Actually even the why its inflated is pretty easy to answer- 401Ks. In the 80s 401Ks came into being, causing a lot of small time investors to put their money in the market, where previously it would go into CDs and other small investments. More money going into the market chasing the same shares causes price inflation by simple supply and demand.
Good point. The money would act much like the easing of credit/loans for housing. More potential buyers, driving the price up.
Another problem I see is that rather than having relatively few investors, all intensely interested in the running of the company - you get a smaller cadre of proxy voters on the behalf of all those investors buying mutual funds consisting of dozens, hundreds of stocks.
Those proxy voters might be better educated, but they're also part of a clique, might not have the best interest of the actual owner of the stock in mind.
Oh, and I remember reading a month ago comparing executive pay to sports coach pay.
Basically, paying CEOs with Stock Options is like paying sports coaches based on the odds the bookies are placing - Stock prices are anticipatory, much like gambling odds.
He advocated paying CEOs on actual performance - net profit, health of the company(IE capital asset level), rather than paying them based on stock price level - it's too easy for a CEO to generate at least a short boost in stock prices, then when it crashes and burns, take the golden parachute and leave for the next company.
And I fail to see how people think that living your last years of life in prison is somehow not so bad. Would you be happy being confined such that you can't leave a campus-sized compound ever? No trips to the beach, no family reunions, no camping, no European vacations, etc? Ever again.
What if you're confined to a wheelchair or walker, and can't easily get to the beach? What if you're already estranged from your family? What if you don't have the money for European vacations?
One 'upside' to prison: Free medical care. That's right, if you have health problems, prison can be a lifesaver - they HAVE to treat you.
Personally, I don't think it's worth it. But when you look at stuff like this, you have to also approach it from a statistical standpoint - SOME will think the tradeoff worth it, much like how some teenagers think it's worth it, and end up spending 60+ years behind bars for murder.
Some great-grandmother blew away the rapist of her great granddaughter. In court. Before the judge, bailiff, jury, etc...
Down in Florida many of the old folks will max out their credit lines when they think they're going to die shortly - they're often already negative for the estate anyways, so why the heck not?
Isn't it more cost effective to make exercise fun, rather than spend money on Wii and its accessories?
At ~$340 wouldn't a Wii and accessories be cheaper than most dedicated exercise machines? Not to mention probably take up less space when you consider that you can dual purpose the TVs and use the Wiis for other games or just put them away.
In any case, 'making exercise fun' might be more expensive than you think. Sure, a class type workout with an instructor can be interesting and effective, but you have to pay the instructor. That gets expensive quick, even if you have a couple dozen in the class.
Running on a track - boring & painful. Music player of whatever stripe is of limited effectiveness for me. Running on a treadmill - even more boring. Running on a treadmill with a TV hooked up - better, especially depending on the program. Still limited.
Using a Wii? Interactive! Real feedback would make it much better. Easier access to exercise tracking can help make sure it remains interesting, tracking stats over time to provide better feedback, etc...
And with Parkinson's, it's likely that they'd need a physical therapist to design a workout - due to varying abilities it might be difficult to place them in a mass class.
I have a 42" 1080P TV that I paid less than $700 for. Of course, I shopped for it for a while.
I'll fully admit that the difference between a DVD and a BD disk is what I'd consider 'minimal', especially since I'm at a better distance for 720 than 1080. The 1080 was cheaper though... And I can always scoot up if I want to see the 'full glory'.
I've obtained a few movies on both DVD and BD for the express purpose of comparison - my conclusion is that I'm NOT going to go on a campaign to replace all my movies with BD versions, though I will buy the BD version if it's cheap enough. They're not getting an extra $20 out of me for it, more like $5, maybe $10 for an exceptionally 'visual' movie.
Who owns the technology behind this publicly funded research?
It gets complicated, but generally the one who got the grant.
Does knowledge gained fall into public domain or does the school/researcher keep it?
Again, it tends to be complicated. University stuff tends to be public domain. Many private researchers can and do patent things that they got grant assistance to develop.
There's different types of grants out there, and the rules vary.
Will any of the funding to GM/Chrysler for new technologies be available to the public domain or are we paying for them to build up new patents?
They wouldn't be public domain until the patents expire, but it's very likely they'd be licensed for very reasonable rates.
But I think the question is why doesn't the government fund research outside of war?
They do. It's just normally in the form of grants to universities and other researchers. Sometimes they get money for what we think are rather silly things, like the ketchup flow rate study.
I wouldn't be surprised at all if there are a number of grants out there for battery technology, after all the researchers are busily working on LiIron and LiSulfur batteries.
The government invests in a heck of a lot of research, it's just so spread around that there's not a huge amount of money in any one thing.
My base does actually use the 12 gauge option, if the other measures work.
They've found that shooting a few birds for real renews the effectiveness of the pure sound shots.
Other options include making the airport not as attractive to birds as other areas outside the flight path. Then you hunt the other areas sufficiently that they don't fill up habitat wise, but not so much you scare the birds away - a brief but intense hunting season, basically.
That seems an unusual situation to me. If you'd brought up 240V@150A it would have taken a lot less wire. What gauge wire did you have to run?
Also, if you were actually using a large fraction of that power it'd probably cause balancing problems - the ground for most homes isn't intended to handle 200 some odd amps of imbalance. They expect that if you're using that much power that much of the equipment will be 240V, or at least half on one phase and half on the other.
Actually, 3-phase power is also taken advantage of for its efficiency running motors. Your washing machine probably uses a 3-phase motor. Hence why it's not so easy to just pop them onto DC.
I'm pretty sure my consumer level washing machine doesn't use 3 phase. For one, my house doesn't have three phase, for two it's a 120V unit.;)
Now, some stuff I deal with at work that would reduce a washer load of laundry down to powder within a minute ARE 3-phase.
Still, it IS an AC motor, which indeed can't just be converted to use DC, though with electric cars and other fancy uses of electric motors coming out, the control sets to convert DC to AC optimized to run electric motors efficienty should become cheaper.
For that matter, I could see a DC fed washing machine being MORE efficient that way - 50 or 60 hertz often isn't the optimate frequency for electric motors. Basically, you might be able to reduce the power the motor needs enough to pay for the power losses of the converter.
How hard is it to step down DC voltages from 120 to 12?
Several orders of magnitude easier and more efficient than it used to be
What about conversion losses?
Comparable to AC voltage conversion; more dependent on how much money you're willing to spend to get an efficient unit and how well sized the power supply is than the difference between AC and DC.
What about wire resistance?
Wire resistance is WHY we want higher voltages. Double the voltage, more or less double the number of watts you can push over a given gauge of wire.
If 120VDC had less loss than 120VAC, then 120VDC would already be in our houses and we would run DC through our main power lines.
Some of the earlier installs WERE DC, back in the day of Edison and Tesla. Heck, I understand they just finished ripping out some of the last legacy home DC lines a few years back, can't remember if it was in NYC or Baltimore.
As for why we don't have DC in the house, it's only a few points more efficient until you're looking at really long runs, and until very recently the power losses from converting 7200VDC->240VDC would be enough higher to make it less efficient, on average, than 7200VAC->240VAC.
Basically, the gain is outweighed by the costs of upgrading our legacy systems.
It would be 120VDC @300A directly to my box. It's not, though. Not a single one I've ever seen is. It is solid 120VAC.
Hmm... That's odd. You seriously have a 300 amp 120VAC service? All the ones I've seen are 240V. Some 208VAC 3-phase at work. Most homes are on a 240V split-phase system. 240V, two phases, 180 degrees apart. You have two hots. For 120VAC power, you split them apart - half the house is on one phase, half on the other, balanced by a grounding rod.
How about 'inertia' and 'previously installed infrastructure'?
Let's say I build a new house and wire it with DC lines.
But as a consequence I'd need either a bunch of small inverters or carefully shop for every bit of electronic gear. Computer - Not so hard. Fridge - Probably cost me a grand more Vacuum? - Laugh.
You're missing a method to ensure the voter doesn't vote multiple times by using the IDNumber on multiple machines at the same time.
So: scan, store as voterID if CheckOut(voterID) 'Returns true if successful, if already checked out, returns false if (voterID == any value in array of legal voters) then run the vote program end if
else { print("Error") go back to vote }
CheckIn(voterID)
The error coding to ensure that the voterID gets checked back in if a vote isn't cast in error and that the ID gets marked used if a vote is cast for a multi-user system would be a lot more complicated, but programmers work on more complex systems all the time.
Where is this University? I'd figure Verizon's wireless internet service should work, and given their coverage of the nation, it should be there. Maybe he was looking for a WiMax type setup?
My thought was 'Is Verizon completely absent there?'. I know it's not the fastest and it's capped; but it should work as long as you're not extensively filesharing. Set up a machine at home if you need to fileshare.
For them that doesn't know: Edison's original design was a carbon impregnated cotton filament, in as near a total vacuum as could be produced in those days. It didn't suffer from filament migration, and other effects that cause modern bulbs to fail. If the original design had been refined as it was, General Electric could have saturated the market for light bulbs in a relatively short time, and been driven out of the market due to the Edison bulb having no predictable EOL.
Conspiracy theory. The problem with 'last forever' incandescent bulbs is that they're horrible at efficiency. 'Energy Miser' bulbs tend to last a bit shorter than standard bulbs because their filament's are thinner.
At around $1 for 4, the cost of the bulb is overwhelmed by the cost of the electricity.
Buy it new, treat it right(do the maintenance), and with a little luck a vehicle will last decades. I plot/plan on 10 years because odds are eventually something will happen. Take the money you save in payments and put it into a fund to buy a new vehicle.
If you get your first new vehicle with a 5 year loan, then keep it for 10, you should have more than enough to replace it with a better new car.
First, retailers aren't interested in stocking hundreds of games that will only sell for $10 if $8 of that goes back to the manufacturer. GameStop can do it because by the time the used games hit that price, they are going to be almost as profitable as selling a single new $60 game.
Then don't use gamestop. Use Walmart and online stores. My model would be Walmart and the bargain bins.
0% of $10 is still 0. 40% of $10 is $4, and can add up.
Games that wouldn't be affordable to these consumers if they didn't have trade-ins.
Maybe, maybe not. From my understanding you normally have to trade in like 3-4 games to get one used one back. Thus the profit margin level. They had to get those 3-4 games in the first place, so unless they stole them you're still looking at a significant loss rate when trading in.
Heck; a crash in trade prices might lead to them trading stuff off in swap meets and such, give a game get a game(unless your games suck and you're trying to get a good or rare one).
They're reaping what they have sown. And all they seem to do is cry about used games and how they're losing revenue.
One simple way would be to come out with more 'classic' releases - selling reprints of older game titles for a fraction of their original cost, but still pure profit for the manufacturers at this point. Pressing discs isn't that much.
That would depress the used-game market quite a bit.
that's a really good point. For example, I don't mind paying extra for a toyota or an apple computer in part because I know that when I sell it, I get more back too. I do take that into account when I compare prices of cars and computers. Oddly I think most people do not.
Given that I don't buy things I anticipate selling anytime soon, considering resale value is secondary to meeting my demands. For example, with computers I still have mine from a decade ago. Given the depreciation rate of computers, resale value is pretty low on the list. Basically, paying extra for a feature I don't want in order to increase the resale value doesn't motivate me because it won't increase the resale over the additional cost. Why spend $500 on something to increase the resale $200?
Cars? I buy them to last a decade or more in my possession - Of course, the reason toyotas have higher resale values when used is that they last forever - that's a consideration.
BTW the paint is actually now more efficient as they have newly discovered a type of alloy that allows you more absorbancy from the sun's output. This you can google too.
Could you please quote the source? That's what I try to do when I quote specific figures. I'm not making a professional paper, so I don't do a great deal of quality control on it, but I try.
On the conspiracy side - I believe that economics and inertia explain our system far more than conspiracy theories. Visiting the Saudis? Most presidents do that.
Economics wise - solar panels, and the associated subsystems, are just too expensive. Wind turbines scale up well, so they're best installed in large farms by professionals. The only problem with EVs is that their batteries are too expensive. LiIon was around $1 a watt/hour when I first checked a couple years ago, it's closer to $.25/wh. Problem? That's still $250 per kwh, or $25k for a battery capable of going 100 miles on a charge(most cars will get ~300 miles/tank). Even at $4/gallon gasoline, that's 6,250 gallons of gasoline, or 188k miles for a 30mpg gasoline vehicle. Even if you lease it for 5% of the value per year*, that's $1250 per year, or over 9k miles per year. What am I getting at? Gasoline is *cheap*, even at $4/gallon.
Current hybrids have both a smaller battery - less than a dozen miles, typically, and use NiMH, which is ~half the price. Problem being, they're more than twice as heavy for the capacity and are less efficient at charging. Switching out a hybrid's NiMH battery with a LiIon and the appropriate associated programing and you should pick up a few more mpg. Of course, current mainstream LiIon has a shorter lifespan than NiMH, though LiFePO4 promises to fix this and drop the cost even more. Lithium Iron batteries start out with lower capacity, but keep it so much better that they generally have more real capacity left after a year.
Please do not let me think you are so naive as not to believe that the Saudies that have more money then you can count... (and that's saying something), would not give money through dummy corporations to invest into the motor companies, it happens all the time...it is called cross trading. Scratch my back....and my friend will scratch yours.
I can count quite high my friend... Still, I would not want to be the accountant figuring out some Saudi prince's net worth. Again, there's no need for the conspiracy. The Saudis do what they do quite openly - mainly working to keep the price of oil at a level high enough to make them money hand over fist and low enough that people don't find alternatives.
Would the auto companies still be going broke if they were subsidized by the Saudies? Why should they engage in mysterious bribes, where they have to get every major auto/engine manufacturer in every country, when open market manipulation is both cheaper and more effective in that it affects entire industries.
Still, I'd like to know, do you at least realize now why the 'multitude of alternators' idea isn't going to work?
*And this would be a heavily subsidized rate, that'd be for something that'd last 20 years. LiIon would be between 5-10.
Slashdot Mirror
There's advertising in most of my books - but it's in the back and is publisher advertising, not third party.
Heck, they seem to like including first chapter of the next book, or some other excerpt, right now.
In the middle would be a tad more annoying.
So the way to bypass the pain of the punishment is to... become and unloved, destitute cripple? Brilliant plan!
Remember, statistical basis. What if you're ALREADY all of those things?
Actually even the why its inflated is pretty easy to answer- 401Ks. In the 80s 401Ks came into being, causing a lot of small time investors to put their money in the market, where previously it would go into CDs and other small investments. More money going into the market chasing the same shares causes price inflation by simple supply and demand.
Good point. The money would act much like the easing of credit/loans for housing. More potential buyers, driving the price up.
Another problem I see is that rather than having relatively few investors, all intensely interested in the running of the company - you get a smaller cadre of proxy voters on the behalf of all those investors buying mutual funds consisting of dozens, hundreds of stocks.
Those proxy voters might be better educated, but they're also part of a clique, might not have the best interest of the actual owner of the stock in mind.
Oh, and I remember reading a month ago comparing executive pay to sports coach pay.
Basically, paying CEOs with Stock Options is like paying sports coaches based on the odds the bookies are placing - Stock prices are anticipatory, much like gambling odds.
He advocated paying CEOs on actual performance - net profit, health of the company(IE capital asset level), rather than paying them based on stock price level - it's too easy for a CEO to generate at least a short boost in stock prices, then when it crashes and burns, take the golden parachute and leave for the next company.
And I fail to see how people think that living your last years of life in prison is somehow not so bad. Would you be happy being confined such that you can't leave a campus-sized compound ever? No trips to the beach, no family reunions, no camping, no European vacations, etc? Ever again.
What if you're confined to a wheelchair or walker, and can't easily get to the beach? What if you're already estranged from your family? What if you don't have the money for European vacations?
One 'upside' to prison: Free medical care. That's right, if you have health problems, prison can be a lifesaver - they HAVE to treat you.
Personally, I don't think it's worth it. But when you look at stuff like this, you have to also approach it from a statistical standpoint - SOME will think the tradeoff worth it, much like how some teenagers think it's worth it, and end up spending 60+ years behind bars for murder.
Some great-grandmother blew away the rapist of her great granddaughter. In court. Before the judge, bailiff, jury, etc...
Down in Florida many of the old folks will max out their credit lines when they think they're going to die shortly - they're often already negative for the estate anyways, so why the heck not?
Isn't it more cost effective to make exercise fun, rather than spend money on Wii and its accessories?
At ~$340 wouldn't a Wii and accessories be cheaper than most dedicated exercise machines? Not to mention probably take up less space when you consider that you can dual purpose the TVs and use the Wiis for other games or just put them away.
In any case, 'making exercise fun' might be more expensive than you think. Sure, a class type workout with an instructor can be interesting and effective, but you have to pay the instructor. That gets expensive quick, even if you have a couple dozen in the class.
Running on a track - boring & painful. Music player of whatever stripe is of limited effectiveness for me.
Running on a treadmill - even more boring.
Running on a treadmill with a TV hooked up - better, especially depending on the program. Still limited.
Using a Wii? Interactive! Real feedback would make it much better. Easier access to exercise tracking can help make sure it remains interesting, tracking stats over time to provide better feedback, etc...
And with Parkinson's, it's likely that they'd need a physical therapist to design a workout - due to varying abilities it might be difficult to place them in a mass class.
I have a 42" 1080P TV that I paid less than $700 for. Of course, I shopped for it for a while.
I'll fully admit that the difference between a DVD and a BD disk is what I'd consider 'minimal', especially since I'm at a better distance for 720 than 1080. The 1080 was cheaper though... And I can always scoot up if I want to see the 'full glory'.
I've obtained a few movies on both DVD and BD for the express purpose of comparison - my conclusion is that I'm NOT going to go on a campaign to replace all my movies with BD versions, though I will buy the BD version if it's cheap enough. They're not getting an extra $20 out of me for it, more like $5, maybe $10 for an exceptionally 'visual' movie.
Who owns the technology behind this publicly funded research?
It gets complicated, but generally the one who got the grant.
Does knowledge gained fall into public domain or does the school/researcher keep it?
Again, it tends to be complicated. University stuff tends to be public domain. Many private researchers can and do patent things that they got grant assistance to develop.
There's different types of grants out there, and the rules vary.
Will any of the funding to GM/Chrysler for new technologies be available to the public domain or are we paying for them to build up new patents?
They wouldn't be public domain until the patents expire, but it's very likely they'd be licensed for very reasonable rates.
But I think the question is why doesn't the government fund research outside of war?
They do. It's just normally in the form of grants to universities and other researchers. Sometimes they get money for what we think are rather silly things, like the ketchup flow rate study.
I wouldn't be surprised at all if there are a number of grants out there for battery technology, after all the researchers are busily working on LiIron and LiSulfur batteries.
The government invests in a heck of a lot of research, it's just so spread around that there's not a huge amount of money in any one thing.
My base does actually use the 12 gauge option, if the other measures work.
They've found that shooting a few birds for real renews the effectiveness of the pure sound shots.
Other options include making the airport not as attractive to birds as other areas outside the flight path. Then you hunt the other areas sufficiently that they don't fill up habitat wise, but not so much you scare the birds away - a brief but intense hunting season, basically.
That seems an unusual situation to me. If you'd brought up 240V@150A it would have taken a lot less wire. What gauge wire did you have to run?
Also, if you were actually using a large fraction of that power it'd probably cause balancing problems - the ground for most homes isn't intended to handle 200 some odd amps of imbalance. They expect that if you're using that much power that much of the equipment will be 240V, or at least half on one phase and half on the other.
Actually, 3-phase power is also taken advantage of for its efficiency running motors. Your washing machine probably uses a 3-phase motor. Hence why it's not so easy to just pop them onto DC.
I'm pretty sure my consumer level washing machine doesn't use 3 phase. For one, my house doesn't have three phase, for two it's a 120V unit. ;)
Now, some stuff I deal with at work that would reduce a washer load of laundry down to powder within a minute ARE 3-phase.
Still, it IS an AC motor, which indeed can't just be converted to use DC, though with electric cars and other fancy uses of electric motors coming out, the control sets to convert DC to AC optimized to run electric motors efficienty should become cheaper.
For that matter, I could see a DC fed washing machine being MORE efficient that way - 50 or 60 hertz often isn't the optimate frequency for electric motors. Basically, you might be able to reduce the power the motor needs enough to pay for the power losses of the converter.
How hard is it to step down DC voltages from 120 to 12?
Several orders of magnitude easier and more efficient than it used to be
What about conversion losses?
Comparable to AC voltage conversion; more dependent on how much money you're willing to spend to get an efficient unit and how well sized the power supply is than the difference between AC and DC.
What about wire resistance?
Wire resistance is WHY we want higher voltages. Double the voltage, more or less double the number of watts you can push over a given gauge of wire.
If 120VDC had less loss than 120VAC, then 120VDC would already be in our houses and we would run DC through our main power lines.
Some of the earlier installs WERE DC, back in the day of Edison and Tesla. Heck, I understand they just finished ripping out some of the last legacy home DC lines a few years back, can't remember if it was in NYC or Baltimore.
As for why we don't have DC in the house, it's only a few points more efficient until you're looking at really long runs, and until very recently the power losses from converting 7200VDC->240VDC would be enough higher to make it less efficient, on average, than 7200VAC->240VAC.
Basically, the gain is outweighed by the costs of upgrading our legacy systems.
It would be 120VDC @300A directly to my box. It's not, though. Not a single one I've ever seen is. It is solid 120VAC.
Hmm... That's odd. You seriously have a 300 amp 120VAC service? All the ones I've seen are 240V. Some 208VAC 3-phase at work. Most homes are on a 240V split-phase system. 240V, two phases, 180 degrees apart. You have two hots. For 120VAC power, you split them apart - half the house is on one phase, half on the other, balanced by a grounding rod.
Compare the space you get in that airline to the bags in the cargo area. Or how cows are shipped, for that matter.
You actually have quite a bit of room even on a flight, and most trains give you even more.
Enjoy the power loss after ten-twenty feet, depending upon your cable.
Depends more on your voltage. I was imagining something between 48 and 240VDC.
120VDC would have less loss than 120VAC.
In this case, history doesn't matter.
How about 'inertia' and 'previously installed infrastructure'?
Let's say I build a new house and wire it with DC lines.
But as a consequence I'd need either a bunch of small inverters or carefully shop for every bit of electronic gear. Computer - Not so hard.
Fridge - Probably cost me a grand more
Vacuum? - Laugh.
Same deal with other gear.
While true, we're also freight with vast support requirements, can't be that densely packed, and generally high priority.
That tends to change the equiations a bit.
You're missing a method to ensure the voter doesn't vote multiple times by using the IDNumber on multiple machines at the same time.
So:
scan, store as voterID
if CheckOut(voterID) 'Returns true if successful, if already checked out, returns false
if (voterID == any value in array of legal voters)
then run the vote program
end if
else {
print("Error")
go back to vote }
CheckIn(voterID)
The error coding to ensure that the voterID gets checked back in if a vote isn't cast in error and that the ID gets marked used if a vote is cast for a multi-user system would be a lot more complicated, but programmers work on more complex systems all the time.
I'm mostly a script writer at this point.
Where is this University? I'd figure Verizon's wireless internet service should work, and given their coverage of the nation, it should be there. Maybe he was looking for a WiMax type setup?
My thought was 'Is Verizon completely absent there?'. I know it's not the fastest and it's capped; but it should work as long as you're not extensively filesharing. Set up a machine at home if you need to fileshare.
Heck, consider getting a box at a hosting site. ;)
For them that doesn't know: Edison's original design was a carbon impregnated cotton filament, in as near a total vacuum as could be produced in those days. It didn't suffer from filament migration, and other effects that cause modern bulbs to fail. If the original design had been refined as it was, General Electric could have saturated the market for light bulbs in a relatively short time, and been driven out of the market due to the Edison bulb having no predictable EOL.
Conspiracy theory. The problem with 'last forever' incandescent bulbs is that they're horrible at efficiency. 'Energy Miser' bulbs tend to last a bit shorter than standard bulbs because their filament's are thinner.
At around $1 for 4, the cost of the bulb is overwhelmed by the cost of the electricity.
Buy it new, treat it right(do the maintenance), and with a little luck a vehicle will last decades. I plot/plan on 10 years because odds are eventually something will happen. Take the money you save in payments and put it into a fund to buy a new vehicle.
If you get your first new vehicle with a 5 year loan, then keep it for 10, you should have more than enough to replace it with a better new car.
First, retailers aren't interested in stocking hundreds of games that will only sell for $10 if $8 of that goes back to the manufacturer. GameStop can do it because by the time the used games hit that price, they are going to be almost as profitable as selling a single new $60 game.
Then don't use gamestop. Use Walmart and online stores.
My model would be Walmart and the bargain bins.
0% of $10 is still 0.
40% of $10 is $4, and can add up.
Games that wouldn't be affordable to these consumers if they didn't have trade-ins.
Maybe, maybe not. From my understanding you normally have to trade in like 3-4 games to get one used one back. Thus the profit margin level. They had to get those 3-4 games in the first place, so unless they stole them you're still looking at a significant loss rate when trading in.
Heck; a crash in trade prices might lead to them trading stuff off in swap meets and such, give a game get a game(unless your games suck and you're trying to get a good or rare one).
They're reaping what they have sown. And all they seem to do is cry about used games and how they're losing revenue.
One simple way would be to come out with more 'classic' releases - selling reprints of older game titles for a fraction of their original cost, but still pure profit for the manufacturers at this point. Pressing discs isn't that much.
That would depress the used-game market quite a bit.
that's a really good point. For example, I don't mind paying extra for a toyota or an apple computer in part because I know that when I sell it, I get more back too. I do take that into account when I compare prices of cars and computers. Oddly I think most people do not.
Given that I don't buy things I anticipate selling anytime soon, considering resale value is secondary to meeting my demands. For example, with computers I still have mine from a decade ago. Given the depreciation rate of computers, resale value is pretty low on the list. Basically, paying extra for a feature I don't want in order to increase the resale value doesn't motivate me because it won't increase the resale over the additional cost. Why spend $500 on something to increase the resale $200?
Cars? I buy them to last a decade or more in my possession - Of course, the reason toyotas have higher resale values when used is that they last forever - that's a consideration.
BTW the paint is actually now more efficient as they have newly discovered a type of alloy that allows you more absorbancy from the sun's output. This you can google too.
Could you please quote the source? That's what I try to do when I quote specific figures. I'm not making a professional paper, so I don't do a great deal of quality control on it, but I try.
On the conspiracy side - I believe that economics and inertia explain our system far more than conspiracy theories. Visiting the Saudis? Most presidents do that.
Economics wise - solar panels, and the associated subsystems, are just too expensive. Wind turbines scale up well, so they're best installed in large farms by professionals. The only problem with EVs is that their batteries are too expensive. LiIon was around $1 a watt/hour when I first checked a couple years ago, it's closer to $.25/wh. Problem? That's still $250 per kwh, or $25k for a battery capable of going 100 miles on a charge(most cars will get ~300 miles/tank). Even at $4/gallon gasoline, that's 6,250 gallons of gasoline, or 188k miles for a 30mpg gasoline vehicle. Even if you lease it for 5% of the value per year*, that's $1250 per year, or over 9k miles per year. What am I getting at? Gasoline is *cheap*, even at $4/gallon.
Current hybrids have both a smaller battery - less than a dozen miles, typically, and use NiMH, which is ~half the price. Problem being, they're more than twice as heavy for the capacity and are less efficient at charging. Switching out a hybrid's NiMH battery with a LiIon and the appropriate associated programing and you should pick up a few more mpg. Of course, current mainstream LiIon has a shorter lifespan than NiMH, though LiFePO4 promises to fix this and drop the cost even more. Lithium Iron batteries start out with lower capacity, but keep it so much better that they generally have more real capacity left after a year.
Please do not let me think you are so naive as not to believe that the Saudies that have more money then you can count... (and that's saying something), would not give money through dummy corporations to invest into the motor companies, it happens all the time...it is called cross trading. Scratch my back....and my friend will scratch yours.
I can count quite high my friend... Still, I would not want to be the accountant figuring out some Saudi prince's net worth. Again, there's no need for the conspiracy. The Saudis do what they do quite openly - mainly working to keep the price of oil at a level high enough to make them money hand over fist and low enough that people don't find alternatives.
Would the auto companies still be going broke if they were subsidized by the Saudies? Why should they engage in mysterious bribes, where they have to get every major auto/engine manufacturer in every country, when open market manipulation is both cheaper and more effective in that it affects entire industries.
Still, I'd like to know, do you at least realize now why the 'multitude of alternators' idea isn't going to work?
*And this would be a heavily subsidized rate, that'd be for something that'd last 20 years. LiIon would be between 5-10.