Reliability ratings are based on a huge sample size of any given vehicle. Statistically if you build enough cars some are bound to be lemons (and hence why we have lemon laws). So one person with a bad Pontiac doesn't mean all Pontiacs are bad. Also what Pontiac did you buy and why did you buy one when you knew they were shutting down that brand? Sounds like sour grapes on what you thought was going to be a knock-out deal.
On topic though, when I was growing up in the 90's I saw stranded cars all the time, broken down on the highway and byways. Now in the last 5-6 years I see one maybe once a week. It's not statistical, just anecdotal, but as a general sampling it does seem to support that cars break less often compared to their older designed counterparts.
Hydroelectric on a large scale is maxed out. We have many small scale choices to use. Hydrogen is our greatest future asset in storing power from both the sun and wind. Ultimately I look at the reality of our lives requiring far less power as the way out of a great deal of this issue. In the past 5 years has been the first time in history electrical consumption went down on average as CFLs took over for regular incandescent light bulbs. With power savings occurring in each new device we buy for mobility and access we get closer to a much lower consumption overall.
As for transportation, the future is in rail for large-scale movement with only the last miles done by trucks. Electric railways are incredibly cheap to operate and cost pennies on the dollar versus diesel trucks. The problem is the infrastructure isn't there but will be by the end of our lives. If anything I stand by the reality that our system will change but won't collapse. We're a tough species and the chance to overcome this will be our greatest achievement to date.
The problem isn't the cost of a barrel of veg oil vs. a barrel of crude, the issue is production to run things. Ultimately we'll need to balance our energy needs between the Big 4 (Wind, Solar, Hydroelectric, and Hydrogen). Biofuels are great but fall short of being able to cover the loss of oil as an energy source. Course I also support the Big 4 as a major turning point for humanity and wish for it to come sooner. It will be a great source for transportation though. I could totally see most cars in the future being equipped with small biofuel tanks (say 1-3 gallons) that would extend the range infinitely but would charge up using electricity from the Big 4 for most of their power.
This is silly to believe that. The Bell system has been lazy in the US for almost 80 years and yet they still control the vast majority of telephony services. Same can be said for the cellular networks, largely indifferent to developments and only when pressured by outsiders do they upgrade (think LTE). Laziness has everything to do with having a stranglehold on the market place. As it stands somewhere in the neighborhood of 90% of all CPUs are bought by middle-companies that put them into devices and computers for the public. So if you can keep those middle-companies buying only from you you can exclude innovative new products no matter how good they are long enough to copy them and implement them.
It's exactly what happened to AMD and fundamentally what will happen to ARM's producers once Intel gets their ARM production up and running. 10 years from now we'll most likely be wondering why nobody is using Tegra 10 or 11 and how most processors are now Intel.
. ..If you sell 80% of the market share and you do so by making sure the big 3 that sell 70% of all computers only use your CPU you can have the best CPUs because you're in the drivers seat of the market and have the excess money. I fail to see how people who deem themselves intelligent miss how A + B = C in this situation.
Marketshare "discounts" + Monopolistic control of the Big 3 = More money than anybody else to develop better chips. It's not rocket science. Intel developed very large fabs and managed to drive out everybody else who made microprocessors but AMD. Now there are a few independent Fabs making ARM stuff but that is still dwarfed by Intel's domination of the x86 market.
3/4ths of a billion dollar was their operating profit. I'm not sure how you quantify that as a discount. That would mean essentially Dell was losing money on every chip sold prior to that quarter. So lets not beat around the bush, Intel had the money and willpower to forcibly squeeze AMD out of the truly lucrative markets.
For the record though: Intel CPUs are faster but in every day business use AMD chips were probably a much better buy for office machines. In fact if you look at the cheap CPUs for the last 5 years AMD prices (at market) are substantially lower for business-level machines so really the idea that Intel CPUs are faster is true but false in the sense of their quality vs. cost analysis. In other words, Dell, IBM, and HP had no reason to keep buying Intel CPUs for their business lines except for the fact that Intel was cutting them deals where Intel made pennies on the dollar or lost money but made up for it in volume sales of more expensive chips in the other consumer lines.
Course you're not a sheep. You would never work for a salary, you demand a fair wage! *shakes fist* oh wait, you're just a sheep without a contract to protect them. So when the next sheep comes along who's willing to work for slightly less it will end in a race to the bottom. Ultimately this argument will go nowhere because you're anecdotal position will never concede failure and your moral superiority complex will refuse to let you recognize we're all in this together rather than in some sort of race to wealth.
Economics of scale only work in physical manufacturing and has nothing to do with regulation. You can't compare the two. Regulations are designed when effective to be used as a way to curb negative behavior or maintain a quality of product that would otherwise remain stagnant or drop. Subsidies for start-up industries makes the industry affordable until economics of scale start taking effect. To make a specific example in this case is your local power company is either a privately held but publicly regulated firm or a public utility that runs the power grid. They build new plants and maintain lines at a certain cost but their relatively huge monopolized area allows them to make a constant profit even as they incur costs. Solyndra was a manufacturer that had to build panels and sell them individually then wait decades for their buyers to recoup their value. The problem ended up being that the government chose a poor company but if it had picked a different company and was successful nobody would talk about it. Everyday they pick companies to get government contracts, loans, and subsidies. They aren't picked based on some personal affinity (for the most part) but to argue there is a social agenda behind it is silly. To argue the solar panel industry will spring up overnight is also ludicrous. As stated they are a large upfront cost that makes selling them difficult to a cash-strapped public. If anything Pres. Obama did give loans through his administration to maintain his promise of having a US-based solar panel industry which is good. China is already developing them and selling them to themselves because their government is buying them in vast quantities to make them work.
You seriously live in some kind of weird entrepreneurial bubble. The constitution is a loose association governing how government should be formed. It isn't the end-all-be-all of society so stop trying to shove it in everybody's face. When they wrote it only white landowners could vote. As the voting limitations faded our society has become more egalitarian. But by definition our society is built to have winners and losers. The losers are those who live in poverty or in near-poverty status. You're making this argument too personal, defending the rich is pointless, I don't hate the rich, I have no personal feelings towards them one way or the other. I just don't wish to have to fight them economically when they have all the tanks and guns metaphorically.
Next time you go apply for a job a wealthy capitalist has defined your salary. The market doesn't define much, it's an illusion to avoid the reality that people are manipulating the world around you. But the greater point is here that the wealthy can afford to pay more back into the system which is the real point. They have garnered the most success from the system and need to return a greater portion. Their companies rose on the back of public education, public utilities, public regulation that kept others from simply copying their work or running them out using unfair business practices. Just as you tell yourself you work harder to be more successful you ignore the reality that unless you're working more paid hours than the average American you're benefiting from the government as part of the citizenry.
PS: The government has helped you more than anything else in this society. If you want a government to truly impede you move to Russia or China.
Car industry, Steel industry, Coal industry, Banking Industry. Innovation from a start-up perspective dried up as the stabilization of the system occurred. I would suggest you just read some damned economics books if you're going to pull this kind of crap.
Right wing talking point is talking...The US is NOTHING like Greece structurally. Greece is a limited agrarian exporter that is being held hostage and forced to do Austrian economics by....GERMANY! The biggest socialist economy on the planet that continually protects its own interest at the harm of Europe in general. Really our social safety net is in tatters after 30 years of economic suicide by the so-called "personal responsibility" party.
I'm all for personal responsibility as soon as the wealthy give up their vast fortunes and start over with me. Until then I support the government leveling the playing field to prevent the wealthy from running roughshod over me. Personal responsibility only gets me so far when the poverty in our country is double that of others in our socio-economic class and the protestant work ethic is bandied about as if it were ever a good thing. Calvinists brought it over to justify why some were superior to others in life. Originally it was god's graces, then it became hard work, now we call it personal responsibility. In the end the argument boils down to luck for the most part.
No one is controlling women. They are just as free as men to fuck at will....with our without shame.
But why the fuck should someone pay for them to do so? If they want birth control, they are just as free now to get it as before....why should other Joe/Jane Q. citizens have to pay to subsidize them fucking? Something that I think everyone will agree upon...is a decision that is up to the individual to make.
Since when is birth control a fucking right??
Since women have to carry the baby. Why do people weirdly assume that sex is an equal-sided equation? Men insert into women and once the event is over if certain measures aren't taken women become pregnant a majority of the time. Thus preventing women from getting birth-control limits the amount of sex that can be had for women due to the risk of pregnancy versus men who can keep going willy-nilly until court cases catch up to them with paternity.
As for the actual issue at hand in this current setup is that religious organizations (such as private religious schools and hospitals) along with employers in general want to be able to morally justify their prohibiting of birth control on their insurances. The public isn't paying for birth control in this scenario and your line of logic could justify life saving treatment, public schooling, and to be on topic: research grants. But the reality is as a society we agree to do certain things for each other no matter what we personally think because we agree to live in this society.
I would have this long drawn out debate with you but let me just point out that every administration picks corporations to back instead of simply doing it themselves. When these companies fail the government usually eats the bill and quietly moves on. This is a case where the Republicans are using their clout with people who are of low intelligence or generally cynical to pull a political stunt over what is essentially a run of the mill issue. Ron Paul can complain loudly about "picking winners and losers" but that's how the world works, we can't just dump cash into a general industry and we can't expect the market to change anything since fundamentally once a market has stabilized or is monopolized it won't innovate much.
I don't blame the public though. Why should they pay a 10% premium to have it today? I'm a major supporter of a more equitable system and charging sales tax is such a red herring. Best Buy doesn't want to admit that their sales network costs them extra money that Amazon doesn't have to deal with. The problem now is they need to figure out how to be competitive at Amazon prices (which means taking a substantial loss in profits but still a worthwhile business model). In the end the only answer for Best Buy is to just lower the prices and start bringing in special colors/limited editions. All the other issues are secondary to those.
I haven't grilled him on it really, he's so overqualified as a salesman with his MA in health-based Information systems that I marvel he still works there. But next time I see him now I will ask him exactly how his pay is structured. We discuss Best Buy problems fairly often when we hang out so I don't necessarily understand all the intricacies but I see the overall problem and it is one faced by most Big-Box-Stores. The online world is breaking their business model and profit scale. Eventually though it will reach equilibrium as people demand same-day purchases and showrooms to a certain extent.
Khan Academy is a tool of very wealthy people who understand very little about education. It's telling that their leadership is almost exclusively stem types with nary a psychologist in sight. I wish him luck but the education system doesn't need his kind of overhaul in the western world.
I have a friend who works there right now and he gets an hourly salary plus commission for working in computers. I'm not sure if it's a region-by-region deal but I do know he makes commission.
1.) Best buy like most retailers pay piss poor, even after commission. Truly intelligent sales personal move up to management or into higher margin businesses (automotive/B2B).
2.) Most Best Buys I do agree are over sized but unless they're paying high rent/utilities/property tax size isn't an issue so much as utilization. They've always had a problem with low shelving, low shelves make a place seem vast except when you put it almost at eye-level, then it makes the place look crowded in an unpleasant way. They really should take it on as a store-within-a-store approach if they want to keep it that size or switch to malls and strip malls with a focused store that deals in media and one that deals in everything else.
3.) Best buy as a whole is purchasing as much as newegg and probably more. The problem for them is it's spread out too thin and eats up precious retail space. I'm in agreement though on narrowing the selection to a 3-5 in each size/variety of item and accept the Amazon/Newegg price as the real floor.
4.) Yes. No disagreement. Accessories actually should be dirt cheap so you can pickup sales. 10 $35 HDMI cables a week is fine but imagine selling 500 a week at 5-10 bucks a pop. Their size and profitability along with the word of mouth value would drive up sales alone on those. As for service plans, I say make them standard on large item purchases like TVs and large appliances along with laptops as a way of eating into the newegg/amazon advantage. The loss in repairs will be overtaken by the piece of mind sales.
5.) Yes. Complete agreement. Color is the biggest enemy of cheap speedy production. Though I would say it is honestly the biggest attractor in a market where everybody sells the same thing. If Best buy could get the major manufacturers and especially the game console manufacturers to make Best Buy-exclusive colors their sales would pick up immediately. A white PS3 or a Blue Xbox 360 would sell like hot cakes in a crowded market place.
I'm adding in...
6.) Fix your website. I position Newegg.com as the gold standard of website design for being minimalistic yet wildly powerful for searching through by requiring products to answer simple questions most people would ask. Amazon's website is about as good as Best Buy's but because they're cheaper people will slog through it. If Best Buy fixed their website to be on-par with Newegg with Amazon prices they could win back a chunk of the internet sales.
Are you implying that Apple users are more tech savvy or that somehow people who purchase an Android phone only know how to text and phone people? The last feature phone I owned was a Sidekick XL so it has been a little while and I know feature phones can now access basic email but really, you're arguing that the people who are paying 20+ USD a month and NEVER uses the internet? Yeah, I don't think so. Apple does firmly have the lead in sales of apps but I would argue that Android because it has a larger hobbyist base they tend to introduce apps that don't cost anything rather than.99 cent apps. I could be wrong, it is merely anecdotal.
Also to the AC - normally "market share" is defined as the share of the market they own or have installed into. If it's a quarterly report of sales they'll say quarterly market share. In other words the numbers day to day are fine but the numbers overall are more indicative of the health or strength of a brand/OS.
Google makes money off of shopping/commercial/industrial/business searches. Intellectual searches don't do much. As it stands facebook is a great place for friends to ask friends about things locally or otherwise form word of mouth. Facebook advertising is weak and largely falls into the "nobody looks at it" range as does most of google web ads. Instead the search industry isn't necessarily growing but nobody is going "mmh...I'm looking for X" I better go to facebook, no they're going to google it still or perhaps bing it at worst. Facebook/twitter/whatever is here to stay but it isn't going to somehow supplant the idea of how we search for things on the internet. Facebook is an intranet of people who can interact as a community, it doesn't supplant a true search for outside information.
. ..That was sales not actual devices active. In other words because a huge number of people updated their iPhone in that time period they sold more than Android did. It didn't change the US market share makeup. Apple is still hovering around 30% and Android around 50%.
To be fair if you look at AT&T and Sprint their profitability has taken a nose dive by carrying the iPhone and while I don't begrudge anyone for it I do recognize the reality is that those who opt to own Android or Windows Mobile or Blackberries are paying substantially more to off-set the huge price that Apple demands for their handsets. It's a complicated business practice and the only victor is Apple sadly. This is a form of corporate welfare where all customers are forced to subsidize a relatively small portion of the market because of their buying habits (and yes, barring variances Apple makes up roughly 30% of any given carrier's makeup so they are a minority).
As to those who think Apple would make more money selling handsets directly that worked on any network it is pure disillusion. Apple is able to sell the iPhone strictly because the carriers are paying an obnoxious sum up front to guarantee so many are manufactured and then sold. If consumers were forced to purchase the phones independently of the carrier Apple's share of the market would take a nose dive as Android and Windows Mobile would rush into that advertisement space and push by the carriers.
Beat me to it. Former is a keyword here. Google is going to lose on some restaurant searches and other social questions but really...their volume isn't going to go down in a realistic way.
I hate to break it to you but unless you mean "family" as in your spouse and children then it's time to put on your big person pants and move away to scary new place. With a degree in CS you should have little problem finding a solid job in any of those cities, spending your free time coding away on a decent indie game or working in a group on a mega-mod or (crazy as it sounds) go apply to a game developer. Blizzard actually lists their job openings and so do most. If you're heart is set on something you're going to do it if it isn't completely unreasonable. I chose to be a professor, that means I had to leave behind my friends and family and move to a new city to teach. It's just part of life. It's part of drive, really.
Woo! Slashdot bingo, somebody brought up how upgradability has to fall within the narrow margins of corporations view of "absolute profit!" I'm a great lover of socialist ideals but even I need step back and go "really? We're arguing over upgradability as a profitable idea?" If anything the vast majority of add-on attempts are done way too late into a product's cycle when it will never sell as it looks like a weak attempt to wring profit out of a dying platform while the next thing is coming shortly there after. If we consider accessories that weren't released at or soon after original launch then we've had tons of huge upgrades on these consoles. The Kinect and PS3 Move both jump at me, they expand user ability dramatically (and I understand it was in response to the Wii) and were massive upgrades to the console, if I understand the Kinect correctly it is in fact almost an independent system that routes into the Xbox 360 and hence why it sells for $199 rather than a meager $49 or so if it was just a camera lens and some optic equipment.
Pure upgradability will never be a realistic option on consoles and barring ARM getting incredibly powerful with a baseline so sky-high that even the crappiest phone will blast away at high-end computer graphics consoles are here to stay for at least another generation or two.
Slashdot Mirror
Anecdotal poster is anecdotal.
Reliability ratings are based on a huge sample size of any given vehicle. Statistically if you build enough cars some are bound to be lemons (and hence why we have lemon laws). So one person with a bad Pontiac doesn't mean all Pontiacs are bad. Also what Pontiac did you buy and why did you buy one when you knew they were shutting down that brand? Sounds like sour grapes on what you thought was going to be a knock-out deal.
On topic though, when I was growing up in the 90's I saw stranded cars all the time, broken down on the highway and byways. Now in the last 5-6 years I see one maybe once a week. It's not statistical, just anecdotal, but as a general sampling it does seem to support that cars break less often compared to their older designed counterparts.
Hydroelectric on a large scale is maxed out. We have many small scale choices to use. Hydrogen is our greatest future asset in storing power from both the sun and wind. Ultimately I look at the reality of our lives requiring far less power as the way out of a great deal of this issue. In the past 5 years has been the first time in history electrical consumption went down on average as CFLs took over for regular incandescent light bulbs. With power savings occurring in each new device we buy for mobility and access we get closer to a much lower consumption overall.
As for transportation, the future is in rail for large-scale movement with only the last miles done by trucks. Electric railways are incredibly cheap to operate and cost pennies on the dollar versus diesel trucks. The problem is the infrastructure isn't there but will be by the end of our lives. If anything I stand by the reality that our system will change but won't collapse. We're a tough species and the chance to overcome this will be our greatest achievement to date.
The problem isn't the cost of a barrel of veg oil vs. a barrel of crude, the issue is production to run things. Ultimately we'll need to balance our energy needs between the Big 4 (Wind, Solar, Hydroelectric, and Hydrogen). Biofuels are great but fall short of being able to cover the loss of oil as an energy source. Course I also support the Big 4 as a major turning point for humanity and wish for it to come sooner. It will be a great source for transportation though. I could totally see most cars in the future being equipped with small biofuel tanks (say 1-3 gallons) that would extend the range infinitely but would charge up using electricity from the Big 4 for most of their power.
This is silly to believe that. The Bell system has been lazy in the US for almost 80 years and yet they still control the vast majority of telephony services. Same can be said for the cellular networks, largely indifferent to developments and only when pressured by outsiders do they upgrade (think LTE). Laziness has everything to do with having a stranglehold on the market place. As it stands somewhere in the neighborhood of 90% of all CPUs are bought by middle-companies that put them into devices and computers for the public. So if you can keep those middle-companies buying only from you you can exclude innovative new products no matter how good they are long enough to copy them and implement them.
It's exactly what happened to AMD and fundamentally what will happen to ARM's producers once Intel gets their ARM production up and running. 10 years from now we'll most likely be wondering why nobody is using Tegra 10 or 11 and how most processors are now Intel.
. . .If you sell 80% of the market share and you do so by making sure the big 3 that sell 70% of all computers only use your CPU you can have the best CPUs because you're in the drivers seat of the market and have the excess money. I fail to see how people who deem themselves intelligent miss how A + B = C in this situation.
Marketshare "discounts" + Monopolistic control of the Big 3 = More money than anybody else to develop better chips. It's not rocket science. Intel developed very large fabs and managed to drive out everybody else who made microprocessors but AMD. Now there are a few independent Fabs making ARM stuff but that is still dwarfed by Intel's domination of the x86 market.
3/4ths of a billion dollar was their operating profit. I'm not sure how you quantify that as a discount. That would mean essentially Dell was losing money on every chip sold prior to that quarter. So lets not beat around the bush, Intel had the money and willpower to forcibly squeeze AMD out of the truly lucrative markets.
For the record though: Intel CPUs are faster but in every day business use AMD chips were probably a much better buy for office machines. In fact if you look at the cheap CPUs for the last 5 years AMD prices (at market) are substantially lower for business-level machines so really the idea that Intel CPUs are faster is true but false in the sense of their quality vs. cost analysis. In other words, Dell, IBM, and HP had no reason to keep buying Intel CPUs for their business lines except for the fact that Intel was cutting them deals where Intel made pennies on the dollar or lost money but made up for it in volume sales of more expensive chips in the other consumer lines.
Course you're not a sheep. You would never work for a salary, you demand a fair wage! *shakes fist* oh wait, you're just a sheep without a contract to protect them. So when the next sheep comes along who's willing to work for slightly less it will end in a race to the bottom. Ultimately this argument will go nowhere because you're anecdotal position will never concede failure and your moral superiority complex will refuse to let you recognize we're all in this together rather than in some sort of race to wealth.
Economics of scale only work in physical manufacturing and has nothing to do with regulation. You can't compare the two. Regulations are designed when effective to be used as a way to curb negative behavior or maintain a quality of product that would otherwise remain stagnant or drop. Subsidies for start-up industries makes the industry affordable until economics of scale start taking effect. To make a specific example in this case is your local power company is either a privately held but publicly regulated firm or a public utility that runs the power grid. They build new plants and maintain lines at a certain cost but their relatively huge monopolized area allows them to make a constant profit even as they incur costs. Solyndra was a manufacturer that had to build panels and sell them individually then wait decades for their buyers to recoup their value. The problem ended up being that the government chose a poor company but if it had picked a different company and was successful nobody would talk about it. Everyday they pick companies to get government contracts, loans, and subsidies. They aren't picked based on some personal affinity (for the most part) but to argue there is a social agenda behind it is silly. To argue the solar panel industry will spring up overnight is also ludicrous. As stated they are a large upfront cost that makes selling them difficult to a cash-strapped public. If anything Pres. Obama did give loans through his administration to maintain his promise of having a US-based solar panel industry which is good. China is already developing them and selling them to themselves because their government is buying them in vast quantities to make them work.
You seriously live in some kind of weird entrepreneurial bubble. The constitution is a loose association governing how government should be formed. It isn't the end-all-be-all of society so stop trying to shove it in everybody's face. When they wrote it only white landowners could vote. As the voting limitations faded our society has become more egalitarian. But by definition our society is built to have winners and losers. The losers are those who live in poverty or in near-poverty status. You're making this argument too personal, defending the rich is pointless, I don't hate the rich, I have no personal feelings towards them one way or the other. I just don't wish to have to fight them economically when they have all the tanks and guns metaphorically.
Next time you go apply for a job a wealthy capitalist has defined your salary. The market doesn't define much, it's an illusion to avoid the reality that people are manipulating the world around you. But the greater point is here that the wealthy can afford to pay more back into the system which is the real point. They have garnered the most success from the system and need to return a greater portion. Their companies rose on the back of public education, public utilities, public regulation that kept others from simply copying their work or running them out using unfair business practices. Just as you tell yourself you work harder to be more successful you ignore the reality that unless you're working more paid hours than the average American you're benefiting from the government as part of the citizenry.
PS: The government has helped you more than anything else in this society. If you want a government to truly impede you move to Russia or China.
Got any data to back that up?
Car industry, Steel industry, Coal industry, Banking Industry. Innovation from a start-up perspective dried up as the stabilization of the system occurred. I would suggest you just read some damned economics books if you're going to pull this kind of crap.
Right wing talking point is talking...The US is NOTHING like Greece structurally. Greece is a limited agrarian exporter that is being held hostage and forced to do Austrian economics by....GERMANY! The biggest socialist economy on the planet that continually protects its own interest at the harm of Europe in general. Really our social safety net is in tatters after 30 years of economic suicide by the so-called "personal responsibility" party.
I'm all for personal responsibility as soon as the wealthy give up their vast fortunes and start over with me. Until then I support the government leveling the playing field to prevent the wealthy from running roughshod over me. Personal responsibility only gets me so far when the poverty in our country is double that of others in our socio-economic class and the protestant work ethic is bandied about as if it were ever a good thing. Calvinists brought it over to justify why some were superior to others in life. Originally it was god's graces, then it became hard work, now we call it personal responsibility. In the end the argument boils down to luck for the most part.
No one is controlling women. They are just as free as men to fuck at will....with our without shame.
But why the fuck should someone pay for them to do so? If they want birth control, they are just as free now to get it as before....why should other Joe/Jane Q. citizens have to pay to subsidize them fucking? Something that I think everyone will agree upon...is a decision that is up to the individual to make.
Since when is birth control a fucking right??
Since women have to carry the baby. Why do people weirdly assume that sex is an equal-sided equation? Men insert into women and once the event is over if certain measures aren't taken women become pregnant a majority of the time. Thus preventing women from getting birth-control limits the amount of sex that can be had for women due to the risk of pregnancy versus men who can keep going willy-nilly until court cases catch up to them with paternity.
As for the actual issue at hand in this current setup is that religious organizations (such as private religious schools and hospitals) along with employers in general want to be able to morally justify their prohibiting of birth control on their insurances. The public isn't paying for birth control in this scenario and your line of logic could justify life saving treatment, public schooling, and to be on topic: research grants. But the reality is as a society we agree to do certain things for each other no matter what we personally think because we agree to live in this society.
I would have this long drawn out debate with you but let me just point out that every administration picks corporations to back instead of simply doing it themselves. When these companies fail the government usually eats the bill and quietly moves on. This is a case where the Republicans are using their clout with people who are of low intelligence or generally cynical to pull a political stunt over what is essentially a run of the mill issue. Ron Paul can complain loudly about "picking winners and losers" but that's how the world works, we can't just dump cash into a general industry and we can't expect the market to change anything since fundamentally once a market has stabilized or is monopolized it won't innovate much.
I don't blame the public though. Why should they pay a 10% premium to have it today? I'm a major supporter of a more equitable system and charging sales tax is such a red herring. Best Buy doesn't want to admit that their sales network costs them extra money that Amazon doesn't have to deal with. The problem now is they need to figure out how to be competitive at Amazon prices (which means taking a substantial loss in profits but still a worthwhile business model). In the end the only answer for Best Buy is to just lower the prices and start bringing in special colors/limited editions. All the other issues are secondary to those.
I haven't grilled him on it really, he's so overqualified as a salesman with his MA in health-based Information systems that I marvel he still works there. But next time I see him now I will ask him exactly how his pay is structured. We discuss Best Buy problems fairly often when we hang out so I don't necessarily understand all the intricacies but I see the overall problem and it is one faced by most Big-Box-Stores. The online world is breaking their business model and profit scale. Eventually though it will reach equilibrium as people demand same-day purchases and showrooms to a certain extent.
Khan Academy is a tool of very wealthy people who understand very little about education. It's telling that their leadership is almost exclusively stem types with nary a psychologist in sight. I wish him luck but the education system doesn't need his kind of overhaul in the western world.
I have a friend who works there right now and he gets an hourly salary plus commission for working in computers. I'm not sure if it's a region-by-region deal but I do know he makes commission.
1.) Best buy like most retailers pay piss poor, even after commission. Truly intelligent sales personal move up to management or into higher margin businesses (automotive/B2B).
2.) Most Best Buys I do agree are over sized but unless they're paying high rent/utilities/property tax size isn't an issue so much as utilization. They've always had a problem with low shelving, low shelves make a place seem vast except when you put it almost at eye-level, then it makes the place look crowded in an unpleasant way. They really should take it on as a store-within-a-store approach if they want to keep it that size or switch to malls and strip malls with a focused store that deals in media and one that deals in everything else.
3.) Best buy as a whole is purchasing as much as newegg and probably more. The problem for them is it's spread out too thin and eats up precious retail space. I'm in agreement though on narrowing the selection to a 3-5 in each size/variety of item and accept the Amazon/Newegg price as the real floor.
4.) Yes. No disagreement. Accessories actually should be dirt cheap so you can pickup sales. 10 $35 HDMI cables a week is fine but imagine selling 500 a week at 5-10 bucks a pop. Their size and profitability along with the word of mouth value would drive up sales alone on those. As for service plans, I say make them standard on large item purchases like TVs and large appliances along with laptops as a way of eating into the newegg/amazon advantage. The loss in repairs will be overtaken by the piece of mind sales.
5.) Yes. Complete agreement. Color is the biggest enemy of cheap speedy production. Though I would say it is honestly the biggest attractor in a market where everybody sells the same thing. If Best buy could get the major manufacturers and especially the game console manufacturers to make Best Buy-exclusive colors their sales would pick up immediately. A white PS3 or a Blue Xbox 360 would sell like hot cakes in a crowded market place.
I'm adding in...
6.) Fix your website. I position Newegg.com as the gold standard of website design for being minimalistic yet wildly powerful for searching through by requiring products to answer simple questions most people would ask. Amazon's website is about as good as Best Buy's but because they're cheaper people will slog through it. If Best Buy fixed their website to be on-par with Newegg with Amazon prices they could win back a chunk of the internet sales.
Are you implying that Apple users are more tech savvy or that somehow people who purchase an Android phone only know how to text and phone people? The last feature phone I owned was a Sidekick XL so it has been a little while and I know feature phones can now access basic email but really, you're arguing that the people who are paying 20+ USD a month and NEVER uses the internet? Yeah, I don't think so. Apple does firmly have the lead in sales of apps but I would argue that Android because it has a larger hobbyist base they tend to introduce apps that don't cost anything rather than .99 cent apps. I could be wrong, it is merely anecdotal.
Also to the AC - normally "market share" is defined as the share of the market they own or have installed into. If it's a quarterly report of sales they'll say quarterly market share. In other words the numbers day to day are fine but the numbers overall are more indicative of the health or strength of a brand/OS.
Google makes money off of shopping/commercial/industrial/business searches. Intellectual searches don't do much. As it stands facebook is a great place for friends to ask friends about things locally or otherwise form word of mouth. Facebook advertising is weak and largely falls into the "nobody looks at it" range as does most of google web ads. Instead the search industry isn't necessarily growing but nobody is going "mmh...I'm looking for X" I better go to facebook, no they're going to google it still or perhaps bing it at worst. Facebook/twitter/whatever is here to stay but it isn't going to somehow supplant the idea of how we search for things on the internet. Facebook is an intranet of people who can interact as a community, it doesn't supplant a true search for outside information.
. . .That was sales not actual devices active. In other words because a huge number of people updated their iPhone in that time period they sold more than Android did. It didn't change the US market share makeup. Apple is still hovering around 30% and Android around 50%.
To be fair if you look at AT&T and Sprint their profitability has taken a nose dive by carrying the iPhone and while I don't begrudge anyone for it I do recognize the reality is that those who opt to own Android or Windows Mobile or Blackberries are paying substantially more to off-set the huge price that Apple demands for their handsets. It's a complicated business practice and the only victor is Apple sadly. This is a form of corporate welfare where all customers are forced to subsidize a relatively small portion of the market because of their buying habits (and yes, barring variances Apple makes up roughly 30% of any given carrier's makeup so they are a minority).
As to those who think Apple would make more money selling handsets directly that worked on any network it is pure disillusion. Apple is able to sell the iPhone strictly because the carriers are paying an obnoxious sum up front to guarantee so many are manufactured and then sold. If consumers were forced to purchase the phones independently of the carrier Apple's share of the market would take a nose dive as Android and Windows Mobile would rush into that advertisement space and push by the carriers.
Beat me to it. Former is a keyword here. Google is going to lose on some restaurant searches and other social questions but really...their volume isn't going to go down in a realistic way.
I hate to break it to you but unless you mean "family" as in your spouse and children then it's time to put on your big person pants and move away to scary new place. With a degree in CS you should have little problem finding a solid job in any of those cities, spending your free time coding away on a decent indie game or working in a group on a mega-mod or (crazy as it sounds) go apply to a game developer. Blizzard actually lists their job openings and so do most. If you're heart is set on something you're going to do it if it isn't completely unreasonable. I chose to be a professor, that means I had to leave behind my friends and family and move to a new city to teach. It's just part of life. It's part of drive, really.
Woo! Slashdot bingo, somebody brought up how upgradability has to fall within the narrow margins of corporations view of "absolute profit!" I'm a great lover of socialist ideals but even I need step back and go "really? We're arguing over upgradability as a profitable idea?" If anything the vast majority of add-on attempts are done way too late into a product's cycle when it will never sell as it looks like a weak attempt to wring profit out of a dying platform while the next thing is coming shortly there after. If we consider accessories that weren't released at or soon after original launch then we've had tons of huge upgrades on these consoles. The Kinect and PS3 Move both jump at me, they expand user ability dramatically (and I understand it was in response to the Wii) and were massive upgrades to the console, if I understand the Kinect correctly it is in fact almost an independent system that routes into the Xbox 360 and hence why it sells for $199 rather than a meager $49 or so if it was just a camera lens and some optic equipment.
Pure upgradability will never be a realistic option on consoles and barring ARM getting incredibly powerful with a baseline so sky-high that even the crappiest phone will blast away at high-end computer graphics consoles are here to stay for at least another generation or two.