Slashdot Mirror
Attack of the Clones to Cost Economy $300m
Audent writes: "Attack of the Clones may make you sick but according to this story, it will cost the US economy $300 million in lost productivity what with all the nerds calling in with a bad case of midiclorianitis. ...
Nerds and geeks and propellorheads are singled out as being most at risk. Take your medication now! dammit." A nameless reader also points to a review (looks like two, but only one is up at the time of this writing) up at http://www.pstwo.net/.
I'm sorry but if I'm not waiting in line for this movie, I'd just be playing solitairre at work. So really the economy is being spurred by me going out and spending money, no?
Enough to fund a small nation would be my guess.
yes i run a goth/punk/emo porn site.
Imagine how much lost nerd & geek productivity does Slashdot produce. It's scary to even try to imagine the number in $$....
;)
The Searchers... staring Jar Jar Binks. The last scene, with his ears flopping in the wind standing in the doorway!
"She be comanch-a--wwooobbeeedo---!"
Someone you trust is one of us.
Congress just voted on a $31 billion farm subsidy bill which benefits mainly large agricultural corporations. Here $300 million is "wasted" over a few million people.
The argument in the article is fundamentally flawed. In the US, as in most countries I think, employees typically have a fixed number of sick days, vacation days and/or personal days. Claiming that Attack of the Clones will somehow increase the total number of such days taken in 2002 by a non-negligable number is just plain silly. If an employee doesn't take vacation or call in sick on Clone Day, then surely he/she will make up for it some other time.
26d6173bbc9af7cfdb7ce60600e6aded518bfe51acca9a84a
My experience is that the high tech industry is pretty laid back about time off. I'm confident that if I wanted to take the afternoon off for something I considered important that I could simply do so and promise to make the time up. Even more likely, I probably already put in extra hours the night before. I certainly wouldn't feel any need to lie about it. How easy would it be for you?
Miko O'Sullivan
"Slashteam": can we please moderate stories, already? This thing has T R O L L all over it with the tag...I mean, "propellorheads?"
Well, it was posted by Timothy, what do you expect?
At least not around here, as most of the geeks are unemployed, and those with jobs are too scared to play hooky.
A well-crafted lie appears unquestionable - Dama Mahaleo
Why is it that there are always studies like this of the "geeks", but there's nothing representative of the other masses? Shouldn't someone do a study of stuff like this when a Hugh Grant or Julia Roberts film hits the theaters and millions of housewives, secretaries and others flock to see it?
What about take-your-daughter/son-to-work day? I wonder how much that costs us?
How about what it costs us ever time Clinton stopped to get a h$mmer.... If that's not a massive waste of cash, what is?
Isn't this just more geek bashing?
Osama Bin Laden could only wish. There are lies, damn lies, and marketing generated statistics. If there was such a thing as an "employment expert", I think they would have, by now, figured out the whole unemployment problem and solved it. Three hundred million bucks in lost productivity? The 9/11 atrocity is estimated at 1.2 billion dollars in economic damage to US worker productivity, not counting lost jobs, from what I have read. To say that Star Wars is going to do 1/4 of the economic damage as September 11th might send Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge's color coded domestic terrorism scale to RED causing him to ban all showings before 6pm local time.
Write this one off to cheap and easy journalism recycling a press release. If this is true, however, I expect to see George Lucas at Gitmo in the next month.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
I don't know if it is really all the much. If I am working hard on something and run into a brick wall (whether ir be work or homework, etc.) I find browsing the web, reading /. etc can sometimes help me get past that. It allows my mind to change gears for a little bit and some times help me to think of something I may not have otherwise. Same goes for any form of recreation. Just because I might spend 30 minutes reading /. at work, doesn't mean 'the economy' just lost 30 minutes of wages and productivity. It means I just took a break and solved a problem quicker than I may have if I had banged my head on my desk for those 30 minutes instead.
What?
Let me (hopefully) be the first to announce that SlashDot discussed this when Episode 1 came out. Slash linked to an article that's still there. It talked about the same Chicago company, Challenger, Gray & Christmas, that publicised EP2 estimates. They were almost the same numbers for EP1.
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2B1ASK1
What about all positive impact of the movie? I'm speaking of all the merchanise that will be sold, extra buckets of popcorn and large drinks, promotional tie-ins and so on.
Granted, most of the money will end up in George's pockets, but the middle man will still make a few extra bucks.
People need to relax, have fun, and enjoy life. That both makes them more productive when they do work, and it gives them a reason to earn money.
Companies prepare for this when they give you sick/vacation time. By giving you that time they've already accounted for the lost productivity and agreed to pay you anyway.
Everyone knows that vacation days are for vaction, and sick days are for when you just don't want to go in.
Yes I do
Maybe I will in fact continue my boycott of RIAA/MPAA.
The thing is, if I go and see Episode II, and it's anywhere near as horrible as Episode I, I won't be faking it when I call in sick.
I don't know a whole lot about how this works yet, but it seems to me that in awarding sick days, companies would have already planned for this. Don't they expect people might take days off? This just happens to be everybody leaving on the same day.
I understand that other factors might be involved, such as not having enough employees available to run a piece of equipment, but that's not what they're talking about. Raw wage calculations should have been taken care of already.
Yes?
In Japan, they require by law that events this popular (Dragon Quest games) get moved to Sunday. Should we do the same?
I'm sure there's some academic terms for these, but some people(idiots) like to simplify the calculation without making proper assumption.
:/
They assumed that they must be doing something productive if they are not watching movies. Hell, they might spend more unproductive hours elsewhere.
Same ill-logic can be found everywhere. I saw in yeasterday's news the local custom confisticated piracy software which said to be causing 15 billions net lost of software industry. 15 billions! It's many times more than the total revuene made by all industries here!
It sounds like all people would buy a $5000 software if they couldn't find a $5 in piracy market. I know they should make it a big deal to attract public attention, but sadly some people(idiots) would believe these figures.
Works for me, even when I am in the office.
testing out my trending skills
we'd all be walking on streets paved with gold.
While hallucinating from lack of sleep.
So what am I supposed to be doing to help the economy today, producing, or spending my income on leisure consumer goods? You can't have it both ways boys and girls.
Hey, I've got a neat idea. I'll just * do what I want.* I think there's a term for that:
Democratic Free Market
Man, we don't want anything like *that* getting lose in the American economy!
KFG
I have friends in the IT business who haven't been to work for about a year.
Not because they're waiting in line for tickets, but because they're unemployed.
I wonder how much that's costing the economy.
Ron Epstein, owner of the Home Theater Forum has a good review online.
A choice quote:
I won't waste any time in saying that Attack Of The Clones is the most remarkable Star Wars film to date. It not only breathes new life into the series, but it brings us back to the original magic that made Star Wars a cultural phenomenon. It is ultimately the Empire Strikes Back of this new saga, that takes us to the darkest corners of the Star Wars universe, as we come face-to-face with the master plan of Darth Sidious.
My experience is that the high tech industry is pretty laid off.
c-hack.com |
Here. There are also all the Star Wars trailers in the download area.
Click here or here.
No, seriously. As far as I can tell, Jar-jar's only REAL crime was being the only character in the first movie with a personality of any sort (the fact that the personality in question was that of an annoying muppet only made this fact more painful, as it meant HE was the only character a semi-sane human being could relate to...which of course, nobody wanted to do...).
His speech and voice aren't really much sillier than Yoda's (and Yoda didn't even have the gee-whiz CGI effects to to keep him from being such an obvious puppet). His slapstick antics weren't really any more annoying than R2D2/C3P0's (heck, the "how rude!" schtick just REEKS of C3P0) were in the original movies...but in the original movies, the main characters HAD personalities that outshone the 'droids, so they weren't so "glaring". In TPM, it just made Jar-jar stand out way more than he would have if the other characters weren't acting like emotionless drones most of the time...
From the brief blurb in the review, it sounds like Lucas is still keeping Jar-jar in the "annoying comic relief" category (though for only a very brief appearance this time)...but I'd much rather they actually let Jar-jar develop beyond that. Seriously - if they let him hang around the other characters long enough, they can have him lose the more outrageous aspects of his speech, get a grip on his tendency to comically panic everytime something happens, and accomplish something once in a while. Or, perhaps he'll just get fed up with the abuse he gets from the alleged "good guys" and give in to the Dark Side - perhaps Lucas' "Big Plans" involve Jar-jar coming back as a vengeful Sith to kick everyone's butts for tormenting him in the first two movies while letting R2D2 and C3P0 do their thing without comment (evidently, they're back in this movie as well).
(If Jar-jar using Magic Force Powers(tm) seems improbable to you, take a look at this article. It may just be that Lucas overdid Jar-jar's "fool" act as much as he overdid the Jedi's "calm and cool" act in the first movie...)
Now if only someone will found the Association for Prevention of Cruelty to Comedy Sidekicks, we'll be in business...
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
Empoyment experts also estimate that sex costs the US economy over 1.4 trillion dollars in lost production.
Dallas-based recruitment firm Gray, Limp, and Lifeless Corp. projects that over 40 million man-hours per day are lost because
of fatigue and injury due to the previous night's sexual activities, and because of lost work caused
by thinking about sex in the forthcoming night. According to CEO Dick Lifeless, "Tens of thousands of sick days result from painful contusions and spained backs alone, caused by these slacker's propensity for wild, excessive sex".
Mr. Lifeless told Reuters that only technology firms were likely to be immune to the economic losses, because of the high proportion of geeks among staff, who were likely to be spending the night alone, eating pizza, reading slashdot, and web-surfing for pornography.
I (when I had a job) always thought that sick days should be treated like holidays. I mean you get a maximim allowance per year of them, so why not use them?
You should be able to book them in advance too:
"Erm, Jack's taking that week off with 'flu, could you take the week after that ? Actually, if you wait until two weeks on Friday, I can let you have ten days off with prostate trouble. OK? I'll pencil you in..."
graspee
Slashdot causes at least this much in lost productivity, every week.
dominionrd.blogspot.com - Restaurants on
And to back up my beliefs, I have two different non-SE widescreen versions of all three movies (notice I didn't say four) on glorious laserdisc.
So all those of you who still haven't seen Episode 1, come out of the closet and admit to the world: I am Jar-Jar free!
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft