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One place where techies earn a lot less than $100k / year is the UK. Not a country you'd associate with little money...

Well, there are numerous problems with this comparison. You want to measure real wage, not the money wage. The real wage/money wage ratio for Britain is probably obviously higher than that for the US worker. Consider, a British pound trades for 1.65 US Dollars right now. After that, you factor in taxes (everyone loves to do that, right?) .

And, then you factor in things like standard of living. Everyone loves to point out the increased gas costs and rent, but not underline the fact that more people don't own a car, or even feel like they need to, because of public transportation. Like, I live in NYC because I hate driving, so it's a "feature" to me. YMMV. Google employees, for instance, save money because of amenities like the Google busses we're hearing so much about. Then you have to factor in the social services that are provided for each country. It is a lot cheaper to be pregnant in Britain. Yes, because the taxes are higher, but if you factor in taxes, you have to factor in what you're getting for them.

I haven't done the work, but I'd be interested in the results.

What does the relationship between the Euro and the Pound have to a supplier based in the USA who trades in dollars ?

Looking at http://www.x-rates.com/d/GBP/USD/graph120.html , the pound has been very close to the dollar for quite a while now. They're both weakening on the global markets, but they're keeping pretty good pace with each other.

The pound is going down.

I don't think it's the Euro that's the problem. Sounds like it's the pound. Looks like the U.S. dollar has been growing against the pound pretty consistently in recent months.

And the NZ Dollar! Me too! Me too! Go, you good thing!

http://www.x-rates.com/d/USD/NZD/graph120.html

first of all, bitcoins have only been around since "overnight." US dollar has been around a while longer.

but take almost any currency you can find and watch the foreign exchange trends over the last 6 months http://www.x-rates.com/

i tried out a dozen different currencies and they all showed a steady decline of value in exchange for the USD, which is becoming more and more worthless every day.

...the book will be priced more by 20 percent.

Even though the US and Canadian dollars achieved parity in December of last year and the US dollar is on the low end.

http://www.x-rates.com/d/CAD/USD/hist2011.html

Oh the days when I could go shopping in Canada when the Canadian dollar was 1/3 less (really, 33 percent - 400 bucks got me 600 CDN) than the US dollar.

--
BMO

That's what we're quibbling about, 5%? It changes that much all the time due to exchange rate fluctuations.

Rs. 200,000 to 300,000 ($4,4000 to $6,600 US)

Maybe it's just me, but I'm still kind of shocked to see numbers like this. The current exchange rate (as I type this) between the U.S. dollar and Indian rupee is about 45.7 to 1! Okay, so the above numbers are only slightly off (rounded for readability I'm sure), but still, does this remind anyone else of Snow Crash?

Shocking, isn't it? I have no idea what's been going on. The US dollar has apparently rallied against most major world currencies except the Japanese yen. Here's an article speculating about why. Apparently, risk adverse investors are dumping less "reliable" currencies in favor of "safe" ones like the US dollar and the yen. No, I don't get it either.

as much as the dollar has fallen - so has other countries' currency fallen as well. because world's economy depends on the USD (well its all interdependent, really). in january it was about $1.47 to the euro it is now $1.27 for 1 euro. the GBP (english pound) also took a nose drive - january it was $1.97 to the pound - it is now about $1.53 to a pound. http://www.x-rates.com/d/USD/EUR/hist2008.html

Here's a serious question. Why did the US dollar suddenly shoot up against all the other currencies when this global financial crisis started? The USA is where the gigantic financial crisis happened. So why is the US dollar suddenly so much higher than it was before? Any economists out there?

Here are some graphs: http://www.x-rates.com/d/USD/EUR/graph120.html http://www.x-rates.com/d/USD/GBP/graph120.html http://www.x-rates.com/d/USD/BRL/graph120.html

WHY???

Here's a serious question. Why did the US dollar suddenly shoot up against all the other currencies when this global financial crisis started? The USA is where the gigantic financial crisis happened. So why is the US dollar suddenly so much higher than it was before? Any economists out there?

Here are some graphs: http://www.x-rates.com/d/USD/EUR/graph120.html http://www.x-rates.com/d/USD/GBP/graph120.html http://www.x-rates.com/d/USD/BRL/graph120.html

WHY???

Here's a serious question. Why did the US dollar suddenly shoot up against all the other currencies when this global financial crisis started? The USA is where the gigantic financial crisis happened. So why is the US dollar suddenly so much higher than it was before? Any economists out there?

Here are some graphs: http://www.x-rates.com/d/USD/EUR/graph120.html http://www.x-rates.com/d/USD/GBP/graph120.html http://www.x-rates.com/d/USD/BRL/graph120.html

WHY???

I dunno, you seen the Canadian Dollar lately? The US dollar had a head start, but Canadia ain't doing so hot either.

Come on everyone knows http://www.xe.com/ is the place to go for currency info, it even has top pagerank on Google.

Wheree do you think I got X-Rates? From Google! Googling dollar euro "foreign exchange" returns X-rates in the top spot.

90 euros for XP, $130

50 Euros for Works, $70.

Canadian dollars, right? So in American that guy just got back $10k, right? Payday!

According to the X-Rates currency calculator 140 euros is 201.46 US dollars and 193.784 Canadian dollars.

Canadian currency jokes now end. Of course, where the Euro or Pound is used, BOTH of our currencies are jokes. I was hanging out with some Europeans over the summer here in New York and they were buying up digital cameras, clothing, etc. etc. To them, it was deeply discounted. Sort of felt like living in Mexico.

Can someone post the USD v. whoever-is-making-is exchange rates comparing now and when the original target price was announced. I'd guess that might account for some of the $100->$200.

Can someone post the USD v. whoever-is-making-is exchange rates comparing now and when the original target price was announced. I'd guess that might account for some of the $100->$200.

Can someone post the USD v. whoever-is-making-is exchange rates comparing now and when the original target price was announced. I'd guess that might account for some of the $100->$200.

Can someone post the USD v. whoever-is-making-is exchange rates comparing now and when the original target price was announced. I'd guess that might account for some of the $100->$200.

Can someone post the USD v. whoever-is-making-is exchange rates comparing now and when the original target price was announced. I'd guess that might account for some of the $100->$200.

Can someone post the USD v. whoever-is-making-is exchange rates comparing now and when the original target price was announced. I'd guess that might account for some of the $100->$200.

Can someone post the USD v. whoever-is-making-is exchange rates comparing now and when the original target price was announced. I'd guess that might account for some of the $100->$200.

Can someone post the USD v. whoever-is-making-is exchange rates comparing now and when the original target price was announced. I'd guess that might account for some of the $100->$200.

Here you have a graph:

http://www.x-rates.com/d/USD/CAD/graph120.html

Only 120 days, but:

http://www.x-rates.com/d/USD/CAD/graph120.html

Strong is not the word I would use.

See, the graph at http://www.x-rates.com/d/USD/CNY/graph120.html points out a clear trend of devaluation of the American Dollar compared to a whole lot of other currencies in the world in the last 120 days. I don't care enough to dig out long-term trends for your education, but having a currency unit A that is worth two units of currency B is not exactly good if four months ago a unit of A was worth 10 units of B. It either shows A is being actively devalued by the government (in order to boost exports or curb imports) or is being discredited by severe doubts on the long term viability of their economy, at least compared to other, more vigorous, ones.

You jest, but have you been paying attention to the exchange rates between U.S. and Canadian dollars lately?

"It must be utterly awful here in the false Free Market "

Hey, I've got a question for you...mr Anonymous.

Define Free Market.

Apply that definition to the US. Does the US match the definition? No? Oh!

Goddamn Randroids, living in their own fantasy lands.

"when people keep pouring into this country."

Funny how capital has been fleeing the US for other places, while the Dollar sinks and sinks. It's almost EXACTLY two dollars to buy a British Pound. The Canadian Dollar will soon be more expensive than the US dollar. Woo. There goes your US (and my, btw) bank account. "I'm short the Dollar" - Bill Gates.

http://www.x-rates.com/calculator.html

Fuck you.

--
BMO

The value of cash is pretty volatile as well - maybe not quite as much so as Google stock, but certainly volatile nonetheless.

In the case of the United States, the Dollar has been fairly consistently falling against the Euro for the past 120 days or so.

The machines currently cost $130, but with that kind of volume the original goal of $100 a machine may be viable.

Really, this kind of comment is rather meaningless for a product that will ship to countries outside of the US. The rise in relative price from $100 to $130 could just reflect the decline in the $US on International exchange markets.

I can only assume this is the reason your post was moderated as funny. One of the things I hate about visiting America is interacting with these machines. The user interface and reliability are worse than we had in the '80s.

In US money is more valuable than freedom/democracy

Well, freedom and democracy are doomed then.

I just checked the prices in Pounds Sterling at crucial.com/uk, and found that it had gone down since I last checked, a couple of weeks ago (when I noticed that it had also gone down from a couple of weeks previously. Your comment, therefore, surprised me. I finally tracked down the answer. The US Dollar fell sharply in the last month (the graphs against other currencies show similar pictures). The memory prices were probably the first to be affected, because those prices have a habit of fluctuating quite widely so suppliers tend to keep their inventories low.

The exchange rate appears to be about NZ$1.6 to US$1 [http://www.x-rates.com/d/NZD/USD/graph120.html%5D [x-rates.com] and according to the website the prices are listed in NZD.

So if you're an American (like me! woo-hoo!), you can divide by 1.6.

currently 6 or 7 krona get you 10 dollars

You're off by a factor of 10. 1 USD = approximately 7.5 Swedish kroner (today).

2x? I upgraded my home PC a month ago, and bought 500GB worth of disks for about £120. Taking an exchange rate of approx 1.76 (from x-rates.com), that works out as a touch over $68, or $6.8 per 50GB.

I appreciate that any new technology starts out expensive then drops in price, but that's ridiculous.

If you are trusting the facts given by these sites:
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/ in.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4436692.stm
http://www.dqindia.com/content/top_stories/2005/10 5091201.asp
http://www.x-rates.com/

From the BBC article, it is about 5344 pounds ($9300 US) annual salary for a software engineer in India. Take that money and you can hire about 182,000 workers in India or give every person in the country $1.50 (or a little less than a pound for 1,080,264,388 people.) Otherwise if you hire 3,000 new workers and pay them that avg. $9300 annual salary, you will still have $1.67 billion left over to invest elsewhere.

The USA is Dying

It is official -- The UN is now confirming: The USA is dying

One more crippling bombshell crushed the already beleaguered American economy
when x-rates.com confirmed that the American Dollar has dropped yet again,
now down to .9 of a Euro. Coming on the heels of a recent Usenet survey which plainly states that The American Economy is in a recession, this news serves to
  reinforce what we've known all along. The USA is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last [samag.com] in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.

You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict the USA's future. The hand writing is on the wall: The USA faces a bleak future. In fact there won't
be any future at all for the USA because it is dying. Things are looking very bad for America. As many of us are already aware, the US continues to lose relevence. Red ink flows like a river of blood.

The IT industry is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core
developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time IT jobs to india only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: The American IT Industry is dying.

Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

Microsoft Encarta states that there are 291,065,636 people in America. What is the US's national debt? Let's see. According to the The Debt clock the USA's National Debt is 6,465,271,811,559.14. Therefore each American
is $22,212.42. in debt. In fact, the USA's national debt has continued to
  increase an average of $992 million per day since September 30, 2002. Indeed,
it can clearly be seen the the US is going broke faster then the Soviet Union did

Due to the troubles of American Meddling, An Capitalist Gorvernment and so on,
South Vietnam was attacked was taken over by North Vietnam who sell another
a more compassionate government. Now Iraq is also dead, its corpse turned over
to feed the US media.

All major surveys show that the USA has steadily declined in the world economy.
America is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If
the USA is to survive at all it will be among a broken collection of warring
factions. America continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save
it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, the United States of America is dead.

Fact: The USA is dying

That's very interesting because: a) they've artificially pegged the yuan-to-U.S.-dollar exchange rate at 8.2765
b) the U.S dollar has been dropping substantially in value in comparison to many other major currencies, over the last 4 years. In May 2001, it took about 1.14 Euros to buy 1 US dollar; now it takes about .78 Euros...

The dollar's been rising lately though. At the beginning of the year, it only took .76 Euros to buy a dollar.

Assuming China's currency really is undervalued, because they're tied to the dollar at a fixed rate, then the US dollar is overvalued (or another currency tied to the dollar is). I'd guess that if China lets their currency float, then in theory the dollar (or the dollar and that other currency) will fall even more, which will make our exports cheaper to the rest of the world and make our imports (including spot market oil) more expensive.

I agree with you. The dollar is weak right now so I would take any literal currency translations with a grain of salt. In January 2003, the exchange rate was 120 Yen to 1 Dollar. May 1st it was 105 Yen to the dollar. Using the 2003 conversion rate, the PS3 would be about $400.

How this works into the PS3's US based pricing strategy is anyone's guess, but I wouldn't just take a price in Yen, convert it, and assume that will be the price in dollars.

I personally own about $500/250GBP worth of music CDs, none of which I would have bought without P2P being there. It does help the record industry make money.

At that price point, I have some severe doubts about the volume of units they will be able to move.

Funny you should mention that...

I'm looking into getting maybe three or four of these mini-ITX systems to do stereo vision processing for a DARPA run. They're easier to work with than usual embedded controlers (since they're 99.9% x86 PC), and they're much cheaper than even the cheapest laptops out there.

These in particular might not be cheap because they're so new, but a Nehemiah 1Ghz is only £95GBP or $171USD (guess they haven't updated their exchange rates), $760.02 for 4 of 'em including shipping anywhere in the lower 48.

I'm getting one of ebay.com and risking the tax man for the sake of $255.

At todays rate

$799.95 = EUR606.61
EUR 799.99 = $1054

The future? More like right now. The Euro is beating the dollar like gangbusters, and the only way out of this situation is massive inflation and tax increases. These are the fruits of Republicanism. By time time the shit hits the fan in 2008 there will probably be a democrat in office who will have to balance the budget and the right-wing noise machine will scream "Spendocrats," like they did when Clinton cleaned up Reagan's mess.

Then a Republican wins the seat again and we go through this stupid process all over again.

What we need is strict spending limits (and term limits) on all politicians regardless of party. Because at the end of the day its our money, not theirs. Well, technically, now its our debt. Perhaps people will be more skeptical of claims to war (and other things) when they realize that paying for a war means more taxes and cuts in services. And inflation and debt.