From a purely capitalistic point of view, it makes no sense to do mind-numbing manufacturing in the US. Even if you were to improve working conditions in China, it will still be immensely cheap. Even in countries with a strong stakeholder's capitalist mentality like Japan are finding out harder and harder to keep tricket-manufacturing jobs within their own borders.
But if "purely capitalist" is not the ultimate arbiter (or maybe even if it is), paying more for labor makes plenty of sense.
We've already seen that the difference in labor cost for producing the typical high priced, high margin Apple product in China vs. the US is negligible with respect to the price. Paying workers $15 per/hour (when did that become the new minimum wage?) vs. $1 per/hour will neither push the consumer price high enough to reduce sales, nor deprive Apple of a healthy profit.
On the other hand, Americans making $15 an hour are much more likely to buy an Apple product than a Chinese worker making $1 an hour.
The logic of paying reasonable wages hasn't changed -- people who earn good money will spend it on your products (or it will circulate back to you eventually). On the other hand, companies that chase cheap labor around the globe will ultimately starve their own customer base.
Keeping "mind-numbing manufacturing" in the USA supports our economic ecosystem and provides plenty of other social and economic benefits.
Tacking the term "trusted" in front of something doesn't mean squat unless you live in a world where all knowledge and other resources are symmetrical.
They "made it worse" in the sense there were very vocal complaints about it. But did those changes actually affect subscriber numbers. And did they affect the amount of advertising that could be sold. If everyone complains but keeps on using the system, those complaints don't mean much. And especially when "everyone' is actually just a small minority of users. Most of Facebook's users just shrugged and kept using the new interface.
That's very hard to know because one of the first ways that they made it worse was to make it a hassle to quit even if you want to. Sure, you can jump through their hoops if you are fired up about it. Or you save yourself some time and let them keep you on their roll but never look at your page. I wonder what percentage of their "users" are just accounts that people can't be bothered to disable (as much as they can be disabled).
Now that you mention it, my mom still reads Consumer Reports -- I should just ask her! (Of course, she has an advanced technical degree and makes twice the money that I do, so it figures that she landed on the sensible solution already. ..)
My responsibility is to me and my money, not theirs.
That's fine as long as there is no such thing as "your neighborhood", "your standard of living", "your beliefs about legal and social justice" etc. Personal economic decisions are not made in vacuum.
Oh please! Do you HONESTLY think they paid MSRP for either the laptop OR the bookbag? The cleaning kit was MAYBE $2, the bookbag MAYBE $8, and they probably made at least $40 on the laptop. So they made out just fine friend, it was the fact they were willing to offer SOMETHING, even if it was cheap, that helped to make the sale.
Right. As opposed to Amazon who offered nothing to make the sale at the same effective price and couldn't even meet the "same day" requirement. Yet, Amazon is somehow viewed as the gold-standard of value for the price-conscious customer.
My point is that either BB's model is unsustainable under your demands (i.e. forced to compete at prices that won't support their operating costs) or Amazon's prices are inflated (i.e. they are charging what it would cost to provide a local brick-n-mortar store service/support and pocketing the difference). Okay, maybe its a combination of the two.
Amazon floods the screen with as many "similar" products and "other things you might like" pitches as they can. Not only do they try to sell you things you don't ask about, they try to sell you things from sellers you didn't expressly visit.
If Amazon isn't just as highly a manipulated shopping experience as the average grocery store, its only because they are still working out the kinks.
The best way is to not try to make funky store brands but to simply offer incentives to buy. When my oldest needed a laptop right that minute for class after the old Dell gave up the ghost he went to two local stores, the Staples and Best buy. The Staples were doing nothing but bait and switch, every model he would look at on the floor was magically out of stock but they could get him 'something similar' for a $300 markup, instead we went to the local BB and when they saw he was comparing prices the floor guy said "I'll throw in a bookbag and cleaning kit" and sealed the deal. Later when we checked online they sold it to him within $40 of the average price and the bookbag made up for the difference so we were happy.
So in order to make the sale they had to match the on-line price while paying for all the overhead required to meet your "right that minute for class" criteria. How do you expect this to be sustainable?
Or, lets suppose it is sustainable. Why do you tolerate on-line retailers charging the same price while offering less service?
Way too much effort involved in sorting through all the buying options. E.g. I would use a new digital camera, but I can't be bothered sorting through a zillion camera models and retailers. I still have a decrepit dumb phone for the same reason.
I don't get any satisfaction from navigating the maze of hassle thrown up by retailers these days.
This is why most of the power in the US is supposed to reside with the states and not the Feds.
Your state and local governments are the people that are more sensitive and responsive to the needs of you and your fellow state citizens.
Distributing power will only distribute lobbyists. That might be a minor inconvenience, but the increased cost of lobbying will come out of citizen/consumer pockets one way or another.
Meanwhile, centralized lobbying efforts will be matched up against much more easily (and quietly) banboozled and/or corrupted local-yocals. "Sensitivity" and "responsiveness" are double edged.
A major argument of the opinion piece is that having at least a rudimentary understanding of how computers and software actually work is increasingly important, and that learning some programming is a good way to accomplish that. I doubt anyone here would argue with that.
I will argue with that. Learning to "code" is not likely to aid non-programmers in understanding how to participate in the process of creating good software. What is increasingly important with respect to computers and software is how to analyze, organize and communicate business logic and requirements.
As a developer, I want clients to be able to clearly describe the problem they are trying to solve or the goal they are trying to achieve. I do not want them suggesting how I meet their requirements.
10 years ago online video was virtually nonexistent, and where it did exist it was never larger than 320x240.
And now it is ubiquitous, HD and largely devoted to pointless things that would be skimmed over and disregarded in a fraction of the load time if left to text and still images.
. ..why are any of these technologies necessary or beneficial to NFL football? The sole benefit I could imagine is the ability to better protect players from injury, or after an injury has occurred. Other than that, I want to see athleticism, strategy and luck, not dweebs huddled around techno-baubles.
The problem here is that everyone has a different idea of what "usable" means.
"Usable" means that the intended audience is able to attain the expected goals. If your intended audience is so varied in their goals and skillset that this is unachievable, that's a bug.
There are two types of people who use phones and other gadgets while driving: Those who realize that their driving ability is impaired, and those who don't realize that their driving ability is impaired.
BTW, I don't remember the last time I saw a cop driving a car without either talking on the phone or using a laptop mounted on the passenger seat.
Depends on the perspective. Some places are much worse... I live in Paris for the same price (500k USD) you can't find much more than 550sq ft apartment.
Yeah, but you are in Paris, not some run-down California suburb surrounded in every direction by 2 hours of stop-and-go traffic.
They do actually make an attempt at showing you ads they think you want to see. They frequently know a surprising amount about you by the time the ad hits your eyes.
Among the ads that they have to show, they show those that they believe that you are most likely to want to see. The quality of the ads still correlates to the quality of their ad-sales, and, AFAIK, the quality is dismal.
Which is interesting. They do know a surprising amount about their users. Yet, they don't seem to be able to appeal to legitimate advertisers (such as they are). Is it because they are inept? Is it because there is better money in ad sales to obvious scam artists? Is their user base simply more attractive to scam artists?
Is laser-targeted advertising not all that it is cracked up to be after all?
Their product is comprehensively evil, from its inhumane production to its unhealthy effects on its victims, er, consumers. Thus, promoting it is also evil.
Nature Publishing Group had an "impact" sale where you can subscribe for the impact number of the journal rather than the list price. No way in Fing hell I'm paying $299 or whatever it is for Nature Physics paper journal. But I'll subscribe for $18 or whatever it was exactly. I suppose just the gasoline to drive to the library every month will pay for this... I'm not sure how they're even keeping up with postage costs at $18.
Does anyone, myself,/., or the NSA, really care about any of this or find any actionable info in this?
Subject referred to "Nature" (note capitalization), "impact" and "NSA" along with obfuscated profanity. Flag profile as potential eco-extremist and refer to appropriate agencies. Add to no-fly list pending further evaluation.
FWIW, I don't mind accurate information about me being collected and processed competently. On the other hand, I very much do mind what actually happens with this information.
Slashdot Mirror
From a purely capitalistic point of view, it makes no sense to do mind-numbing manufacturing in the US. Even if you were to improve working conditions in China, it will still be immensely cheap. Even in countries with a strong stakeholder's capitalist mentality like Japan are finding out harder and harder to keep tricket-manufacturing jobs within their own borders.
But if "purely capitalist" is not the ultimate arbiter (or maybe even if it is), paying more for labor makes plenty of sense.
We've already seen that the difference in labor cost for producing the typical high priced, high margin Apple product in China vs. the US is negligible with respect to the price. Paying workers $15 per/hour (when did that become the new minimum wage?) vs. $1 per/hour will neither push the consumer price high enough to reduce sales, nor deprive Apple of a healthy profit.
On the other hand, Americans making $15 an hour are much more likely to buy an Apple product than a Chinese worker making $1 an hour.
The logic of paying reasonable wages hasn't changed -- people who earn good money will spend it on your products (or it will circulate back to you eventually). On the other hand, companies that chase cheap labor around the globe will ultimately starve their own customer base.
Keeping "mind-numbing manufacturing" in the USA supports our economic ecosystem and provides plenty of other social and economic benefits.
Tacking the term "trusted" in front of something doesn't mean squat unless you live in a world where all knowledge and other resources are symmetrical.
- anyone acting strangely might be on drugs, and
- anyone not acting strangely might be on drugs, and covering it up.
Don't forget:
- anyone buying drugs is financing terrorism
They "made it worse" in the sense there were very vocal complaints about it. But did those changes actually affect subscriber numbers. And did they affect the amount of advertising that could be sold. If everyone complains but keeps on using the system, those complaints don't mean much. And especially when "everyone' is actually just a small minority of users. Most of Facebook's users just shrugged and kept using the new interface.
That's very hard to know because one of the first ways that they made it worse was to make it a hassle to quit even if you want to. Sure, you can jump through their hoops if you are fired up about it. Or you save yourself some time and let them keep you on their roll but never look at your page. I wonder what percentage of their "users" are just accounts that people can't be bothered to disable (as much as they can be disabled).
They expect people to pay for something they can get for free.
But they will make it up on lack of volume!
Now that you mention it, my mom still reads Consumer Reports -- I should just ask her! (Of course, she has an advanced technical degree and makes twice the money that I do, so it figures that she landed on the sensible solution already. . .)
My responsibility is to me and my money, not theirs.
That's fine as long as there is no such thing as "your neighborhood", "your standard of living", "your beliefs about legal and social justice" etc. Personal economic decisions are not made in vacuum.
Oh please! Do you HONESTLY think they paid MSRP for either the laptop OR the bookbag? The cleaning kit was MAYBE $2, the bookbag MAYBE $8, and they probably made at least $40 on the laptop. So they made out just fine friend, it was the fact they were willing to offer SOMETHING, even if it was cheap, that helped to make the sale.
Right. As opposed to Amazon who offered nothing to make the sale at the same effective price and couldn't even meet the "same day" requirement. Yet, Amazon is somehow viewed as the gold-standard of value for the price-conscious customer.
My point is that either BB's model is unsustainable under your demands (i.e. forced to compete at prices that won't support their operating costs) or Amazon's prices are inflated (i.e. they are charging what it would cost to provide a local brick-n-mortar store service/support and pocketing the difference). Okay, maybe its a combination of the two.
Amazon floods the screen with as many "similar" products and "other things you might like" pitches as they can. Not only do they try to sell you things you don't ask about, they try to sell you things from sellers you didn't expressly visit.
If Amazon isn't just as highly a manipulated shopping experience as the average grocery store, its only because they are still working out the kinks.
No. It looks like they didn't have what he was looking for at all.
Huh? He bought the laptop from BB, that day, and got a book bag and cleaning kit thrown in.
The "advantage" Amazon was offering was delivering the laptop only, 2-5 days later for the same price.
The best way is to not try to make funky store brands but to simply offer incentives to buy. When my oldest needed a laptop right that minute for class after the old Dell gave up the ghost he went to two local stores, the Staples and Best buy. The Staples were doing nothing but bait and switch, every model he would look at on the floor was magically out of stock but they could get him 'something similar' for a $300 markup, instead we went to the local BB and when they saw he was comparing prices the floor guy said "I'll throw in a bookbag and cleaning kit" and sealed the deal. Later when we checked online they sold it to him within $40 of the average price and the bookbag made up for the difference so we were happy.
So in order to make the sale they had to match the on-line price while paying for all the overhead required to meet your "right that minute for class" criteria. How do you expect this to be sustainable?
Or, lets suppose it is sustainable. Why do you tolerate on-line retailers charging the same price while offering less service?
Way too much effort involved in sorting through all the buying options. E.g. I would use a new digital camera, but I can't be bothered sorting through a zillion camera models and retailers. I still have a decrepit dumb phone for the same reason.
I don't get any satisfaction from navigating the maze of hassle thrown up by retailers these days.
. . .use steganography to embed the data in a compromising picture of yourself and then upload it to Facebook. Presto -- it will be there forever.
How about we instead turn our rightful indignation against Big Pharma and ask why the fuck is it not legal to buy the same drugs from Canada for less?
Why isn't it possible to buy them at a competitive price from the local pharmacy?
This is why most of the power in the US is supposed to reside with the states and not the Feds.
Your state and local governments are the people that are more sensitive and responsive to the needs of you and your fellow state citizens.
Distributing power will only distribute lobbyists. That might be a minor inconvenience, but the increased cost of lobbying will come out of citizen/consumer pockets one way or another.
Meanwhile, centralized lobbying efforts will be matched up against much more easily (and quietly) banboozled and/or corrupted local-yocals. "Sensitivity" and "responsiveness" are double edged.
A major argument of the opinion piece is that having at least a rudimentary understanding of how computers and software actually work is increasingly important, and that learning some programming is a good way to accomplish that. I doubt anyone here would argue with that.
I will argue with that. Learning to "code" is not likely to aid non-programmers in understanding how to participate in the process of creating good software. What is increasingly important with respect to computers and software is how to analyze, organize and communicate business logic and requirements.
As a developer, I want clients to be able to clearly describe the problem they are trying to solve or the goal they are trying to achieve. I do not want them suggesting how I meet their requirements.
http://www.newschannel5.com/story/15725035/officials-claim-tennessee-becomes-first-state-to-deploy-vipr-statewide
10 years ago online video was virtually nonexistent, and where it did exist it was never larger than 320x240.
And now it is ubiquitous, HD and largely devoted to pointless things that would be skimmed over and disregarded in a fraction of the load time if left to text and still images.
. . .why are any of these technologies necessary or beneficial to NFL football? The sole benefit I could imagine is the ability to better protect players from injury, or after an injury has occurred. Other than that, I want to see athleticism, strategy and luck, not dweebs huddled around techno-baubles.
The problem here is that everyone has a different idea of what "usable" means.
"Usable" means that the intended audience is able to attain the expected goals. If your intended audience is so varied in their goals and skillset that this is unachievable, that's a bug.
There are two types of people who use phones and other gadgets while driving: Those who realize that their driving ability is impaired, and those who don't realize that their driving ability is impaired.
BTW, I don't remember the last time I saw a cop driving a car without either talking on the phone or using a laptop mounted on the passenger seat.
Depends on the perspective. Some places are much worse... I live in Paris for the same price (500k USD) you can't find much more than 550sq ft apartment.
Yeah, but you are in Paris, not some run-down California suburb surrounded in every direction by 2 hours of stop-and-go traffic.
They do actually make an attempt at showing you ads they think you want to see. They frequently know a surprising amount about you by the time the ad hits your eyes.
Among the ads that they have to show, they show those that they believe that you are most likely to want to see. The quality of the ads still correlates to the quality of their ad-sales, and, AFAIK, the quality is dismal.
Which is interesting. They do know a surprising amount about their users. Yet, they don't seem to be able to appeal to legitimate advertisers (such as they are). Is it because they are inept? Is it because there is better money in ad sales to obvious scam artists? Is their user base simply more attractive to scam artists?
Is laser-targeted advertising not all that it is cracked up to be after all?
Their product is comprehensively evil, from its inhumane production to its unhealthy effects on its victims, er, consumers. Thus, promoting it is also evil.
Nature Publishing Group had an "impact" sale where you can subscribe for the impact number of the journal rather than the list price. No way in Fing hell I'm paying $299 or whatever it is for Nature Physics paper journal. But I'll subscribe for $18 or whatever it was exactly. I suppose just the gasoline to drive to the library every month will pay for this... I'm not sure how they're even keeping up with postage costs at $18.
Does anyone, myself, /., or the NSA, really care about any of this or find any actionable info in this?
Subject referred to "Nature" (note capitalization), "impact" and "NSA" along with obfuscated profanity. Flag profile as potential eco-extremist and refer to appropriate agencies. Add to no-fly list pending further evaluation.
FWIW, I don't mind accurate information about me being collected and processed competently. On the other hand, I very much do mind what actually happens with this information.