It's not that far out of whack. He said 1/4 the price of gas. I just did the math and, based on the average tax in the US and the cost of gas where I am, gasoline tax is about 19% of the cost of gas. 1/4 the price of gas would be 25%. And actually, since the date of the gas tax listed was April 1, I just recalculated based on the price of gas in April and at that point it was 22.5%. So he really isn't that far off.
Retail margins are generally 30% to 50%. That is how much a retail store needs over what it pays for product in order to pay all its bills (electric, payroll, taxes, etc) and still have the owner show a bit of profit. I ran a college bookstore at one time and a professor told me that 10% over cost should be enough. The store I ran had around $400,000 a year in gross sales. 10% on $400,000 is $40,000 to pay rent (the university took 5% of sales for rent), salaries and still leave the owners with some profit.
People look at the markups in retail and think the stores are making a lot of money without really thinking it all through.
According to your analogy, if Ford didn't change the design of the Mustang for 10 years, but continued to sell them for those ten years, then after 3 years they could stop selling parts?
So, even though XP was first released 9 years ago, it was still their flagship OS until November 2006. I lean toward thinking that this action by the Russian government is unreasonable, but your analogy does not work.
You're right that a single domain name shouldn't be the center of the whole business. But you apparently have never heard of simplification. In order to make the point about how a cybersquatter could add value, I simplified things to show the connection between what the cybersquatter was doing and an net increase in value for the economy.
Now it happens that I think that as a general rule cybersquatters are scum who capitalize on other people's creativity. br.
I, also, don't think cybersquatting should be made any more illegal than it already is (there are remedies if you register a domain name that matches the name of the business I am already running and have trademarked) because I believe that any such laws would likely start to infringe on legitimate uses of webpages.
Here is the value that is added. Joe Blow has this idea for a neat website. He won't make a dime from it. He'd like to set it up as Publicexample.com. A few weeks later John Public has an idea for a business that can make him a lot of money from a website named Publicexample.com.
Scenario one: Joe Blow has already registered Publicexample.com and is unwilling to sell it. John Public's business never gets off the ground.
Scenario two: Jane Squatter registered Publicexample.com and will sell it for $1000. Joe Blow passes. He won't make any money off of the site, so he doesn't want to pay to get it. John Public expects to make a lot of money off of the site, so he does pay it and his business gets a chance to start.
In Scenario one Joe Blow won't accept any amount of money because he is emotionally attached to the site (or maybe he will only take an amount that is prohibitively expensive for the same reason). In Scenario two, if that domain name was really worth it to Joe Blow, he could still have it because he had his idea first, but since it wasn't John Public can get it and start his business.
Now these scenarios make some assumptions that don't necessarily play out in the real world, but they illustrate the added value the OP was talking about.
A train doesn't have to wait for traffic, stop for red lights/stop signs or obey most traffic laws. You can read, play games, sleep or carry a real conversation on a train. You don't have to be sober or alert. You also don't have to circle around city blocks looking for parking for half an hour or pay outrageous fees to park. On top of it all, it doesn't pollute the environment as much as it would if everyone were driving cars.
A train doesn't go where I want to go from where I live. When I worked in the city, I took the train, but it took twice as long to get there as if I drove. At the time, the advantages of not driving were worth more than my time. Today my time is worth more, if I was working in the city I'm not sure that it would be worth it to take the train.
And a financial environment with equal pay for equal work, and gender-neutral access to that work.
While it is true that women in general earn less per year than men, it is also true that women in general work fewer hours per year than men. Men, also, tend to take "high risk" jobs at a much higher rate then women. In summation, a thorough evaluation of the pay differences between men and women indicates that it results from the tendency of men and women to make different choices about their priorities in life.
In addition to building up more muscle mass, bone also develops differently in men allowing muscle attachments to bone to support greater force. Furthermore, Iseem to recall reading that there are morphologic differences between the brains of men and women.
As far as the parent poster's idea that all differences between men and women is a product of sexism let's consider Title IX. In order to meet Title IX requirements (as interpreted by courts), colleges and universities are required to have equal opportunities for women in sports as for men. Many schools have aggressively recruited women for scholarships and still been unable to fill the slots. As a result they have felt obligated to reduce the number of men's sports teams that they field.
Now whether this is a product of socialization or is an inherent difference between men and women, the fact is that after 35 years there are still significantly more men in college who wish to be involved in organized athletics then women. This despite the fact that women now outnumber men on the majority of college campuses.
Please explain the fallacy of Socioeconomic Darwinism without relying on religious terminology.
Granted, one of the groups that were major proponents of applying Darwinism to socioeconomics (the Nazis) was largely wiped out. However, that does not prove the the idea wrong. It just proves that the Nazis socioeconomic program was anti-survival, not that the philosophical underpinnings were wrong.
I believe that the Nazis were wrong because they were evil, but if there is no God, the word evil is meaningless.
When my doctor prescribes penicillin after I had a severe allergic reaction the last time he prescribed it, I find a new doctor. Your example is perfect because doctors are people that many take on authority and don't question their judgment. My sister suffered severe trauma as a toddler that has resulted in life long health issues. My parents took the doctors at their word after it happened. The doctors were wrong and failed to fully inform my parents about potential complications. While chances are good that no treatment was available to diminish the complications, if my parents had been aware of the possibility of these complications they would have sought treatment for them when they first arose, rather than treat them as behavioral issues. My sister suffered with the symptoms of these complications for several years before anyone (including her) realized they were physiological and not behavioral.
In several states, it is illegal to record a phone conversation without the knowledge and consent of all parties to the conversation. In many of these states it is a felony. If you have a phone conversation with someone in California and record the conversation without their consent you can be fined up to $5000 even if you are in another state.
He wasn't talking about the Kindle. He was talking about Amazon's ebooks. I have never looked into them because they have DRM, but I was under the impression that they only run on the Kindle. I don't own a Kindle. AS far as I understand Amazon ebooks only work on the Kindle, so I have never considered them. I am not going to spend $300 on a Kindle and then spend as much per book as I do now. I like reading books on paper, why should I spend an additional $300 to read them in electronic format?
The reason is that Congress is supposed to consider Constitutionality itself. BTW, the Constitution doesn't actually give the Courts the authority to decide on the Constitutionality of a law. That is a power that the Supreme Court gave itself. Since many (if not most) of the framers of the Constitution were still alive when the SC made this ruling and I have not come across any references to them complaining about this ruling, it seems that they found it acceptable.
Personally, I find it terrible that there have been times when Congressmen have voted for and Presidents have signed into law bills that they acknowledged that they believed to be unconstitutional, counting on the courts to overturn them.
I have an easy solution, take your child out of the care of these incompetents and educate her yourself.
This is not entirely facetious. If the school can't even pay enough attention to your child to make sure that she gets on the correct bus, what makes you think they are paying enough attention to make sure that she is learning anything?
Releasing changes that have been made to open source code can be sold to management if you explain it in terms that they understand. This is different from convincing management to open source software that was completely developed in house.
If management is too stupid to recognize that other people in other companies sometimes have ideas that could make your company more profitable, they are too stupid to run a successful company and you should find another job before they go bankrupt.
Most of the cases where management of a successful business rejects ideas just because it came from outside are a product of people not talking in language management understands.
When I was just out of college I worked for a bookstore that was expanding its space into next door. The highly paid design consultant came back with a very fancy design that everyone who worked there saw the flaw to right away. The consultant talked to people and got their feedback. They all said they didn't like one aspect of the design. They said that it would make the new store "feel" wrong. After about two weeks the consultant finally got to me. I told him that customers would spend less money because of this design feature that no one liked and I explained why that would happen. The light finally went off for the consultant, but by then it was too late to change the plans. The other people I worked with all understood what I was saying, but they didn't say it that way, so the consultant ignored what they were saying as just being about "feelings".
When I was in University,I found that there was an inverse relationship between the content of the lectures and the attendance requirements for the class. That is, the more stringent the attendance requirement for the class, the less actual content the class had.
Trying to argue that the spirit of Open Source to recontribute to improve products, and that we've built our company upon that spirit and so we should contribute falls on deaf ears. We've now gotten big enough that the senior management and lawyers are more concerned with our IP than with supporting the community that supported us when we were starting. It's bad enough that I'm not even allowed to post code snippets/example bind or ntp configs etc on to various mailing lists I may be on because they also belong to "us".
There is a strong push at the technical level to recontribute, to fund a couple of the projects that we use heavily, but ultimately it's the higher ups and the legal folks that say no way.
I expect things like that are the reason enterprises are leeches, and I expect there is a large contingent of technical workers who disagree with the decision. I know I do.
The problem is that you are not communicating with the higher ups in language they understand. You say, "We should recontribute because that is the spirit of Open Source." They hear, "We should give away our hard work so that our competitors can benefit from it."
What you should say is, "We should recontribute so that someone else can make IMPROVEMENTS on our modifications that we can then use without having to pay for it." You need to communicate to them that there are people out there who, once they see the changes you have made to the project, will make other changes that you would not have thought of, but that you can benefit from.
And that is why we have the problems we have. You couldn't give a rat's ass about the election that should make the biggest difference in your life. Also, the election that you can have the biggest influence on the outcome.
People want to change things by voting in national elections and ignoring local elections. That is not the way Democracy works. You can change things a lot by voting in local elections. You can't change things much by voting in national elections.
And this is the first I've heard of this election. I had no idea this was happening. My guess is that too few people knew about the election in the first place, and that it was just a failure to advertise it properly.
That would make sense except that this election happens every year. Are you saying that the people who voted in this election last year didn't know they were going to have it this year?
Lets stop demonising all of the newspapers here. We are talking about our ability of our society to have full time, paid reporters who act as independant watchdogs which play a critical role in our society as a check and balance against corruption. Making sure the newspapers can survive is in the best interests of consumers who rely upon and benefit from the research, investigation and reporting of news investigators and journalists.
The problem is they stopped working as independent watchdogs years ago. They have been promoting their own agenda for years while claiming to be neutral. The original newspapers were biased and proud of it. They came out and told you what they stood for and didn't pretend to give the other side a fair shake.
The problem is that the newspaper industry has become pamphleteers. They weren't held accountable, so now they are (by the general public being unwilling to buy their content).
Can you please point me towards some historical documentation describing a sky fairy walking on water and pulling loaves and fishes out of thin air? I mean if somebody actually did those things you would have thought that every historian of the time would have written about it, wouldn't you? And please don't say "The Bible", which was written decades after those events were supposed to have happened.
I find it sad that in the 21st century people still cling on to these myths - why on earth do you think the christian myth is any more valid than the Viking or Greek mythology?
What historians are those? Exactly who do you think was writing about the events in Palestine at that time?
I assume you believe most of what is presented about Alexander the Great. Most of what we "know" about him comes from a document written 400 years after his death.
The only historian from that time period that I am aware of was Josephus. Josephus wrote after most of the New Testament was written and he does mention Jesus.
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It's not that far out of whack. He said 1/4 the price of gas. I just did the math and, based on the average tax in the US and the cost of gas where I am, gasoline tax is about 19% of the cost of gas. 1/4 the price of gas would be 25%. And actually, since the date of the gas tax listed was April 1, I just recalculated based on the price of gas in April and at that point it was 22.5%. So he really isn't that far off.
Retail margins are generally 30% to 50%. That is how much a retail store needs over what it pays for product in order to pay all its bills (electric, payroll, taxes, etc) and still have the owner show a bit of profit. I ran a college bookstore at one time and a professor told me that 10% over cost should be enough. The store I ran had around $400,000 a year in gross sales. 10% on $400,000 is $40,000 to pay rent (the university took 5% of sales for rent), salaries and still leave the owners with some profit.
People look at the markups in retail and think the stores are making a lot of money without really thinking it all through.
According to your analogy, if Ford didn't change the design of the Mustang for 10 years, but continued to sell them for those ten years, then after 3 years they could stop selling parts?
So, even though XP was first released 9 years ago, it was still their flagship OS until November 2006. I lean toward thinking that this action by the Russian government is unreasonable, but your analogy does not work.
You're right that a single domain name shouldn't be the center of the whole business. But you apparently have never heard of simplification. In order to make the point about how a cybersquatter could add value, I simplified things to show the connection between what the cybersquatter was doing and an net increase in value for the economy.
Now it happens that I think that as a general rule cybersquatters are scum who capitalize on other people's creativity. br. I, also, don't think cybersquatting should be made any more illegal than it already is (there are remedies if you register a domain name that matches the name of the business I am already running and have trademarked) because I believe that any such laws would likely start to infringe on legitimate uses of webpages.
Here is the value that is added. Joe Blow has this idea for a neat website. He won't make a dime from it. He'd like to set it up as Publicexample.com. A few weeks later John Public has an idea for a business that can make him a lot of money from a website named Publicexample.com.
Scenario one: Joe Blow has already registered Publicexample.com and is unwilling to sell it. John Public's business never gets off the ground.
Scenario two: Jane Squatter registered Publicexample.com and will sell it for $1000. Joe Blow passes. He won't make any money off of the site, so he doesn't want to pay to get it. John Public expects to make a lot of money off of the site, so he does pay it and his business gets a chance to start.
In Scenario one Joe Blow won't accept any amount of money because he is emotionally attached to the site (or maybe he will only take an amount that is prohibitively expensive for the same reason). In Scenario two, if that domain name was really worth it to Joe Blow, he could still have it because he had his idea first, but since it wasn't John Public can get it and start his business.
Now these scenarios make some assumptions that don't necessarily play out in the real world, but they illustrate the added value the OP was talking about.
A train doesn't have to wait for traffic, stop for red lights/stop signs or obey most traffic laws. You can read, play games, sleep or carry a real conversation on a train. You don't have to be sober or alert. You also don't have to circle around city blocks looking for parking for half an hour or pay outrageous fees to park. On top of it all, it doesn't pollute the environment as much as it would if everyone were driving cars.
A train doesn't go where I want to go from where I live. When I worked in the city, I took the train, but it took twice as long to get there as if I drove. At the time, the advantages of not driving were worth more than my time. Today my time is worth more, if I was working in the city I'm not sure that it would be worth it to take the train.
And a financial environment with equal pay for equal work, and gender-neutral access to that work.
While it is true that women in general earn less per year than men, it is also true that women in general work fewer hours per year than men. Men, also, tend to take "high risk" jobs at a much higher rate then women. In summation, a thorough evaluation of the pay differences between men and women indicates that it results from the tendency of men and women to make different choices about their priorities in life.
In addition to building up more muscle mass, bone also develops differently in men allowing muscle attachments to bone to support greater force. Furthermore, Iseem to recall reading that there are morphologic differences between the brains of men and women.
As far as the parent poster's idea that all differences between men and women is a product of sexism let's consider Title IX. In order to meet Title IX requirements (as interpreted by courts), colleges and universities are required to have equal opportunities for women in sports as for men. Many schools have aggressively recruited women for scholarships and still been unable to fill the slots. As a result they have felt obligated to reduce the number of men's sports teams that they field.
Now whether this is a product of socialization or is an inherent difference between men and women, the fact is that after 35 years there are still significantly more men in college who wish to be involved in organized athletics then women. This despite the fact that women now outnumber men on the majority of college campuses.
Please explain the fallacy of Socioeconomic Darwinism without relying on religious terminology.
Granted, one of the groups that were major proponents of applying Darwinism to socioeconomics (the Nazis) was largely wiped out. However, that does not prove the the idea wrong. It just proves that the Nazis socioeconomic program was anti-survival, not that the philosophical underpinnings were wrong.
I believe that the Nazis were wrong because they were evil, but if there is no God, the word evil is meaningless.
When my doctor prescribes penicillin after I had a severe allergic reaction the last time he prescribed it, I find a new doctor. Your example is perfect because doctors are people that many take on authority and don't question their judgment. My sister suffered severe trauma as a toddler that has resulted in life long health issues. My parents took the doctors at their word after it happened. The doctors were wrong and failed to fully inform my parents about potential complications. While chances are good that no treatment was available to diminish the complications, if my parents had been aware of the possibility of these complications they would have sought treatment for them when they first arose, rather than treat them as behavioral issues. My sister suffered with the symptoms of these complications for several years before anyone (including her) realized they were physiological and not behavioral.
In several states, it is illegal to record a phone conversation without the knowledge and consent of all parties to the conversation. In many of these states it is a felony. If you have a phone conversation with someone in California and record the conversation without their consent you can be fined up to $5000 even if you are in another state.
He wasn't talking about the Kindle. He was talking about Amazon's ebooks. I have never looked into them because they have DRM, but I was under the impression that they only run on the Kindle. I don't own a Kindle. AS far as I understand Amazon ebooks only work on the Kindle, so I have never considered them. I am not going to spend $300 on a Kindle and then spend as much per book as I do now. I like reading books on paper, why should I spend an additional $300 to read them in electronic format?
The reason is that Congress is supposed to consider Constitutionality itself. BTW, the Constitution doesn't actually give the Courts the authority to decide on the Constitutionality of a law. That is a power that the Supreme Court gave itself. Since many (if not most) of the framers of the Constitution were still alive when the SC made this ruling and I have not come across any references to them complaining about this ruling, it seems that they found it acceptable.
Personally, I find it terrible that there have been times when Congressmen have voted for and Presidents have signed into law bills that they acknowledged that they believed to be unconstitutional, counting on the courts to overturn them.
I have an easy solution, take your child out of the care of these incompetents and educate her yourself.
This is not entirely facetious. If the school can't even pay enough attention to your child to make sure that she gets on the correct bus, what makes you think they are paying enough attention to make sure that she is learning anything?
Releasing changes that have been made to open source code can be sold to management if you explain it in terms that they understand. This is different from convincing management to open source software that was completely developed in house.
If management is too stupid to recognize that other people in other companies sometimes have ideas that could make your company more profitable, they are too stupid to run a successful company and you should find another job before they go bankrupt.
Most of the cases where management of a successful business rejects ideas just because it came from outside are a product of people not talking in language management understands.
When I was just out of college I worked for a bookstore that was expanding its space into next door. The highly paid design consultant came back with a very fancy design that everyone who worked there saw the flaw to right away. The consultant talked to people and got their feedback. They all said they didn't like one aspect of the design. They said that it would make the new store "feel" wrong. After about two weeks the consultant finally got to me. I told him that customers would spend less money because of this design feature that no one liked and I explained why that would happen. The light finally went off for the consultant, but by then it was too late to change the plans. The other people I worked with all understood what I was saying, but they didn't say it that way, so the consultant ignored what they were saying as just being about "feelings".
When I was in University,I found that there was an inverse relationship between the content of the lectures and the attendance requirements for the class. That is, the more stringent the attendance requirement for the class, the less actual content the class had.
Trying to argue that the spirit of Open Source to recontribute to improve products, and that we've built our company upon that spirit and so we should contribute falls on deaf ears. We've now gotten big enough that the senior management and lawyers are more concerned with our IP than with supporting the community that supported us when we were starting. It's bad enough that I'm not even allowed to post code snippets/example bind or ntp configs etc on to various mailing lists I may be on because they also belong to "us".
There is a strong push at the technical level to recontribute, to fund a couple of the projects that we use heavily, but ultimately it's the higher ups and the legal folks that say no way.
I expect things like that are the reason enterprises are leeches, and I expect there is a large contingent of technical workers who disagree with the decision. I know I do.
The problem is that you are not communicating with the higher ups in language they understand. You say, "We should recontribute because that is the spirit of Open Source." They hear, "We should give away our hard work so that our competitors can benefit from it."
What you should say is, "We should recontribute so that someone else can make IMPROVEMENTS on our modifications that we can then use without having to pay for it." You need to communicate to them that there are people out there who, once they see the changes you have made to the project, will make other changes that you would not have thought of, but that you can benefit from.
I think you missed the point (it's even in the summary). These lines weren't on the "dial before you dig" maps.
And that is why we have the problems we have. You couldn't give a rat's ass about the election that should make the biggest difference in your life. Also, the election that you can have the biggest influence on the outcome.
People want to change things by voting in national elections and ignoring local elections. That is not the way Democracy works. You can change things a lot by voting in local elections. You can't change things much by voting in national elections.
And this is the first I've heard of this election. I had no idea this was happening. My guess is that too few people knew about the election in the first place, and that it was just a failure to advertise it properly.
That would make sense except that this election happens every year. Are you saying that the people who voted in this election last year didn't know they were going to have it this year?
He was referring to the rigged 2000 election, where the office was stolen from President-Elect Gore.
So, are you saying that the Democrats in Florida rigged the election so that George W Bush would win?
I
Lets stop demonising all of the newspapers here. We are talking about our ability of our society to have full time, paid reporters who act as independant watchdogs which play a critical role in our society as a check and balance against corruption. Making sure the newspapers can survive is in the best interests of consumers who rely upon and benefit from the research, investigation and reporting of news investigators and journalists.
The problem is they stopped working as independent watchdogs years ago. They have been promoting their own agenda for years while claiming to be neutral. The original newspapers were biased and proud of it. They came out and told you what they stood for and didn't pretend to give the other side a fair shake.
The problem is that the newspaper industry has become pamphleteers. They weren't held accountable, so now they are (by the general public being unwilling to buy their content).
Can you please point me towards some historical documentation describing a sky fairy walking on water and pulling loaves and fishes out of thin air? I mean if somebody actually did those things you would have thought that every historian of the time would have written about it, wouldn't you? And please don't say "The Bible", which was written decades after those events were supposed to have happened.
I find it sad that in the 21st century people still cling on to these myths - why on earth do you think the christian myth is any more valid than the Viking or Greek mythology?
What historians are those? Exactly who do you think was writing about the events in Palestine at that time?
I assume you believe most of what is presented about Alexander the Great. Most of what we "know" about him comes from a document written 400 years after his death.
The only historian from that time period that I am aware of was Josephus. Josephus wrote after most of the New Testament was written and he does mention Jesus.