So you're telling us that counterfeiting produces informed consumers which means that those selling high-price-high-margins branded products loose money because people... *gasp*... know better!?
We should close price comparisson sites then: by the same argument they cause the loss of trillions of dollars by letting consumers find out where to buy equivalent products for the cheapest price.
Same thing for reviewing sites and magazines: if they didn't inform people, they might very well have gone and bought things like $3000 Denon digital cables instead of equaly good $5 Cat5 cables.
If one sees political spin in everything and anything one does not agree with, one should ask oneself: "Could it be that the problem is in me, not the world?"
Somehow I suspect the GP will just see my statement above as political spin (for whom?).
This statement from him is just a last ditch effort to recapture the media's attention after India's announcement challenged his position in two ways:
It shows that a very large and very important developing nation does not believe that the OLPC project can provide the cheap access to computers that they promised.
By having a price-tag which is 20% of that of the OLPC it shows just how exceptionaly expensive and overengineered the XO-1 is for it's stated purpose.
By "offering the OLPCs technology to India", Negroponte is trying to both create the impression that India did not went out on their own because the OLPC's technology was not adequate for it's stated aims and to set up the groundwork to later claim some of the success from India's project by stating that it succeeded thanks to the help from the OLPC project.
The OLPC is pretty much dead and has been dead ever since they sold out to Intel. What was initially supposed to be a rugged notebook for developing countries ended up mostly being sold to mid-level countries such as Uruguay and Peru (source).
Somewhere during his quest for visibility - which was meant to give the OLPC project the needed funds and customers - Negroponte got addicted to the spotlights and lost focus on what the OLPC was meant to achieve: the OLPC project became the means by which Negroponte got his moments in the spotlight, not the other way around.
Negroponte essentially sold the project out to the large corporate interests whom the XO-1 threathened as a disruptive technology. While the true soul of what the OLPC project was meant to do slumbered on for a bit in the form of netbooks and it will take something like India's project to bring it back to life.
For high-frequency trading you need a) To have highly realiable servers located right next to the exchange. b) To be a broker in the exchange so that your trading fees are not the sky-high retail fees that you would have to pay if going through a broker. c) Money for your systems to trade with, margin calls and such d) Backoffice systems to deal with things like settlement.
This is the barrier to entry in this business that keeps anybody with the right knowledge to set-up high-frequency trading systems that compete with investment banks and hedge funds.
If you read the article you see that some of these guys have left their banks and setup shop doing high-frequency trading because there is a company that provides them the conditions listed above while they provide the know-how AND this company has a better profit sharing arrangement that the banks/hedge-funds they were working for.
For most exchanges there are no such companies around willing to lower the barrier to entry into this business for knowledgeable people, so there is no easy way for those people to get out on their own and do it without working for a bank.
We're talking about Hedge Funds here, so their bosses are in fact ex-Traders, ex-Sales and ex-Analysts from big investment banks and such.
- The reason why they are the bosses of the hedge funds is that they had millions of dollars to start their hedge funds, business contacts to get extra founds at low cost and already potential customers lined up from their time with the big banks. - The reason they made millions of dollars in the first place is because they got fat bonuses in their previous job. - The reason they got their bonuses is because they were lucky: I work in the industry and I know what I see. Also, studies show that the best performing hedge funds in one year are less likelly to be in the top the following years - in other words, hedge funds are not consistent in their performance, which indicates that chance, not skill is what determines most of their it.
Keep in mind that, most of the money made in Investment Banking is of the rent-seeking variety, such as: - Decieve your customers by creating and selling them strange, complex and expensive derivatives to protect them from a certain risk when they could get equivalent protections from buying cheap standard products from the market. - Get yourself in the middle of a transaction and take a cut. The transaction would occur anyway if u weren't there but either it would be cheaper for the buyer or more profitable for the seller. - Get 20x your core capital in cheap loans (thanks to low interest rates and an implicit government guarantee). Invest those 21x core-capital in safe, low return instruments (say, 5% yield bonds). At the end cash it, repay loan, post more than 100% returns on your core capital (since the 5% return was applied to the 20x loan + 1x core capital), pay traders big bonuses for their "skill".
Essentially Investment Banking (and Hedge Funds) are the posh version of the Car Mechanic: professionals in the business use their superior knowledge of how finance works to decieve the customers (which are not specialists in that domain) to think that what they really need to "fix the problem" is something a lot more expensive that what is actually needed.
This would be alright if it wasn't for the fact that some of their customers are the managers of things like pension funds which (mis)manage our money and "invest" it through those guys instead of doing the due dilligence themselves to figure out that the average return after comissions and costs of a hedge fund is lower than the return on major market indexes (which you can get cheaply via ETFs).
So: - Guys that started working in an industry which is mostly parasitic got lucky and made millions in bonuses. - They used those millions, plus the contacts they created while working in that industry to setup a company and make money directly from the suckers^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hcustomers instead of via bonuses. - They setup systems (i.e. auto-trading) that allow them to insert themselves into and get a cut from other people's trades because their systems are faster reacting to the market than other traders since they're located next to the exchanges and react within milliseconds. - Add to this that in many cases, after they left their big bank jobs their old employer lost money on their bets and had to be rescued by the state using our tax money.
There are plenty of bosses out there that one can respect for having real risks and clawed their way to success by creating companies that provided real products/services to their customers but these guys ain't it.
These guys are more like pimps that made enough from forcing junkies to prostitute themselves that they could afford to open a brothel.
It's called Works For Hire - people pay up-front to get something done.
Mozart did it, Michaelangelo did it, bloody Leonardo da Vinci did it. If it was good enough for them then, it should be good enough for modern "artists".
In fact, I as a freelance Software Developer work in exactly in that way - somebody pays me for my time in developing software for a specific purpose: it's not exactly making me incredibly wealthy but it's a pretty good income.
In the age of the Internet one needs not even have a single wealthy patron - masses of people can easilly pool resources to pay for making a game.
Of course, going back to this method of paying for intellectual things to be made would really be bad for things like EA's CxO hookers and blow fund.
I keep hearing that Coal fired power plants release more radioactive substances into the atmosphere than Nuclear power plants. Sounds like a non-paid-for negative externality.
Then there's the whole subject of Global Warming: - Say that there is a non-zero probability that releasing CO2 from burning fossil fuels is causing an increase in global temperatures (say that there is a chance that it is but maybe its not) - Say that there is a non-zero probability that such an increase in global temperatures would cause a significant raise of the sea level (and thus entire costal areas including large cities would be affected) and changes to global weather patterns that would turn previously fertile areas into infertile areas (again say that there is a chance that it will be so but maybe it will not)
The potential costs of such events coming to be (and there is a non-zero probability of that happening) are huge.
No matter how Global-Warming-non-believer you are, laboratory tests do show that that a higher concentration of CO2 in the air causes an increase in temperature (in laboratory) and that water increases in volume with an increase in temperature - maybe Global-Warming-non-believers are right and it doesn't work at all like that in real-world conditions, but it's possible they are wrong.
In such a situation it makes sense to have insurance - after all, the purpose of insurance is to be able to coupe with an unlikelly-but-high-cost situation. Such insurance would pay for the costs to 3rd parties in the event that releasing CO2 into the air does in fact cause global warming and said global warming does in fact significantly raises sea levels and changes weather patterns.
Currently, those that burn fossil fuels do not have to pay for such insurance. That's a non-paid-for negative externality.
Fossil fuels are the cheapest way to produce energy as long as they do not have to pay for negative externalities.
The byproducts of burning fossil fuels for electricity are just dumped in the air and as long those that are doing the burning do not have to pay for the negative consequences of those byproducts they can "produced" electricity for a lower cost.
Here's an example for your understanding: - Imagine I came up with a process to get gold from seawater. Running the process would cost me $50 for every gram of gold produced. However this process would have the downside that for every gram of gold extracted it produce 1 cubic kilometer of highly toxic water and cleaning that would cost $1000.
If I have to pay for the negative externalities of the process ($1000 per gram of gold produced to clean-up the 1 cubic kilometer of toxic water produced as a side-effect) then my process is only competitive for gold prices above $1050 per gram.
However, if I can get away with just dumping the toxic water somewhere for free, then at $50 per gram of gold my process is highly competitive with getting gold the old-fashioned way (mining).
Generation of electrity from fossil fuels is currently at the point where they get away with dumping some of the toxic products created as a side effect of their process directly to the air without paying for it. Like my example above, their process is profitable because they don't have to pay for dumping toxic substances into the environment.
A good place would be in the Philosophy classes or maybe Theology (or as we call it, "Religion studies") class.
Science classes is were pupils are taught what scientists currently believe are the explanation for how the world is and maybe other theories also considered by the science community.
In Science classes one does not teach random stuff believed by random people such as:
Santa Claus exists
Love comes from the heart
After flipping a coin 100 times always getting heads it's more likelly get tails on the next try
The Sun rotates around the Earth
UFOs exist
$Deity created man and all that we see
even if they intuitivelly look like being true and/or are believed by a large number of people.
Otherwise we might as well start teaching "theories" like:
We all live in a full and perfectly realistic virtual environment but we are not aware of it (like the Matrix)
The world was created 5 seconds ago with everything in it, including the memories we have from before that which are all fake memories
The world is an illusion and what we think is our "life" is in fact just a dream of our real selfs which are not at all in body and mind like what we percieve as ourselves to be in the dream
The world we perceive is just a part of the real world, like the shadows projected in the walls of a cavern by a fire (Socrates)
A very, very small percentage of individuals makes it big more often than not due to sheer luck (right time, right place) rather than superior skill while large numbers keep up taking vast amounts of shit in the hope of making it big too.
Reminds me of the chapter in "Freakonomics" of why the average drug-dealer makes less than a McDonals burger-flipper and still lives with his momma: turns out each and every one of them hopes to become one of the top-dogs.
By the way: the Internet boom and with it most of the chances for low-level IT people of becoming rich out of IPOs are long gone and yet a lot of people in IT in certain countries still work like slaves even though the chance of making it big is now close to nil - how do you explain this?
Having worked in countries where the work culture in IT is closer to the US (UK and Portugal) and places where it's closer to Sweden (Holland) I can tell you that the total overall productivity (as measured in meaningful ways like requirement function points implemented per week) in the later is much higher than in the former.
In intellectual professions (and that includes management) overworked people are tired people, tired people take more shortcuts and make more mistakes, mistakes have to be fixed and that takes time. Sometimes little time is lost (like with small programming bugs) and sometimes huge amounts of time are lost (like with high-level design faults or failures to spot critical dependencies in project planning).
As far as I can tell, at the moment the only competitive advantage the US has in Software is actually a huge availability of investor's money to fund IT companies, which is a business environment advantage, not any kind of superior technical or management environment.
Me, I'm taking the slow route to becoming a dollar millionaire: only 5 more years to go and i'm taking a lot less shit on the way there.
This is why I work as a contractor in software development: i have no job security but it's known upfront and priced into the contracts I take, I get paid by the hour or the day but I don't have to do crazy unpaid overwork, I don't need to deal with corporate bullshit like evaluations;promotions;bonuses (my bonus comes with my pay every month), I'm well trained in seeking and finding employment (in fact is a skill one quickly develops) and management has only a single lever on me - the nuclear option of terminating my contract - which would harm them more than me (they would look bad for having hired me in the first place and would have wasted the time i spent learning their systems, while I would just find a new contract in 2 weeks)
This is not showing off - it's more like selling the model: I believe most software developers should be contractors.
Here's a couple of technical things that game-development almost never touches (except MMOs): Distributed computing, distributed caching, cross-systems integration, real-time computing, sub-millisecond latencies, web-based interfaces, relational-databases.
And then non-technical things: business requirements, technical analysis, technical architecture.
Game development is a segment of software development concerned with developing applications for a specific purpose, just like all others.
That's because some morons have decided to make it illegal to consume products derived from those poppies. Then some more morons decided to copy those laws over to their countries.
If it wasn't for those laws, poppies in there would be worth little more than tobacco (in fact less, 'cause the country is so far from sea and transportation costs are high).
Part of the process of making a soldier consists of inbuing them with an exceptionally strong sense of group and belonging to the group: it's well know that in the thick of it men do not fight above all for their countries they fight above all for their mates.
Thus it's not surprising that an (ex-)member of a military outfit will belief that "(we) are the best".
I've seen the same thing in some ex-high-school colleagues of mine, years later when we had a reunion, after they had been in the Portuguese special forces.
That is why we have government, to protect the weak from the tyranny of the strong.
In order to maximize the wealth of a country, one needs to maximize the number of people working in productive endeaviours in that country and each individual's capacity for production (with higher education, better tools, better organization).
The "weak" you mention are the majority of people, which must kept working in productive endeavours.
The real purpose of government is maximize the wealth of a country.
The way governments differs is in: - How big is your chance to go from "weak" to "strong" and vice-versa (i.e. social mobility). In the US at the moment, this is at historical lows (lower than most developed nations). - How high of a percentage of the total wealth of a nation is accepted to be in the hands of a few "strong" individuals. In the US this is now at historical highs (comparable to the time of the "Robber Barons"). - How many rights are given to the "weak" in order to balance the de facto powers of the "strong" - i.e. making sure that the law is fair and independent of any "power-differentials", making sure that all parties have access to all relevant information when making purchasing decisions or entering into contracts and such. At the moment, the US fails miserably in these.
I postulate that in the last decenia and at the moment, at least in the US, the purpose of government has mostly been to keep the "weak" working hard to produce wealth, not to protect them from the "strong".
All this makes me think that you could use this site to find designers for a longer term business relationship and, for bigger companies, maybe even hire them (if said company accepts people teleworking from maybe even other countries). While the hassle might be worth it for starting a brand new project or for searching for new talent, it's probably not worth it to expand/continue a project (such as a branding effort) where you would usually want to stick with the original designer.
From the designer's point of view, if companies use this site to find good designers to hire (or contract as freelancers) for work via teleworking, this opens up the possibility of being able to work from anywhere in the world you want as long as you have an Internet connection.
In that sense, for the trully talented the time spent doing the door-opening designs at the lowish entry rates would just be an investment into getting new clients for longer term business relations.
I'm not saying the original post is true or fair, but have you considered that the people who post pictures of themselves online are those that are happiest with how they look which is more often people that aren't fat? That's self-selection in action
That was in fact in the back of my mind when i wrote it but I was trying to sneak it through...;)
Also I myself might suffer of personal self-selection: in my choice of guild I tend to go for non-hardcore guilds with a more mature membership which might select against me getting in contact with the chronically-unemployed and/or those with a lack of physical self-esteem and/or having severe food disorders.
Still, to disprove the point of the GP (that all players of this kinds of games are fat and unemployed) all that it takes is showing one or more players which are not fat or not unemployed: my personal experience shows that in all those games there are plenty which are neither.
UK, more specifically England, more specifically London.
My 5x factor is an approximation and was rounded down. It is in fact roughly correct for the area where I live (London) - see http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=285 - if it was against the whole of the UK it would be closer to 7x.
This is before taxes, after taxes the difference is even bigger (i'm a freelancer so I end up paying less taxes but have no job security, no employee rights and no income while on vacations).
I'm very specialized and very experienced in what I do, and work as a freelancer (more specifically contractor) hence the income I get.
Compared with some of the people working in finance in London my income is peanuts.
If that's true, then why is everybody I know of who plays WoW or other similar games an overweight unemployed loser?
Having played something like 5 different MMORPGs over the years, with the exception of the teenagers I have yet to come across any unemployed team member in any of the guilds I've been with. For those that have pictures, none is fat. (I myself make about 5x the average income in where I live and am not fat)
I can only think of a couple explanations for the disconnect between what you are saying and what I see: - You are lying, probably for shock reasons - i.e. you're trolling. - I'm in the EU zone and you are in another area and the demographics of players is different. - You yourself are unemployed and usually play at core work hours when anybody with a job will not be online, so everybody you cross paths with is either unemployed or an below work age. - Personal self-selection: maybe the type of person you get well enough and for long enough with to be told what they do is the kind of people that tend to be fat and unemployed.
I currently live in the UK and I'm sure that if I frequented the local pubs during work days at the core working hours, I pretty much would only come across (fat) unemployed people.
On a smaller level, running raids is training in team leadership.
You have to know the weaknesses and strenghts of (potential) members while assembling the group and during the fight, you need to "know your enemy", do some tactical planning and serve as a guide before the encounters and you (often) need to give in-encounter commands.
There's also a low level of personality management (especially in Pick-UP Groups) involved and sometimes you have to take hard decisions (like kicking a very underperforming member for a new one).
Look at HD and how all that's HD is sold as so much better that SD and how we should buy new TV Sets and Blu-Ray players and get all our movie collection again this time in Blu-Ray disks...
In the same way, 3D is the next gimmick that's supposed to help consumer electronics to sell us new TV sets and new players and media companies to sell us (once more) our movie collections in a new format.
Dell would "outsource their firmware development and manufacture to China with too little oversight" even if the consumer had not "demanded the cheap prices of the hardware we buy" - it's just that in that case they would pocket the difference.
Look at a typical brand-intensive (where a large percentage of the face price is for brand, not actual product) consumer electronics company like Apple - they have their products manufactured in China just like everybody else.
No, the problem with consumers is not that they want stuff cheap, the problem with consumers is that they accept shitty products and do not seriously penalise a brand when it turns out they do not have proper quality control in place.
Slashdot Mirror
So you're telling us that counterfeiting produces informed consumers which means that those selling high-price-high-margins branded products loose money because people ... *gasp* ... know better!?
We should close price comparisson sites then: by the same argument they cause the loss of trillions of dollars by letting consumers find out where to buy equivalent products for the cheapest price.
Same thing for reviewing sites and magazines: if they didn't inform people, they might very well have gone and bought things like $3000 Denon digital cables instead of equaly good $5 Cat5 cables.
If one sees political spin in everything and anything one does not agree with, one should ask oneself: "Could it be that the problem is in me, not the world?"
Somehow I suspect the GP will just see my statement above as political spin (for whom?).
This statement from him is just a last ditch effort to recapture the media's attention after India's announcement challenged his position in two ways:
By "offering the OLPCs technology to India", Negroponte is trying to both create the impression that India did not went out on their own because the OLPC's technology was not adequate for it's stated aims and to set up the groundwork to later claim some of the success from India's project by stating that it succeeded thanks to the help from the OLPC project.
The OLPC is pretty much dead and has been dead ever since they sold out to Intel. What was initially supposed to be a rugged notebook for developing countries ended up mostly being sold to mid-level countries such as Uruguay and Peru (source).
Somewhere during his quest for visibility - which was meant to give the OLPC project the needed funds and customers - Negroponte got addicted to the spotlights and lost focus on what the OLPC was meant to achieve: the OLPC project became the means by which Negroponte got his moments in the spotlight, not the other way around.
Negroponte essentially sold the project out to the large corporate interests whom the XO-1 threathened as a disruptive technology. While the true soul of what the OLPC project was meant to do slumbered on for a bit in the form of netbooks and it will take something like India's project to bring it back to life.
Quietly squirrel away all the paper-clips from the stationary cabinate until ... they're all out of paper-clips.
THAT WILL TEACH THEM NOT TO MESS WITH ME! MUAHAHAHAHA...
For high-frequency trading you need
a) To have highly realiable servers located right next to the exchange.
b) To be a broker in the exchange so that your trading fees are not the sky-high retail fees that you would have to pay if going through a broker.
c) Money for your systems to trade with, margin calls and such
d) Backoffice systems to deal with things like settlement.
This is the barrier to entry in this business that keeps anybody with the right knowledge to set-up high-frequency trading systems that compete with investment banks and hedge funds.
If you read the article you see that some of these guys have left their banks and setup shop doing high-frequency trading because there is a company that provides them the conditions listed above while they provide the know-how AND this company has a better profit sharing arrangement that the banks/hedge-funds they were working for.
For most exchanges there are no such companies around willing to lower the barrier to entry into this business for knowledgeable people, so there is no easy way for those people to get out on their own and do it without working for a bank.
We're talking about Hedge Funds here, so their bosses are in fact ex-Traders, ex-Sales and ex-Analysts from big investment banks and such.
- The reason why they are the bosses of the hedge funds is that they had millions of dollars to start their hedge funds, business contacts to get extra founds at low cost and already potential customers lined up from their time with the big banks.
- The reason they made millions of dollars in the first place is because they got fat bonuses in their previous job.
- The reason they got their bonuses is because they were lucky: I work in the industry and I know what I see. Also, studies show that the best performing hedge funds in one year are less likelly to be in the top the following years - in other words, hedge funds are not consistent in their performance, which indicates that chance, not skill is what determines most of their it.
Keep in mind that, most of the money made in Investment Banking is of the rent-seeking variety, such as:
- Decieve your customers by creating and selling them strange, complex and expensive derivatives to protect them from a certain risk when they could get equivalent protections from buying cheap standard products from the market.
- Get yourself in the middle of a transaction and take a cut. The transaction would occur anyway if u weren't there but either it would be cheaper for the buyer or more profitable for the seller.
- Get 20x your core capital in cheap loans (thanks to low interest rates and an implicit government guarantee). Invest those 21x core-capital in safe, low return instruments (say, 5% yield bonds). At the end cash it, repay loan, post more than 100% returns on your core capital (since the 5% return was applied to the 20x loan + 1x core capital), pay traders big bonuses for their "skill".
Essentially Investment Banking (and Hedge Funds) are the posh version of the Car Mechanic: professionals in the business use their superior knowledge of how finance works to decieve the customers (which are not specialists in that domain) to think that what they really need to "fix the problem" is something a lot more expensive that what is actually needed.
This would be alright if it wasn't for the fact that some of their customers are the managers of things like pension funds which (mis)manage our money and "invest" it through those guys instead of doing the due dilligence themselves to figure out that the average return after comissions and costs of a hedge fund is lower than the return on major market indexes (which you can get cheaply via ETFs).
So:
- Guys that started working in an industry which is mostly parasitic got lucky and made millions in bonuses.
- They used those millions, plus the contacts they created while working in that industry to setup a company and make money directly from the suckers^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hcustomers instead of via bonuses.
- They setup systems (i.e. auto-trading) that allow them to insert themselves into and get a cut from other people's trades because their systems are faster reacting to the market than other traders since they're located next to the exchanges and react within milliseconds.
- Add to this that in many cases, after they left their big bank jobs their old employer lost money on their bets and had to be rescued by the state using our tax money.
There are plenty of bosses out there that one can respect for having real risks and clawed their way to success by creating companies that provided real products/services to their customers but these guys ain't it.
These guys are more like pimps that made enough from forcing junkies to prostitute themselves that they could afford to open a brothel.
It's called Works For Hire - people pay up-front to get something done.
Mozart did it, Michaelangelo did it, bloody Leonardo da Vinci did it. If it was good enough for them then, it should be good enough for modern "artists".
In fact, I as a freelance Software Developer work in exactly in that way - somebody pays me for my time in developing software for a specific purpose: it's not exactly making me incredibly wealthy but it's a pretty good income.
In the age of the Internet one needs not even have a single wealthy patron - masses of people can easilly pool resources to pay for making a game.
Of course, going back to this method of paying for intellectual things to be made would really be bad for things like EA's CxO hookers and blow fund.
I keep hearing that Coal fired power plants release more radioactive substances into the atmosphere than Nuclear power plants. Sounds like a non-paid-for negative externality.
Then there's the whole subject of Global Warming:
- Say that there is a non-zero probability that releasing CO2 from burning fossil fuels is causing an increase in global temperatures (say that there is a chance that it is but maybe its not)
- Say that there is a non-zero probability that such an increase in global temperatures would cause a significant raise of the sea level (and thus entire costal areas including large cities would be affected) and changes to global weather patterns that would turn previously fertile areas into infertile areas (again say that there is a chance that it will be so but maybe it will not)
The potential costs of such events coming to be (and there is a non-zero probability of that happening) are huge.
No matter how Global-Warming-non-believer you are, laboratory tests do show that that a higher concentration of CO2 in the air causes an increase in temperature (in laboratory) and that water increases in volume with an increase in temperature - maybe Global-Warming-non-believers are right and it doesn't work at all like that in real-world conditions, but it's possible they are wrong.
In such a situation it makes sense to have insurance - after all, the purpose of insurance is to be able to coupe with an unlikelly-but-high-cost situation. Such insurance would pay for the costs to 3rd parties in the event that releasing CO2 into the air does in fact cause global warming and said global warming does in fact significantly raises sea levels and changes weather patterns.
Currently, those that burn fossil fuels do not have to pay for such insurance. That's a non-paid-for negative externality.
Fossil fuels are the cheapest way to produce energy as long as they do not have to pay for negative externalities.
The byproducts of burning fossil fuels for electricity are just dumped in the air and as long those that are doing the burning do not have to pay for the negative consequences of those byproducts they can "produced" electricity for a lower cost.
Here's an example for your understanding:
- Imagine I came up with a process to get gold from seawater. Running the process would cost me $50 for every gram of gold produced. However this process would have the downside that for every gram of gold extracted it produce 1 cubic kilometer of highly toxic water and cleaning that would cost $1000.
If I have to pay for the negative externalities of the process ($1000 per gram of gold produced to clean-up the 1 cubic kilometer of toxic water produced as a side-effect) then my process is only competitive for gold prices above $1050 per gram.
However, if I can get away with just dumping the toxic water somewhere for free, then at $50 per gram of gold my process is highly competitive with getting gold the old-fashioned way (mining).
Generation of electrity from fossil fuels is currently at the point where they get away with dumping some of the toxic products created as a side effect of their process directly to the air without paying for it. Like my example above, their process is profitable because they don't have to pay for dumping toxic substances into the environment.
... just not in the Science classes.
A good place would be in the Philosophy classes or maybe Theology (or as we call it, "Religion studies") class.
Science classes is were pupils are taught what scientists currently believe are the explanation for how the world is and maybe other theories also considered by the science community.
In Science classes one does not teach random stuff believed by random people such as:
even if they intuitivelly look like being true and/or are believed by a large number of people.
Otherwise we might as well start teaching "theories" like:
which are all in the domain of Philosophy
A very, very small percentage of individuals makes it big more often than not due to sheer luck (right time, right place) rather than superior skill while large numbers keep up taking vast amounts of shit in the hope of making it big too.
Reminds me of the chapter in "Freakonomics" of why the average drug-dealer makes less than a McDonals burger-flipper and still lives with his momma: turns out each and every one of them hopes to become one of the top-dogs.
By the way: the Internet boom and with it most of the chances for low-level IT people of becoming rich out of IPOs are long gone and yet a lot of people in IT in certain countries still work like slaves even though the chance of making it big is now close to nil - how do you explain this?
Having worked in countries where the work culture in IT is closer to the US (UK and Portugal) and places where it's closer to Sweden (Holland) I can tell you that the total overall productivity (as measured in meaningful ways like requirement function points implemented per week) in the later is much higher than in the former.
In intellectual professions (and that includes management) overworked people are tired people, tired people take more shortcuts and make more mistakes, mistakes have to be fixed and that takes time. Sometimes little time is lost (like with small programming bugs) and sometimes huge amounts of time are lost (like with high-level design faults or failures to spot critical dependencies in project planning).
As far as I can tell, at the moment the only competitive advantage the US has in Software is actually a huge availability of investor's money to fund IT companies, which is a business environment advantage, not any kind of superior technical or management environment.
Me, I'm taking the slow route to becoming a dollar millionaire: only 5 more years to go and i'm taking a lot less shit on the way there.
This is why I work as a contractor in software development: i have no job security but it's known upfront and priced into the contracts I take, I get paid by the hour or the day but I don't have to do crazy unpaid overwork, I don't need to deal with corporate bullshit like evaluations;promotions;bonuses (my bonus comes with my pay every month), I'm well trained in seeking and finding employment (in fact is a skill one quickly develops) and management has only a single lever on me - the nuclear option of terminating my contract - which would harm them more than me (they would look bad for having hired me in the first place and would have wasted the time i spent learning their systems, while I would just find a new contract in 2 weeks)
This is not showing off - it's more like selling the model: I believe most software developers should be contractors.
Here's a couple of technical things that game-development almost never touches (except MMOs): Distributed computing, distributed caching, cross-systems integration, real-time computing, sub-millisecond latencies, web-based interfaces, relational-databases.
And then non-technical things: business requirements, technical analysis, technical architecture.
Game development is a segment of software development concerned with developing applications for a specific purpose, just like all others.
That's because some morons have decided to make it illegal to consume products derived from those poppies. Then some more morons decided to copy those laws over to their countries.
If it wasn't for those laws, poppies in there would be worth little more than tobacco (in fact less, 'cause the country is so far from sea and transportation costs are high).
Part of the process of making a soldier consists of inbuing them with an exceptionally strong sense of group and belonging to the group: it's well know that in the thick of it men do not fight above all for their countries they fight above all for their mates.
Thus it's not surprising that an (ex-)member of a military outfit will belief that "(we) are the best".
I've seen the same thing in some ex-high-school colleagues of mine, years later when we had a reunion, after they had been in the Portuguese special forces.
I'm sure when fire was first invented somebody said that "man-made lightning will render these things irrelevant".
In order to maximize the wealth of a country, one needs to maximize the number of people working in productive endeaviours in that country and each individual's capacity for production (with higher education, better tools, better organization).
The "weak" you mention are the majority of people, which must kept working in productive endeavours.
The real purpose of government is maximize the wealth of a country.
The way governments differs is in:
- How big is your chance to go from "weak" to "strong" and vice-versa (i.e. social mobility). In the US at the moment, this is at historical lows (lower than most developed nations).
- How high of a percentage of the total wealth of a nation is accepted to be in the hands of a few "strong" individuals. In the US this is now at historical highs (comparable to the time of the "Robber Barons").
- How many rights are given to the "weak" in order to balance the de facto powers of the "strong" - i.e. making sure that the law is fair and independent of any "power-differentials", making sure that all parties have access to all relevant information when making purchasing decisions or entering into contracts and such. At the moment, the US fails miserably in these.
I postulate that in the last decenia and at the moment, at least in the US, the purpose of government has mostly been to keep the "weak" working hard to produce wealth, not to protect them from the "strong".
All this makes me think that you could use this site to find designers for a longer term business relationship and, for bigger companies, maybe even hire them (if said company accepts people teleworking from maybe even other countries). While the hassle might be worth it for starting a brand new project or for searching for new talent, it's probably not worth it to expand/continue a project (such as a branding effort) where you would usually want to stick with the original designer.
From the designer's point of view, if companies use this site to find good designers to hire (or contract as freelancers) for work via teleworking, this opens up the possibility of being able to work from anywhere in the world you want as long as you have an Internet connection.
In that sense, for the trully talented the time spent doing the door-opening designs at the lowish entry rates would just be an investment into getting new clients for longer term business relations.
That was in fact in the back of my mind when i wrote it but I was trying to sneak it through ... ;)
Also I myself might suffer of personal self-selection: in my choice of guild I tend to go for non-hardcore guilds with a more mature membership which might select against me getting in contact with the chronically-unemployed and/or those with a lack of physical self-esteem and/or having severe food disorders.
Still, to disprove the point of the GP (that all players of this kinds of games are fat and unemployed) all that it takes is showing one or more players which are not fat or not unemployed: my personal experience shows that in all those games there are plenty which are neither.
UK, more specifically England, more specifically London.
My 5x factor is an approximation and was rounded down. It is in fact roughly correct for the area where I live (London) - see http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=285 - if it was against the whole of the UK it would be closer to 7x.
This is before taxes, after taxes the difference is even bigger (i'm a freelancer so I end up paying less taxes but have no job security, no employee rights and no income while on vacations).
I'm very specialized and very experienced in what I do, and work as a freelancer (more specifically contractor) hence the income I get.
Compared with some of the people working in finance in London my income is peanuts.
Having played something like 5 different MMORPGs over the years, with the exception of the teenagers I have yet to come across any unemployed team member in any of the guilds I've been with. For those that have pictures, none is fat. (I myself make about 5x the average income in where I live and am not fat)
I can only think of a couple explanations for the disconnect between what you are saying and what I see:
- You are lying, probably for shock reasons - i.e. you're trolling.
- I'm in the EU zone and you are in another area and the demographics of players is different.
- You yourself are unemployed and usually play at core work hours when anybody with a job will not be online, so everybody you cross paths with is either unemployed or an below work age.
- Personal self-selection: maybe the type of person you get well enough and for long enough with to be told what they do is the kind of people that tend to be fat and unemployed.
I currently live in the UK and I'm sure that if I frequented the local pubs during work days at the core working hours, I pretty much would only come across (fat) unemployed people.
On a smaller level, running raids is training in team leadership.
You have to know the weaknesses and strenghts of (potential) members while assembling the group and during the fight, you need to "know your enemy", do some tactical planning and serve as a guide before the encounters and you (often) need to give in-encounter commands.
There's also a low level of personality management (especially in Pick-UP Groups) involved and sometimes you have to take hard decisions (like kicking a very underperforming member for a new one).
Look at HD and how all that's HD is sold as so much better that SD and how we should buy new TV Sets and Blu-Ray players and get all our movie collection again this time in Blu-Ray disks ...
In the same way, 3D is the next gimmick that's supposed to help consumer electronics to sell us new TV sets and new players and media companies to sell us (once more) our movie collections in a new format.
"We're all unique, precious little flowers" for most of us doesn't ring quite as true after one's older than 5.
Dell would "outsource their firmware development and manufacture to China with too little oversight" even if the consumer had not "demanded the cheap prices of the hardware we buy" - it's just that in that case they would pocket the difference.
Look at a typical brand-intensive (where a large percentage of the face price is for brand, not actual product) consumer electronics company like Apple - they have their products manufactured in China just like everybody else.
No, the problem with consumers is not that they want stuff cheap, the problem with consumers is that they accept shitty products and do not seriously penalise a brand when it turns out they do not have proper quality control in place.