Then there's the issue of a lot of cops are just dicks who want to bully people and beat them up. My brother in laws are both cops and watch videos online of non-violent people being tazed by cops and laugh. They need to start doing psych evaluations and such before hiring cops to try to weed out the sociopaths who are just in it because they're legally allowed to assault people without punishment.
Ooh, ooh, I know this one! This is where I make up an unprovable claim that makes me look cooler than you to "prove" a point too instead of using actual facts! Sadly for you, I'm too old to play that game, so I'll just leave you to your fantasies where a 30 mph vehicle that holds one person and no cargo is "practical".
You can raise taxes on "rich" people (hell, even everyone who makes over $100k a year) to 100% and confiscate every last bit of their wealth - and it STILL won't pay off the whole we're in. That's what you don't get - the "SPEND SPEND SPEND!" people like you wrote so many checks that we're FUCKED for a very long time.
Your idiocy of taxing people to prevent competitiveness.....all it results in is higher costs for everything, which HURTS US citizens, but you'll refuse to ignore that and think that having no disposable income is a "good thing" because that means that evil people aren't "being greedy". But whatever, I've given up on trying to educate the intentionally ignorant like yourself.
Maybe you should read those news articles a little more closely and see how horrifically impractical those cars are. They have no luggage space, hold only (occasionally two) people, can only go at very slow speeds (around 25 - 30 mph), and don't go for very long.
Hardly - while you might be able to easily get all of the kids to learn it in school, what are you going to do about the hundreds of millions of adults who aren't in school? THAT'S the real issue. It's like if we decided to change the national language to Mandarin....sure, you could easily teach all the kids, but everyone who's already out of school is going to be a problem.
Good god, $2-3 IS almost the same price. I can see you going to buy a car and picking a lower quality car just because of a $4 price difference. The difference between upconverting and blu-ray is entirely dependent on the DVD - some look great, others look horrible. Very rarely do you see an upconverted DVD that looks as good as blu-ray though. It matters because there are TWO SEPARATE PRODUCTS. One, which is cheaper, is just the blu-ray - the other, which costs more, is the blu-ray AND dvd AND digital copy - so of COURSE it's going to cost some more (yet it still costs far less than buying the dvd, buying the single disc blu-ray, and buying a digital copy from iTunes or Amazon).
People drive farther to save a few cents on gas because they're morons. However, when they know that they're getting a BETTER PRODUCT, they're willing to pay more - and they really don't care about another $3 for a movie that looks much better. I find the rabid rage against blu-ray to be quite amusing. It's funny how much people on here get mad if someone pirates a game, but pirating movies because it's "too expensive" is just fine.
First off, I've never once seen a store sell a brand new dvd for $10, so I call bullshit. Secondly, your own goddamn list showed that it's normally only a couple of dollars difference between a single disc dvd and single disc blu-ray. $14 versus $17 is "about the same", especially when the one costing more is a SUPERIOR PRODUCT. The blu-rays that cost more are the ones that are not just a blu-ray, but also a blu-ray + dvd + digital copy (or more copies). Such as the blu-ray of Blade Runner which is 5 discs with five different versions of the movie, plus special features, that was a whopping $30 on Amazon. Hell, for many blu-rays you can find them on Amazon for $15.
Yes, a few years ago when blu-rays actually cost $30-$40, you had an argument on price. Now prices are no more than what DVD's were two years ago and barely more than what DVD's are now. These days it's just an excuse to justify pirating movies - the same goes for the completely untrue argument of "you barely see a quality difference" - if you can't see a quality difference, then the problem is either your TV sucks or your eyes suck.
Some of those prices aren't entirely descriptive - such as Harry Potter 7 which you can get on single disc dvd / single disc blu-ray or 2 disc dvd and two disc blu-ray (with dvd copy and digital copy). Regardless, the WORST of those blu-ray prices is no more than what DVD's were just a couple years ago - yet I doubt you were raging over how "expensive" DVD's were. As you said though, most are only a couple dollars less to get on DVD....so how exactly is that disproving my point that blu-ray doesn't cost much more for a better product?
1) Anything over 30" is noticeable. I'm currently looking at a 42" TV that's about 15 feet away and the difference between standard def, upconverted, and high def is completely noticeable
2) You can upconvert DVD's on a blu-ray player. There is no "you have to rebuy everything" - that's something that only uninformed people promote.
3) The "format war" lasted what, one year? Two tops. The reason it's not going even faster than it is is due to the economy - people aren't going to spend any more money than necessary right now.
4) Most people still don't have enough bandwidth to make hi-def streaming / downloading practical for the masses.
To make matters even more complex, he has around 400 DVD's already. He's not going to re-buy all those on Blue-ray so his DVD player works just fine for him.
They will play and upconvert on a blu-ray player....but then he can buy NEW movies on blu-ray.
I own two Blue-ray players and would love to own more Blue-ray discs but truthfully, when new releases are coming out at 30$
You're NOT shopping in the right places if you're paying that much. New blu-rays are like $17 at Best Buy / Amazon and around $22-$25 for blu-ray AND dvd combos. These prices are no more than what new DVD's cost a couple years ago.
Just like it took several years for DVD players to finally kill off VHS - and that didn't even have the added difficulty of a bad economy to slow things down.
MSRP and what stores sell for is not always the same. Sorry, but you're an idiot to pay $30 for a movie when you can go to Best Buy and get it for $25 or go to Amazon and get it for $20. I got a PS3 a few months ago and (since I'm a movie addict) have already grabbed around 50 blu-rays....the average price among them was about exactly $20 (some were special editions that I paid more for, such as the three disc extended cut of Avatar and the 5-disc versions of Tron / Tron Legacy and Blade Runner).
Even if we did get a Blu-Ray player we probably wouldn't buy many (if any) disks - we just can't justify the additional cost when a Blu-Ray disk costs in the neighborhood of 2x what a regular DVD costs.
WTF? You clearly are NOT aware of what you're talking about. The typical price difference between a DVD and a blu-ray is $4-$5. That's maybe around 30% more for a blu-ray and the blu-ray price is STILL no more than what a DVD cost before blu-ray existed and drove the price down. I own hundreds of DVD's and hundreds of seasons of tv shows on DVD - but guess how many I've rebought on blu-ray? Less than 10. Why? Because I only rebuy them if they don't look that great upconverted / it's a movie where the visuals are REALLY important. I simply spend just as much as I would've a few years ago on new DVD's on new blu-rays and get a much better picture quality for it.
False. Maybe if you need glasses and aren't wearing them, but even from 20 feet away on a 46" tv, you can tell the difference quite easily.
At new release, Blurays are 2X or more than the price of a DVD.
Nice troll! At most, a Blu-ray costs $7 more at first release, typically it's more like $5. That's not even a matter of Blu-ray costing more than DVD's did new - it's just that a new release blu-ray now costs what a new release DVD used to and a new release DVD now costs less due to it being outdated technology.
Go to Best Buy's site - Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1: DVD $13.99 Blu-ray $17.99 Blu-ray+DVD+digital copy $22.99. There's a measly $4 price difference between blu-ray and dvd and if you buy BOTH you get a massive discount.
That actually depends on the source DVD. For instance, upconverting Night at the Museum looks almost like blu-ray. However, other DVD's that are older usually don't look nearly as good compared to the blu-ray version.
Either you're trolling, or you just have a horrible quality TV (yes, quality of the TV does matter). I have the Tron Legacy 5 disc pack and it looks MUCH better on Blu-ray than on an upconverted DVD.
Blu-Ray is also more expensive than DVD counterparts.
You're kidding right? You can buy a DVD and a blu-ray for almost the exact same amount on Amazon at least. If the DVD is cheaper, it's because the Blu-ray is already damn cheap and the DVD isn't worth jack anymore. Even a blu-ray player isn't expensive anymore, especially compared to what VCR's and DVD players used to cost a percentage of your income.
What the author is also forgetting is that we're in the worst economy in generations...and this started only a couple years after the blu-ray format came out. My parents don't have a blu-ray player for their TV, not for lack of wanting one, but because my dad lost his $90k a year job and now works at a hotel making less than $30k....losing $60k a year in pre-tax income definitely cuts into their disposable income. If he got a better paying job next week, he'd probably run out to best buy the next day and grab a blu-ray player.
Heh, that's what we need....an amendment to the Constitution requiring the government to follow the Constitution.....too bad they'd just ignore that part of it as well.
Hardly. The cause is that Americans think that due to where they were born, they are entitled to be wealthy. When Americans finally realize that unskilled labor is (almost literally) a dime a dozen and start actually WORKING and getting real educations (diploma mills don't count and you need to LEARN something in school, not just get drunk and cheat off someone else), then we can start having a real focus on ending outsourcing. But instead of realizing that Americans aren't superior due to being Americans, they want to vilify the rest of the world and promote the uneducated unskilled workers who refuse to do something with their lives.
Just tax imports for the cost of the externalities in the US that aren't accounted for in the country in question.
Yes, then watch as prices rise (thus hurting every consumer in the US), due to higher costs and lower consumption there are fewer jobs, and other countries start taxing anything imported from the US which hurts US workers and consumers even more. I've said this dozens of times on this site - please, for the love of god, will you people learn the slightest thing about Economics and stop ranting about irrational crap that would HURT the people you claim to want to help.
No, it's not about taxes. Why? Because the government's insatiable desire to spend and control exceeds the amount of money available to tax. Here's an article by an Economist explaining why taxing the rich to death won't fix the budget issues http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/wew/articles/11/EatTheRich
Not just taxing away all of the income of anyone even vaguely considered "rich" but also confiscating all of their current wealth wouldn't come close to paying off the national debt. The only reason why we even come close to having the standard of living we have is that "evil" trade you despise. Go ask people who are old (and no, I don't mean in their 40's - I mean old). They'll tell you how the average person didn't come close to having the number of clothes we have today, how cars as a proportion of your income were much higher, how every damn thing available to guy was much more expensive (relative to income) and how there were far fewer choices to buy from.
So please, go ahead - jack taxes and tariffs and see how fast the quality of life for Americans drops. Even you would flee the country if you actually created the America you desire because you'd realize it's a horrible place to live.
Other than a massive exaggeration, we are already there, and have been since at least the 1940s. That's how America works...haves and have-nots. Mostly because the have-nots keep refusing to get an education and work hard and believe in things like punishing those who work hard to reward those who didn't and that by throwing money at a problem without fixing the sociological cause of it will fix things.
This - but it also needs to be combined with people realizing that just because you live in America does NOT mean that you're automatically worth significantly more money than someone with the same education from another country. If Bob in Florida demands $80k a year for an engineering job and Surresh in India is willing to do the exact same job with the exact same education for $50k a year - guess what? Bob's ass is going to be sitting in the unemployment line. Americans need to realize that the days of "I deserve to be rich because I was born in America!" are over.
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Then there's the issue of a lot of cops are just dicks who want to bully people and beat them up. My brother in laws are both cops and watch videos online of non-violent people being tazed by cops and laugh. They need to start doing psych evaluations and such before hiring cops to try to weed out the sociopaths who are just in it because they're legally allowed to assault people without punishment.
Obama, is that you on LSD again??
Ooh, ooh, I know this one! This is where I make up an unprovable claim that makes me look cooler than you to "prove" a point too instead of using actual facts! Sadly for you, I'm too old to play that game, so I'll just leave you to your fantasies where a 30 mph vehicle that holds one person and no cargo is "practical".
You can raise taxes on "rich" people (hell, even everyone who makes over $100k a year) to 100% and confiscate every last bit of their wealth - and it STILL won't pay off the whole we're in. That's what you don't get - the "SPEND SPEND SPEND!" people like you wrote so many checks that we're FUCKED for a very long time.
Your idiocy of taxing people to prevent competitiveness.....all it results in is higher costs for everything, which HURTS US citizens, but you'll refuse to ignore that and think that having no disposable income is a "good thing" because that means that evil people aren't "being greedy". But whatever, I've given up on trying to educate the intentionally ignorant like yourself.
Regardless, here's an article that you'll ignore about how we can't tax our way out of our deficit problem. http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/wew/articles/11/EatTheRich
Maybe you should read those news articles a little more closely and see how horrifically impractical those cars are. They have no luggage space, hold only (occasionally two) people, can only go at very slow speeds (around 25 - 30 mph), and don't go for very long.
Hardly - while you might be able to easily get all of the kids to learn it in school, what are you going to do about the hundreds of millions of adults who aren't in school? THAT'S the real issue. It's like if we decided to change the national language to Mandarin....sure, you could easily teach all the kids, but everyone who's already out of school is going to be a problem.
Good god, $2-3 IS almost the same price. I can see you going to buy a car and picking a lower quality car just because of a $4 price difference. The difference between upconverting and blu-ray is entirely dependent on the DVD - some look great, others look horrible. Very rarely do you see an upconverted DVD that looks as good as blu-ray though. It matters because there are TWO SEPARATE PRODUCTS. One, which is cheaper, is just the blu-ray - the other, which costs more, is the blu-ray AND dvd AND digital copy - so of COURSE it's going to cost some more (yet it still costs far less than buying the dvd, buying the single disc blu-ray, and buying a digital copy from iTunes or Amazon).
People drive farther to save a few cents on gas because they're morons. However, when they know that they're getting a BETTER PRODUCT, they're willing to pay more - and they really don't care about another $3 for a movie that looks much better. I find the rabid rage against blu-ray to be quite amusing. It's funny how much people on here get mad if someone pirates a game, but pirating movies because it's "too expensive" is just fine.
First off, I've never once seen a store sell a brand new dvd for $10, so I call bullshit. Secondly, your own goddamn list showed that it's normally only a couple of dollars difference between a single disc dvd and single disc blu-ray. $14 versus $17 is "about the same", especially when the one costing more is a SUPERIOR PRODUCT. The blu-rays that cost more are the ones that are not just a blu-ray, but also a blu-ray + dvd + digital copy (or more copies). Such as the blu-ray of Blade Runner which is 5 discs with five different versions of the movie, plus special features, that was a whopping $30 on Amazon. Hell, for many blu-rays you can find them on Amazon for $15.
Yes, a few years ago when blu-rays actually cost $30-$40, you had an argument on price. Now prices are no more than what DVD's were two years ago and barely more than what DVD's are now. These days it's just an excuse to justify pirating movies - the same goes for the completely untrue argument of "you barely see a quality difference" - if you can't see a quality difference, then the problem is either your TV sucks or your eyes suck.
Some of those prices aren't entirely descriptive - such as Harry Potter 7 which you can get on single disc dvd / single disc blu-ray or 2 disc dvd and two disc blu-ray (with dvd copy and digital copy). Regardless, the WORST of those blu-ray prices is no more than what DVD's were just a couple years ago - yet I doubt you were raging over how "expensive" DVD's were. As you said though, most are only a couple dollars less to get on DVD....so how exactly is that disproving my point that blu-ray doesn't cost much more for a better product?
1) Anything over 30" is noticeable. I'm currently looking at a 42" TV that's about 15 feet away and the difference between standard def, upconverted, and high def is completely noticeable
2) You can upconvert DVD's on a blu-ray player. There is no "you have to rebuy everything" - that's something that only uninformed people promote.
3) The "format war" lasted what, one year? Two tops. The reason it's not going even faster than it is is due to the economy - people aren't going to spend any more money than necessary right now.
4) Most people still don't have enough bandwidth to make hi-def streaming / downloading practical for the masses.
To make matters even more complex, he has around 400 DVD's already. He's not going to re-buy all those on Blue-ray so his DVD player works just fine for him.
They will play and upconvert on a blu-ray player....but then he can buy NEW movies on blu-ray.
I own two Blue-ray players and would love to own more Blue-ray discs but truthfully, when new releases are coming out at 30$
You're NOT shopping in the right places if you're paying that much. New blu-rays are like $17 at Best Buy / Amazon and around $22-$25 for blu-ray AND dvd combos. These prices are no more than what new DVD's cost a couple years ago.
Just like it took several years for DVD players to finally kill off VHS - and that didn't even have the added difficulty of a bad economy to slow things down.
MSRP and what stores sell for is not always the same. Sorry, but you're an idiot to pay $30 for a movie when you can go to Best Buy and get it for $25 or go to Amazon and get it for $20. I got a PS3 a few months ago and (since I'm a movie addict) have already grabbed around 50 blu-rays....the average price among them was about exactly $20 (some were special editions that I paid more for, such as the three disc extended cut of Avatar and the 5-disc versions of Tron / Tron Legacy and Blade Runner).
Even if we did get a Blu-Ray player we probably wouldn't buy many (if any) disks - we just can't justify the additional cost when a Blu-Ray disk costs in the neighborhood of 2x what a regular DVD costs.
WTF? You clearly are NOT aware of what you're talking about. The typical price difference between a DVD and a blu-ray is $4-$5. That's maybe around 30% more for a blu-ray and the blu-ray price is STILL no more than what a DVD cost before blu-ray existed and drove the price down. I own hundreds of DVD's and hundreds of seasons of tv shows on DVD - but guess how many I've rebought on blu-ray? Less than 10. Why? Because I only rebuy them if they don't look that great upconverted / it's a movie where the visuals are REALLY important. I simply spend just as much as I would've a few years ago on new DVD's on new blu-rays and get a much better picture quality for it.
....any good DVD player has this feature as well. Blu-ray is depends on the disc on if it supports it. I've always used that with DVD's though.
False. Maybe if you need glasses and aren't wearing them, but even from 20 feet away on a 46" tv, you can tell the difference quite easily.
At new release, Blurays are 2X or more than the price of a DVD.
Nice troll! At most, a Blu-ray costs $7 more at first release, typically it's more like $5. That's not even a matter of Blu-ray costing more than DVD's did new - it's just that a new release blu-ray now costs what a new release DVD used to and a new release DVD now costs less due to it being outdated technology.
Go to Best Buy's site - Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1: DVD $13.99 Blu-ray $17.99 Blu-ray+DVD+digital copy $22.99. There's a measly $4 price difference between blu-ray and dvd and if you buy BOTH you get a massive discount.
That actually depends on the source DVD. For instance, upconverting Night at the Museum looks almost like blu-ray. However, other DVD's that are older usually don't look nearly as good compared to the blu-ray version.
Either you're trolling, or you just have a horrible quality TV (yes, quality of the TV does matter). I have the Tron Legacy 5 disc pack and it looks MUCH better on Blu-ray than on an upconverted DVD.
Blu-Ray is also more expensive than DVD counterparts.
You're kidding right? You can buy a DVD and a blu-ray for almost the exact same amount on Amazon at least. If the DVD is cheaper, it's because the Blu-ray is already damn cheap and the DVD isn't worth jack anymore. Even a blu-ray player isn't expensive anymore, especially compared to what VCR's and DVD players used to cost a percentage of your income.
What the author is also forgetting is that we're in the worst economy in generations...and this started only a couple years after the blu-ray format came out. My parents don't have a blu-ray player for their TV, not for lack of wanting one, but because my dad lost his $90k a year job and now works at a hotel making less than $30k....losing $60k a year in pre-tax income definitely cuts into their disposable income. If he got a better paying job next week, he'd probably run out to best buy the next day and grab a blu-ray player.
Heh, that's what we need....an amendment to the Constitution requiring the government to follow the Constitution.....too bad they'd just ignore that part of it as well.
Hardly. The cause is that Americans think that due to where they were born, they are entitled to be wealthy. When Americans finally realize that unskilled labor is (almost literally) a dime a dozen and start actually WORKING and getting real educations (diploma mills don't count and you need to LEARN something in school, not just get drunk and cheat off someone else), then we can start having a real focus on ending outsourcing. But instead of realizing that Americans aren't superior due to being Americans, they want to vilify the rest of the world and promote the uneducated unskilled workers who refuse to do something with their lives.
Just tax imports for the cost of the externalities in the US that aren't accounted for in the country in question.
Yes, then watch as prices rise (thus hurting every consumer in the US), due to higher costs and lower consumption there are fewer jobs, and other countries start taxing anything imported from the US which hurts US workers and consumers even more. I've said this dozens of times on this site - please, for the love of god, will you people learn the slightest thing about Economics and stop ranting about irrational crap that would HURT the people you claim to want to help.
No, it's not about taxes. Why? Because the government's insatiable desire to spend and control exceeds the amount of money available to tax. Here's an article by an Economist explaining why taxing the rich to death won't fix the budget issues http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/wew/articles/11/EatTheRich
Not just taxing away all of the income of anyone even vaguely considered "rich" but also confiscating all of their current wealth wouldn't come close to paying off the national debt. The only reason why we even come close to having the standard of living we have is that "evil" trade you despise. Go ask people who are old (and no, I don't mean in their 40's - I mean old). They'll tell you how the average person didn't come close to having the number of clothes we have today, how cars as a proportion of your income were much higher, how every damn thing available to guy was much more expensive (relative to income) and how there were far fewer choices to buy from.
So please, go ahead - jack taxes and tariffs and see how fast the quality of life for Americans drops. Even you would flee the country if you actually created the America you desire because you'd realize it's a horrible place to live.
Other than a massive exaggeration, we are already there, and have been since at least the 1940s. That's how America works...haves and have-nots. Mostly because the have-nots keep refusing to get an education and work hard and believe in things like punishing those who work hard to reward those who didn't and that by throwing money at a problem without fixing the sociological cause of it will fix things.
FTFY
This - but it also needs to be combined with people realizing that just because you live in America does NOT mean that you're automatically worth significantly more money than someone with the same education from another country. If Bob in Florida demands $80k a year for an engineering job and Surresh in India is willing to do the exact same job with the exact same education for $50k a year - guess what? Bob's ass is going to be sitting in the unemployment line. Americans need to realize that the days of "I deserve to be rich because I was born in America!" are over.