I think your child also learns better with someone who is not his parent. I see the kinds of things my son is capable of learning from third parties when I can't get him to tie his shoes without an argument and it only reinforces this.
I wish I could afford a personal tutor but then again their are social aspects of school, even the negative ones, that teach lessons at least as valuable as some of the academic ones.
I had a customer I was sole support for business IT. They had a processing facility with an old analog camera system dating from the early 1980s. They needed to replace it as components were failing and the video quality was pretty poor. It got done, but the vendor was a hack and the equipment super low budget whitebox PC stuff.
Anyway, the lesson I've learned is that "video surveillance" may use IT technology, but a lot of the people doing it really aren't skilled at IT, they're at best low voltage wiring guys, at worst just all-around hacks.
The general problem is that IT is tasked to keep the overall network & server environment running at a given level of service. Management (often some facilities person, far outside the IT reporting hierarchy) then hires an unknown entity that works at a level way below this who wants the network changed to suit their project, and usually for dumb reasons "we put the video server in closet X because it meant shorter runs to the cameras, but the archiving server is on the other side of the building." Why do you think IT doesn't want to cooperate?
It can get done right -- somebody from facilities engages with IT management BEFORE the contract is signed and IT reviews the requirements of the project to make sure the network will support it without upending the entire network or engaging in something really dumb. But it usually doesn't. The surveillance guys lowball the quote, facilities signs it, and the install gets started and then IT gets a bunch of bullshit thrown at them. They say no, the vendor says the job won't finish without more money, and facilities and IT go to war.
MS already provides some remote device management in Exchange, why would they need to buy RIM? Why not just expand what Exchange is capable of doing and make it exclusive to Windows Phone 7?
Exchange corporate ubiquity coupled with WP7 remote management features and the Microsoft controlled WP7 app store might make for an attractive package.
Since they own the app store, MS would then have access to all the details of WP7 apps, allowing easy allow/disallow/install for corporate WP7 devices. They could probably merge in corporate purchasing of apps so that new WP7 phones could get connected to the enterprise Exchange server and then fully provisioned with all of the corporate approved apps, centrally purchased.
And of course there could be a tick box for "Allow only phone which accept WP7 policies", shutting out Android and iPhone for all but the execs who demand those phones. This makes WP7 the corporate standard.
And MS could make WP7 policies an "open" standard which vendors would have to either integrate in their phones or not support, allowing MS to skirt the monopoly issue.
And NONE of this requires any BES technology, just some creative thinking on MS part.
The blind spot is an area of ground off the roadway where the policeman can hide without being seen from a distance, it is not a road condition. The squad car is not on an area accessible under any normal driving conditions (ie, this is not the shoulder).
It's about hiding from drivers so they can't slow down ahead of time.
I suspect that's because increased speed leads to more severe and more likely fatal accidents and is a fairly settled area of knowledge.
But if the higher speeds aren't resulting in more accidents, you're enforcing speed limits because you can, not because the stretch of road in question results in more accidents. Speed is irrelevant if accidents aren't occuring.
Yes, more speed will make accidents that happen worse, but then again, going 10 mph will be safer than 55, too.
I seem to remember something in driver's ed about Speed Limits being advisory -- they were primarily supposed to inform you of the maximum safe speed for the road which was also the maximum legal speed. But, it wasn't a right, as there was a "basic speed law" that said that the punishable speed limit could actually be lower, depending on driving conditions.
My problem with speed enforcement is that it's not generally automated -- the police setup speed "traps" where people are known to exceed the speed limit. But in my experience, these traps are really just that -- traps -- places where the road conditions are such that the posted speed limit is too slow for driving conditions (visibility, road conditions, traffic levels, limited access disruptions) which subtly encourage drivers to speed AND the officers have a secluded place (blind spot) from which to "catch" speeders.
Ironically, the places where speeding is most dangerous are the places where its most difficult to have speed traps because of traffic, road conditions (small shoulders, limited visibility, etc).
And I've never heard of the police using accident statistics to justify their placement of speed traps. I'm also told by those in law enforcement that speed enforcement in many metro areas has nothing to do with road safety but is considered a crime deterrent (criminals apparently avoid areas with police presence) and field intelligence tool as it allows officers to "interview" motorists and possibly find other, more substantial violations or criminal behavior; a thinly veiled checkpoint.
I haven't done that for hamburger as we don't eat enough of it, but I do buy the whole prime NY strips and slice them myself and then vacuum seal into bags of two.
Its amazing how much cheaper it is, like $6/lb cheaper for Costco prime than luxury grocery store choice.
My last big company IT job had 3 major departments, all of whom had their own IT ideas, and at least one with their own IT person who did some purchasing and install and config of PCs.
There was a lot of time where dealing with resource competition and fighting the departments over standards was such a distraction, I told my boss we should just not bother -- cut up the PC budget among departments and let them figure it out on their own.
IT would provide LAN for free, but internet would be metered with costs based on bandwidth required to provide at least 25% peak capacity (when we he 25%, we would add more).
Email would be per mailbox with storage charges over 5 GB. File sharing would be per 250 GB consumed. Departments would buy printers and supplies.
Basically, IT would become an internal ISP/cloud provider and nothing else. The user departments would buy the laptops/Macs they "need" and could go batshit on storage usage, since they would be paying for it.
I took Percocet 24 hours a day for two weeks (roughly equivalent to daily 20 mg Oxycontin tablets) as a result of a bad infection in a wisdom tooth and the subsequent extraction (it's far rougher when you're in your 40s).
I couldn't wait to be off of it -- there was little euphoria as the initial infection's pain was the WORST I had ever experienced, and there was a lot of pain after the extraction (which due to scheduling problems took 4-5 days after the infection).
But after a while, I was just tired and lethargic -- like I couldn't quite wake up. I was glad to be done.
Anyway, I think the lesson there isn't that oxycodone is magically addictive, but different people have different reactions. I don't think a week is really enough to develop any kind of meaningful physical dependence, either, otherwise they would want to supervise your withdrawal with taper doses or possibly a mild tranquilizer.
Worse than that, I don't even think the DEA applies medical logic -- I think their logic is all about drug control. They could care less about whether clinically effective medicine is taking place, they just want fewer painkillers in civilian hands.
I'd wager cost has nothing to do with it and that they're being prescribed methadone over Oxycontin because of the reputation Oxycontin has, and the doctors don't want to be associated with Oxycontin.
And it's not that Oxycontin is a 'bad' medication, but it's gotten caught up in our moralistic, war on drugs mindset.
Doctors don't generally like to prescribe pain killers. They worry about addiction, they worry about the DEA auditing their prescribing habits and yanking their license, without which it's kind of hard to be a doctor.
When they prescribe methadone, is it really out of cost, or have they grown so fearful of prescribing Oxycontin that somehow methadone seems like a reasonable alternative? And how many of those fears are medical/pharmacological, and how many are "if I prescribe Oxycontin I'll get in trouble" or "gee, there's a lot of press about Oxycontin, I shouldn't prescribe it"?
Let's assume that felony crimes of violence are an automatic rejection, but what else is rejected?
Cheating on your wife? Collecting porn? Smoking Pot? Heavy Drinking? Unconventional political attitudes, such as supporting libertarians or something other than conventional two-party candidates (assuming your beliefs are non-treasonous and non-seditious)? Gun ownership? Religious beliefs outside mainstream Catholic/Protestant/Jewish (IIRC, the CIA's original management was anti-Jew, anti-Catholic, too, but that was kind of a typical 1940s prejudice, too).
Are they looking to blackball you for not being a model citizen, or do they just want to *know* about your weaknesses and if they will compromise you?
I figure everyone has vices and selecting people without vices in my experience means picking people who aren't very good at much of anything.
There's two kinds of locked down. "Locked down" relative to the OS vendor (which the iPhone is) or "locked down" relative to the cell phone carrier (which the iPhone is not).
Generally the latter is worse, IMHO, as the carriers have no incentive to improve a device with software updates and in many cases disable or cripple features in a deliberate attempt to drive up fees and require a phone replacement to get a 'new' feature your current hardware supported natively from its manufacturer.
Items such as file transfer were crippled by carriers so you would pay to use their MMS service or email services to transfer photos off your phone. As is evident with many Android phones, most carriers don't bother to update phone software -- on ANY phone.
I read someplace that this is kind of how they curtailed the car/roadside bombings in Iraq that were so common there.
They put up enough drones to cover the city with video; when a bomb went off, they basically rewound time and followed the car that blew up back to where it came from, which often was a bomb factory or other insurgent facility.
What bothers me is that they seem to be looking for ways to lower credit scores of people who have good credit scores. It seems obvious to me that this has nothing to do with borrowing and repayment, as they want to keep linking in items that are not related to borrowing and payment history or income. They made a run at using driving records to contribute to credit history, and now social networking.
Their statisticians claim these are relevant, but if they are, why doesn't borrowing and payment history represent this? Next thing you know they'll correlate hair color or something and charge more, since blondes are slow pays.
My sense is that the purpose of this is to drive down credit scores for people who have good credit histories. Why? It allows banks to charge higher interest rates or more fees those borrowers, something of a rising tide that prevents a lot of shopping around as it gets factored into a "credit score" that all lenders use.
Creditors don't do a lot of individualized underwriting anymore -- it's not like the old days where you sat in the banker's office and told him how your mortgage payment was late because Aunt Dora died and you had to travel to the funeral and didn't get it in the mail or that you were in line for a promotion which would raise your salary by 35%. Now the banker just looks at your score and makes a decision. Shopping around is pointless -- it's the same score everywhere.
IMHO, this is the biggest problem with the dependence on the credit score. A small number of organizations (2, maybe 3?) generate them and lenders use them as an objective number. The problem is that the credit score sellers see banks as their clients, and thus have an incentive to suppress scores as it increases bank profits and the value of the score to the lender. ("Use our score and make more money.")
I thought the way this was managed these days was with contractual incentives.
The seller wants $100 dollars for a project. The buyer wants to pay $50 dollars for the project.
Normally, the buyer and the seller would negotiate some price, say $75, with generally no timing.
Now what seems common is that the buyer negotiates to pay $75 with completion guaranteed on some date. The buyer also negotiates incentives and penalties -- if the project is done earlier, there's some extra money for early completion, and for every N units of time the project is late, the buy deducts money.
The early completion bonus is capped to mitigate sloppy work as well as to keep the agreed completion date realistic, and the project actually has to function right, with the bonus sacrificed for problems that crop up.
They do this with highway projects -- I lived blocks from a billion dollar freeway project and it was amazing to see it done about a month early -- the vendor got a bonus.
If ABP makes money off this deal (and I don't understand why they would do this without making money...), I'm sure their principles of only "allowing non-intrusive ads" will last five minutes until the right price is reached and then they'll allow them, too.
What I don't understand is why the ad biz would try to do business with them -- short term, it's extortion -- pay us and we might unblock your ads. Long-term, you'll pay them and people will switch to BlockAdPlus or whatever the replacement is that does the same thing with the same blocklists but doesn't allow ads.
Either way, the advertisers get squeezed and don't get a lot of long-term satisfaction out of it.
I just hope that this doesn't happen to NoScript. I see that system as much more complex to replace than AdBlock. I could be wrong, but ABP seems more of an URL filter for a page, where NoScript seems to need do more heavy lifting.
"Essentially legal" and "actually legal" are very different.
The "legal" dispensaries have essentially the same supply issues as the street dealers and in some cases are competing with them for the same product and have to match street dealers for supplies. And the whole supply chain is still considered illegal.
In some cases, dispensaries may have a supply advantage (grow operation) but they also have to supply a high quality product that its more expensive to produce and also seem to provide a lot of high quality variety which, again, comses from a constrained and illicit supply.
In short, the dispensaries have high supply costs, just like street dealers, and they also have to supply high quality -- no brown Mexican crap.
Even if the dispensaries had lower supply costs, they are selling something else -- high quality and more importantly, the convenience and safety of a retail purchase.
If marijuana was ACTUALLY legal, the supply constraints go away -- what does it do to prices when farmers figure out how to grow high quality marijuana measured in the millions of bushels? When 'elite' brands can setup hydroponic grow operations in half-million square foot warehouses?
At this point retail competition will push the price down since there's little incentive or need to keep it at parity with street prices.
Cisco probably goes along with lenient RMA terms for major clients because they have such profit in the contract that it's not really costing them any money to provide that leniency, plus getting a large volume of broken equipment back has its own costs. The marginal value of the equipment may not be high enough to warrant repairing it, at least for low end equipment.
It also wouldn't surprise me that Cisco would have some kind of competitive intelligence team that buys equipment from resellers and traces its provenance so that Cisco can alter its sales policies to keep that used equipment out of the secondary market. Ie, a trade-up discount of $250 that involves actually giving up the old hardware may actually be worth a new product sale of $5000 if it keeps the old hardware out of the secondary market.
My guess is that this guy just did it too long and eventually the contract came up and somebody in finance decided to do an audit or start digging into the data and came up with a funny pattern.
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I think your child also learns better with someone who is not his parent. I see the kinds of things my son is capable of learning from third parties when I can't get him to tie his shoes without an argument and it only reinforces this.
I wish I could afford a personal tutor but then again their are social aspects of school, even the negative ones, that teach lessons at least as valuable as some of the academic ones.
To be somewhat fair to "IT"...
I had a customer I was sole support for business IT. They had a processing facility with an old analog camera system dating from the early 1980s. They needed to replace it as components were failing and the video quality was pretty poor. It got done, but the vendor was a hack and the equipment super low budget whitebox PC stuff.
Anyway, the lesson I've learned is that "video surveillance" may use IT technology, but a lot of the people doing it really aren't skilled at IT, they're at best low voltage wiring guys, at worst just all-around hacks.
The general problem is that IT is tasked to keep the overall network & server environment running at a given level of service. Management (often some facilities person, far outside the IT reporting hierarchy) then hires an unknown entity that works at a level way below this who wants the network changed to suit their project, and usually for dumb reasons "we put the video server in closet X because it meant shorter runs to the cameras, but the archiving server is on the other side of the building." Why do you think IT doesn't want to cooperate?
It can get done right -- somebody from facilities engages with IT management BEFORE the contract is signed and IT reviews the requirements of the project to make sure the network will support it without upending the entire network or engaging in something really dumb. But it usually doesn't. The surveillance guys lowball the quote, facilities signs it, and the install gets started and then IT gets a bunch of bullshit thrown at them. They say no, the vendor says the job won't finish without more money, and facilities and IT go to war.
Haha, no kidding. I can't triple the user's number, but almost.
And WTF is he doing on my lawn, anyway?
Another victory for the pedantic.
MS already provides some remote device management in Exchange, why would they need to buy RIM? Why not just expand what Exchange is capable of doing and make it exclusive to Windows Phone 7?
Exchange corporate ubiquity coupled with WP7 remote management features and the Microsoft controlled WP7 app store might make for an attractive package.
Since they own the app store, MS would then have access to all the details of WP7 apps, allowing easy allow/disallow/install for corporate WP7 devices. They could probably merge in corporate purchasing of apps so that new WP7 phones could get connected to the enterprise Exchange server and then fully provisioned with all of the corporate approved apps, centrally purchased.
And of course there could be a tick box for "Allow only phone which accept WP7 policies", shutting out Android and iPhone for all but the execs who demand those phones. This makes WP7 the corporate standard.
And MS could make WP7 policies an "open" standard which vendors would have to either integrate in their phones or not support, allowing MS to skirt the monopoly issue.
And NONE of this requires any BES technology, just some creative thinking on MS part.
No, it's about entrapping drivers who aren't risking safety.
I hope that clarifies it for you.
The blind spot is an area of ground off the roadway where the policeman can hide without being seen from a distance, it is not a road condition. The squad car is not on an area accessible under any normal driving conditions (ie, this is not the shoulder).
It's about hiding from drivers so they can't slow down ahead of time.
I suspect that's because increased speed leads to more severe and more likely fatal accidents and is a fairly settled area of knowledge.
But if the higher speeds aren't resulting in more accidents, you're enforcing speed limits because you can, not because the stretch of road in question results in more accidents. Speed is irrelevant if accidents aren't occuring.
Yes, more speed will make accidents that happen worse, but then again, going 10 mph will be safer than 55, too.
I seem to remember something in driver's ed about Speed Limits being advisory -- they were primarily supposed to inform you of the maximum safe speed for the road which was also the maximum legal speed. But, it wasn't a right, as there was a "basic speed law" that said that the punishable speed limit could actually be lower, depending on driving conditions.
My problem with speed enforcement is that it's not generally automated -- the police setup speed "traps" where people are known to exceed the speed limit. But in my experience, these traps are really just that -- traps -- places where the road conditions are such that the posted speed limit is too slow for driving conditions (visibility, road conditions, traffic levels, limited access disruptions) which subtly encourage drivers to speed AND the officers have a secluded place (blind spot) from which to "catch" speeders.
Ironically, the places where speeding is most dangerous are the places where its most difficult to have speed traps because of traffic, road conditions (small shoulders, limited visibility, etc).
And I've never heard of the police using accident statistics to justify their placement of speed traps. I'm also told by those in law enforcement that speed enforcement in many metro areas has nothing to do with road safety but is considered a crime deterrent (criminals apparently avoid areas with police presence) and field intelligence tool as it allows officers to "interview" motorists and possibly find other, more substantial violations or criminal behavior; a thinly veiled checkpoint.
They used to do this for quite a few targets of interest -- CPUSA, black militants, labor organizers, KKK members.
Except they went further -- bugs, phone taps, mail interception.
All in the name of freedom.
I haven't done that for hamburger as we don't eat enough of it, but I do buy the whole prime NY strips and slice them myself and then vacuum seal into bags of two.
Its amazing how much cheaper it is, like $6/lb cheaper for Costco prime than luxury grocery store choice.
My last big company IT job had 3 major departments, all of whom had their own IT ideas, and at least one with their own IT person who did some purchasing and install and config of PCs.
There was a lot of time where dealing with resource competition and fighting the departments over standards was such a distraction, I told my boss we should just not bother -- cut up the PC budget among departments and let them figure it out on their own.
IT would provide LAN for free, but internet would be metered with costs based on bandwidth required to provide at least 25% peak capacity (when we he 25%, we would add more).
Email would be per mailbox with storage charges over 5 GB. File sharing would be per 250 GB consumed. Departments would buy printers and supplies.
Basically, IT would become an internal ISP/cloud provider and nothing else. The user departments would buy the laptops/Macs they "need" and could go batshit on storage usage, since they would be paying for it.
I took Percocet 24 hours a day for two weeks (roughly equivalent to daily 20 mg Oxycontin tablets) as a result of a bad infection in a wisdom tooth and the subsequent extraction (it's far rougher when you're in your 40s).
I couldn't wait to be off of it -- there was little euphoria as the initial infection's pain was the WORST I had ever experienced, and there was a lot of pain after the extraction (which due to scheduling problems took 4-5 days after the infection).
But after a while, I was just tired and lethargic -- like I couldn't quite wake up. I was glad to be done.
Anyway, I think the lesson there isn't that oxycodone is magically addictive, but different people have different reactions. I don't think a week is really enough to develop any kind of meaningful physical dependence, either, otherwise they would want to supervise your withdrawal with taper doses or possibly a mild tranquilizer.
Worse than that, I don't even think the DEA applies medical logic -- I think their logic is all about drug control. They could care less about whether clinically effective medicine is taking place, they just want fewer painkillers in civilian hands.
I'd wager cost has nothing to do with it and that they're being prescribed methadone over Oxycontin because of the reputation Oxycontin has, and the doctors don't want to be associated with Oxycontin.
And it's not that Oxycontin is a 'bad' medication, but it's gotten caught up in our moralistic, war on drugs mindset.
Doctors don't generally like to prescribe pain killers. They worry about addiction, they worry about the DEA auditing their prescribing habits and yanking their license, without which it's kind of hard to be a doctor.
When they prescribe methadone, is it really out of cost, or have they grown so fearful of prescribing Oxycontin that somehow methadone seems like a reasonable alternative? And how many of those fears are medical/pharmacological, and how many are "if I prescribe Oxycontin I'll get in trouble" or "gee, there's a lot of press about Oxycontin, I shouldn't prescribe it"?
What sort of items that turn up do they reject?
Let's assume that felony crimes of violence are an automatic rejection, but what else is rejected?
Cheating on your wife? Collecting porn? Smoking Pot? Heavy Drinking? Unconventional political attitudes, such as supporting libertarians or something other than conventional two-party candidates (assuming your beliefs are non-treasonous and non-seditious)? Gun ownership? Religious beliefs outside mainstream Catholic/Protestant/Jewish (IIRC, the CIA's original management was anti-Jew, anti-Catholic, too, but that was kind of a typical 1940s prejudice, too).
Are they looking to blackball you for not being a model citizen, or do they just want to *know* about your weaknesses and if they will compromise you?
I figure everyone has vices and selecting people without vices in my experience means picking people who aren't very good at much of anything.
There's two kinds of locked down. "Locked down" relative to the OS vendor (which the iPhone is) or "locked down" relative to the cell phone carrier (which the iPhone is not).
Generally the latter is worse, IMHO, as the carriers have no incentive to improve a device with software updates and in many cases disable or cripple features in a deliberate attempt to drive up fees and require a phone replacement to get a 'new' feature your current hardware supported natively from its manufacturer.
Items such as file transfer were crippled by carriers so you would pay to use their MMS service or email services to transfer photos off your phone. As is evident with many Android phones, most carriers don't bother to update phone software -- on ANY phone.
I read someplace that this is kind of how they curtailed the car/roadside bombings in Iraq that were so common there.
They put up enough drones to cover the city with video; when a bomb went off, they basically rewound time and followed the car that blew up back to where it came from, which often was a bomb factory or other insurgent facility.
What bothers me is that they seem to be looking for ways to lower credit scores of people who have good credit scores. It seems obvious to me that this has nothing to do with borrowing and repayment, as they want to keep linking in items that are not related to borrowing and payment history or income. They made a run at using driving records to contribute to credit history, and now social networking.
Their statisticians claim these are relevant, but if they are, why doesn't borrowing and payment history represent this? Next thing you know they'll correlate hair color or something and charge more, since blondes are slow pays.
My sense is that the purpose of this is to drive down credit scores for people who have good credit histories. Why? It allows banks to charge higher interest rates or more fees those borrowers, something of a rising tide that prevents a lot of shopping around as it gets factored into a "credit score" that all lenders use.
Creditors don't do a lot of individualized underwriting anymore -- it's not like the old days where you sat in the banker's office and told him how your mortgage payment was late because Aunt Dora died and you had to travel to the funeral and didn't get it in the mail or that you were in line for a promotion which would raise your salary by 35%. Now the banker just looks at your score and makes a decision. Shopping around is pointless -- it's the same score everywhere.
IMHO, this is the biggest problem with the dependence on the credit score. A small number of organizations (2, maybe 3?) generate them and lenders use them as an objective number. The problem is that the credit score sellers see banks as their clients, and thus have an incentive to suppress scores as it increases bank profits and the value of the score to the lender. ("Use our score and make more money.")
I thought the way this was managed these days was with contractual incentives.
The seller wants $100 dollars for a project. The buyer wants to pay $50 dollars for the project.
Normally, the buyer and the seller would negotiate some price, say $75, with generally no timing.
Now what seems common is that the buyer negotiates to pay $75 with completion guaranteed on some date. The buyer also negotiates incentives and penalties -- if the project is done earlier, there's some extra money for early completion, and for every N units of time the project is late, the buy deducts money.
The early completion bonus is capped to mitigate sloppy work as well as to keep the agreed completion date realistic, and the project actually has to function right, with the bonus sacrificed for problems that crop up.
They do this with highway projects -- I lived blocks from a billion dollar freeway project and it was amazing to see it done about a month early -- the vendor got a bonus.
Yes, because they can scrape off a chunk, take it over to Mohammed's House of Paints and ask for a gallon with extra attention paid to color matching.
If ABP makes money off this deal (and I don't understand why they would do this without making money...), I'm sure their principles of only "allowing non-intrusive ads" will last five minutes until the right price is reached and then they'll allow them, too.
What I don't understand is why the ad biz would try to do business with them -- short term, it's extortion -- pay us and we might unblock your ads. Long-term, you'll pay them and people will switch to BlockAdPlus or whatever the replacement is that does the same thing with the same blocklists but doesn't allow ads.
Either way, the advertisers get squeezed and don't get a lot of long-term satisfaction out of it.
I just hope that this doesn't happen to NoScript. I see that system as much more complex to replace than AdBlock. I could be wrong, but ABP seems more of an URL filter for a page, where NoScript seems to need do more heavy lifting.
"Essentially legal" and "actually legal" are very different.
The "legal" dispensaries have essentially the same supply issues as the street dealers and in some cases are competing with them for the same product and have to match street dealers for supplies. And the whole supply chain is still considered illegal.
In some cases, dispensaries may have a supply advantage (grow operation) but they also have to supply a high quality product that its more expensive to produce and also seem to provide a lot of high quality variety which, again, comses from a constrained and illicit supply.
In short, the dispensaries have high supply costs, just like street dealers, and they also have to supply high quality -- no brown Mexican crap.
Even if the dispensaries had lower supply costs, they are selling something else -- high quality and more importantly, the convenience and safety of a retail purchase.
If marijuana was ACTUALLY legal, the supply constraints go away -- what does it do to prices when farmers figure out how to grow high quality marijuana measured in the millions of bushels? When 'elite' brands can setup hydroponic grow operations in half-million square foot warehouses?
At this point retail competition will push the price down since there's little incentive or need to keep it at parity with street prices.
Cisco probably goes along with lenient RMA terms for major clients because they have such profit in the contract that it's not really costing them any money to provide that leniency, plus getting a large volume of broken equipment back has its own costs. The marginal value of the equipment may not be high enough to warrant repairing it, at least for low end equipment.
It also wouldn't surprise me that Cisco would have some kind of competitive intelligence team that buys equipment from resellers and traces its provenance so that Cisco can alter its sales policies to keep that used equipment out of the secondary market. Ie, a trade-up discount of $250 that involves actually giving up the old hardware may actually be worth a new product sale of $5000 if it keeps the old hardware out of the secondary market.
My guess is that this guy just did it too long and eventually the contract came up and somebody in finance decided to do an audit or start digging into the data and came up with a funny pattern.