What about water costs? Considering that some say water could be the next oil (in terms of scarcity), would/could the cost of "watering the reactor" make this idea unprofitable?
Depending on your tax rate, you can have 5% capital gains.
Raising cap gains would probably freak the market out, or at least a lot of my clients. As far as tax planning goes it would rip up the world of taxable accounts. Taxed twice on investments? 33% once then 25% on long term gains? Yuck. Who would want to move money around then? It would incent people to save more into retirement plans, attaching a lot of unnecessary strings to that money. So, unless Congress is willing to add many more incentives to IRAs, Roths, and other retirement vehicles, upping capital gains might not be in the country's best interest (no pun intended).
We talk about a negative savings rate in this country. Raising capital gains will not incent people to save money if it's going to be taxed... what happens in an emergency and they have to sell off assets? People already don't save enough taxable money, in my experience (I'm a financial planner), but I may have an inadequate selection of people.
The point isn't just the average consumer. It's the big guns, too. If capital gains go up, what about fund distributions at the end of each year? How does a change in cap gains affect future tax planning? It would really hurt in more ways than one, and could be the death knell for a faltering economy if things slide for another year or two.
No capital gains? That'd be interesting, but never going to happen. That's a different ball of political/financial wax, though.
What do they want? They probably want to try and make sure that the Democrats don't come in and riase the capital gains tax back up to 25% and crash the market!
Ultimately, I think IT support can be about building relationships with people, albeit small relationships.
As a financial planner I have to learn how to be a partner with people, relate to them, and get them to trust me with their money. Helping different types of people is most often about showing them what is in it for them (why should they care), and helping shore up their insecurities. The know it all and whiz kid could be Analytic types who just didn't get enough hugs as a kid (or something) and are insecure. So, trying to out-do them and show them how they are inferior is a BAD idea. However, working as a partner with them, acting like someone who is on their side to offer suggestions, now *that* will get you much farther, in my experience, and you'll also have a person who begins to trust you and who will be loyal over time.
That's just one personality type I've encountered, there are others of course.
I know it's a stretch for the metaphor between IT and running a client-based practice, but I thought this might prove useful. Mod me down if it's just a bunch of pie-in-the-sky guff, though.
The radio imparted commentary about this. However, they described the Voyager probes as going "North and South, respectively". I did a mental double take in my car, and wondered who in the hell got to decide which way is "North" in this 3D (or more) coordinate system. Can they even have that?
What is most disturbing to me is that everyone these days seems to be saying just this. "Oh, we're the smart group of people." Me and MY friends would never act this way." Well, SOMEBODY must be acting that way, but everyone seems to agree that it isn't them. Does anyone see a problem here? Could it be that Great American Pasttime, "Passing the Buck"?
If there is anything we should be scared of, it is this elitist attitude that "Me and my friends are smarter than that."
Nintendo seems more interested in innovation as a method of driving business than in just jumping on a bandwagon without understanding the market and customer, ala the N-Gage.
I can't help but think that if Nintendo did something like this, the phone would act as not only a game system but as a controller or interface for Nintendo consoles as well, which I think would be obvious to many Slashdotters.
Could it be similar to what Sega was trying to do with its VMUs on the Dreamcast? That seemed like a good idea, it just didn't have enough developer support or hardware oomph. Think about it: A simple way to keep people continually involved with their games, even when they're away from the television. Keep'em hooked and coming back for more, make it a richer experience, and then... profit!
Actually, if you get down to it, it costs more power to switch an incandescent light on and off than it does to simply leave it on, so you'd probably pay more.
The operative element I see here is "drive it to my parents house and leave it under a tarp till I get back from wherever I end up."
The parents won't be around forever. Where are you going to put your rust bucket then?
What happens when that rust bucket breaks down? Or when you need serious medical care? You'll be under a mountain of debt like everybody else, then.Option 2 seems nice for a little while, but when you come right down to it, it's just as socially irresponsible as Option 1.
If you want freedom, you have to work for it. That's the way the world goes. You don't get it for free, and if anybody tells you otherwise they're either lying to you or trying to sell something. Now, what you choose to do with that freedom (buy a bunch of useless shit, or save it so you can enjoy more freedom later on) is up to you, of course.
I only state that standardizing the forms makes sense from the mouths of doctors, not that the government should automatically take this over. There must be a better way, private or otherwise.
You assume that the government automatically makes a mess of anything it touches. Saying that is just as counterproductive as open-endedly espousing a government led push for universal health care.
The system itself is horribly broken. I have clients who are doctors in private practice who have told me time and again that the cost of their service could easily be cut in half if the forms for the insurance industry were simply standardized.
The inner workings of the system are broken, and fixing it is not just about who foots the bill.-
Compress and distort the music down until it sounds horrible, then come out with a remastered version a few years later! Hooray for capitalism!
Listen to a Rush album from the 80's (if you can, heh) and then "Vapor Trails". The compression was so bad on the latter you can hear static during a number of songs. The record company keeps promising to remaster and rerelease the album. Dollar signs for everyone.
In light of the upcoming Olympics, I see news like this as neither good nor bad. Unless China has something quite sneaky up it's sleave, like some super-duper set of human rights and freedoms they will grant to their citizens for the duration of The Games, I imagine many of these issues will come to light with so many different sets of eyes and ears visiting.
The viewpoints and opinions that the spectators and athletes take back to their respective countries seem like they could do more to change Chinese policy than any news article or government sanction/tariff/international law.
It takes you five key presses at a minimum to dial a number? How old is your phone? Minimum is 2 (call it 3)for mine and all the phones I've used in the past, with 1 for speed dial. Really, can Apple make 2 button presses THAT much more exciting that I'll want to spend $450 more? I better get a happy ending every time too, at that price point.
You made the assumption that many people are unhappy with their phones, yet give nothing to back this up. The basic experience of dialing a phone has been nailed down. Press one key (for me it's pressing the down arrow) to get your list of numbers, then select the first character of the name you want. Scroll down if necessary, dial. It's fairly straightforward, although who is to say that something new can't be devised?
I would argue that the reason people are unhappy with their phones is that the features promised by the phone are unintuitive and hard to learn/use, or not up to par with their expectations. Apple under promised and overdelivered as the Little Music Player That Could. At least, peoples' expectations of the iPod were low.
This time, Apple is promising all sorts of bells and whistles, lots of functionality. They're going to save the cell phone/PDA world, apparently. However, they've already told us the shortcomings: 5 hour battery life. So now, as a phone, what do I do? I forget my charger for a weekend trip and suddenly I can't do much business or personal talking because I'm worried the phone will die. But wait! It plays music too! But hold on a minute, it has 8GB, which is a handsome size... but I just put a few episodes of my favorite show on there since I heard this thing plays video... which I don't want to watch now because my phone might die this weekend, especially if I watch a 2 hour movie on the road... so I can only listen to a few things. Well darn it.
In short, while this argument hangs on forgetting the charger (and believe me, I have it happen to myself, friends, and clients *all* the time) it still highlights the fact that the features each on their own could be great and really slick (like the iPod doing one thing, but doing it well), but has cramming them all together diminished Apple's ability to make a modern, usable product instead of just a pretty hunk of tech? It's a classic tech question that's already been covered here, I see. Mod me down.
In terms of Apple making a phone that "has good workflow": Maybe this is the key. If the experience is good enough, will people ignore its shortcomings in actually usability? Will people take "feel good vibes" over logical utility? Civilization typically seems to as long as it is marketed well to them. (I tentatively reference Jared Diamond's book "Collapse")
We'll see.
Wow. I was just pointing out that it's surprising how many people's ethical structures can fail at their security in the knowledge they won't be caught, but how deepseated the idea that "someone is always watching" is.
I agree with you that being confident in oneself can engender more consistent actions. The weak-willed, as it were, do seem to have a tendency to crumble. The Stoics and all that jazz.
I wasn't expecting to get my ass blown off for posting earlier. Perhaps I should have posted on shiney.happy.people.net instead of slashdot.
Nice response, though, Geof.
Slashdot Mirror
What about water costs? Considering that some say water could be the next oil (in terms of scarcity), would/could the cost of "watering the reactor" make this idea unprofitable?
Gah, I'm sorry mods. I ranted there, and it's totally off topic.
Depending on your tax rate, you can have 5% capital gains.
Raising cap gains would probably freak the market out, or at least a lot of my clients. As far as tax planning goes it would rip up the world of taxable accounts. Taxed twice on investments? 33% once then 25% on long term gains? Yuck. Who would want to move money around then? It would incent people to save more into retirement plans, attaching a lot of unnecessary strings to that money. So, unless Congress is willing to add many more incentives to IRAs, Roths, and other retirement vehicles, upping capital gains might not be in the country's best interest (no pun intended).
We talk about a negative savings rate in this country. Raising capital gains will not incent people to save money if it's going to be taxed... what happens in an emergency and they have to sell off assets? People already don't save enough taxable money, in my experience (I'm a financial planner), but I may have an inadequate selection of people.
The point isn't just the average consumer. It's the big guns, too. If capital gains go up, what about fund distributions at the end of each year? How does a change in cap gains affect future tax planning? It would really hurt in more ways than one, and could be the death knell for a faltering economy if things slide for another year or two.
No capital gains? That'd be interesting, but never going to happen. That's a different ball of political/financial wax, though.
What do they want? They probably want to try and make sure that the Democrats don't come in and riase the capital gains tax back up to 25% and crash the market!
Talk about Alpha Bits, literally.
Ultimately, I think IT support can be about building relationships with people, albeit small relationships.
As a financial planner I have to learn how to be a partner with people, relate to them, and get them to trust me with their money. Helping different types of people is most often about showing them what is in it for them (why should they care), and helping shore up their insecurities. The know it all and whiz kid could be Analytic types who just didn't get enough hugs as a kid (or something) and are insecure. So, trying to out-do them and show them how they are inferior is a BAD idea. However, working as a partner with them, acting like someone who is on their side to offer suggestions, now *that* will get you much farther, in my experience, and you'll also have a person who begins to trust you and who will be loyal over time.
That's just one personality type I've encountered, there are others of course.
I know it's a stretch for the metaphor between IT and running a client-based practice, but I thought this might prove useful. Mod me down if it's just a bunch of pie-in-the-sky guff, though.
The radio imparted commentary about this. However, they described the Voyager probes as going "North and South, respectively". I did a mental double take in my car, and wondered who in the hell got to decide which way is "North" in this 3D (or more) coordinate system. Can they even have that?
What is most disturbing to me is that everyone these days seems to be saying just this. "Oh, we're the smart group of people." Me and MY friends would never act this way." Well, SOMEBODY must be acting that way, but everyone seems to agree that it isn't them. Does anyone see a problem here? Could it be that Great American Pasttime, "Passing the Buck"?
If there is anything we should be scared of, it is this elitist attitude that "Me and my friends are smarter than that."
Now for a decent sized marketing budget, I can look in a telescope and see "Eat at Joe's" plastered up in the heavens?
Nintendo seems more interested in innovation as a method of driving business than in just jumping on a bandwagon without understanding the market and customer, ala the N-Gage. I can't help but think that if Nintendo did something like this, the phone would act as not only a game system but as a controller or interface for Nintendo consoles as well, which I think would be obvious to many Slashdotters. Could it be similar to what Sega was trying to do with its VMUs on the Dreamcast? That seemed like a good idea, it just didn't have enough developer support or hardware oomph. Think about it: A simple way to keep people continually involved with their games, even when they're away from the television. Keep'em hooked and coming back for more, make it a richer experience, and then... profit!
Actually, if you get down to it, it costs more power to switch an incandescent light on and off than it does to simply leave it on, so you'd probably pay more.
Moderation? I learned that. I moderate this "young, foolish, and liberal".
The operative element I see here is "drive it to my parents house and leave it under a tarp till I get back from wherever I end up."
The parents won't be around forever. Where are you going to put your rust bucket then?
What happens when that rust bucket breaks down? Or when you need serious medical care?
You'll be under a mountain of debt like everybody else, then.Option 2 seems nice for a little while, but when you come right down to it, it's just as socially irresponsible as Option 1.
If you want freedom, you have to work for it. That's the way the world goes. You don't get it for free, and if anybody tells you otherwise they're either lying to you or trying to sell something. Now, what you choose to do with that freedom (buy a bunch of useless shit, or save it so you can enjoy more freedom later on) is up to you, of course.
Yeah, but they're going to be contaminated with foreign substances, so they'll just be boycotted anyway.
His brother? I thought George Clinton & his Parliament Funkadelic were safe as long they lived in their mother ship powered by funk music.
I only state that standardizing the forms makes sense from the mouths of doctors, not that the government should automatically take this over. There must be a better way, private or otherwise.
You assume that the government automatically makes a mess of anything it touches. Saying that is just as counterproductive as open-endedly espousing a government led push for universal health care.
Planned obsolescence, perhaps?
I've had this happen on every pair of glasses I've had with an anti-scratch coating.
This is a me too post, and I endorse it.
The system itself is horribly broken. I have clients who are doctors in private practice who have told me time and again that the cost of their service could easily be cut in half if the forms for the insurance industry were simply standardized.
The inner workings of the system are broken, and fixing it is not just about who foots the bill.-
Fortwo, where are you?
Make an album sound horrible, then rerelease it a few years later as a Remastered Classic. Ah, capitalism, how I love thee. Let me count the ways...
Compress and distort the music down until it sounds horrible, then come out with a remastered version a few years later! Hooray for capitalism! Listen to a Rush album from the 80's (if you can, heh) and then "Vapor Trails". The compression was so bad on the latter you can hear static during a number of songs. The record company keeps promising to remaster and rerelease the album. Dollar signs for everyone.
In light of the upcoming Olympics, I see news like this as neither good nor bad. Unless China has something quite sneaky up it's sleave, like some super-duper set of human rights and freedoms they will grant to their citizens for the duration of The Games, I imagine many of these issues will come to light with so many different sets of eyes and ears visiting.
The viewpoints and opinions that the spectators and athletes take back to their respective countries seem like they could do more to change Chinese policy than any news article or government sanction/tariff/international law.
P.S. Just mod me down to 0 for not formatting it in plain text. yuck.
It takes you five key presses at a minimum to dial a number? How old is your phone? Minimum is 2 (call it 3)for mine and all the phones I've used in the past, with 1 for speed dial. Really, can Apple make 2 button presses THAT much more exciting that I'll want to spend $450 more? I better get a happy ending every time too, at that price point. You made the assumption that many people are unhappy with their phones, yet give nothing to back this up. The basic experience of dialing a phone has been nailed down. Press one key (for me it's pressing the down arrow) to get your list of numbers, then select the first character of the name you want. Scroll down if necessary, dial. It's fairly straightforward, although who is to say that something new can't be devised? I would argue that the reason people are unhappy with their phones is that the features promised by the phone are unintuitive and hard to learn/use, or not up to par with their expectations. Apple under promised and overdelivered as the Little Music Player That Could. At least, peoples' expectations of the iPod were low. This time, Apple is promising all sorts of bells and whistles, lots of functionality. They're going to save the cell phone/PDA world, apparently. However, they've already told us the shortcomings: 5 hour battery life. So now, as a phone, what do I do? I forget my charger for a weekend trip and suddenly I can't do much business or personal talking because I'm worried the phone will die. But wait! It plays music too! But hold on a minute, it has 8GB, which is a handsome size... but I just put a few episodes of my favorite show on there since I heard this thing plays video... which I don't want to watch now because my phone might die this weekend, especially if I watch a 2 hour movie on the road... so I can only listen to a few things. Well darn it. In short, while this argument hangs on forgetting the charger (and believe me, I have it happen to myself, friends, and clients *all* the time) it still highlights the fact that the features each on their own could be great and really slick (like the iPod doing one thing, but doing it well), but has cramming them all together diminished Apple's ability to make a modern, usable product instead of just a pretty hunk of tech? It's a classic tech question that's already been covered here, I see. Mod me down. In terms of Apple making a phone that "has good workflow": Maybe this is the key. If the experience is good enough, will people ignore its shortcomings in actually usability? Will people take "feel good vibes" over logical utility? Civilization typically seems to as long as it is marketed well to them. (I tentatively reference Jared Diamond's book "Collapse") We'll see.
Wow. I was just pointing out that it's surprising how many people's ethical structures can fail at their security in the knowledge they won't be caught, but how deepseated the idea that "someone is always watching" is. I agree with you that being confident in oneself can engender more consistent actions. The weak-willed, as it were, do seem to have a tendency to crumble. The Stoics and all that jazz. I wasn't expecting to get my ass blown off for posting earlier. Perhaps I should have posted on shiney.happy.people.net instead of slashdot. Nice response, though, Geof.