In general, increased demand will increase the price of a good unless supply increases. This is of course typical since more demand means more money to be made by supplying firms. Nonetheless, a statement along the lines of new demand will bring down prices is at least incomplete (if not misleading or false).
If you think about your vote, it is one of many, and extremely unlikely to determine an election. Consider that you are voting for candidates who are trying to represent the largest group possible, the bundle of policies they will claim to support is not going to reflect exactly what you want and your vote doesn't tell them which policies you like and don't like. So really your vote is worth very little. Depending on what your alternative activity is, it may not even be worth the time it takes to vote.
So is your vote worth a full scholarship to an established university? Do you think that you will get at the same benefit from the vote as from the tuition money? Depends, some would agrue that certain officials are more likely to go down dark paths, but again, if your vote doesn't decide the election, then you've forgone that tuition money and thrown away your vote.
Personally, if I lived in a swing state my vote might be worth something, but since I don't I'd probably trade it for a hot cup of coffee.
1. The customer pays at least some of the tax since taxes go into the prices of the products. Also, since I assume that the patent costs were paid by Microsoft in order to protect some of the functional uniqueness of their products, it shouldn't have been called a tax by the article's author, but rather a developement cost.
2. Pricing is always driven by cost, there may just be other revenue sources (think about complimentary products like Office, also think about different pricing schedules, re: price discrimination) which can make up the difference in pricing (by the way, price is not the same thing as cost). Also, revenue-cost=profit, profit being what firms usually try to maximize. Although trying to increase revenue is part of profit maximizing, you make it sound like they ignore costs, which is most likely false.
3. If demand for the product is not very sensative to changes in price (price elasticity) then raising the price can actually increase revenue by a lot.
In the quotation, Gates says "salaries for these jobs at Microsoft start at about $100,000 a year. Their counterparts can be hired more cheaply in China or India..." This implies to me that domestic hirees are paid around $100K initially, and that those hired through a visa program cost less. Has Mister Oak misread the quotation or is he purposefully misrepresenting it?
"A pamphlet that photographers give to residents who question their activities says first responders, such as police and firefighters, could save 'precious seconds' if they..."...look for the house with the smoke coming out of it...
I'm not sure I want a robot parking my car. I mean, it's going to have to adjust my driver's seat and it's such a pain to put all of that back the way it was...
The Bureau of Labor Statistics considers anything over 50 employees (over the course of five weeks) to be a mass layoff: http://www.bls.gov/mls/ (first paragraph)
I fear that my post will sound like flamebait, or that I will seem to be an industrial apologist. Let me start by stating that I simply wish to play the skeptic for a second.
The highest temperatures in 400+ years seems to imply that in a period before the industrial revolution that the temperature was at least this high. Should one not wonder if atmospheric pollutants are simply accelorating a natural, cyclical swing in temperature? Clearly things have been heating since the last ice age, and prior to that they had cooled. There are at least grounds for wondering if changes (albeit different ones) in atmoshperic composition don't happen naturally in a way that affects temperature. Personally, I'm inclined to think that we shouldn't change the air we breath, especially since the prospects for improving on the naturally occurring mix aren't great, but a statement saying something along the lines of 'it hasn't been this dark since last night', makes me wonder if people are selling a mechanism for the change and correlation as causality to forward their political agendas. Showing that a thing may occur under current circumstances, and that it is happening is not causality.
I am skeptical that either side is presenting all of the possible evidence, and that what they say comes to us without bias; everybody knows that in politics you put forth the evidence which best frames you position, exageration does occur. Is it impossible that environmentalists have done the same thing here?
Certainly we should abide by things like Kyoto Protocol, or perhaps even more stringant standards, but some questions have to be answered before we go cannonizing global warming via industrialization. Why was the temperature as hot as it was 1000 years ago? Why did it cool? Doesn't the 400 year window that they mention at first put the point of comparison in the "Little Ice Age" and shouldn't we expect the temperature to be higher in a non-ice age than in an ice age? Did these scientist actually use paintings of glaciars and other similar "proxy evidence" to determine previous temperatures as the article claims? If there have been such previous heatings and "Little Ice Age[s]", is there some sort of periodcity to this sort of thing, or at the very least a precedent? Assuming global warming via industrialization is undeniable fact, would we be better off having not made that trade, being serfs and peasants, having none of the simple wonders which make life pleasant, which reduce infant mortality, which make simple diseases survivable, not having the knowledge that has come from that advancement?
Average lines of code seems like a bad metric since the number of lines probably is corelated negatively with the size and complexity of the project as well as the number of people working on it. Although it wasn't the main point of the article, the post includes it as if it were meaningful or descriptive of whatever underlying problems do exist. Even if it were a meaningful statistic, one is forced to wonder how the number was compiled (how many lines of code did you write last year? gross or net? including or excluding revised lines? is it adjusted for part-time programmers? who did they ask?) and how a project manager could be expected to accurately know this?
The idea that a tax credit will make something more efficient is humorous. First, if something is worth doing, it will not require the gov't giving us an incentive to do it. The reason the open source model has grown in popularity is because the necessary incentives are already in place. Some people are able to make money providing support, distribution of the software, related literature, etc. For others the incentive is the pleasure they derive from creation (an old boss of mine called this the "existential joy of creation"). Second, when has gov't intervention, complicating taxes (further) and providing an advantage to one type of business and not others ever been socially desireble? Will the world be a better place if you have to bribe people to do what you (not necessarily everybody) consider "right"? There are obviously people out there who feel that open source is not the best way to organize software production, is it an accepteble use of gov't to put these people at a relative disadvantage by subsidizing the opposite of what they do? Lastly, if we assume that open source requires a subsidy in order to compete it can only mean we beleive that it is not otherwise viable.
Some firms will compete through cost while others compete through quality of services. Considering customer-service of a specialized product a non-core part of your business is idiotic: intricate electronics have their own personalities, someone from Dell is not likely to be able to trouble-shoot a competitor's product-specific problem. Consider the difference in incentives between someone like Dell and a contracted company. Disregard the part of the article where they clam that the name on your work-ID effects your quality, that's bunk.
To Dell, satisfying a customer can be meassured in terms of future revenue, while a contractor is going to view each call as a cost to be paid out of their contracted fee. Changing the incentive structure would change the results drastically.
Imagine: You get paid some amount of money per week to deal with customers, out of this you must pay for staff and equipment. More time spent on customers means more staff must be hired. What would be the profit maximizing solution? Spend as little time on customers as you can while maintaining sufficient quality that you contract doesn't get canceled. You know there are no substitues for your services, customers MUST come to you unless they wish to incur the cost of a new computer. If you breed an atmosphere where your workers try to minimize the duration of calls, your quality will degrade and people will not purchase that brand in the future.
Now imagine a setup where you get some smaller amount of money, almost enough to keep your doors open, and your customers rate your performance as "poor", "okay", or "good", and you get paid a small bonus for being "okay", and a larger bonus for being "good". Being "poor" most of the time means you go out of business (hopefully for the customers' sake you lose your contract first...) Pass on part of the quality bonus to your employees and they will spend more time, making sure that they get their extra money by being helpful. In order to realize the largest return possible you will invest part of your profits in training and more staff (for a decreased wait-time).
The contracting firm of course needs to ask if they can do it for less money, but cheaper labor means a smaller fixed cost, so it would likely end-up outsourcing to another firm somewhere were wages are lower, say in rural Kentucky or purhaps off-shoring it to somewhere in the British Commonwealth. Basic microeconomic lessons: if your product runs the same software as your competitors, then your cost/quality combination must be more attractive if you wish to capture or retain that marginal customer; time spent on the phone listening to recorded messages tell you how much your business is valued is considered a cost by consumers; and incentives matter.
I wonder what respectable method they used to determine how much music people got in hard copy from their friends, versus downloading, and buying. I suppose you could use sales figure for the last one, but one is forced to be skeptical of anybody how can produce numbers on how many burned CDs were used for "copying and distributing music" versus "data back-up", or "copying music for other purposes" (I only used burned CDs in my car so that if the CD booklet gets stolen I don't lose all of my originals). I wonder if they count my copying and distrubuting music that I write and record in the 29%...
Is it the case that the can-spam act caused this increase? What was the mechanism for doing so? Is a percentage change as good an indicator as the source numbers (part of the increase could be caused by non-spam decreasing over the cited period due to increased use of another channel for communications like mobile phones/txt messaging)?
for it to be an anti-trust issue, the companies would have had to have been purposefully colluding to effect the price (commonly called 'price-fixing') of the good (rambus memory). if they didn't produce large enough quantities to make rambus acceptible as a widely adopteble standard because the royalties made the technology inaccessibly priced (high royalties mean the profit margin shrinks, and can become negative...) , this is not a trust. the claims in the blurb are contradictory, and if they are the claims of rambus, then the case is trying to blame somebody else because a certain someone shot themself in the proverbial foot with excesive royalties...
The answer to that is no. It is more important for the results to reflect the exercise than for the people to have faith in the collection method. To be perfectly frank, if the gov't wants to use electronic voting machines, it will. It is the duty of those who build and test the machines to make sure that the machines are tamper-evident and relieble. If the system does not function securely, then it must not be used. IMHO, if there is no paper receipt for the votes cast, the incentive to cheat will be overwhelming. One solution to this issue might be to have an electronic voting machine which punches a card (like a butterfly ballot or an IBM-style punchcard) indicating what vote was cast. These votes could be counted electrically, but would retain a physical record of the vote. Thus there would be the same sort of instant tally that a fully electronic system offers, but there also would be physical receipts to confirm the tally in the case of any questions. If the physical votes do not match the electronic one, you know you have a problem. Each precinct gets exactly the number of voting cards they need for all of their registered voters, returning the unused ones to ensure that there are no votes being replaced with forged votes.
A quote often attributed to Stalin (although there is doubt as to if he said this,) "It's not the people that vote who count, it's the people who count the votes."
It's just like a real desk...
on
iWorkstations?
·
· Score: 1
It's just like a real desk, except that there is no room for anything but a specific line of Apple computers.
Does this method deal with different grammer structures? In flective languages, like Latin and Russian, grammical cases are signified by different endings. Also, is only one translation used or do they use many competing translations? Different translations of the same phrases can yield drastically different meanings.
This could become a beuatiful thing. What they should do is take out some loans and put that money with the permit revenues into promoting a park and ride system. I think they should designate certain roads as bus/car pool/premit only, to increase the utility one gets (in the form of a decreased commute time) by either buying a permit or taking advantage of busses or by car pooling.
Even if only the top 10-15% of rush-hour traffic can afford these permits, everyone else can afford the bus (the parking fees and fees for riding could be covered by a small annual fee, and I'm sure there is some kind of tax write-off they could get for using public transit) or can car pool, which takes that many more drivers off of the LESS direct routes (not indirect way the heck out of the way, just not the very best route). By keeping the permit-routes in good shape, and free of most conjestion, the value of the permit remains high and can be used to pay off the initial loans as well as to subsidize the bussing system.
If you read the blurbs by the pitures about the missions, you'll notice that these landers all had very short lives when they landed on Venus. There are rumored to be, and my astronomy teacher claims to have seen, videos of the Soviets using language not "fit for print" as they watched their probe being eaten by the less then friendly atmospere (which contains noticible amounts of the multi-zillions dollar probe-eating compound sulfuric acid.)
Slashdot Mirror
In general, increased demand will increase the price of a good unless supply increases. This is of course typical since more demand means more money to be made by supplying firms. Nonetheless, a statement along the lines of new demand will bring down prices is at least incomplete (if not misleading or false).
If you think about your vote, it is one of many, and extremely unlikely to determine an election. Consider that you are voting for candidates who are trying to represent the largest group possible, the bundle of policies they will claim to support is not going to reflect exactly what you want and your vote doesn't tell them which policies you like and don't like. So really your vote is worth very little. Depending on what your alternative activity is, it may not even be worth the time it takes to vote.
So is your vote worth a full scholarship to an established university? Do you think that you will get at the same benefit from the vote as from the tuition money? Depends, some would agrue that certain officials are more likely to go down dark paths, but again, if your vote doesn't decide the election, then you've forgone that tuition money and thrown away your vote.
Personally, if I lived in a swing state my vote might be worth something, but since I don't I'd probably trade it for a hot cup of coffee.
1. The customer pays at least some of the tax since taxes go into the prices of the products. Also, since I assume that the patent costs were paid by Microsoft in order to protect some of the functional uniqueness of their products, it shouldn't have been called a tax by the article's author, but rather a developement cost.
2. Pricing is always driven by cost, there may just be other revenue sources (think about complimentary products like Office, also think about different pricing schedules, re: price discrimination) which can make up the difference in pricing (by the way, price is not the same thing as cost). Also, revenue-cost=profit, profit being what firms usually try to maximize. Although trying to increase revenue is part of profit maximizing, you make it sound like they ignore costs, which is most likely false.
3. If demand for the product is not very sensative to changes in price (price elasticity) then raising the price can actually increase revenue by a lot.
In the quotation, Gates says "salaries for these jobs at Microsoft start at about $100,000 a year. Their counterparts can be hired more cheaply in China or India..." This implies to me that domestic hirees are paid around $100K initially, and that those hired through a visa program cost less. Has Mister Oak misread the quotation or is he purposefully misrepresenting it?
"A pamphlet that photographers give to residents who question their activities says first responders, such as police and firefighters, could save 'precious seconds' if they..." ...look for the house with the smoke coming out of it...
I'm not sure I want a robot parking my car. I mean, it's going to have to adjust my driver's seat and it's such a pain to put all of that back the way it was...
The Bureau of Labor Statistics considers anything over 50 employees (over the course of five weeks) to be a mass layoff: http://www.bls.gov/mls/ (first paragraph)
2/7/18
And if they don't? Well, call out the National Guard...
I fear that my post will sound like flamebait, or that I will seem to be an industrial apologist. Let me start by stating that I simply wish to play the skeptic for a second.
The highest temperatures in 400+ years seems to imply that in a period before the industrial revolution that the temperature was at least this high. Should one not wonder if atmospheric pollutants are simply accelorating a natural, cyclical swing in temperature? Clearly things have been heating since the last ice age, and prior to that they had cooled. There are at least grounds for wondering if changes (albeit different ones) in atmoshperic composition don't happen naturally in a way that affects temperature. Personally, I'm inclined to think that we shouldn't change the air we breath, especially since the prospects for improving on the naturally occurring mix aren't great, but a statement saying something along the lines of 'it hasn't been this dark since last night', makes me wonder if people are selling a mechanism for the change and correlation as causality to forward their political agendas. Showing that a thing may occur under current circumstances, and that it is happening is not causality.
I am skeptical that either side is presenting all of the possible evidence, and that what they say comes to us without bias; everybody knows that in politics you put forth the evidence which best frames you position, exageration does occur. Is it impossible that environmentalists have done the same thing here?
Certainly we should abide by things like Kyoto Protocol, or perhaps even more stringant standards, but some questions have to be answered before we go cannonizing global warming via industrialization. Why was the temperature as hot as it was 1000 years ago? Why did it cool? Doesn't the 400 year window that they mention at first put the point of comparison in the "Little Ice Age" and shouldn't we expect the temperature to be higher in a non-ice age than in an ice age? Did these scientist actually use paintings of glaciars and other similar "proxy evidence" to determine previous temperatures as the article claims? If there have been such previous heatings and "Little Ice Age[s]", is there some sort of periodcity to this sort of thing, or at the very least a precedent? Assuming global warming via industrialization is undeniable fact, would we be better off having not made that trade, being serfs and peasants, having none of the simple wonders which make life pleasant, which reduce infant mortality, which make simple diseases survivable, not having the knowledge that has come from that advancement?
Average lines of code seems like a bad metric since the number of lines probably is corelated negatively with the size and complexity of the project as well as the number of people working on it. Although it wasn't the main point of the article, the post includes it as if it were meaningful or descriptive of whatever underlying problems do exist. Even if it were a meaningful statistic, one is forced to wonder how the number was compiled (how many lines of code did you write last year? gross or net? including or excluding revised lines? is it adjusted for part-time programmers? who did they ask?) and how a project manager could be expected to accurately know this?
The idea that a tax credit will make something more efficient is humorous. First, if something is worth doing, it will not require the gov't giving us an incentive to do it. The reason the open source model has grown in popularity is because the necessary incentives are already in place. Some people are able to make money providing support, distribution of the software, related literature, etc. For others the incentive is the pleasure they derive from creation (an old boss of mine called this the "existential joy of creation"). Second, when has gov't intervention, complicating taxes (further) and providing an advantage to one type of business and not others ever been socially desireble? Will the world be a better place if you have to bribe people to do what you (not necessarily everybody) consider "right"? There are obviously people out there who feel that open source is not the best way to organize software production, is it an accepteble use of gov't to put these people at a relative disadvantage by subsidizing the opposite of what they do? Lastly, if we assume that open source requires a subsidy in order to compete it can only mean we beleive that it is not otherwise viable.
Some firms will compete through cost while others compete through quality of services. Considering customer-service of a specialized product a non-core part of your business is idiotic: intricate electronics have their own personalities, someone from Dell is not likely to be able to trouble-shoot a competitor's product-specific problem. Consider the difference in incentives between someone like Dell and a contracted company. Disregard the part of the article where they clam that the name on your work-ID effects your quality, that's bunk.
To Dell, satisfying a customer can be meassured in terms of future revenue, while a contractor is going to view each call as a cost to be paid out of their contracted fee. Changing the incentive structure would change the results drastically.
Imagine: You get paid some amount of money per week to deal with customers, out of this you must pay for staff and equipment. More time spent on customers means more staff must be hired. What would be the profit maximizing solution? Spend as little time on customers as you can while maintaining sufficient quality that you contract doesn't get canceled. You know there are no substitues for your services, customers MUST come to you unless they wish to incur the cost of a new computer. If you breed an atmosphere where your workers try to minimize the duration of calls, your quality will degrade and people will not purchase that brand in the future.
Now imagine a setup where you get some smaller amount of money, almost enough to keep your doors open, and your customers rate your performance as "poor", "okay", or "good", and you get paid a small bonus for being "okay", and a larger bonus for being "good". Being "poor" most of the time means you go out of business (hopefully for the customers' sake you lose your contract first...) Pass on part of the quality bonus to your employees and they will spend more time, making sure that they get their extra money by being helpful. In order to realize the largest return possible you will invest part of your profits in training and more staff (for a decreased wait-time).
The contracting firm of course needs to ask if they can do it for less money, but cheaper labor means a smaller fixed cost, so it would likely end-up outsourcing to another firm somewhere were wages are lower, say in rural Kentucky or purhaps off-shoring it to somewhere in the British Commonwealth. Basic microeconomic lessons: if your product runs the same software as your competitors, then your cost/quality combination must be more attractive if you wish to capture or retain that marginal customer; time spent on the phone listening to recorded messages tell you how much your business is valued is considered a cost by consumers; and incentives matter.
I wonder what respectable method they used to determine how much music people got in hard copy from their friends, versus downloading, and buying. I suppose you could use sales figure for the last one, but one is forced to be skeptical of anybody how can produce numbers on how many burned CDs were used for "copying and distributing music" versus "data back-up", or "copying music for other purposes" (I only used burned CDs in my car so that if the CD booklet gets stolen I don't lose all of my originals). I wonder if they count my copying and distrubuting music that I write and record in the 29%...
I'm sure those consumers who were burried under all that spam will be getting their cut of that settlement any day now.
Is it the case that the can-spam act caused this increase? What was the mechanism for doing so? Is a percentage change as good an indicator as the source numbers (part of the increase could be caused by non-spam decreasing over the cited period due to increased use of another channel for communications like mobile phones/txt messaging)?
If Colorado were to pass such a bill, it would be the third state to award electoral votes this way.
for it to be an anti-trust issue, the companies would have had to have been purposefully colluding to effect the price (commonly called 'price-fixing') of the good (rambus memory). if they didn't produce large enough quantities to make rambus acceptible as a widely adopteble standard because the royalties made the technology inaccessibly priced (high royalties mean the profit margin shrinks, and can become negative...) , this is not a trust. the claims in the blurb are contradictory, and if they are the claims of rambus, then the case is trying to blame somebody else because a certain someone shot themself in the proverbial foot with excesive royalties...
Just on a technical note: he isn't permitted to prepend his name with the title "Sir" unless he is a subject of the Crown.
The answer to that is no. It is more important for the results to reflect the exercise than for the people to have faith in the collection method. To be perfectly frank, if the gov't wants to use electronic voting machines, it will. It is the duty of those who build and test the machines to make sure that the machines are tamper-evident and relieble. If the system does not function securely, then it must not be used. IMHO, if there is no paper receipt for the votes cast, the incentive to cheat will be overwhelming. One solution to this issue might be to have an electronic voting machine which punches a card (like a butterfly ballot or an IBM-style punchcard) indicating what vote was cast. These votes could be counted electrically, but would retain a physical record of the vote. Thus there would be the same sort of instant tally that a fully electronic system offers, but there also would be physical receipts to confirm the tally in the case of any questions. If the physical votes do not match the electronic one, you know you have a problem. Each precinct gets exactly the number of voting cards they need for all of their registered voters, returning the unused ones to ensure that there are no votes being replaced with forged votes.
A quote often attributed to Stalin (although there is doubt as to if he said this,) "It's not the people that vote who count, it's the people who count the votes."
It's just like a real desk, except that there is no room for anything but a specific line of Apple computers.
Does this method deal with different grammer structures? In flective languages, like Latin and Russian, grammical cases are signified by different endings. Also, is only one translation used or do they use many competing translations? Different translations of the same phrases can yield drastically different meanings.
Even if only the top 10-15% of rush-hour traffic can afford these permits, everyone else can afford the bus (the parking fees and fees for riding could be covered by a small annual fee, and I'm sure there is some kind of tax write-off they could get for using public transit) or can car pool, which takes that many more drivers off of the LESS direct routes (not indirect way the heck out of the way, just not the very best route). By keeping the permit-routes in good shape, and free of most conjestion, the value of the permit remains high and can be used to pay off the initial loans as well as to subsidize the bussing system.
If you read the blurbs by the pitures about the missions, you'll notice that these landers all had very short lives when they landed on Venus. There are rumored to be, and my astronomy teacher claims to have seen, videos of the Soviets using language not "fit for print" as they watched their probe being eaten by the less then friendly atmospere (which contains noticible amounts of the multi-zillions dollar probe-eating compound sulfuric acid.)