How is this any weirder than guys paying buckets of money to have a girl in leather whip them?
Businesses, particularly small businesses, can make a profit selling an otherwise equivalent product at more money if they can offer something else with it. Whether that's "Made in the USA", "Organically Grown", "Kosher", "Good customer service" or otherwise not offending the person's sensabilities.
Don't forget that the problems were apparently fairly hard to detect until you had a large "test" population. If a medication immediatly kills one out of a million people, without side effects in others, it would have a good chance of getting approved. But then it would end up being pulled once a couple million people start taking it.
Questions can be made about it being detected and pulled faster. Any big money decision is tough. Also, most drugs have downsides. The question becomes are the upsides better than the downsides, and then is the ratio better than alternates.
The ciminal wants to make a living. He doesn't want to risk getting shot. If you're a burgler, which home would you enter first: The one with the "Gun Free Home" Sign, or the one with the NRA sticker?
Heck, I have a sticker that says "Gun control means hitting your target" and a Citizen's Committie for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms lifetime member sticker. CCRKBA is a group for those who think that the NRA is too compromising.
Besides, unless the homeowner is living in a very bad area, the odds are that he'll never have a break-in while he or she is home, much less have multiple ones. Once a criminal is dead, he's not commiting any more crimes. There are far more homeowners than burglers/muggers/rapists/thugs. If you flipped a coin everytime a burglery happened, and killed the one that loses, there would very quickly be no more burglers. It'd be too expensive.
I'd much rather live in a place where the entire "whoever-shoots-whomever-else-first-wins" discussion is moot...
Sure, I'd love to live in a place with no criminals. Well, I live in North Dakota, so it comes close. But I'm also a realist. The gun ban in England & Australia hasn't disarmed the criminals. In areas where they get really psycho the criminals move to knives, hammers, and baseball bats and target the elderly and weak more. Heck, think about it, firearms have been around for hundreds of years. Give me access to a hardware store and I can build a blackpowder weapon, to include making the powder and balls. Given the resources of the drug black market and some better tools, and I can churn out smokeless powder (commercialized in the 1800's), rounds, and machine guns. Heck, in afgahnistan there is a town that makes AK-47's by hand without power tools!
So in a sense it is moot. The criminal wins, as he has the gun/weapon and you don't. At least I have the chance. Thus, the criminal types leave ND and move to Chicago or New York.
Ask yourself this: Why is it that on average, the areas with the most gun control have the most crime?
Actually, it's worse than that. I'm in the military, and get to shoot and qualify on an M-16 a whole once every two years!
The twice in a month would be for special forces or a unit on the verge of deploying.
An AR-15(M-16 has 'da switch', and is very difficult for a civilian to get) is overkill, unless you're defining "home" as your house and the lands surrounding it. But it is an accurate, reliable, fun, and inexpensive weapon to shoot down at the range. Many of the improvements that the weapons in Iraq & Afgahnistan have were developed by civilians for the civilian market, then adapted for military use.
Besides, the 2nd amendment isn't about hunting, or just home defense. Consider it the ultimate limit on government's power on the people.
The other issues part is an important part. It's best for issues that the congress either doesn't want to address, or as a limit to the congresscritter's power. People who run for office tend to have some common views.
The issues work both ways. If you support gay marriage, a ban issue will get you out, just to oppose it, along with the fundies who want the ban.
As for seperating them out, it's a turnout issue as well as a cost issue. I would have a hard time getting out to vote every week.
Nuclear power is clean in the sense that unless an accident occurs, the waste is contained. As for the boondoggle, that's because of the government distorting things. Plants can't reprocess their materials, because the materials could theoretically be made into a nuke, but they fail to mention that if you have the equipment required to seperate it and enrich it, that it's easier to use fresh ore.
I breath radioactive material every day, along with other chemicals, that come from the coal plant down the road. I'm pragmatic. I'd rather have the chance of a nuclear leak than the crud I breath every day.
Oh, and if you're going into combat, which would you prefer:
A M-16 barely newer than Vietnam, built by the lowest bidder, that you've shot twice in the last month.
A M-16 built by a company like Rock River Arms, tuned for reliability, having a two stage trigger, with guarenteed 1 MOA accuracy, and shot by you at the range every weekend?
Simple enough: Criminals will know that you're armed, so the logical step is to get a bigger gun and to be more inclined to use it.
Actually, this has been shown to be false. They're actually more likely to go to another house, without a gun. The occupied burglery rate in america is a fraction of that in england. The crooks are scared the people will have a gun.
The criminal has to win every time. The citizen only has to win once.
The.gov is paying for R&D into Solar & Wind too. More or less level playing field. Security & facility management are paid for by the actual plants. Research & weapons plants are a different story.
the huge and corrupt government oversight infrastructure, which is an essential part of its business
I'd count this as a negative subsidy, personally. Even if the taxes for the oversight don't come from the plant's production, it still increases costs to deal with the oversight. And essential? If the inspectors didn't come by to inspect paperwork, the plant would be shutting down within a day? I think not.
The moratorium on new plants came after the nuke construction and management companies proved they were too corrupt and incompetent to make them safely enough, poisoning the US only a little, with the big disaster of Chernobyl far enough away to minimize poisoning the US, but showing how high the stakes are.
So an unsafely designed plant, built in a corrupt communist country, operated by people under political & personal pressure to keep the plant running shows that American nuclear companies were corrupt and incompetent? This is like the Hindenburg preventing blimps and hydrogen usage. The germans painted the thing with what amounted to thermite! Public perception is powerfull.
Every nuke-powered vessel and bomb built, and they've been continuous through the public powerplant moratorium, is paid top dollar to the same contractors.
So they get some side benefits, for research pursuing a different realm. But nuclear powered ships are quite different from a multi-megawatt power plant, and bombs are an entirely different animal. As for Yucca mountain, the total cost of storage and cleanup there will far exceed any taxes paid these companies.
Oh, I agree here. But think of it as a contract. The.gov said "pay me this and I'll take care of the waste". The.gov turned out to be really off on how much it was really going to cost. If the.gov had said "make sure that it doesn't get into the ecosystem", I'm sure the power companies might find some novel method. If the telecom said "Sure, we can run fiber into your home for $100 install", and you accepted, then they found out that it's going to cost them $1000 to install, would you pony up the extra $900, or would you expect them to do it for the agreed $100?
Remember, the power industry, like the telecom industry, is one of the most regulated industries out there. "Open Market" isn't really a term that applies to them. But whether they cost more to operate because of government interference, or get subsidies/help from the government gets really hard to tell.
I know that nuke plants aren't maintenance free. I felt that was a given;). But I felt that I needed to mention that solar plants still require maintenance.
Contamination from old mines in India that would be a superfund site in America. Try doing a contamination survey for most mines. Lead, Arsenic, other poisons make appearances.
Want to have some fun? Take a geiger counter to a pile of coal ash.
Sorry, I know that nuke plants aren't maintenance free, but many people think that for solar power you throw some panels on the ground and they make power without a human around for years.
As for the cost per megawatt, I used figures I compiled about a year ago using a mirror plant being built in Australia and the Pebble Bed being made in South Africa. I no longer have the figures, unfortunately. I even figured out how much land the solar plants would take to replace all the power generation in the states, and the cost. I did the same for the nuclear plants. It was substantially cheaper for nuclear, even if you assume that construction costs are substantially higher within the states.
I'm not paying taxes to subsidize the loser's victory
I wonder, what do you count as "subsidies"? At least right now, solar and wind are receiving far more in the way of subsidies than coal or nuclear. If nuclear's so subsidized, then why haven't any new plants been built in the last thirty years? Yucca mountain can't really be called a subsidy, they paid a tax per megawatt to build it.
You seem to be forgetting that the point of the hydrogen is to power vehicles and other portable devices. We're talking about shipping the hydrogen to fueling stations, not to heat homes.
Though depending on the economies, efficient hydrogen furnaces might be better than the line losses for electricity. But then you consider pumping costs... Major math would need to be done.
So isn't the stuff that comes out of a coal plant's stacks. Except the nuclear stuff is safely in a pool, rather than in the air that I'm breathing.
but a geopolitical crisis
Just because it's a political "crisis" doesn't mean that it's ultimatly a geological crisis. There are ways to handle the waste.
And factoring in the energy to build these reactors reduces their efficiency
The build energy argument can be used for every technology. Heck, Solar and Wind both have much higher build costs per megawatt.
How about biomass reactors that generate hydrogen from agricultural waste, which are neither radioactive nor wasteful?
Research is progressing on this option too. May the best technology win. Changing economics as well as scientific developments will favor one or the other depending on the situation. People in my area often have multiple fuel heating systems. We'll heat with everything. Wood, Oil, Corn, Electric, and Natural Gas. Price of electricity goes up? Switch to Gas. Gas/Oil goes up? Use electric. Are you really cheap? Chop down some trees. Or buy some dry feed corn and burn that.
This system works on the heat production to heat the water. So hydro or wind wouldn't work efficiently. Other systems that use the steam cycle to power turbines probably would.
Using a hydrocarbon based power plant would be defeating the purpose, besides, there's more efficient methods of making hydrogen from hydrocarbonds than even hot water electrolysis.
The mirror type solar power plant might work too, but they cost an order of magnitude more to make per megawatt than a nuclear plant. And they're not manintenance free once built.
If you define "normal" as at average pressure for sealevel;). Go higher up, and water will boil at a lower temperature. Increase the pressure, and the opposite will happen.
Looks like an interesting concept. You're producing heat anyways, and the extra heat "loosens" the molecular bonding.
As far as the non-existant hydrogen transfer network, well, hydrogen transport is a pain. Likes to leak...
Other than hand counting is slow and expensive in manpower. Don't forget the way that we like to put 20 or so elections, along with three or four issues on a single ballet.
In the recent North Dakota election, you filled out a paper ballet by hand, then fed it into a combined scanner/lock box. If any problems in the ballot are detected, the scanner doesn't deposit in the lock box portion, and it's spit back out for correction.
Initial reports are fast, the audit can take place the next day. Everything's logged and auditable.
All we ask for is the ability to do a manual recount. Well, that and plug other vote fraud problems as they're found. Like making sure the lock-box is empty before use.
Voting security is tough because you have people on both sides willing to engage in more or less vast conspiracies to commit fraud. I mean, how the heck do you design a system where you have to assome that 3/4 of the people will mess with the system if they think they can get away with it?
You've described the Anime business model...
on
TV Piracy is Next
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I've lost track of the number of Anime series/movies that I've downloaded, watched, and ended up eventually buying the DVD of.
Heck, Anime companies have made statements that amount to "Sue the pirates? Heck, no, they're our best customers!"
Most of them don't even pay macrovision to turn that bit on for the "copy protection" because "We don't believe in paying money for something that doesn't help the business." It doesn't stop piracy, it doesn't increase sales (actually decreases them!), and it annoys the legitimate customers.
Making it available for download (with commercials) would be a legitimate business strategy. Heck, you could even go the iTunes route and sell it for a minimal cost w/o commercials. I know that I'm almost at the point of hooking a computer to my TV to replace the DVD player, and start ripping all my DVD's to a HD, so I don't have to go searching for movies. Just don't make it so annoying that the pirated versions are easier to use. That's what doomed the earlier music programs. And Ebooks. Definatly the Ebooks. I only get ebooks from baen, which comes in five formats, including HTML & RTF. How much more universal can you get than that?
Or price the DVD's low enough that people are willing to pay the money for the added convenience(Yes, I know it varies), legality (yes, it's worth money!), quality, and features. Also, release them quickly enough that the pirates aren't providing a product that's otherwise unavailable. Heck, that's happing in the movie industry right now.
You look at Farscape. They actually made so much money from the DVD sales that they made a Direct to DVD season! How messed up is that? Not really, ultimatly speaking. I'm not willing to pay $40 a month for cable/dish when the only channels I'd really watch would be the cartoon &SciFi channels. $40x12=$480 a year, which can cover about 4 season DVDs. Doing without a Tivo/VCR gets me another. Which I can watch at any time (I work long&unusual hours), as often as I like, rewinding and whatnot.
Maybe according to the "official" figures, because it's often illegal to work more than 35 hours a week, (I might be off on this, but it's what I've heard. I've also heard that working extra undocumented and unpaid (in the sense that you don't get a wage for them, but you'll quickly not be paid at all if you don't) time is quite frequent.
Slashdot Mirror
If you offer a wanted service, they will come...
How is this any weirder than guys paying buckets of money to have a girl in leather whip them?
Businesses, particularly small businesses, can make a profit selling an otherwise equivalent product at more money if they can offer something else with it. Whether that's "Made in the USA", "Organically Grown", "Kosher", "Good customer service" or otherwise not offending the person's sensabilities.
Don't forget that the problems were apparently fairly hard to detect until you had a large "test" population. If a medication immediatly kills one out of a million people, without side effects in others, it would have a good chance of getting approved. But then it would end up being pulled once a couple million people start taking it.
Questions can be made about it being detected and pulled faster. Any big money decision is tough. Also, most drugs have downsides. The question becomes are the upsides better than the downsides, and then is the ratio better than alternates.
The ciminal wants to make a living. He doesn't want to risk getting shot. If you're a burgler, which home would you enter first: The one with the "Gun Free Home" Sign, or the one with the NRA sticker?
Heck, I have a sticker that says "Gun control means hitting your target" and a Citizen's Committie for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms lifetime member sticker. CCRKBA is a group for those who think that the NRA is too compromising.
Besides, unless the homeowner is living in a very bad area, the odds are that he'll never have a break-in while he or she is home, much less have multiple ones. Once a criminal is dead, he's not commiting any more crimes. There are far more homeowners than burglers/muggers/rapists/thugs. If you flipped a coin everytime a burglery happened, and killed the one that loses, there would very quickly be no more burglers. It'd be too expensive.
I'd much rather live in a place where the entire "whoever-shoots-whomever-else-first-wins" discussion is moot...
Sure, I'd love to live in a place with no criminals. Well, I live in North Dakota, so it comes close. But I'm also a realist. The gun ban in England & Australia hasn't disarmed the criminals. In areas where they get really psycho the criminals move to knives, hammers, and baseball bats and target the elderly and weak more. Heck, think about it, firearms have been around for hundreds of years. Give me access to a hardware store and I can build a blackpowder weapon, to include making the powder and balls. Given the resources of the drug black market and some better tools, and I can churn out smokeless powder (commercialized in the 1800's), rounds, and machine guns. Heck, in afgahnistan there is a town that makes AK-47's by hand without power tools!
So in a sense it is moot. The criminal wins, as he has the gun/weapon and you don't. At least I have the chance. Thus, the criminal types leave ND and move to Chicago or New York.
Ask yourself this: Why is it that on average, the areas with the most gun control have the most crime?
Actually, it's worse than that. I'm in the military, and get to shoot and qualify on an M-16 a whole once every two years!
The twice in a month would be for special forces or a unit on the verge of deploying.
An AR-15(M-16 has 'da switch', and is very difficult for a civilian to get) is overkill, unless you're defining "home" as your house and the lands surrounding it. But it is an accurate, reliable, fun, and inexpensive weapon to shoot down at the range. Many of the improvements that the weapons in Iraq & Afgahnistan have were developed by civilians for the civilian market, then adapted for military use.
Besides, the 2nd amendment isn't about hunting, or just home defense. Consider it the ultimate limit on government's power on the people.
The other issues part is an important part. It's best for issues that the congress either doesn't want to address, or as a limit to the congresscritter's power. People who run for office tend to have some common views.
The issues work both ways. If you support gay marriage, a ban issue will get you out, just to oppose it, along with the fundies who want the ban.
As for seperating them out, it's a turnout issue as well as a cost issue. I would have a hard time getting out to vote every week.
Nuclear power is clean in the sense that unless an accident occurs, the waste is contained. As for the boondoggle, that's because of the government distorting things. Plants can't reprocess their materials, because the materials could theoretically be made into a nuke, but they fail to mention that if you have the equipment required to seperate it and enrich it, that it's easier to use fresh ore.
I breath radioactive material every day, along with other chemicals, that come from the coal plant down the road. I'm pragmatic. I'd rather have the chance of a nuclear leak than the crud I breath every day.
Oh, and if you're going into combat, which would you prefer:
A M-16 barely newer than Vietnam, built by the lowest bidder, that you've shot twice in the last month.
A M-16 built by a company like Rock River Arms, tuned for reliability, having a two stage trigger, with guarenteed 1 MOA accuracy, and shot by you at the range every weekend?
Simple enough:
Criminals will know that you're armed, so the logical step is to get a bigger gun and to be more inclined to use it.
Actually, this has been shown to be false. They're actually more likely to go to another house, without a gun. The occupied burglery rate in america is a fraction of that in england. The crooks are scared the people will have a gun.
The criminal has to win every time. The citizen only has to win once.
all the R&D, security and facility management
.gov is paying for R&D into Solar & Wind too. More or less level playing field. Security & facility management are paid for by the actual plants. Research & weapons plants are a different story.
.gov said "pay me this and I'll take care of the waste". The .gov turned out to be really off on how much it was really going to cost. If the .gov had said "make sure that it doesn't get into the ecosystem", I'm sure the power companies might find some novel method. If the telecom said "Sure, we can run fiber into your home for $100 install", and you accepted, then they found out that it's going to cost them $1000 to install, would you pony up the extra $900, or would you expect them to do it for the agreed $100?
The
the huge and corrupt government oversight infrastructure, which is an essential part of its business
I'd count this as a negative subsidy, personally. Even if the taxes for the oversight don't come from the plant's production, it still increases costs to deal with the oversight. And essential? If the inspectors didn't come by to inspect paperwork, the plant would be shutting down within a day? I think not.
The moratorium on new plants came after the nuke construction and management companies proved they were too corrupt and incompetent to make them safely enough, poisoning the US only a little, with the big disaster of Chernobyl far enough away to minimize poisoning the US, but showing how high the stakes are.
So an unsafely designed plant, built in a corrupt communist country, operated by people under political & personal pressure to keep the plant running shows that American nuclear companies were corrupt and incompetent? This is like the Hindenburg preventing blimps and hydrogen usage. The germans painted the thing with what amounted to thermite! Public perception is powerfull.
Every nuke-powered vessel and bomb built, and they've been continuous through the public powerplant moratorium, is paid top dollar to the same contractors.
So they get some side benefits, for research pursuing a different realm. But nuclear powered ships are quite different from a multi-megawatt power plant, and bombs are an entirely different animal.
As for Yucca mountain, the total cost of storage and cleanup there will far exceed any taxes paid these companies.
Oh, I agree here. But think of it as a contract. The
Remember, the power industry, like the telecom industry, is one of the most regulated industries out there. "Open Market" isn't really a term that applies to them. But whether they cost more to operate because of government interference, or get subsidies/help from the government gets really hard to tell.
Sounds great! Can we start building it today? Next Year? Next ten years?
I know that nuke plants aren't maintenance free. I felt that was a given ;). But I felt that I needed to mention that solar plants still require maintenance.
The previously features christmas tree sized low maintenance reactor
Well, the nuclear portion is maintenance free, at least.
My estimate of costs came from comparing the build costs for an australian mirror plant with the south african pebble bed. And I assumed linear, as in it takes x plants at y dollars each to reach the USA's annual production.
PBMR: $100 million per 110 MegaWatt "Module" (.9mil per MW)
Solar 1:$2.1 Million for 180 Kilowatts (11mil per MW for an admittably small plant)
Solar 2:$3 Million per Megawatt?
Well, it's not exactly "order of magnitude", but a factor of three is still quite a difference.
Contamination from old mines in India that would be a superfund site in America. Try doing a contamination survey for most mines. Lead, Arsenic, other poisons make appearances.
Want to have some fun? Take a geiger counter to a pile of coal ash.
I'm well aware of that ;)
Why do you think that I hate coal power so much?
Sorry, I know that nuke plants aren't maintenance free, but many people think that for solar power you throw some panels on the ground and they make power without a human around for years.
As for the cost per megawatt, I used figures I compiled about a year ago using a mirror plant being built in Australia and the Pebble Bed being made in South Africa. I no longer have the figures, unfortunately. I even figured out how much land the solar plants would take to replace all the power generation in the states, and the cost. I did the same for the nuclear plants. It was substantially cheaper for nuclear, even if you assume that construction costs are substantially higher within the states.
Oddly enough the Platte River runs right through the middle of Nebraska, making it a nice source of water for cooling.
I'm not paying taxes to subsidize the loser's victory
I wonder, what do you count as "subsidies"? At least right now, solar and wind are receiving far more in the way of subsidies than coal or nuclear. If nuclear's so subsidized, then why haven't any new plants been built in the last thirty years? Yucca mountain can't really be called a subsidy, they paid a tax per megawatt to build it.
You seem to be forgetting that the point of the hydrogen is to power vehicles and other portable devices. We're talking about shipping the hydrogen to fueling stations, not to heat homes.
Though depending on the economies, efficient hydrogen furnaces might be better than the line losses for electricity. But then you consider pumping costs... Major math would need to be done.
radioactive waste, which is not only poisonous
So isn't the stuff that comes out of a coal plant's stacks. Except the nuclear stuff is safely in a pool, rather than in the air that I'm breathing.
but a geopolitical crisis
Just because it's a political "crisis" doesn't mean that it's ultimatly a geological crisis. There are ways to handle the waste.
And factoring in the energy to build these reactors reduces their efficiency
The build energy argument can be used for every technology. Heck, Solar and Wind both have much higher build costs per megawatt.
How about biomass reactors that generate hydrogen from agricultural waste, which are neither radioactive nor wasteful?
Research is progressing on this option too. May the best technology win. Changing economics as well as scientific developments will favor one or the other depending on the situation. People in my area often have multiple fuel heating systems. We'll heat with everything. Wood, Oil, Corn, Electric, and Natural Gas. Price of electricity goes up? Switch to Gas. Gas/Oil goes up? Use electric. Are you really cheap? Chop down some trees. Or buy some dry feed corn and burn that.
Basically, yes.
This system works on the heat production to heat the water. So hydro or wind wouldn't work efficiently. Other systems that use the steam cycle to power turbines probably would.
Using a hydrocarbon based power plant would be defeating the purpose, besides, there's more efficient methods of making hydrogen from hydrocarbonds than even hot water electrolysis.
The mirror type solar power plant might work too, but they cost an order of magnitude more to make per megawatt than a nuclear plant. And they're not manintenance free once built.
If you define "normal" as at average pressure for sealevel ;). Go higher up, and water will boil at a lower temperature. Increase the pressure, and the opposite will happen.
Looks like an interesting concept. You're producing heat anyways, and the extra heat "loosens" the molecular bonding.
As far as the non-existant hydrogen transfer network, well, hydrogen transport is a pain. Likes to leak...
Other than hand counting is slow and expensive in manpower. Don't forget the way that we like to put 20 or so elections, along with three or four issues on a single ballet.
In the recent North Dakota election, you filled out a paper ballet by hand, then fed it into a combined scanner/lock box. If any problems in the ballot are detected, the scanner doesn't deposit in the lock box portion, and it's spit back out for correction.
Initial reports are fast, the audit can take place the next day. Everything's logged and auditable.
All we ask for is the ability to do a manual recount. Well, that and plug other vote fraud problems as they're found. Like making sure the lock-box is empty before use.
Voting security is tough because you have people on both sides willing to engage in more or less vast conspiracies to commit fraud. I mean, how the heck do you design a system where you have to assome that 3/4 of the people will mess with the system if they think they can get away with it?
I've lost track of the number of Anime series/movies that I've downloaded, watched, and ended up eventually buying the DVD of.
Heck, Anime companies have made statements that amount to "Sue the pirates? Heck, no, they're our best customers!"
Most of them don't even pay macrovision to turn that bit on for the "copy protection" because "We don't believe in paying money for something that doesn't help the business." It doesn't stop piracy, it doesn't increase sales (actually decreases them!), and it annoys the legitimate customers.
Making it available for download (with commercials) would be a legitimate business strategy. Heck, you could even go the iTunes route and sell it for a minimal cost w/o commercials. I know that I'm almost at the point of hooking a computer to my TV to replace the DVD player, and start ripping all my DVD's to a HD, so I don't have to go searching for movies. Just don't make it so annoying that the pirated versions are easier to use. That's what doomed the earlier music programs. And Ebooks. Definatly the Ebooks. I only get ebooks from baen, which comes in five formats, including HTML & RTF. How much more universal can you get than that?
Or price the DVD's low enough that people are willing to pay the money for the added convenience(Yes, I know it varies), legality (yes, it's worth money!), quality, and features. Also, release them quickly enough that the pirates aren't providing a product that's otherwise unavailable. Heck, that's happing in the movie industry right now.
You look at Farscape. They actually made so much money from the DVD sales that they made a Direct to DVD season! How messed up is that? Not really, ultimatly speaking. I'm not willing to pay $40 a month for cable/dish when the only channels I'd really watch would be the cartoon &SciFi channels. $40x12=$480 a year, which can cover about 4 season DVDs. Doing without a Tivo/VCR gets me another. Which I can watch at any time (I work long&unusual hours), as often as I like, rewinding and whatnot.
Maybe according to the "official" figures, because it's often illegal to work more than 35 hours a week, (I might be off on this, but it's what I've heard. I've also heard that working extra undocumented and unpaid (in the sense that you don't get a wage for them, but you'll quickly not be paid at all if you don't) time is quite frequent.