, it's that US supermarkets are spoiled for choice. I mean, I went back home and saw a WALL of bread, and a long aisle where half was just cans of soup! For me, it's not just the difference between 10 different SKUs of peanut butter and 50+, but US stores seem to have much more stock of each SKU, too.
Tesco's one of the world's most profitable retailers (I think it's #4 globally) and ASDA is a subsidiary of Wal-Mart. London's just a special case - where do you put an out-of-town superstore in zones 1 or 2 of the Tube map?
I wouldn't mind if they were in zones 4 or 5, but it still doesn't add much choice. Tesco Extra stores aren't exactly small, but they still don't have much choice in the grocery side.
If a different store had the range, I'd go there instead. But each store targeting a slice of the demographic pie has very much the same limited range with a tiny bit of diversity outside of store brands.
I used to do this every once in a while. One thing to be aware of, are large trucks behind you at the top of hills. They tend to want to increase speed going down hills to use their velocity to climb the next. It's probably a good idea to accommodate this.
yanw, the article points out what they had previously said before this comprimise. I like the old position, not the new "only partially completely incorrect" model.
from a post on Google’s official blog in 2007: “The nation’s spectrum airwaves are not the birthright of any one company. They are a unique and valuable public resource that belong to all Americans. The FCC’s auction rules are designed to allow U.S. consumers — for the first time — to use their handsets with any network they desire, and and use the lawful software applications of their choice.”
>to keep sales of in-game currency for real money under control, the publisher/developer for eve online a while back created the mechanism of redeemable subscription codes
Replace the word "keep" with the phrase "cash in on". Eve never really cared about isk farmers/sellers, they are paying subscribers after all. Sure they would ban a few hundred accounts every few months, but it would only be a small percentage of the total farmers.
Once they realized they could be making some of that money themselves did they create PLEX. And the farming continues as they don't want to stoop to the level of selling isk for money.
In the 50's and 60's it looked like the US was just trying to maintain a 2:1 lead over the Soviets. I wonder if it was driven mainly by bragging rights.
It was driven by the desire to be able to guarantee that, even if the Soviets attacked first and took out as many military and infrastructural targets as possible, the US would still be able to launch a crippling nuclear counterattack. The Soviets wanted the exact same thing, but in reverse. It wasn't driven by bragging rights; it was driven by the dangerous fact that the advantage in a nuclear war goes with whoever strikes first.
The development of ICBMs, missile submarines, and so on, actually made us a lot safer by making the "strike first and strike hard" approach much less effective. The situation was more volatile back when it took a month or so to put together the bombs for a nuclear attack. When you look at it from such a ruthless perspective, the Cold War made a weird kind of sense.
The point is to make it so that whoever strikes first still loses. If the first-striker advantage is big enough, then the country that strikes first could survive with their population, government, and military capabilities largely intact, while pretty much destroying the other side.
