I think I paid $72 for FF6 (FF III back then) for my SNES when I was 12.... worth every penny and I pulled it out two weeks ago to play through it again
The only game I've paid more than $40 new for was a twin pack of GTA3 and Vice City for $45, which I got about 200-250 hours of combined play time between the two. other than that I've bought TF2 ($20, 400 hours) and CounterStrike Source aka CSS which I've gotten probably 120 hours or play out of @ $9.99. I like to at least get a dollar an hour out of my entertainment investments, which is why I rent a movie rather than buy it when I'm only going to watch it once. Paying $60 for a 20 hour single player game that has no multiplayer aspect is a real waste. Even if it has crappy multiplayer you're at least going to get 10 hours of additional playtime out of it (although it's better to just rent singleplayer games at this point).
My point? The best value are online multiplayer games, which typically cost much less than singleplayer games, and singleplayer games are a worse value than renting a b-comedy dvd.
The "problem" the industry sees with used game sales is that, given enough patience from the gamers, a very limited number of copies could conceivably be passed around the world LEGALLY for everyone to play in turn.
And yet, the book publishing industry continues on despite the occurance of used bookstores for over 200 years. There's nothing stopping EA from buying back copies of their games from customers for more than gamestop is willing to pay for them.
In what housing market? What summer? Some markets were underserved in the recent housing boom. Did you ever work past 6 on a Friday, or on Saturday or Sunday? Did you work with more than one company? 45 hours is just a 9 hour day.
Construction work is never more than 40 hours a week. Construction workers are always home by the time I get off work, and they're always out at the clubs on friday/saturday nights and at church on Sundays. That's just how construction works. Unless they're working food service in which case they're working 2 jobs while taking english classes at night school (most of the mexicans at the schlotski's i was working at in high school were doing this)
Strangely enough almost all furniture in the us (IKEA exempted) is made here in the US. Commerical furniture is one of those strange animals that even with cheap gas it's cheaper to build it here and ship it straight from the manufacturer to the final location than it is to mass produce in china, warehouse and distribute. Certian types of banquet and folding chairs are imported, but imports don't even have 50% of the market here. Something to think about next time you're sitting at the doctor's office, at the DPS, school or church.
Interesting you should mention windows - there's actually an active sit-in for a vinyl window plant in chicago right now. I know there's at least one vinyl window factory in washington state still active - my friend's dad owns it. Plywood is also produced locally in most cases. There are some rare hardwood plywood veneers made in china and india but most residential building materials (not including fasteners) are still produced here in the US.
The Miami construction market is based largely on hurricane damage and the (still) increasing property values there. Was this a mexican immigrant or a cuban immigrant? $600/mo goes a lot further in cuba than it does in Mexico, and the cost of living in Miami is on par with Boston and Washington DC; Dallas and Texas in general have some of the lowest costs of living in the US outside of rural mississippi and the rest of the gulf coast. Its likely he was sending $600/month home when he was only making $1200-2000/month in the Dallas area. What's the title of the article you got this from? i'm curious now.
A lot of the kids i went to high school with dropped out of school to take up jobs in construction with their parents (whom are only legal since their kids were born here) and typically sent back half of their income to their families across the border. One 16 year old kid i knew was on our track team and worked whatever the maximum number of hours a week you can at that age, and sent all but $100 a week (also about 50%) back to his family. $1000/wk for construction seems a little high. I know drywallers get paid about $20 an hour to do out of town work (dallas to san antonio) but $1000 a week? That seems a little high, is he a bilingual foreman or something? $600 a month may be all they can afford to send after rent, car payment, and gas for their truck (though gas prices have dropped recently). That's still $7,200 a year, plus whatever he spends in mexico while visiting family and buying them gifts there. Sorry to substantiate using my real life experience vs. your article you read in a magazine.
There are some fields where it is possible (construction, restaurants...)
Here in the south (Dallas, TX south to Houston, Austin and San Antonio), almost all construction and restaurant jobs are held by illegal immigrants, who send most of the money home to Mexico
I still don't see why they're pushing people so hard to upgrade to 3.0. The version 3.0 still seems slower and more buggy than the version of 2.0 I have been using for some time. Does the firefox corperation get more money from google every time you download the latest version or something? I would argue that FF 2.0 is not and obsolete product - it does everything I need perfectly, and I would consider myself a power user. The mozilla corp. has been pushing people to upgrade now pretty hard for about six months and I really don't see the need to upgrade.
I prefer v.2 to v.3 so much that I still use v.2 at work, although I will boot into v.3 at work to check and see how it renders our website at work differently from 2.0 (we have bad code and in most cases there's a significant difference). v.2 has everything I need and a smaller memory footprint - why would I upgrade?
Well it's a freight shipment from China, which are notoriously late. Unless you own all the product on the ship (think apple at a major product launch like the iPhone, new iMac, etc), you're screwed, especially if you're using a budget carrier which he undoubtedly is. Jan 29th means he was told "last week in January" which means "third week of february". Depending on how badly he's pissed off samsung for lifting the curtian behind the wizard of oz on how LCD manufacturing works, they may pull some strings to get it caught up in customs for a few weeks and make him sweat it out.
I'm seeing this happening in the commercial furniture industry as well. Importers/warehouses/middlemen are thinning out as online retailers start buying things directly from the manufacturer and warehousing it locally without a brick and mortar solution. This is different from how things worked in the past, where you would buy products from a brand who had them designed, advertised and manufactured for you. Instead of top down retailing like apple you're going to see more bottom up online retailing as international manufacturing capacity increasingly becomes more sophisticated.with the advent of online retailing the riskiest part of retail has been removed and there's essentially no operating cost anymore.
Most people I know would rather go down to best buy and buy a new computer for $400 rather than crack open the case and figure out what part is the hard drive, and pay the neighbor's kid to transfer the tax files and pr0n to the new drive and install whatever OS they have back on there. Hell a new computer probably costs less than the parts and labor to replace a drive and recover all the useful files from the old drive. New computer = another MS license sold, which is probably $40 in MS's pocket.
I don't think they PLANNED it that way, but the long way around says MS ultimately profits. That said I've never had a drive fail on me in.... 17 years? I guess I'm due. *knocks on wood*
What. Apple contracts all their manufacturing out, just like Dell and HP. As Dell and HPs share would drop to make room for Apple, so would their contracts for manufacturing computers. This is ridiculous and you have no idea how modern computer manufacturers work. The fact of the matter is there is excess manufacturing capacity at the moment, not a lack of it. I'd hit you upside the head with my REALITY stick, but I'm afraid you'd stain it with stupid in the process.
This was true in my high school as well. A large portion of the football team went to ivy leauge schools (we're in Texas). The ones that didn't however either made it into 2nd or 3rd tier state colleges in a highschool with an 80% "goes on to college" rate, where most of the students head off to 1st or 2nd tier state colleges.
Yes, and there are flood control dams and dams for drinking water and flood control. We have lots of these in Texas. Actually I'm reasonably sure Texas leads the nation in small privately owned dams. It doesn't mean these are viable for producing more than 100W of energy.
I was under the impression that most oil and oil products are refined and then sent via pipeline (at almost zero cost) to local areas which are then trucked the "last mile". You are correct federal gas tax is only about $0.20/gal but the cost of gas really is regional, not based at all on transportation costs. Gas is cheaper in austin typically by thirty cents even though dallas is just as close to houston as austin is. New refineries would be cleaner you're right, but those same cleaner technologies can be applied to existing refineries.
Yeah itd be fantastic if we damed up the mississippi. Screw interstate commerce on the river!
Also most rivers lie at the bottom of flood plains. You could dam up the many undamed rivers but you'd flood huge portions of the country and the vertical drop or rate of flow simply doesn't exist for it to be economical.
So yeah, all the viable high flow hydro points were damed up decades ago and we're tapped out. You're an idiot Q.E.D.
WTF dude you aren't slaves. Your employer owes you backpay. Don't let anyone fuck with you when it comes to your paycheck. The third option is to sue him for back pay when you leave. If it's overtime he owes you so much the better. Probably best to let a lawyer do it for the cost of your backpay, if for nothing else than to teach him a lesson.
They built this with not even 1/10th the world's oil reserves. Imagine what kind of prosperity we'd have in america if we'd built those at home. Thousands upon thousands of construction jobs, contractor positions, manufacturing and skilled labor jobs right there. But that money went out of the country and to the middle east (who then outsourced construction to indian migrant workers). We can do a lot with that money and that's just one blatant example. I can link to the palm islands and a five star hotel shaped like a sailboat if you really need me to...
I agree with most of what you say, except that in regards to hydro, we mostly tapped that out by 1965 or so. Yes, they're getting rid of A dam, but a) it doesn't produce that much power and b) it's been solidly proven for 20 years, and at least acknowledged for 30 years that dams really fuck with river ecology, especially the colorado and columbia rivers.
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Congratulations you're the ultimate consumer that CEOs count on! Now go out there and buy a US made car from one of the big three so we don't have to.
1680x1050 is the new 1440x900, yo.
I think I paid $72 for FF6 (FF III back then) for my SNES when I was 12.... worth every penny and I pulled it out two weeks ago to play through it again
The only game I've paid more than $40 new for was a twin pack of GTA3 and Vice City for $45, which I got about 200-250 hours of combined play time between the two. other than that I've bought TF2 ($20, 400 hours) and CounterStrike Source aka CSS which I've gotten probably 120 hours or play out of @ $9.99. I like to at least get a dollar an hour out of my entertainment investments, which is why I rent a movie rather than buy it when I'm only going to watch it once. Paying $60 for a 20 hour single player game that has no multiplayer aspect is a real waste. Even if it has crappy multiplayer you're at least going to get 10 hours of additional playtime out of it (although it's better to just rent singleplayer games at this point).
My point? The best value are online multiplayer games, which typically cost much less than singleplayer games, and singleplayer games are a worse value than renting a b-comedy dvd.
The "problem" the industry sees with used game sales is that, given enough patience from the gamers, a very limited number of copies could conceivably be passed around the world LEGALLY for everyone to play in turn.
And yet, the book publishing industry continues on despite the occurance of used bookstores for over 200 years. There's nothing stopping EA from buying back copies of their games from customers for more than gamestop is willing to pay for them.
In what housing market? What summer? Some markets were underserved in the recent housing boom. Did you ever work past 6 on a Friday, or on Saturday or Sunday? Did you work with more than one company? 45 hours is just a 9 hour day.
How does the scientific method play into a debate on wages and immigration/foreign policy?
Construction work is never more than 40 hours a week. Construction workers are always home by the time I get off work, and they're always out at the clubs on friday/saturday nights and at church on Sundays. That's just how construction works. Unless they're working food service in which case they're working 2 jobs while taking english classes at night school (most of the mexicans at the schlotski's i was working at in high school were doing this)
Strangely enough almost all furniture in the us (IKEA exempted) is made here in the US. Commerical furniture is one of those strange animals that even with cheap gas it's cheaper to build it here and ship it straight from the manufacturer to the final location than it is to mass produce in china, warehouse and distribute. Certian types of banquet and folding chairs are imported, but imports don't even have 50% of the market here. Something to think about next time you're sitting at the doctor's office, at the DPS, school or church.
Interesting you should mention windows - there's actually an active sit-in for a vinyl window plant in chicago right now. I know there's at least one vinyl window factory in washington state still active - my friend's dad owns it. Plywood is also produced locally in most cases. There are some rare hardwood plywood veneers made in china and india but most residential building materials (not including fasteners) are still produced here in the US.
The Miami construction market is based largely on hurricane damage and the (still) increasing property values there. Was this a mexican immigrant or a cuban immigrant? $600/mo goes a lot further in cuba than it does in Mexico, and the cost of living in Miami is on par with Boston and Washington DC; Dallas and Texas in general have some of the lowest costs of living in the US outside of rural mississippi and the rest of the gulf coast. Its likely he was sending $600/month home when he was only making $1200-2000/month in the Dallas area. What's the title of the article you got this from? i'm curious now.
A lot of the kids i went to high school with dropped out of school to take up jobs in construction with their parents (whom are only legal since their kids were born here) and typically sent back half of their income to their families across the border. One 16 year old kid i knew was on our track team and worked whatever the maximum number of hours a week you can at that age, and sent all but $100 a week (also about 50%) back to his family. $1000/wk for construction seems a little high. I know drywallers get paid about $20 an hour to do out of town work (dallas to san antonio) but $1000 a week? That seems a little high, is he a bilingual foreman or something? $600 a month may be all they can afford to send after rent, car payment, and gas for their truck (though gas prices have dropped recently). That's still $7,200 a year, plus whatever he spends in mexico while visiting family and buying them gifts there. Sorry to substantiate using my real life experience vs. your article you read in a magazine.
There are some fields where it is possible (construction, restaurants...)
Here in the south (Dallas, TX south to Houston, Austin and San Antonio), almost all construction and restaurant jobs are held by illegal immigrants, who send most of the money home to Mexico
I still don't see why they're pushing people so hard to upgrade to 3.0. The version 3.0 still seems slower and more buggy than the version of 2.0 I have been using for some time. Does the firefox corperation get more money from google every time you download the latest version or something? I would argue that FF 2.0 is not and obsolete product - it does everything I need perfectly, and I would consider myself a power user. The mozilla corp. has been pushing people to upgrade now pretty hard for about six months and I really don't see the need to upgrade.
I prefer v.2 to v.3 so much that I still use v.2 at work, although I will boot into v.3 at work to check and see how it renders our website at work differently from 2.0 (we have bad code and in most cases there's a significant difference). v.2 has everything I need and a smaller memory footprint - why would I upgrade?
You have to post this the day after my slashdot mod points expire. If my keyboard didn't have drain holes I'd say you owe me a new keyboard.
Well it's a freight shipment from China, which are notoriously late. Unless you own all the product on the ship (think apple at a major product launch like the iPhone, new iMac, etc), you're screwed, especially if you're using a budget carrier which he undoubtedly is. Jan 29th means he was told "last week in January" which means "third week of february". Depending on how badly he's pissed off samsung for lifting the curtian behind the wizard of oz on how LCD manufacturing works, they may pull some strings to get it caught up in customs for a few weeks and make him sweat it out.
I'm seeing this happening in the commercial furniture industry as well. Importers/warehouses/middlemen are thinning out as online retailers start buying things directly from the manufacturer and warehousing it locally without a brick and mortar solution. This is different from how things worked in the past, where you would buy products from a brand who had them designed, advertised and manufactured for you. Instead of top down retailing like apple you're going to see more bottom up online retailing as international manufacturing capacity increasingly becomes more sophisticated.with the advent of online retailing the riskiest part of retail has been removed and there's essentially no operating cost anymore.
Most people I know would rather go down to best buy and buy a new computer for $400 rather than crack open the case and figure out what part is the hard drive, and pay the neighbor's kid to transfer the tax files and pr0n to the new drive and install whatever OS they have back on there. Hell a new computer probably costs less than the parts and labor to replace a drive and recover all the useful files from the old drive. New computer = another MS license sold, which is probably $40 in MS's pocket.
I don't think they PLANNED it that way, but the long way around says MS ultimately profits. That said I've never had a drive fail on me in.... 17 years? I guess I'm due. *knocks on wood*
What. Apple contracts all their manufacturing out, just like Dell and HP. As Dell and HPs share would drop to make room for Apple, so would their contracts for manufacturing computers. This is ridiculous and you have no idea how modern computer manufacturers work. The fact of the matter is there is excess manufacturing capacity at the moment, not a lack of it. I'd hit you upside the head with my REALITY stick, but I'm afraid you'd stain it with stupid in the process.
This was true in my high school as well. A large portion of the football team went to ivy leauge schools (we're in Texas). The ones that didn't however either made it into 2nd or 3rd tier state colleges in a highschool with an 80% "goes on to college" rate, where most of the students head off to 1st or 2nd tier state colleges.
Yes, and there are flood control dams and dams for drinking water and flood control. We have lots of these in Texas. Actually I'm reasonably sure Texas leads the nation in small privately owned dams. It doesn't mean these are viable for producing more than 100W of energy.
I was under the impression that most oil and oil products are refined and then sent via pipeline (at almost zero cost) to local areas which are then trucked the "last mile". You are correct federal gas tax is only about $0.20/gal but the cost of gas really is regional, not based at all on transportation costs. Gas is cheaper in austin typically by thirty cents even though dallas is just as close to houston as austin is. New refineries would be cleaner you're right, but those same cleaner technologies can be applied to existing refineries.
Yeah itd be fantastic if we damed up the mississippi. Screw interstate commerce on the river!
Also most rivers lie at the bottom of flood plains. You could dam up the many undamed rivers but you'd flood huge portions of the country and the vertical drop or rate of flow simply doesn't exist for it to be economical.
So yeah, all the viable high flow hydro points were damed up decades ago and we're tapped out. You're an idiot Q.E.D.
WTF dude you aren't slaves. Your employer owes you backpay. Don't let anyone fuck with you when it comes to your paycheck. The third option is to sue him for back pay when you leave. If it's overtime he owes you so much the better. Probably best to let a lawyer do it for the cost of your backpay, if for nothing else than to teach him a lesson.
And how will the USA redirecting $700B per year make a difference?
Have you seen this? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burj_Dubai
They built this with not even 1/10th the world's oil reserves. Imagine what kind of prosperity we'd have in america if we'd built those at home. Thousands upon thousands of construction jobs, contractor positions, manufacturing and skilled labor jobs right there. But that money went out of the country and to the middle east (who then outsourced construction to indian migrant workers). We can do a lot with that money and that's just one blatant example. I can link to the palm islands and a five star hotel shaped like a sailboat if you really need me to...
I agree with most of what you say, except that in regards to hydro, we mostly tapped that out by 1965 or so. Yes, they're getting rid of A dam, but a) it doesn't produce that much power and b) it's been solidly proven for 20 years, and at least acknowledged for 30 years that dams really fuck with river ecology, especially the colorado and columbia rivers.