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"By virtually every measure - per capita living space, number of bathrooms, number of cars, air conditioning, heating, gasoline cost, number of tvs, indoor plumbing, hot water, disposable income, cost of food"

The gasoline cost in the Europe is because of taxes, same for the VAT on cars. But in most places, public transport is so good that most don't really need to drive, let alone own more than 1 car. US building standards, while getting better, have been shite for a long time and leaky buildings cost a lot to heat or cool.
All those gas guzzlers that Americans have enjoyed driving since forever hasn't helped. And it's put a lot of money in the hands of people who'd just as soon see it wiped off the map.

"This is especially true for the poor with people whom the U.S. government defines as below the poverty line enjoying a standard of living that is comparable to a middle class standard of living in Europe"

For any one of the advanced Euro nations, it's nearly the opposite. Also there are a lot of EMPLOYED Americans who are deathly afraid of asking for a vacation whereas any working European can happily take 3-5 weeks off. A couple places even pay your MORE during your vacation to help defray vacation-related expenses
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ta...
http://www.cepr.net/documents/...

And don't even try to bring up parental leave & childcare.

"America is about the cleanest producer in the world, much cleaner than Europe. The key measure is emission per unit of industrial production, not the total emissions"
""the U.S. has only 4% of the world's population, but it produces 25% of greenhouse gases". What the educators leave out is that the U.S. produces 35% of the world's GNP so actually the U.S. is a very clean producer"

Have a look at this graph
In terms of CO2 emissions per purchasing power parity of GDP, it's well behind France, Spain, Switzerland, Austria, Germany......
If you don't like that graph, you can try sorting this table

".....but the U.S. is still virtuous in its production and the way it guards the environment. The U.S. has nothing to be ashamed of on that front"

Only because a lot of people put their asses on the line to change the way things used to be - and still are.
There are still many oil spills and much coal sludge contamination to this day. Not to mention the fuckton of elected officials, mostly in "business-friendly" states who would change all that in a heartbeat and continually work to undermine the virtuous stewardship of the environment.

I'm pleased to have given you the chance to rant & rag about NY & CA but the truth is both have been very good at keeping down the per-capita energy use for several decades.
As to your point about the USA raising it's standard of living, so has everyone else - but no other advanced country in the G20 has done so by making workers find an extra 160 hours per year ( effectively adding a 13th month of full-time work ) since the 70s. In some, they work fewer hours than they did 40 yrs ago.

And number of TVs?? Really? Why not add cellphones to the list? Except there are lots of other places where the phones & service are better & cheaper, right?

It's not bullshit. Apparently you don't pay attention to the economics of PCs these days.

Wintel HW sales have been collapsing over the last 5 years. At a compounded rate of 14% per year for all the major vendors (HP, Dell, etc.). Why do you think HP is splitting off its PC/printer business??? It's an albatross that is threatening to sink the entire company. Compounded decline means the "Rule of 72" becomes a "halving time" instead of a "doubling" time. Thus the market size of Wintel has peaked and is in rapid decline being now at close to 50% of the highest peak.

Apple, on the other hand, during the exact same time, has continued positive growth rates of 5%-15% for Macs. Now Apple's market share has been small and still is relatively small, but that's OK. Consider also that Apples margins, cash-on-hand and stock market cap exceed Microsoft and Intel combined! Both of these companies are at risk right now.

Here's the thing about market share: it's the worst possible thing to have high market share if 1) there are no growth opportunities, 2) you are anything over 50% share (which makes growth harder to find), and 3) if you margins are small or worse collapsing. Guess what: financially this describes all the major Wintel HW vendors! Apple was OK with small market share because 1) you can always grow, and 2) their margins were larger than all the other Wintel competitors combined, and 3) because they are one of the top two market leaders for mobile. Margin matters, not market share (Apple's margins are better than Samsung's right now).

Apple's margins are huge. And Apple now controls most of the critical leading edge tech supply chains for PCs as a generic commodity. This at the same moment that Wintel HW vendors, who have constantly played the "death spiral pricing" that squeezes margins, and specifically squeeze out the ability to make significant R&D and capital expenditures, really can't afford to "out spend" Apple to retrieve these supply chains.

What is actually happening is that PC sales are falling exponentially while Mac sales are (still) climbing exponentially and they will meet very soon at some level that is smaller than the PC peak sales numbers of a few years ago. And that peak level will never be met again even by Macs. Or by PCs. Macs will cannibalize PC sales in many cases but PCs will survive and that level of PC sales will mostly decline and be limited to some niche markets like data centers, SW development and industrial computing. The general public will see them fade from their consciousness over the next decade.

Apple has been doing fine, in other words, even without share. But it gets "better".

Remember when Steve said "It's a post-PC world". He was telling a factual truth. No one in the Wintel world wanted to see the truth but it IS the truth. Again, the numbers tell the story: most of those declines in PC growth has been people who are late adopters and for whom owning a PC was always "too much complexity" and "not a good fit". What they always ever needed was simply what smart phones deliver to them. Hence, PCs are being abandoned and smart phones aka "mobile" have become the next adoption curve for "computing/networking devices". The adoption curve of this latter, more generically category (which includes PCs, Wintel and Mac, and mobile of all brands) is itself entering late adoption - when the majority of the general population starts buying something, the category has long since stopped being an early adoption nerd toy and the primary market, for which all economic decisions are beholden to and defined for, are late adoption "appliance" markets.

As a subclass within this superclass, PCs (both Wintel and Mac) are now at where Minicomputers were in 1980: on their way out for the majority market. Minicomputers were to PC in 1980 as PC are to Mobile today.

D

Well, if you also count mobile phones as computers, Samsung is number one. These arguments go nowhere.

Apple offers a tight integration software/hardware ecosystem. That's their main advantage. Always was. Sometimes they are ahead of the curve, sometimes they get behind. Right now, due to the massive market and the number of companies invested in products for Android, they are behind.

That doesn't make Apple a worse company than before, those who need or like the tighter integration and/or fashion statement will still buy their products. For those who buy based on other criteria, Apple was never a consideration and still isn't.

Almost always, but not always. http://www.forbes.com/2010/08/...

> Does this make anyone feel bad for Steve Ballmer?

No.

Egalitarianism

Wage gap myth:

http://www.consad.com/content/reports/Gender%20Wage%20Gap%20Final%20Report.pdf

Majors by Gender: Is It Bias or the Major that Determines Future Pay?

There Is No Male-Female Wage Gap

The Gender Pay Gap is a Complete Myth

Gender pay gap is not what activists claim

Equal pay statistics are bogus because they don’t compare like with like

Fair Pay Isn’t Always Equal Pay

Wage Gap Myth Exposed -- By Feminists

5 Feminist Myths That Will Not Die

The Wage Gap Myth

Don’t Blame Discrimination for Gender Wage Gap

The pay inequality myth: Women are more equal than you think

Women Now a Majority in American Workplaces

Labor force participation rate for men has never been lower.

Share of Men in Labor Force at All-Time Low

Women In Tech Make More Money And Land Better Jobs Than Men

Female U.S. corporate directors out-earn men: study

Female CEOs outearned men in 2009.

Women between ages 21 and 30 working full-time made 117% of men’s wages.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, single women between 22 and 30 years old earn an average of $27,000 a year. That’s 8% more than comparable men.

Workplace Salaries: At Last, Women on Top

Young Women’s Pay Exceeds Male Peers

The 15 Jobs Where Women Earn More Than Men

Women aged between 22 and 29 earn over £10 per hour on average, compared to men their same age who earn just under this amount.

Young women now earn more than men in UK

Strange. Apple makes the best products

Best?

For whom? By what standards?

They make some very good products and have a consistent and effective design language but they are as much a fashion company now as a technology one.

I think his arguments that lower growth leads to greater wealth inequity are very persuasive. He has posted his very extensive research on his website

The difficulty with his argument (at least, that particular argument) has been the quality of his numbers. If his numbers are correct, then his argument follows naturally. However, getting the data has proven difficult. This one seems especially serious, imo. Tax returns are obviously not a good source for data on total wealth.

It got so bad that soon Piketty told people to disregard his own numbers, and use Zucman-Saez's numbers instead.

1) The state legislature is run by people. People are (a) greedy and (b) want to stay in power. When car company lobby groups see potential competition, it's cheaper for them to bribe, sorry, "provide campaign funds" to a pet politician than to actually compete. Those people take the money and decry the horrible, horrible Tesla company for daring to defile the hard working people who they've been speaking to (read - taking wodges of cash from).

2)There are some reasons, e.g. here and various Google searches would give you differing opinions. Perhaps it's simply that, because of their current low sales volumes, dealerships just can't provide the right environment to sell Teslas.

There's a reason that top CEOs get paid what they do. Without them, there is no functioning company.

By that standard, there are probably dozens or even hundreds of employees who should be paid top dollar at a given company. Many if not most workers at companies are specialists at what they do, and without them, the company probably would not be able to function.

Most businesses don't tend to hire a lot of interchangeable nobodies with no expectation that they have or will ever have skills that would be important to the function of the company -- except maybe for really crappy entry-level positions that require no training or experience. Everybody else in the company has a good chance of serving some function -- otherwise, why bother employing them?

Sure, some or even most get paid what we think of as more than they're actually worth, but those companies are in a position to pay them so much because of their CEO.

Actually, several recent studies (like this one) seem to suggest that larger salaries and benefits may actually HURT a company's chances of getting a valuable CEO.

If they're not good enough, they get fired - it happens all of the time.

Yeah, actually the CEOs, like heads of federal government organizations, tend NOT to be fired because they're "not good enough." They get fired because bad stuff happens. It doesn't really matter if they are responsible when the company fails to perform -- it could be a bad economy or a bad business to begin with or crappy products or actual bad management at the top... if the business does bad enough, the CEO takes the blame.

That's pretty much the CEO's job: make random decisions and take the blame for really big problems (even when it's not his fault).

I'm not at all saying that there aren't good CEOs out there. But I think you're vastly overestimating how important their talents are compared to other people at companies. If you start reading around in some recent studies on this stuff, you'll find some folks who understand randomness and probability noting that claiming that CEOs largely get promoted or hired or fired according to random whims of the economy. Yes, they can make really terrible decisions or really good ones, but often those are mostly just lucky. And if they're lucky, they get promoted or hired at an even bigger company, if they aren't, they get fired.

It's mostly the mid-level management folks where you tend to find a sprinkling of real talent that is driving the company forward on an everyday basis. CEOs with exorbitant salaries are just a fixture in companies because we think we need them. I think the jury is actually out about whether that's the best form of governance for successful companies -- in many cases, you'd probably be just as good choosing any random CEO at that level (or maybe even just putting a magic 8-ball at the helm).

Uh, I don't think a large number of them refused to work under Eich. He had been at the organization for years.

Yes, they did, at least according to most news reports, the board and acknowledged by Eich himself when he explained why he stepped down.

What you can ask is why didn't it become an issue before, and that is a good question. Partly because it wasn't known before, and partly because being the CEO and head of an organization is different, you are the figurehead representing the organization, internally and externally.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jv...

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jv...

In all fairness, they're only attacking *white* male masculinity. If you're black or brown, you can get caught beating your wife in an elevator or raping a bunch of kids, and the liberal faggot PC press will just blame the white male head of the NFL for it and the evil white police who didn't arrest you.

Thats great advice. The problem is statistically men aren't working more, they are just getting paid more, and thats unfair.

I'll ignore everything else[1], but that statement has long been acknowledged as wrong . To be honest, if women were more valuable than men in the workplace (produced the same for less pay) the first all-female company to arise would sooner or later tower over the industry due to the lower employment costs. This does not happen - see here

[1] Discussing feelings is useless; there are no objective measures hence we come down to the argument of whose feelings matter more.

You should have professional magicians look at it.

Yep. And I'm pretty confident that Ian Bryce of the Sydney Skeptics found the trick.

Rossi refused Dick Smith's million dollar challenge, for a short demonstration of the machine in which the power from the earth cable is also measured, as Mr. Smith believed that the wiring may have been "misconnected".

(Details from the Sydney Skeptics thoughts here: Bryce said photos show a current meter on the brown wire, while the unmeasured green wire lies beside it in plain view. ( See photo ) Scientists regard a green wire as a safety earth, and would not expect it to be used to carry power. Under such a misconnection, there is the risk that metal parts could become live, and pose a hazard to people nearby. If Rossi disagrees, he can arrange for an independent test. It would be very straightforward to repeat the test with metering in all three wires. This would show whether the millions of dollars Rossi is seeking are justified or would be better spent elsewhere.

Rossi turned him down. If the power is being supplied through the earth wire, and he was at the junction, he would easily be able to perpetrate this hoax.

http://www.latimes.com/busines...

His 2010 cameo in Iron Man 2 didn't hurt either, and neither did the use of SpaceX for filming of some scenes.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ve...

It also helps that unlike Ellison his products are both physical and have direct practicality for most of the population so he is more easily associated with the inventor aspect of Tony Stark persona.
Signature red color of his space-age car is another bonus.
And so is the whole "rocket man" thing.

In comparison, Ellison is more like Tony Stark BEFORE Iron Man.
Yachting billionaire who collects cars, jets, islands and women and has a million dollar entertainment system which uses a swimming pool as a subwoofer, while his "charity" donations seem mostly to revolve around lawsuits.

As for comparison to Steve Jobs...
As the Iron Man 2 article above stated, Steve Jobs has "always been less Iron Man, more Willy Wonka".
Who, while espousing such lines as "Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life? Or do you want to come with me and change the world?" ended up selling overpriced toys.

While Musk actually seems to be trying to actively fulfill the second part of that quote.

Oh, so it's entirely genetic, and that's why 20 years ago, the field's gender mix was almost 60-40 and now 85-15. Because genetics change dramatically over short timespans.[1] [2]

Bio-determinism bites. And it's an easy, lazy, insufficient answer. I, and others, are prepared to accept that there exist biological gender differences. But, given human history, you can't say that gender differences are strictly biological without evidence. And you can examine socioeconomic factors that influence gender-based occupation decisions. In the previous link, girls(and boys) with higher self-esteem are more likely to avoid gender-typical job roles. Rather substantially, if you can actually read the article, and not just the abstract. Primitivistic psychoanalysis suggests that people who fill gender-typical jobs are likely following social pressure, than innate instincts.

Sexism in IT is real, I mean, hell, ask a transgender person whose seen both sides. But even if that were 0% of the problem, it wouldn't imply genetic determinism.

Some is not a lot of people. It's probably not big enough for publishers to care, nor cater specially for - because it just costs more money to do than they'll get back (ROI).

Which is exactly the draw of free software. It lets companies that use software meet needs that the publisher refuses to meet for ROI reasons.

It's like why PC ports of AAA games are so shitty - because the ROI on PC is poor. There may be more PC users, but there's also a ton more piracy, so what sold well on consoles may barely make up the porting costs on PC.

Does a copyright infringer really cost the studio anything? Not every infringing copy directly correlates to a lost sale unless copyright infringement demonstrably siphons off paying users. So a port can be worthwhile so long as there are enough paying users. Copyright infringement is a service problem, and this appears to be true of both games and movies.

As we all know, there's no problem in the labor market that can't be solved with more education.

As President Obama says at the official White House web site, "Earning a post-secondary degree or credential is no longer just a pathway to opportunity for a talented few; rather, it is a prerequisite for the growing jobs of the new economy." Because, as he notes, "With the average earnings of college graduates at a level that is twice as high as that of workers with only a high school diploma, higher education is now the clearest pathway into the middle class."

To help sustain this middle class, the President has proposed policies that will:

- Help Middle Class Families Afford College
- by Keeping Costs Down
- Strengthen Community Colleges
- Improve Transparency and Accountability

Therefore, earning a PhDs must not be enough. What we need is a new credential. Something beyond PhD. A... "Super PhD" that will help high achievers stand out to those employers seeking only the best. Of course, that means longer class schedules, more lab training, in short... more education.

Don't worry, our financial institutions are here to help. Banks will be happy to lend you more with government backed student loans. It's the least they can do for a beleaguered middle class too uneducated to succeed in this high tech economy.

America is that Shiny City upon a Hill, a place where gleaming gold coins lay scattered about ripe for the picking. You only need more education to find them. A new life awaits you in that shining city on the hill. The chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure! So come on America, become a go-getter and land that Super PhD! The Sciences are just filled with Gold Coins of Opportunity in this Shinny City on a Hill for those with the right education.

This is a well known practice in advertising companies. Targeting advertising that's too accurate is creepy, so they filter in junk content so you don't feel uncomfortable. Here's an interesting article about the practice: http://www.forbes.com/sites/ka...

That was a demonstration only and the junction temperature was an unrealistic 25 C, not 85 C, and the efficiency of the driver circuit is not included in the laboratory results. Maybe the process to produce the sample is phenomenally expensive, and maybe they had to pick through thousands of units to find one that hit the mark. Because how else do you explain that the Crees you can buy in the store only produce a piss poor 84 lumens per watt? Do they purposely market obsolete shit because they know they can get away with marketing obsolete shit, or are there possibly actual engineering and economic reasons they can't sell the good stuff?

From what I can tell, just looking at my local beloved Bears, who are up in the higher tier of teams by profits, stadium revenue appears to be closer to 25% of total revenue. TV revenue is less than half of total revenue, and operating profits almost exactly equal gate receipts.

http://www.forbes.com/teams/ch...

Stadium revenue are 25% of NFL's. 50% comes from TV rights. And another 25% from merchandising.

Don't throw BS numbers around if you don't know WTF you are talking about. Thank you.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ku...

The mass censorship of gamers over the last month has raised questions about how well functioning that immune system really is. Gamers and the game media have never gotten along. But the degree to which gamers were thrown out of sites for talking about Gamergate was disturbing, and the "trivial" nature of gaming as a subject matter does not soften the blow.

Gamers were ejected from all major game news sites/blogs, almost all major game forums, news media outlets, subjected to shadow bans and mass deletions across the whole of Reddit, barred from editing Wikipedia, and finally -- in the the most absurd capstone to the whole farce -- all gamergate discussion was banned from 4chan, a place which still openly permits the posting of severed human body parts and rabidly anti-semetic hate speech. What few remaining forums for discussion were left ended up being DDoSed.

What happened during gamergate was what we were told could never happen to free discussion on the web: Site by site, the lights on the internet went out for video gamers.

In retrospect, it could only have happened for something as "trivial" as video games, and to a group as "subcultural" as the gaming community. But it has happened; It is still happenning. The entire concept of the Internet as a "fifth estate" or a forum for open debate has been severely discredited by recent events. If video gamers are unable to discuss or dispute that "Gamers are dead", or that games are not misogynist on the internet, then what can be discussed or disputed?

If the internet has an immune system, I don't see the patient recovering yet, and even in the event of a return to "health", the complications of this acute inflammation of censorship will be with us for a long time. This may yet end up being a watershed for the medium and our assumptions about it. Something has just gone very, very wrong.

The majority of the gamers who wrote Intel agree with you. In fact, the entire furore over the past month seems to have cemented the idea of "gamer" as a inclusive, universal identity into the collective mind of the gaming community across the web.

However, that was not the argument the Gamasutra and other articles made. The gaming press collectively declared that "Gamers were dead", that gaming as a descriptor was obsolete, that the "identity was dead", or referred only to a obsolete subset of exclusionary, female unfriendly, "selfish", "conservative", "tribalistic", and -- implied by the accompanying stock images -- fat angry unkempt adult males.

Meanwhile, games companies, marketing firms and online game fansites were still actively using the term to refer to everyone who, well, plays games. Even Forbes magazine was shaking its head in disbelief at the game media's attack on its own consumers. People are now asking how much damage recent controversies may have done to the public image of the gaming industry.

A $80 billion dollar industry which had achieved almost universal consumer acceptance and success may have just been torpedoed as a woman-hating "Cathedral of Misogyny" by its own press publications. Intel is cutting its losses before the conflagration spreads to the rest of tech.

Are
you
sure?

You were too fucking stupid to spend the ten seconds on Google it would have taken to avoid outing yourself as the biggest retard on Slashdot. Again.

You desperately want to refute me, but you can't. Instead, you will tuck your tail between your legs and slink away in shame.

I wouldn't mind paying the net metering fee, IF the subsidies for fossil fuels were removed as well.

An article at Forbes reports that coal increases health care costs by 19 to 45 cents a kwh. Oil increases the costs by 8 to 19 c/kwh, and natural gas by 1 to 2 c/kwh. Then there's the estimated cost of climate change, assuming we beat it. (Yes, I trust a near-unanimous group of subject matter experts. Heck, I bet those 97% would really like to be wrong, so we wouldn't need to do something about the issue.)

Summing up, I'd rather pay $168 a year for a connection, as opposed to paying an extra $1000/year for fossil fuel electricity. (5000 kwh * 20 cents/kwh). Actually, aren't we already paying that extra $1000/year in extra health care costs, property insurance, and natural disaster relief?

Just to let you know, this was probably submitted by the fanatical Solyndra-supporting troll, mdsolar [slashdot.org]. He's been around these parts for a while.

Interesting to see a baseless ad hominem accusation being moderated informative. Is this a reflection of how low Slashdot has sunk, or an example of energy utilities trying to control and frame an online discussion?

Whatever the case, utilities have a right to be scared. The falling cost and sheer reliability of distributed energy sources are set to send many utilities into a death spiral. I have no doubt they'll thrash around, grasp at straws and do as much damage as they can on their way out, but there's no doubt they'll be the buggy whip makers of our generation (pun intended).

http://www.forbes.com/fdc/welc...

Clayton Christensen explains why the basic thinking taught in business schools and promulgated by consultants is killing innovation and the US economy:

Christensen retells the story of how Dell progressively lopped off low-value segments of its PC operation to the Taiwan-based firm ASUSTek - the motherboard, the assembly of the computer, the management of the supply chain and finally the design of the computer. In each case Dell accepted the proposal because in each case its profitability improved: its costs declined and its revenues stayed the same. At the end of the process, however, Dell was little more than a brand, while ASUSTeK can-and does-now offer a cheaper, better computer to Best Buy at lower cost.

Why is this happening? According to Christensen, the phenomenon is being

"driven by the pursuit of profit. That's the causal mechanism for these things... The problem lies with the business schools which are at fault. What we've done in America is to define profitability in terms of percentages. So if you can get the percentage up, it feels like we are more profitable. It causes us to do things to manipulate the percentage....

Thus when a firm calculates the rate of return on a proposal to outsource manufacturing overseas, it typically does not include:

• The cost of the knowledge that is being lost, possibly forever.
• The cost of being unable to innovate in future, because critical knowledge has been lost.
• The consequent cost of its current business being destroyed by competitors emerging who can make a better product at lower cost.
• The missed opportunity of profits that could be made from innovations based on that knowledge that is being lost.

cite

The EU never made such a statement and never levies fines in such cases even if the action turns out to be illegal.

This is another case of breathless reporters doing their best to get clicks by accusing Apple of something, anything.

It clearly states in that article that they may very well find that Apple is altering prices in an illegal way and may get fined. It's just not as simple as the original article made it seem. And if you doubt at all that Apple is doing this, you're a tad naive. If they get caught at it or not is the only real question.

Apple made provisions for tax of $8.283 billion (Provision for income taxes 8,283). Which was indeed 24.2% of their profits declared in that year.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ti...

The EU never made such a statement and never levies fines in such cases even if the action turns out to be illegal.

This is another case of breathless reporters doing their best to get clicks by accusing Apple of something, anything.

I agree with using renewables first. It bypasses the "subsidies" that the fossil fuel industry receive.

An article at Forbes reports that coal increases health care costs by 19 to 45 cents a kwh. Oil increases the costs by 8 to 19 c/kwh, and natural gas by 1 to 2 c/kwh. Mercury in fish is getting bad enough that Consumer Reports had an article on it last month. I'm pretty sure fish aren't mining mercury. Then there's the climate change issue.

Any one of those reasons, from three different sources, is good enough for me to prefer renewables over fossil fuels. For nuclear, I haven't decided yet, but I'm leaning in the direction of it being sold at the same time as renewable, not after all renewable supply is consumed.

Same story here with a Whirlpool HE front-loader. The washer quickly developed a moldy smell. The clothes often came out of the machine with completely dry spots because of inadequate water levels. It started leaking a few months ago. We replaced the logic board and the front door baffle only to have the problems return. All this despite taking all the preventative steps and using the recommended products as directed.

The service techs that came out to deal with the machine had the same story as well -- these front-loading HE washers just do not work due to the difficulty in meeting the new efficiency requirements, and the manufacturers will not design them to do so, since it would cut into their profit margins and reduce demand.

I am also now thinking of purchasing Speed Queen while they are still available.

Also notable -- there is a class-action lawsuit pending against Whirlpool, and it looks like it's getting some traction: http://www.forbes.com/sites/da...

Is it possible to have socialists ideas before the term socialism was coined? It doesn't matter what you were referencing, the idea you were conveying is a socialist one.

So you're saying that the proletariat of France were socialists before socialism was cool? What hipsters! For the record, proto-socialist ideas started popping up in France distinctly after the revolution. I suppose that these distinctions are lost on you, though, since you're using the word in a prejorative sense, not a technical one.

Did you read below that I will repeat it since you missed it, if you are saying they had it equally as good you need to find something that made up for a serf's lack of technology, like cell phones, clean drinking water, indoor plumbing, living quarters without livestock, cars, laundry facilities,... What area did the serfs have it better then migrant workers to make up for all those things I listed.

First, I'll reiterate my objection that those aren't things that migrant workers have, generally speaking. Second, I'll reiterate the response I offered earlier: leisure time and living space.

If they are only given enough not to riot then they are way over compensated.

Your "they" refers to people risking their capital, according to the rules of English grammar. There is no meaningful risk of them rioting, so that interpretation of your words doesn't make sense. I don't think you meant to refer to the poor either, since then you'd be saying that they should be paid less so as to cause riots. Riots are generally undesirable for a society, so that interpretation doesn't make sense either. I can't think of any other ways to parse this statement, so I'm genuinely not sure what you're trying to say here.

People are breaking the law just for the opportunity to go work as a migrant worker, that is a long way away from a revolt.

I'm glad you think so. You may think the distribution of wealth in this country is just fine, but 92% of Americans would disagree with you, despite the fact that a majority of Americans actually underestimate the actual inequity in wealth distribution. See aforementioned Forbes link as reference for this claim.

I repeat, yet again, this thread got rather long. I don't like that. The last time I participated in a thread this long, it got way too long. The lesson I learned there is that some people have trouble communicating with me, and that it takes a considerable amount of effort to resolve the issue. Since I'm not willing to dedicate sufficient effort to accomplish that in this thread, I think this is as good a time as any to throw in the towel.

The disclaimer I've added to the end of my last three posts (as well as this one) has been rather prophetic, don't you think? Perhaps you're interested in breaking the 76-post-long-thread record I set with bingoUV? That would be even more impressive with this disclaimer in place the whole time. I totally think you should go for it.

capitalist

There's that word again.

Don't lend to people with crap credit to begin with. People who got NINJA loans were a prime reason for the mortgage crisis.

There are many possible terms one might use to characterize HUD penalizing banks for making too few subprime, alt-a nodoc garbage loans in the name of social justice, but "capitalism" isn't one of them.

New CRA regulations in 1995 required banks to demonstrate that they were making mortgage loans to underserved communities, which inevitably included borrowers whose credit standing did not qualify them for a conventional mortgage loan. To meet this new requirement, insured banks–like the GSEs–had to reduce the quality of the mortgages they would make or acquire. As the enforcers of CRA, the regulators themselves were co-opted into this process, approving lending practices that they would otherwise have scorned. The erosion of traditional mortgage standards had begun.

.We all know what is meant by that "underserved communities" euphemism. These are political prerogatives, not "capitalist" ones.

I tend think it's a combination of issues. Some can be offset or fixed by teaching women differently (negotiation for more money), some possibly can be offset through a combination of law and working with their employers (maternity leave), but prejudice is the bug bear that's so hard to fix since it raises hackles (putting some on the defensive), is hard to teach & is misattributed as the cause when it's actually a different cause.

Women not asking for more money
http://www.womendontask.com/qu...
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...
http://hbr.org/2003/10/nice-gi...
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Women deciding to have children
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
http://www.pewresearch.org/fac...
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Prejudice
http://www.forbes.com/sites/wo...

That discrepancy skirts zero a but it conspicuously never flips around the other side.

First, about this claim, you're just Wrong. Don't make claims you can't back. Construction workers & supervisors, painters, teachers, bakers, bartenders, servers... all jobs that women make more than men. Though "hooker" is not listed in Forbes, I'd guess female sex workers make more than men too.

It is true that women make less than men, but the OP very specifically stated opportunities, not outcomes. The salary rankings are outcomes. The Pew Research Center produced much different numbers (.84 up to .93 per 1.00; .93 is for younger women) than the white house (.77 per 1.00) just by ranking hourly wages instead of weekly wages. This brings in all the part-time workers and full-time workers that work 35+ hours into the same boat as those that work 40 hours+. Furthermore, what research like the white house study fails to account for is things like: 39% of women took a significant amount of time off work to care for their family, 42% have reduced their hours for the same, 27% have quit altogether; while only 24% of men have taken a significant amount of time off work for family. You don't even need the research that shows large breaks hurt your salary. Anybody that has taken a break from work knows that. Perhaps that is why the .93 cents per dollar for younger women; they haven't yet had the chance to drop work for family?

Obviously I have not proven the OP claim, that there are equal or more opportunities for women, the hopefully I have shown that the issue is not so open & shut as you think. Nobody, to my knowledge, is counting Opportunities. Nobody here has even defined them. But with 42% of women not taking full advantage of their opportunity to work full time once they have a job, compared to only 27% percent of men, the argument seems plausible enough to warrant some thought.

While that's true, it's still not a simple issue. If you look at the whole it looks like a big, pervasive problem, but having worked in several jobs in financial positions I can tell you that none of them used gender as criteria for salary. If you were in position X, you made $Y regardless of your gender. So it's largely not the case that men make more than women who are equally qualified and employed.

So what's going on?

First, many women stop work to have children. This interrupts their career progress, resets their salary, and prevents them from ascending as high as men. This is the reason that women who stop work to raise children and later divorce still get alimony. There is also a perception that women will do this, of course, and that is a problem.

Second, the careers that men choose tend to pay more. A carpenter, an electrician, a plumber, an engineer, a doctor, a tool and die machinist, a computer programmer or administrator, etc. The careers that women choose tend to pay less. A teacher, an administrative assistant, a nurse, a librarian, medical data entry, child care. Now the reason for this is actually pretty complicated. Professions that men worked were paid a salary to support an entire family wife and kids. That amount of money was simply what a man cost, since any job he took necessarily had to support his family due to cultural standards of the day. If he wasn't getting paid that amount, then he could neither support his existing family, nor could he marry a woman and start a family. Professions that women worked were paid a salary to support a single person or possibly a single person with one child. Today, those salaries remain affected by those historic amounts due to market forces. That's why professional jobs designed to attract men have reasonably good salaries even if they largely didn't exist when the workplace was divided on gender lines (i.e., computer programmers).

The key to take away here is: women and men are voluntarily choosing their own professions and we still see a salary discrepancy. The professions they choose have salaries determined by market forces, which includes how people were paid in the past. Programs exist which encourage women to take college paths that lead to better paying careers, but in spite of the fact that women now consistently and significantly outnumber men in annual college enrollment numbers, men still outnumber women in technical and professional degrees and women are still not choosing degrees which result in better paying careers.

So who is to blame? On the one hand you have people saying that women don't make as much and that's a problem for society as a whole. Women are also not taken as authoritatively as men are, so men tend to get hired into positions of higher authority which, of course, pay more. On the other, you have people saying that women made voluntary choices that resulted in them earning less so they should bear the responsibility for the consequences of their own choices rather than expecting society to fix it for them.

Fundamentally, none these problems can be easily solved through government policy or regulation. Are we expecting the government to step in an force salaries for jobs to be increased or decreased? That you have to pay a teacher and an engineer the same? That's not equality. That's parity. Are we going to say that the woman who worked 5 years, quit 10 to raise kids, and then returns deserves the same salary and opportunities as a man who has worked for 15 years? How is that fair to devalue 10 years of relevant experience? What about the increasingly common situation where the man quits his job to raise the kids? Does he deserve the same considerations?

There have been significant innovations brought to the global space efforts by Mangalyaan. These innovations are the ones that cut the costs of the Mars initiative to $75M.

There have been innovations in planning, management and execution. The key ones have been a strategic focus on component reuse and leveraging other ongoing space missions within ISRO to concurrently complete tasks for Mangalyaan (:-) Isro folks hate the nickname). The whole project was planned in detail and completely schedule driven. Mangalyaan took 18 months from Mission announcement to lift-off. http://www.forbes.com/sites/sa...

The other major innovation was in terms of software modelling & simulation of the entire mission. Physical tests were made redundant on a scale never done before - just one prototype was needed. This cut waste, time & costs significantly.

ISRO chose a longer route but the slingshotting technique paid off in terms of far lesser fuel consumption (thus reducing the weight of the space craft) and yet took approximately the same time as the Maven.

Low manpower costs also helped.

I would think the payoffs to the global space community are in terms of cutting edge techniques developed. Collaboration with the Indian industry have helped build next-gen capability which will pay off in the years to come.

The Mom, a Technology demonstrator is a product of Jugaad or Frugal Engineering. The next mission is scheduled for sometime in 2017-2020. More at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...

There have been MANY examinations of the claim given the way the alarmists cling to it like drowning men clinging to life rafts. In the REAL world, you rarely encounter so many voices making shrill claims using the exact same percentage number for ANYTHING. It does not matter if some political people at NASA echo the claim (James Hansen, after all, was famously working for NASA at Goddard while hustling for AGW...)

Let mey point out a just one of the many dissections of that claim. If you do not want to read that in its entirety, try this brief summary.

Of course, if the Forbes link is too "right wing" for you, you might prefer the get the 97% bubble popped by a left-leaning source

Be VERY wary when lots of political activists all start chanting a slogan with a very-specific number like "97%"... it's rarely honest and usually scripted propaganda no matter WHAT party you think might be behind it.

Umm.. The numbers are not even close to 12 million.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/th...

http://www.nbcnews.com/health/...

Obamacare seems to have only helped a little under 3% of the people who did not have coverage previously. Even now, there are still problems with it as one of the largest insurance companies in Minnesota is pulling out of the exchange.

http://www.nbcnews.com/health/...

Now before you get all pissy, this isn't a swipe at obamacare, it's the facts surrounding it that you seem to have missed and evidence of the GP's statement that "they simply do not have any clue to anything that they are involved with". Evidently, neither do you unless you were listening to them.

My favorite is still the articles that talked about the suicides at Foxconn facilities making XBoxes for Microsoft, yet included pictures of Apple products for the story.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/cl...
"...He’ll now own 98% of the lush 141 square mile resort island..."

Or perhaps you mean the Senate seats?

Apple's iPhone 5s Is The Dominant Smartphone In Japan

Can't speak to wherever in Australia they were planning, but Oregon is a tough market. Lots of hydro, growing wind segment, and not enough transmission capacity to make sure excess can be shuffled off to other markets. 2011 was a wet year, and oversupply was already somewhat of a problem. The economics for intermittent renewable sources -- wind, solar, wave -- get worse in a hurry if you can't sell all the power you could potentially generate.

I'll buy that GW is dangerous when ALGORE sells his beach house

The beach house that's 2 miles from the beach, at an elevation of 510 feet?

How about all of his oil shares?

  http://www.forbes.com/sites/la...

I am happy to use Google for you.

Here's the Forbes article Germanys Green Energy Disaster a Cautionary Tale for World Leaders.

That was 2013. Here it is even worse a year later in the NY times article German Energy Push Runs Into Problems, reporting major troubles such as:

. Electricity prices in Germany are already among the highest in the world.

. The price of industrial electricity has risen about 37 percent since 2005.

. International energy experts say the country cannot meet its future needs solely through renewable sources as planned

. The unexpected drop in global energy prices through the emergence of abundant, low-cost natural gas in the United States, further degrades Germany's green energy economic plan

CNET also covers this well, noting SapphireGlass costs $30 per unit versus $3 for Gorilla Glass. From the CNET article...

Corning, which has repeatedly criticized the use of sapphire as a mobile-device display, says its testing found that though sapphire is harder to scratch than its Gorilla Glass, daily use of a sapphire display will produce tiny cracks in the material. Those cracks can easily proliferate and cause the display to break more easily over time than Gorilla Glass. As a major manufacturer of industrial crystals, Corning should know a thing or two about sapphire. It used to make tubes of it for high-temperature lighting during the 1960s and 1970s, according to Jeffrey Evenson, Corning's operations chief of staff.

"As material guys, we think Gorilla has a lot more potential," Evenson said, who added that glass is much easier to manipulate into different forms, such as with the rounded Gorilla Glass display of the new Samsung Note Edge smartphone.

http://www.cnet.com/news/why-t...