Gleemax Terms of Use - Unacceptable

RPGRealms

First Post
HeavenShallBurn said:
And look what happens when they get too greedy. How many major corporations are having troubles right now? A lot of that is due to investors with unreasonable and unsupportable demands of profitability and growth that their market can't meet. It shows a major flaw in the business model, a moderate boost in short term profits for long term self-destruction. When moderating their immediate demands would create more total revenue and prevent the kind of meltdowns we see in these corporations.

Yeah, the blue chips corporations on Wall Street are killing themselves off with their quest for profits...or is it they have managed to stay as blue chip stocks because of them?

Companies don't generally price themselves out of business. Could you let me know some of these businesses that did?
 

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Delta

First Post
RPGRealms said:
Companies don't generally price themselves out of business. Could you let me know some of these businesses that did?

How about this week's New Yorker financial page:
( http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2008/02/11/080211ta_talk_surowiecki )

Rumors that monoline insurers, like M.B.I.A. and Ambac, were in serious trouble helped spark the vast market sell-off that prompted the Federal Reserve’s interest-rate cut two weeks ago, and, only a few days later, rumors of a government-orchestrated bailout of these companies set off a six-hundred-point rally in the Dow.

Monoline insurers do a straightforward job: they insure securities—guaranteeing, for instance, that if a bond defaults they’ll cover the interest and the principal... Unfortunately, a sleepy, straightforward business wasn’t good enough for the insurers. Like everyone else in recent years, they wanted to cash in on the housing and lending boom. In order to expand, they started insuring the complex securities that Wall Street created by packaging mortgages, including subprime ones, for investors. This was a lucrative business... but it rested on a false assumption: that the insurers knew how risky these securities really were. They didn’t. Instead, they gravely underestimated how likely the loans were to go bad, which meant that they didn’t charge enough for the insurance they were offering, and didn’t put away enough to cover the claims. They’re now on the hook for tens of billions of dollars in potential losses...

That’s why so many people on Wall Street are pushing for a bailout for the insurers. It may be an abandonment of free-market principles, but no one has ever accused the Street of putting principle above profit.
 

HeavenShallBurn

First Post
RPGRealms said:
Yeah, the blue chips corporations on Wall Street are killing themselves off with their quest for profits...or is it they have managed to stay as blue chip stocks because of them?
And many of them are in financial trouble right now. Only ones that aren't have a monopoly on a resource or service vital to society's function.

Companies don't generally price themselves out of business. Could you let me know some of these businesses that did?
Try the entire auto-industry. Seen what's been happening to Ford and GM recently. They've brought prices up so high only a small proportion can afford their products and continue to exist only via the fact people who can almost afford their products buy on credit they can't repay. They've shoved the costs off on car dealerships so much they can barely make a profit at all on new car sales to prop themselves up. Consider the proportion of new cars you've seen on the road to ones 10 or more years old lately, it's going down not up and they make no profit on used cars.
 


RPGRealms

First Post
HeavenShallBurn said:
And many of them are in financial trouble right now. Only ones that aren't have a monopoly on a resource or service vital to society's function.


Try the entire auto-industry. Seen what's been happening to Ford and GM recently. They've brought prices up so high only a small proportion can afford their products and continue to exist only via the fact people who can almost afford their products buy on credit they can't repay. They've shoved the costs off on car dealerships so much they can barely make a profit at all on new car sales to prop themselves up. Consider the proportion of new cars you've seen on the road to ones 10 or more years old lately, it's going down not up and they make no profit on used cars.

Ford and GM are hardly the entire auto-industry and in fact are no longer the largest in the industry. And when costs rise, the prices must also rise. I don't see the world's largest automaker having similar problems despite similarly priced vehicles, or many other automakers.

And you are saying both that Ford and GM are having trouble selling cars because they priced them too high (because Ford and GM are greedy and want to screw the customer out of every cent they can get) yet at the same time you are saying they aren't making any profits on those cars.
 
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resistor

First Post
RPGRealms said:
A common misconception from mis-reading the d20 license. There was nothing stopping you from including an XP table in a d20 product. In point of fact, the license specifically allows it.

I could be wrong, but my understanding was that you could include an XP table, but not the XP table. I'll stand corrected if I'm wrong, though.
 

HeavenShallBurn

First Post
RPGRealms said:
Ford and GM are hardly the entire auto-industry and in fact are no longer the largest in the industry. And when costs rise, the prices must also rise. I don't see the world's largest automaker having similar problems despite similarly priced vehicles, or many other automakers.
Ah but the point is they WERE and have been steadily suffering over time to bring them to this current state. Also the primary market of Ford and GM is the US in a way that is fundamentally different than the current industry leaders. Toyota sells more cars in the rest of the world than the US, same with Daimler, Honda. But both Ford and GM are tied into the US economy in a way that is moderated in the others. Their breadth of market is compensating for the problems in the US.

And you are saying both that Ford and GM are having trouble selling cars because they priced them too high (because Ford and GM are greedy and want to screw the customer out of every cent they can get) yet at the same time you are saying they aren't making any profits on those cars.
Profit and price are a two way street the price is inversely proportional to the market. The more it goes up, the fewer people can afford the product this is basic economics. And there is a balancing point at which price and number of customers creates a peak profit. Once you go past this point your pricing is reducing the number of customers more than the increased price per unit can compensate for. This is the state the major automakers are all in. And it's only exacerbated by the worsening economic conditions, rising inflation, and loss of purchasing power of the population. Examine the sales figures of these car companies in the US. You'll see that new cars are not being bought at the same rate. To attempt to compensate for this costs are being pushed onto the individual dealerships (which are franchises they're not for the most part company owned) and this is generating hardship on the dealerships to stay afloat selling new cars where much less of the income is profit.
 

Delta

First Post
RPGRealms said:
How is this an example of a company screwing over their customers and pricing themselves out of business?

It's an example of a company trying to take advantage of a market and totally misjudging their risk (to the initial benefit of its customers I might add).

It's support to the grandparent poster to whom you objected saying, "And look what happens when they get too greedy. How many major corporations are having troubles right now? A lot of that is due to investors with unreasonable and unsupportable demands of profitability and growth that their market can't meet. "
 

Hussar

Legend
In fact, if the terms of use specified that any material posted on the Gleemax falls under the terms of the OGL and that, unless clearly delineated at the beginning of a post, the entirety of the post is considered open.

But, that doesn't protect the poster any more than what the current TOU does. If all the content is automatically considered Open Content, then you could post something and I could copy it verbatim without paying you a dime. All I have to do is include a link to your post in my S15.

Actually, that would be worse for posters because that would mean that ANYONE could take your ideas and run with them without paying you. As it stands, only WOTC can do that. Granted, that kinda sucks too, but, it's better than letting everyone be able to do it.
 

resistor

First Post
Hussar said:
But, that doesn't protect the poster any more than what the current TOU does. If all the content is automatically considered Open Content, then you could post something and I could copy it verbatim without paying you a dime. All I have to do is include a link to your post in my S15.

Actually, that would be worse for posters because that would mean that ANYONE could take your ideas and run with them without paying you. As it stands, only WOTC can do that. Granted, that kinda sucks too, but, it's better than letting everyone be able to do it.

You missed the part where I said one could explicitly delineate not-open portions of a posting at the beginning of the post. Or just have a checkbox for each post "Does this post contain non-open content?" that defaults to unchecked. (This is functionally equivalent to my Creative Commons idea).

---
Random Tangent:

I mentioned earlier that I'm a computer programmer. The idea of open gaming is derived almost wholesale from the idea of open source software. The source of the software I write every day is released under a BSD-like license, meaning it has only three restrictions:

1) Preserve my attribution in the code
2) Preserve my attribution in the binary
3) I don't make any warranties about this code. Use at your own risk.

In the open source world, this is the extreme end (other than public domain grants, which are rare) of the permissivity scale. The GNU Public License, at the other end, tries to protect the openness of the work by placing more restrictions in the license, which can be summarized as trying to force the taker of the code to share alike.
 

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