Well, either I'm wrong and the laws of physics don't apply in Finland, or some or all of the following are true:
1) The cost of your cell phone service is partially subsidized by your government 2) Demand for network usage is less than in the U.S. 3) Greater amounts of radio spectrum have been allocated for this purpose in Finland than in the U.S, increasing supply 4) The Finnish phone companies are employing slave labor, and their families are starving in order to bring excellent phone service to the good people of Finland 5) The U.S. phone companies are a cartel, which means the millions they spend on advertising each day is just for show, so that nobody suspects that they're not actually in competition.
I think that just maybe, differences between phone service in Finland and the U.S. are a little more complex than "The U.S. phone companies are a cartel!"
There are no local cell phone monopolies in the U.S., at least not by law. Each service area must have two providers.
There is only so much bandwidth available on a cellular system, as the frequencies at which you may transmit are limited (extremely limited, I might add).
The frequencies sent over cables are not regulated, so you can multiplex to your heart's content and achieve massive bandwidth that way. (It also helps that there's much less interference and loss in wired communication.)
The reason the wireless phone service price hasn't changed is because if it got any cheaper, the network would become saturated because people wouldn't self-limit their phone usage as much. The reason that all phone companies charge about the same is more due to the physics of radio communication than collusion. I guarantee that if Cingular could charge half of what they do and still make a profit, they would, because they'd put all the others out of business, and it's a very competitive market.
The phone companies know exactly how many users they can support at what data rates down to insane degrees of accuracy. There are ugly equations with many logarithms and square roots in them that tell them this.
For example, you can determine, based on the frequencies you're allocated and how you're multiplexing your users' data, what signal-to-interference ratio you need to support 336 users with a 2% chance of a dropped call during the peak usage hour.
The problem is, you can't just add network capacity without limit. It's a tradeoff between cell size, signal strength, and interference. Decreasing cell size might give you the ability to support more users, but you'll also have to decrease the signal strength at the same time or you'll just be adding interference. Using directional antennas will help with the interference problem, but you'll have to handle many more hand-offs and overall QoS may suffer.
Whereas, with wired communication, if you have one wire and then you add another, you've just doubled your bandwidth. Wireless is a much more limited resource, and always will be.
Like Java, the strength of Perl is in its libraries and its popularity. Unlike Java, Perl has support for a decent set of built in data structures, and the built in regular expression syntax is second to none.
Perl's greatest strength is CPAN, which is a library of perl modules that handle just about any programming task that you can think of, and then some. Sometimes, it's uncanny how well certain modules fit your problem -- you can almost guess the names based on what you want. (need to find the size of an image? Try Image::Size.)
In my opinion, Perl's syntax is awful. Because it doesn't have a context-free grammar, and many lines are ambiguous unless you're actually running a Perl program, writing a syntax highlighter for Perl is all but impossible. Another annoyance is having to use the different symbols like @ and % to denote variable type, and the reference/dereference syntax looks like comic book swear words. So, it's not "typing friendly." That's its biggest weakness.
But really, the syntax of a language is such a small part of the overall picture that it's not worth worrying about too much. Finding a CPAN module that does exactly what you need more than makes up for any time you spend struggling to learn the syntax.
You can't beat Perl for web programming. I just wish it were half as well supported as PHP seems to be on the cheap web hosts.
It's great when Linus Torvalds releases Linux as open-source, even though it's systematically destroying the competitive market for mid-level Unix OS's, because he's a nice, altruistic guy.
It's not as good when Sun and IBM open-source their Java IDE's, because it destroys the market for Java IDE's, because they're laaaarge corporations, and are only doing this to weed out smaller competitors.
And it's eeevil when someone open-sources something on a Windows platform, because they obviously are only doing it for the publicity, regardless of whether they have competitors or not.
But then again, Sun and IBM are directly competing with Microsoft, the most evil of all. And open-sourcing on Windows might mean more software gets ported to Linux.
But wait, we should ignore this benefit, because, again, these are laaaarge corporations and aren't part of the community. Nor are they completely altruistic, because they make money.
But I really do like Eclipse and Java.
(Damn it, I'm confused! Who am I supposed to hate here?)
Like you said, this is because you have a government granted monopoly to a private company that has no incentive to provide anything better than "good enough."
It's not a free market, it's the worst of all possible scenarios.
Most traditional liberatarian/conservatives would agree that providing infrastructure support is a legitimate and useful function of government. The logistical and real-estate problems in building a national highway system, for example, are probably only solvable through government intervention.
The fact that the U.S. Constitution explicity grants the federal government power to build roads for the use of the Post Office is telling. Obviously the founders could not envision e-mail, but facilitating the transfer of such information would most definitely be within the original scope of the document. It doesn't even require creative "interpretation" by the Supreme Court to see that.
This is one case where the U.S. government has a legitimate claim to the legal authority to provide infrastructure to U.S. citizens, and they've abdicated that responsibility instead.
Now, I'm not arguing that a federally sponsored internet infrastructure would be necessarily cheaper and more efficient overall than the one we have now. It would be more expensive in order to be universally available.
But this whole thing is a perfect example of how our government is so broken that they have to invent new "powers" that allow them to waste billions of dollars on ridiculous programs that are blatantly unconstitutional, all while completely ignoring a basic responsibility.
Let's say there's one web hosting company, that manages to get a law passed that allows them the exclusive right to sell web hosting. (Gaming the system, in your example.)
Wouldn't it be true that the extra money they'd make would be better spent elsewhere, as the market would not bear such a price without the artificial scarcity caused by the law? Isn't that the reason everyone complains about monopolies and lack of competition?
In such a case, the world is poorer, because the money isn't being used as efficiently as it could have. Arguing that it is used more efficiently in the hands of the web hosting company is to argue that that web hosting company knows more about the economy than the collective knowledge of its customers.
The broken window fallacy exists because the opportunity cost is ignored -- what could that shopkeeper have done with the money he spent fixing the window if it hadn't been broken?
The same logical error is used in the above article. He's ignoring the potentially better use that extra money spent on web hosting could have been put.
>The extra $50 that the user pays is the user's loss, but it's also the hosting company's gain. >If we consider costs and benefits across all parties, the two cancel out. >The world as a whole is not poorer because someone overpaid for hosting.
And thus the broken window fallacy continues...
Wealth is created through increased efficiency. A decrease in efficiency is a decrease in wealth, regardless of who benefits.
By the "world is not poorer" logic, we might as well all ride horses, since we'd be paying oat producers and horseshoe manufacturers instead of the auto industry, so the world as a whole wouldn't be poorer.
By paying more for inefficient hosting, that takes money away from more efficient uses.
All you have to do to substantially reduce "gaming" the system is to not make it worthwhile.
Since you can pay Google to have your site link placed right at the top of the search results, for less that what you'd pay someone to game the system to reach a similar position, it wouldn't make sense for large companies to try to "game" Google at all.
If it weren't for the advertising, we'd probably see a lot more of this on Google.
Maybe this project could implement something similar.
Actually, you do need the space, because of various laws passed for "protecting the safety of children."
It used to the be the case that you could hold your kid on your lap in the passenger seat, or let them sit in the back seat *without a child seat* before they were old enough to vote.
These days, you need a huge vehicle just to be able to fit all the ridiculously huge safety gear that the law REQUIRES you to have.
I'm glad you made the comment that you did. It's a perfect illustration, of how one group who has no idea how the another group must live, can nevertheless radically affect them through well-intentioned knee-jerk reactions.
Having had to help a friend set up iTunes and an iPod in windows, I can't say that this surprises me. The software barely worked under XP, and would render the machine unusable for minutes at a time when the ipod was plugged in/unplugged and iTunes was trying to recognize or sync with it, or whatever the heck it was doing.
I figured that whatever library they're using to communicate over USB, it can't be standard on Win32, as it brought the machine to its knees.
I couldn't believe the ipod was as popular as it is with such awful software support. After trying to get the damn thing to work properly for about a half hour, it had me desperately wishing for the standard "MP3 player shows up as a USB mass storage device so you can drag mp3's to it" interface.
I think that possibly one reason that software isn't getting better is that hardware hasn't caught up to software in terms of abstraction.
Why is there a hardware stack with special instructions for supporting pushing and popping data onto it? It's not absolutely necessary.
Why are there certain data types like int, float, etc?
Why is there hardware supported virtual memory? Didn't that start as software? Why didn't it stay that way?
It's because these are extremely useful abstractions over bits. The hardware could just move bits around, but we have stacks and data types to support the fast execution of C-style programs and the UNIX process model.
Herein lies the problem. Until hardware supports more abstractions than just C-style data types and functions, we'll always be coding to that level.
Hardware has been getting faster and faster in terms of raw speed, but in terms of features, it's been stagnant for decades.
How nice would it be to be to have hardware supported garbage collection? This would solve a huge number of problems in the software world.
Sure, you can use high-level languages to get similar results, but there's no unifying architecture that lets them inter-operate easily.
I think that things will get better once manufacturers start to look at other ways than raw speed to differentiate themselves.
Anything that you enjoy doing instantly becomes much less fun the moment you are doing it because you are required to, for whatever reason.
If you enjoy programming as a hobby, why not just continue to do it as a hobby? There are plenty of open source projects that would benefit tremendously from having an extra hand, especially one that doesn't have many other commitments. There are so many projects I wish I had time to work on, but other obligations get in that way. The time you have is such a luxury.
But I'd go further and say that the problem with Linux acutally is just one thing.
It's not the dominant operating system.
That one fact alone means a whole lot to the average person. They want something they can get help with from people they know, the want something they can replace easily, they want the dominant operating system. Just like most people want the dominant movie format, and will wait to get it.
90% market dominance isn't just a result of good marketing, it's the primary "feature" of windows. Nothing else will be able to offer that feature by definition.
What's going to have to happen is for Microsoft to either adopt Linux/open source (I tend to think this is actually likely in the long term future) or Linux is going to have to be so vastly superior to Windows for the average person so as to make the 90% market share "feature" irrelevant.
It's not going to happen through advocacy.
That said, my money's on virtualization. We'll probably all be running multiple OS's simultaneously before Windows loses 5% marketshare.
I don't think you'll find a tuner card that would work. (But don't let that stop you from looking!)
But, one exciting possibility may be the ability to decode over-the-air HDTV signals in real time.
Of course, that's an extra investment in exterior hardware capable of down-converting the carrier frequency to something you can transmit over USB, (like the USRP from www.ettus.com) but just the fact that it's possible to do with the PS-3 makes me want to give it a try.
I bought a PS-3 for the sole reason that I want to run Linux on it to use as a cheap, quiet server, and play with the Cell processor, which I think should be pretty fast for DSP and software radio applications.
I'm pretty excited about the Cell, and the Playstation is an incredible value for a small form-factor computer that you can put next to your TV without having fan noise be a bother.
I love when Microsoft comes out with a resource hog OS.
It just means that when I buy my next low-end PC, the hardware will be incredible just so it can run Vista, and FreeBSD will run like a dream on it.
I think we all owe MS a great deal of gratitude for pushing the envelope so that decent OS's can make use of commodity hardware that ten years ago was unimaginably fast.
Which is why I said, "In the economic" sense. Which means, "pertaining to the field of economics, which is the study of distribution of scarce resources."
Sure things have other "value" besides economic, but as far as the economy (the interaction between *multiple* people exchanging goods and services) is concerned, there is no value besides what someone else is willing to pay for something.
>Far to much of the price of houses today is due not to the value of a house (what you can do with a house, live in it) but instead due to how much people think that they can sell the house for later.
And this perception leads them to pay more for something, increasing its economic value. There is no "right price" for a house. There is only what you believe to be a good price as a buyer, and what the seller believes to be a good price at which to sell. Both parties perceive a benefit to the transaction, or it would not take place. Who are you to tell the thousands of people buying and selling houses that the decision they've made is wrong?
In addition, the housing market is much more complex than what you describe. What's happening, in addition to the speculation, is that more people are more willing to take on longer term mortgages. A 30-year mortgage would have been considered insanity by my grandfather, but it's commonplace today. Women entering the work force have had a tremendous effect on the type of houses families can afford. But 50 years ago, women just didn't work. We've had a cultural shift that's had a huge economic impact. Also, everyday "stuff" is much cheaper today than years ago, so people are willing to spend a greater percentage of their income on housing.
But back to the "value" part of the equation. You may REALLY love your grandfather's old watch, such that you'd never sell it for any price, but that doesn't mean it has that same value to anyone who doesn't share your sentiment. There is no inherent value to your watch. If there were, you would be able to get everyone in the world to agree on an exact price for it. (Which you won't -- this is why economic transactions take place to begin with.)
We'd have to consider the sentimental value that you place on things if economics were a study of your personal preferences and emotions. ..but it's not.
>When people are flipping properties so quickly, everything has a sale price higher than its actual value.
When talking about economics, there's no such thing as "actual value."
Value, in the economic sense, is determined by what someone is willing to pay for something.
In relation to this news story, people are willing to pay higher prices for the raw material that goes into making pennies than they are for pennies.
Which doesn't make any sense. Why not just go get a bunch of pennies from the bank or mint and melt them? Well, because it's against the law. The difference in price between zinc and the penny comes from the value that people place on not breaking the law.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, either I'm wrong and the laws of physics don't apply in Finland, or some or all of the following are true:
1) The cost of your cell phone service is partially subsidized by your government
2) Demand for network usage is less than in the U.S.
3) Greater amounts of radio spectrum have been allocated for this purpose in Finland than in the U.S, increasing supply
4) The Finnish phone companies are employing slave labor, and their families are starving in order to bring excellent phone service to the good people of Finland
5) The U.S. phone companies are a cartel, which means the millions they spend on advertising each day is just for show, so that nobody suspects that they're not actually in competition.
I think that just maybe, differences between phone service in Finland and the U.S. are a little more complex than "The U.S. phone companies are a cartel!"
There are no local cell phone monopolies in the U.S., at least not by law. Each service area must have two providers.
Supply and demand.
There is only so much bandwidth available on a cellular system, as the frequencies at which you may transmit are limited (extremely limited, I might add).
The frequencies sent over cables are not regulated, so you can multiplex to your heart's content and achieve massive bandwidth that way. (It also helps that there's much less interference and loss in wired communication.)
The reason the wireless phone service price hasn't changed is because if it got any cheaper, the network would become saturated because people wouldn't self-limit their phone usage as much. The reason that all phone companies charge about the same is more due to the physics of radio communication than collusion. I guarantee that if Cingular could charge half of what they do and still make a profit, they would, because they'd put all the others out of business, and it's a very competitive market.
The phone companies know exactly how many users they can support at what data rates down to insane degrees of accuracy. There are ugly equations with many logarithms and square roots in them that tell them this.
For example, you can determine, based on the frequencies you're allocated and how you're multiplexing your users' data, what signal-to-interference ratio you need to support 336 users with a 2% chance of a dropped call during the peak usage hour.
The problem is, you can't just add network capacity without limit. It's a tradeoff between cell size, signal strength, and interference. Decreasing cell size might give you the ability to support more users, but you'll also have to decrease the signal strength at the same time or you'll just be adding interference. Using directional antennas will help with the interference problem, but you'll have to handle many more hand-offs and overall QoS may suffer.
Whereas, with wired communication, if you have one wire and then you add another, you've just doubled your bandwidth. Wireless is a much more limited resource, and always will be.
Like Java, the strength of Perl is in its libraries and its popularity. Unlike Java, Perl has support for a decent set of built in data structures, and the built in regular expression syntax is second to none.
Perl's greatest strength is CPAN, which is a library of perl modules that handle just about any programming task that you can think of, and then some. Sometimes, it's uncanny how well certain modules fit your problem -- you can almost guess the names based on what you want. (need to find the size of an image? Try Image::Size.)
In my opinion, Perl's syntax is awful. Because it doesn't have a context-free grammar, and many lines are ambiguous unless you're actually running a Perl program, writing a syntax highlighter for Perl is all but impossible. Another annoyance is having to use the different symbols like @ and % to denote variable type, and the reference/dereference syntax looks like comic book swear words. So, it's not "typing friendly." That's its biggest weakness.
But really, the syntax of a language is such a small part of the overall picture that it's not worth worrying about too much. Finding a CPAN module that does exactly what you need more than makes up for any time you spend struggling to learn the syntax.
You can't beat Perl for web programming. I just wish it were half as well supported as PHP seems to be on the cheap web hosts.
It's great when Linus Torvalds releases Linux as open-source, even though it's systematically destroying the competitive market for mid-level Unix OS's, because he's a nice, altruistic guy.
It's not as good when Sun and IBM open-source their Java IDE's, because it destroys the market for Java IDE's, because they're laaaarge corporations, and are only doing this to weed out smaller competitors.
And it's eeevil when someone open-sources something on a Windows platform, because they obviously are only doing it for the publicity, regardless of whether they have competitors or not.
But then again, Sun and IBM are directly competing with Microsoft, the most evil of all. And open-sourcing on Windows might mean more software gets ported to Linux.
But wait, we should ignore this benefit, because, again, these are laaaarge corporations and aren't part of the community. Nor are they completely altruistic, because they make money.
But I really do like Eclipse and Java.
(Damn it, I'm confused! Who am I supposed to hate here?)
Oh yeah, Microsoft SUCKS!
Like you said, this is because you have a government granted monopoly to a private company that has no incentive to provide anything better than "good enough."
It's not a free market, it's the worst of all possible scenarios.
Most traditional liberatarian/conservatives would agree that providing infrastructure support is a legitimate and useful function of government. The logistical and real-estate problems in building a national highway system, for example, are probably only solvable through government intervention.
The fact that the U.S. Constitution explicity grants the federal government power to build roads for the use of the Post Office is telling. Obviously the founders could not envision e-mail, but facilitating the transfer of such information would most definitely be within the original scope of the document. It doesn't even require creative "interpretation" by the Supreme Court to see that.
This is one case where the U.S. government has a legitimate claim to the legal authority to provide infrastructure to U.S. citizens, and they've abdicated that responsibility instead.
Now, I'm not arguing that a federally sponsored internet infrastructure would be necessarily cheaper and more efficient overall than the one we have now. It would be more expensive in order to be universally available.
But this whole thing is a perfect example of how our government is so broken that they have to invent new "powers" that allow them to waste billions of dollars on ridiculous programs that are blatantly unconstitutional, all while completely ignoring a basic responsibility.
Let's say there's one web hosting company, that manages to get a law passed that allows them the exclusive right to sell web hosting. (Gaming the system, in your example.)
Wouldn't it be true that the extra money they'd make would be better spent elsewhere, as the market would not bear such a price without the artificial scarcity caused by the law? Isn't that the reason everyone complains about monopolies and lack of competition?
In such a case, the world is poorer, because the money isn't being used as efficiently as it could have. Arguing that it is used more efficiently in the hands of the web hosting company is to argue that that web hosting company knows more about the economy than the collective knowledge of its customers.
The broken window fallacy exists because the opportunity cost is ignored -- what could that shopkeeper have done with the money he spent fixing the window if it hadn't been broken?
The same logical error is used in the above article. He's ignoring the potentially better use that extra money spent on web hosting could have been put.
>The extra $50 that the user pays is the user's loss, but it's also the hosting company's gain.
>If we consider costs and benefits across all parties, the two cancel out.
>The world as a whole is not poorer because someone overpaid for hosting.
And thus the broken window fallacy continues...
Wealth is created through increased efficiency. A decrease in efficiency is a decrease in wealth, regardless of who benefits.
By the "world is not poorer" logic, we might as well all ride horses, since we'd be paying oat producers and horseshoe manufacturers instead of the auto industry, so the world as a whole wouldn't be poorer.
By paying more for inefficient hosting, that takes money away from more efficient uses.
Google separates them by color, so it's easy to tell an ad vs. the real result.
This project could do something similar.
All you have to do to substantially reduce "gaming" the system is to not make it worthwhile.
Since you can pay Google to have your site link placed right at the top of the search results, for less that what you'd pay someone to game the system to reach a similar position, it wouldn't make sense for large companies to try to "game" Google at all.
If it weren't for the advertising, we'd probably see a lot more of this on Google.
Maybe this project could implement something similar.
Actually, you do need the space, because of various laws passed for "protecting the safety of children."
It used to the be the case that you could hold your kid on your lap in the passenger seat, or let them sit in the back seat *without a child seat* before they were old enough to vote.
These days, you need a huge vehicle just to be able to fit all the ridiculously huge safety gear that the law REQUIRES you to have.
I'm glad you made the comment that you did. It's a perfect illustration, of how one group who has no idea how the another group must live, can nevertheless radically affect them through well-intentioned knee-jerk reactions.
Having had to help a friend set up iTunes and an iPod in windows, I can't say that this surprises me. The software barely worked under XP, and would render the machine unusable for minutes at a time when the ipod was plugged in/unplugged and iTunes was trying to recognize or sync with it, or whatever the heck it was doing.
I figured that whatever library they're using to communicate over USB, it can't be standard on Win32, as it brought the machine to its knees.
I couldn't believe the ipod was as popular as it is with such awful software support. After trying to get the damn thing to work properly for about a half hour, it had me desperately wishing for the standard "MP3 player shows up as a USB mass storage device so you can drag mp3's to it" interface.
Who pays hundreds of dollars for this crap?
Let's ban deaf people, too.
We have a reason to suspect that you violate the speed limit on public roads.
Slap!
This GPS receiver will let us know exactly when you do. Your ticket will come in the mail. Thank you for supporting our county!
Please do not remove the device, as you will be charged with destruction of government property.
I think that possibly one reason that software isn't getting better is that hardware hasn't caught up to software in terms of abstraction.
Why is there a hardware stack with special instructions for supporting pushing and popping data onto it? It's not absolutely necessary.
Why are there certain data types like int, float, etc?
Why is there hardware supported virtual memory? Didn't that start as software? Why didn't it stay that way?
It's because these are extremely useful abstractions over bits. The hardware could just move bits around, but we have stacks and data types to support the fast execution of C-style programs and the UNIX process model.
Herein lies the problem. Until hardware supports more abstractions than just C-style data types and functions, we'll always be coding to that level.
Hardware has been getting faster and faster in terms of raw speed, but in terms of features, it's been stagnant for decades.
How nice would it be to be to have hardware supported garbage collection? This would solve a huge number of problems in the software world.
Sure, you can use high-level languages to get similar results, but there's no unifying architecture that lets them inter-operate easily.
I think that things will get better once manufacturers start to look at other ways than raw speed to differentiate themselves.
I have a rule.
Anything that you enjoy doing instantly becomes much less fun the moment you are doing it because you are required to, for whatever reason.
If you enjoy programming as a hobby, why not just continue to do it as a hobby? There are plenty of open source projects that would benefit tremendously from having an extra hand, especially one that doesn't have many other commitments. There are so many projects I wish I had time to work on, but other obligations get in that way. The time you have is such a luxury.
Amen.
But I'd go further and say that the problem with Linux acutally is just one thing.
It's not the dominant operating system.
That one fact alone means a whole lot to the average person. They want something they can get help with from people they know, the want something they can replace easily, they want the dominant operating system. Just like most people want the dominant movie format, and will wait to get it.
90% market dominance isn't just a result of good marketing, it's the primary "feature" of windows. Nothing else will be able to offer that feature by definition.
What's going to have to happen is for Microsoft to either adopt Linux/open source (I tend to think this is actually likely in the long term future) or Linux is going to have to be so vastly superior to Windows for the average person so as to make the 90% market share "feature" irrelevant.
It's not going to happen through advocacy.
That said, my money's on virtualization. We'll probably all be running multiple OS's simultaneously before Windows loses 5% marketshare.
Try Basic 256.
If you have kids, it's excellent. If you don't, working on it is a great programming exercise, and helps potential new programmers out.
We're about to do a new release, too, that includes sound support for windows.
I don't think you'll find a tuner card that would work. (But don't let that stop you from looking!)
But, one exciting possibility may be the ability to decode over-the-air HDTV signals in real time.
Of course, that's an extra investment in exterior hardware capable of down-converting the carrier frequency to something you can transmit over USB, (like the USRP from www.ettus.com) but just the fact that it's possible to do with the PS-3 makes me want to give it a try.
I can answer this today since my PS3 is here :-)
On initial boot, you get two penguins. The linux kernel runs on the PowerPC core and one SPE.
After that, you see two yellow dogs and six small penguins, which I assume indicate the other SPE's available. (One is indeed disabled)
So, you get 6 free SPE's to play around with.
1) A file/subversion server for my home network.
2) It's not, yet. It's arriving today via UPS.
And the main reason I bought it was not as a server, although that's certainly a benefit. I'm more interested in development on the Cell.
I bought a PS-3 for the sole reason that I want to run Linux on it to use as a cheap, quiet server, and play with the Cell processor, which I think should be pretty fast for DSP and software radio applications.
I'm pretty excited about the Cell, and the Playstation is an incredible value for a small form-factor computer that you can put next to your TV without having fan noise be a bother.
Why not support it in the Linux kernel?
I think the problem just may have been that they were in danger of being trampled by a dwarf.
I love when Microsoft comes out with a resource hog OS.
It just means that when I buy my next low-end PC, the hardware will be incredible just so it can run Vista, and FreeBSD will run like a dream on it.
I think we all owe MS a great deal of gratitude for pushing the envelope so that decent OS's can make use of commodity hardware that ten years ago was unimaginably fast.
Which is why I said, "In the economic" sense. Which means, "pertaining to the field of economics, which is the study of distribution of scarce resources."
.but it's not.
Sure things have other "value" besides economic, but as far as the economy (the interaction between *multiple* people exchanging goods and services) is concerned, there is no value besides what someone else is willing to pay for something.
>Far to much of the price of houses today is due not to the value of a house (what you can do with a house, live in it) but instead due to how much people think that they can sell the house for later.
And this perception leads them to pay more for something, increasing its economic value. There is no "right price" for a house. There is only what you believe to be a good price as a buyer, and what the seller believes to be a good price at which to sell. Both parties perceive a benefit to the transaction, or it would not take place. Who are you to tell the thousands of people buying and selling houses that the decision they've made is wrong?
In addition, the housing market is much more complex than what you describe. What's happening, in addition to the speculation, is that more people are more willing to take on longer term mortgages. A 30-year mortgage would have been considered insanity by my grandfather, but it's commonplace today. Women entering the work force have had a tremendous effect on the type of houses families can afford. But 50 years ago, women just didn't work. We've had a cultural shift that's had a huge economic impact. Also, everyday "stuff" is much cheaper today than years ago, so people are willing to spend a greater percentage of their income on housing.
But back to the "value" part of the equation. You may REALLY love your grandfather's old watch, such that you'd never sell it for any price, but that doesn't mean it has that same value to anyone who doesn't share your sentiment. There is no inherent value to your watch. If there were, you would be able to get everyone in the world to agree on an exact price for it. (Which you won't -- this is why economic transactions take place to begin with.)
We'd have to consider the sentimental value that you place on things if economics were a study of your personal preferences and emotions. .
>When people are flipping properties so quickly, everything has a sale price higher than its actual value.
When talking about economics, there's no such thing as "actual value."
Value, in the economic sense, is determined by what someone is willing to pay for something.
In relation to this news story, people are willing to pay higher prices for the raw material that goes into making pennies than they are for pennies.
Which doesn't make any sense. Why not just go get a bunch of pennies from the bank or mint and melt them? Well, because it's against the law. The difference in price between zinc and the penny comes from the value that people place on not breaking the law.