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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?
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.
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.
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
Well, from cmdr taco's own comment we can figure slashdot get 1 million unique visitors a day. Ok then. Say, 50 % are actually at work and at the correct time, 500,000 unique visitors. Assume they only visit slashdot ONCE during their daily job for 15 minutes. You get 500,000 x 15 = 7,500,000 minutes of lost productivity per day.
Hmm, figure average wage of U.S. worker to be 35,000$/year (roughly) that is, 20$/hour. OK then, so 7,500,000 minutes = 125,000 hours x 20$/hour = 2.5 million dollars/per day.
Extrapolating for a work year (roughly 270 work days in a year) = 675 million dollars in a year due to slashdot and lost productivity.
Hmmm. I'm probably wrong, for one thing not everybody spends 15 minutes a day on slashdot, not everyone looks every day, not everybody does it works, not everybody makes 20$/hour so that number is prolly too high.
But even if you figure it is DOUBLE or TRIPLE what the real number is.. wow.. even if it is QUADRUPLE that means that the real number would be 168,750,000 million. Not quite Star Wars but close..
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.
- Story about building a PC using an old shoe box, chicken wire, and old Mac SE parts: $25M
- Story about same machine running Linux: $50M
- Story (with link) to same machine running a web server and powered by potato energy: $150M
- Obligatory flaming of JonKatz techno rant: $300M
- Story Proving/Disproving Evolution, Story about paid Microsoft benchmarks, Story with anything about genetics: 8x the annual GDP of small European country.
[Having no karma and learning to love it: Priceless]In Japan, they require by law that events this popular (Dragon Quest games) get moved to Sunday. Should we do the same?
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
My experience is that the high tech industry is pretty laid off.
c-hack.com |
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
Removing Solitaire from Windows would seriously compromise it's functionality. It is a key part of the operating system. If MS are forced to remove solitaire from Windows, then they may have to withdraw it from the market.
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