Join the non-sequitor club. They don't make sense, but they sure love pizza.
I was down on 2 rather high-profile "learning experiences" on the part of the automotive industry. They were singled out far a) being trendously expensive and b) dubious in merit.
Airbags were supposed to be a passive restraining system. Unfortunately, as built they can cause severe injury or death unless you are in you seat belt, regardless of the speed of impact.
Anti-lock brakes give you an edge inon driving condition: if your one side suddenly looses traction. For every other energency stopping situation they at best perform the same as conventional brakes, and at worst compromise your ability to stop at all.
Adding a roll-cage and 5 point belts would have been cheaper and far more effective.
And given that ABS is supposed to help maintain control, we find its effects negligable at best in normal driving conditions, useless at extremes, and causing new problems under conditions where the existing systems perform well.
In my critical eye that's an engineering failure given the billions of dollars that went into their devolopment.
And don't forget Aluminum wiring. Works great... until the aluminum oxide builds up on the electrical connections.
Hey, and that crap they threw into gasoline, yup that was safe.
Asbestos was a really nice fire retardent material. Too bad it had a tendency to create dust that causes lung cancer.
And to cap it all off, let's have 3 cheers for air bags and anti-lock brakes. If you are a small-fry like my wife and myself, you too can be killed in a 10mph impact by a piece of safety equipment! Anti-Lock brakes, they actually increase breaking distance and if you pump them (like anyone over the age of 26 was trained to do) you are screwed.
You really start to understand why people in ages past were so resistant to change.
This whole business of paint that gets faded and dies bugs me. For one thing, I know my neighbors are as cheap as I am. For another, I live next to I-95. We will be re-painting once a year, or more likely, living with faded paint.
Now, if we have a chemical reaction that eat's smog, why not just spray-paint it onto gravel (to get tons of surface area) with a permeable case. That way you just change-out the 'potpourie' every couple of years without bothering to re-paint.
If you want to REALLY filter the air, use a fan (or the wind generated by speeding cars) to force the air through the scrubber.
Why am I suddenly reminded about the Simpon's bit with the something that is eaten by the something that is eaten by the snakes that are eaten by the gorillas.
What about the gorillas? Well come winter they'll freeze (or something like that.)
Alright, now what about the money EARNED. Let's see, Fred's dry-goods story employed Fred and a few stock clerks, and some checkout counter people. Fred had to pay his suppliers for things, but above that and transportation cost most of the money stayed in town.
In comes wal-mart that prices Fred, Joe, Arleen, and Corey out of business. Now assuming that Wal-Mart employes roughly the same number of people that Fred, Joe, Arleen, and Corey's store did (not bloody likely), and assuming Wal-Mart pays said employees the same wage (no way in hell), where do the profits go?
Wal-mart is not selling below cost... to themselves. They have a tendency to shift costs to their suppliers, and cut whatever corners are possible for day-to-day operations.
Where do they cut corners? In Mid-Atlantic area last year there were 3 wal-mart's whose roof's collapsed in the same snow storm. Granted, there was a lot of snow, but strangely they were the only building affected. They have shown that they aren't above hiring (or looking the other way when a fully-owned subsidiary hires) illegal immigrants, nor having employees work off the clock.
Next case: pick up something in wal-mart that is manufactured in the United States. I'll wait, it'll take you a while. Wal-Mart, by itself, accounts for 10% of our trade deficit with China. Ok, so we give up a few $20/hour manufacturing jobs for a few $5.25/hour stockboy jobs.
Finally, they HAVE Microsoft-like market shares in many communities. And they aren't above throwing their weight around to get zoning variences to place a parking lot over a historic landmark. Go ahead Joe consumer. You try to get a varience to put a shed up too close to the edge of your property.
At long last there is a baleen whale effect. They make a razor thin profit on every unit purchased. Their whole economic model is to starve everyone else out. The bigwigs in Arkasas only make money because Wal-mart is such a gigantic operation. It will only continue to make money by killing competitors. Once they have succeeded in driving everyone else out of the retail business, they will either implode or jack their prices through the roof (and then implode.)
The US GDP grows 2-3% a year. Adjusting for inflation it's almost constant. As Giant an operation as walmart is, you would think their success would by growing our GDP. I mean, look at the hundreds of billions of dollars involved. They have double digit growth, and yet the economy as a whole is standing still.
And while I'm at it, have you every heard of the concept of "deflation." Oh yes, dropping prices for everyone generally does bizarre things to our currency. And with a downward trend in wages, well, you do the math Mr. Economist.
The economics of Wal-mart is a textbook case of predatory pricing. That are today's answer to Standard Oil and A&P. Oh wait, we already have laws about that...
It all comes back to the wal-mart conundrum. At some point the price reductions we demand from manufacturers starts to cost indirectly more that we are saving on the sticker price.
With Wal-Mart they tend to employ a fraction of the people that a similarly sized retailer would, at a much lower wage. They also tend to drive other local retailers out of business, thus fewer people are employed for less money, lowering the Domestic Product for that community. In the case of a SuperWalmart, they also tend to depress the spending power of SEVERAL communities.
In this case hard drives have become so "cheap" that we end up buying them at twice or 3 times the rate. Add it up, are we saving that much money?
For the record, medical components croak on a regular basis. They have built-in checkers to detect when something goes tit-up, so an IC failure would be handled like any other failure. Annoying, but a broken unit is useless, not a health hazard, (and you either test the sucker before you take it out in the field or have a couple on hand ANYWAY.)
Most other devices are like that too. They die completely rather than risk giving you a bogus answer.
With any luck the part will fail while the product is still under warrenty. By the time the warrenty expires the damn thing is probably obsolete anyway. YANR to not buy expensive components on the bleeding edge.
IMHO, anonymity leads to wierd behavior. You seperate a person from his or her action, and you will see they behave like a different person. I am not advocating that free speech should be punished. I just think we go down a dark path when we try to mix up the ability to speak freely with the ability to speak without fear of repricussions.
Not to mention the ability to tell the time at a distance, or under low-visibility situations. Set up an illuminated analog clock, and an illuminated digital clock side by side.
Kill the lights, take off yourt glasses, and tell me which one is easier to read? Is it 9:38 or 3:33, or 5:55?
Folks, we didn't NEED indiglo with alanog watches. You could yell the time with any faint light source,
Never confuse a religion's teachings with the crap made up by demogogues who seek to use it as a platform for hate. Muhammed didn't say crap about virgins. Christ himself turned down numerous offers from his followers to "rise up" wand kick the Romans and the Zealots out of Judea.
Why am I not going to be shocked when in 3 years my Postfix box will be ignored by Exchange servers because it's open-source and thus and open relay. This is such a shameless grab, almost as bad as their campaign to paint Linux boxes as unsecure. Any linux users remember THAT back in '99? Talk to any MS admin about a Linux box and they swore it was virus infected.
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I was down on 2 rather high-profile "learning experiences" on the part of the automotive industry. They were singled out far a) being trendously expensive and b) dubious in merit.
Airbags were supposed to be a passive restraining system. Unfortunately, as built they can cause severe injury or death unless you are in you seat belt, regardless of the speed of impact.
Anti-lock brakes give you an edge inon driving condition: if your one side suddenly looses traction. For every other energency stopping situation they at best perform the same as conventional brakes, and at worst compromise your ability to stop at all.
Adding a roll-cage and 5 point belts would have been cheaper and far more effective.
In my critical eye that's an engineering failure given the billions of dollars that went into their devolopment.
ABS doesn't help when the car goes into a spin.
Hey, and that crap they threw into gasoline, yup that was safe.
Asbestos was a really nice fire retardent material. Too bad it had a tendency to create dust that causes lung cancer.
And to cap it all off, let's have 3 cheers for air bags and anti-lock brakes. If you are a small-fry like my wife and myself, you too can be killed in a 10mph impact by a piece of safety equipment! Anti-Lock brakes, they actually increase breaking distance and if you pump them (like anyone over the age of 26 was trained to do) you are screwed.
You really start to understand why people in ages past were so resistant to change.
I can't imagion that having nitric acid build up on your walls is all that healthy for them either.
Now, if we have a chemical reaction that eat's smog, why not just spray-paint it onto gravel (to get tons of surface area) with a permeable case. That way you just change-out the 'potpourie' every couple of years without bothering to re-paint.
If you want to REALLY filter the air, use a fan (or the wind generated by speeding cars) to force the air through the scrubber.
What about the gorillas? Well come winter they'll freeze (or something like that.)
Great solution (no pun intended) just the same.
Well, until you find out that they replaced the active ingredient with Red Phosphorous out of concern for the environment.
/cliche
In comes wal-mart that prices Fred, Joe, Arleen, and Corey out of business. Now assuming that Wal-Mart employes roughly the same number of people that Fred, Joe, Arleen, and Corey's store did (not bloody likely), and assuming Wal-Mart pays said employees the same wage (no way in hell), where do the profits go?
Arkansas.
Where do you think those low prices come from? Ok, that and shipping manufacturing overseas.
Where do they cut corners? In Mid-Atlantic area last year there were 3 wal-mart's whose roof's collapsed in the same snow storm. Granted, there was a lot of snow, but strangely they were the only building affected. They have shown that they aren't above hiring (or looking the other way when a fully-owned subsidiary hires) illegal immigrants, nor having employees work off the clock.
Next case: pick up something in wal-mart that is manufactured in the United States. I'll wait, it'll take you a while. Wal-Mart, by itself, accounts for 10% of our trade deficit with China. Ok, so we give up a few $20/hour manufacturing jobs for a few $5.25/hour stockboy jobs.
Finally, they HAVE Microsoft-like market shares in many communities. And they aren't above throwing their weight around to get zoning variences to place a parking lot over a historic landmark. Go ahead Joe consumer. You try to get a varience to put a shed up too close to the edge of your property.
At long last there is a baleen whale effect. They make a razor thin profit on every unit purchased. Their whole economic model is to starve everyone else out. The bigwigs in Arkasas only make money because Wal-mart is such a gigantic operation. It will only continue to make money by killing competitors. Once they have succeeded in driving everyone else out of the retail business, they will either implode or jack their prices through the roof (and then implode.)
The US GDP grows 2-3% a year. Adjusting for inflation it's almost constant. As Giant an operation as walmart is, you would think their success would by growing our GDP. I mean, look at the hundreds of billions of dollars involved. They have double digit growth, and yet the economy as a whole is standing still.
And while I'm at it, have you every heard of the concept of "deflation." Oh yes, dropping prices for everyone generally does bizarre things to our currency. And with a downward trend in wages, well, you do the math Mr. Economist.
The economics of Wal-mart is a textbook case of predatory pricing. That are today's answer to Standard Oil and A&P. Oh wait, we already have laws about that...
I was being sarcastic.
What environmentalists? All our crap is made in third world countries!
With Wal-Mart they tend to employ a fraction of the people that a similarly sized retailer would, at a much lower wage. They also tend to drive other local retailers out of business, thus fewer people are employed for less money, lowering the Domestic Product for that community. In the case of a SuperWalmart, they also tend to depress the spending power of SEVERAL communities.
In this case hard drives have become so "cheap" that we end up buying them at twice or 3 times the rate. Add it up, are we saving that much money?
Most other devices are like that too. They die completely rather than risk giving you a bogus answer.
With any luck the part will fail while the product is still under warrenty. By the time the warrenty expires the damn thing is probably obsolete anyway. YANR to not buy expensive components on the bleeding edge.
Oh wait, we don't manufacture anything in the US anymore. Well, bully for everyone else.
Kill the lights, take off yourt glasses, and tell me which one is easier to read? Is it 9:38 or 3:33, or 5:55?
Folks, we didn't NEED indiglo with alanog watches. You could yell the time with any faint light source,
Hey, it keeps her happy.
As for Moses...
Not to mention the cost of stamps rising almost annually.
And then EvilTwinSkippy was enlightened...
Why am I not going to be shocked when in 3 years my Postfix box will be ignored by Exchange servers because it's open-source and thus and open relay. This is such a shameless grab, almost as bad as their campaign to paint Linux boxes as unsecure. Any linux users remember THAT back in '99? Talk to any MS admin about a Linux box and they swore it was virus infected.