Actually, the land a house sits on goes up because land is a scarce item (there is a finite amount of it and a largely infinite number of uses for it).
In most parts of the world land is not really scarce, only in certain locations (such as California and Hawaii) where weather, business, and local conditions push up demand beyond supply.
Cash in the bank IS sitting idle. There is no way else to describe that. However, just because it is sitting idle doesn't mean it's wrong, either.
So you are now using your cash, it is no longer sitting idle, you are purchasing gear cheap. You happen to have a different strategy, but you are doing the exact same thing the other guy is describing except you aren't using debt to power your business.
PS, he's not right, either, there are companies out there, publicly held, without debt. Apple comes to mind. I'm sure Microsoft and Google are also (largely) debt free. You know, the hugely successful companies despite the downturn?
I am not an economist but I have owned a couple businesses and consider myself a reasonably practical person.
I have always believed that the vast majority of today's financial instruments have been invented out of thin air for no reason other than to ultimately ensure the employment of bankers and brokers.
Actually, probably not. I suspect (I'm a programmer by nature, so my experience with code may apply here) it's more of each institution and "network" offering redundant services until multiple institutions mature to the point where these services collide and become confusing.
For example, lots of people have a checking account, savings account, credit card, personal line of credit, HELOC, brokerage account, and more.
That wasn't true one generation ago. My parents had only a checking acount, savings account, and credit card.
I see absolutely no reason why a single account could not offer all those features.
With the advent of computers and networks, now it is possible. But 20 years ago? Not possible.
How would a bank know how much equity you had in your house? How would your credit card company know how much you had in the bank? How would your mortgage company know what your investment amount was?
Today, you actually have one company that handles all of it (and in cases where they don't, they can still trade information). So now I can have a HELOC, personal line of credit, credit card, savings account, etc, all tied together, in that credit from one reduces the amount of credit available on another, and all paid from the same account.
The only reason you "need" all that is because the banks created all these funny rules so that they could introduce more and more products and services.
In this case I actually disagree. Different people have different had different "collateral", so different kinds of credit were available to them. That explains why different products exist. Someone with a house vs someone with a strong credit rating vs someone who had lots of money all had access to different products. Now a single person has access to all of them.
This is done so they can charge you more for each of those things, and also to differentiate them from their competitors.
Besides consumer banking, can somebody explain to me why we NEED "commercial paper"? Yes, I've read the wikipedia page and I know how it's used, but I don't understand why it's needed. If you can't make payroll then you're pulling from your credit one way or another - why do we need separate instruments for a 2 week loan versus a longer term loan, or a credit card, or whatever?
As before, commercial paper was "invented" before credit cards (or business lines of credit or whatever) existed. It satisfied a market need that probably doesn't exist today.
And don't even get me started on real estate lending...
It's like freaking starbucks - you can get your banking services just as special as an upside-down triple no foam half calf non fat 160 degree two splenda mocha. But it's one thing for a coffee company to cater to every individual snowflake's desire, and quite another IMHO for something as important as our financial system to become as absurdly complex and fragile as it is.
It's this statement that brought me to this answer. Software is flexible (soft), so it can be molded quite easily to different needs according to different usages. The problem is that after four versions needs have evolved, but the original code has not, so now you have something complex and fragile that was originally quite simple and straightforward.
As for the people who are really benefitting from all this complexity - well, it's only during recession that we all collectively take a good hard look at who's making a contribution to society and who isn't.
My daughter loves pink and Hello Kitty, but she loves cars and train sets too. I think it's more about not restricting her access to boys toys than anything else.
My mother in law was kind of upset when I bought her a train table... she thought I was pushing my toys onto her!
Why? What business model would you suggest they follow?
It's not like they can pull a Microsoft and require a license fee for every single phone shipped by AT&T and all their other iPhone vendors (that is what got Microsoft their millions from the PC manufacturers).
Can you name another vendor that sells hardware that monetizes their software, and manages to grow handsomely?
Sun isn't it, they give away their OS that isn't tied to their hardware AND they happen to be going down.
IBM isn't it, they sold their hardware PC divisions, and their computing divisions they do have they aren't monetizing their OS (AIX).
HP isn't it either; HPUX isn't "monetized".
Even Microsoft doesn't do it (for their Zune, their XBox, and XBox 360).
The closest I can think of is Android, but that's still "free", with the monetization coming in from advertising dollars as more handsets connect to the net.
I'm sorry, I should have been more clear, I thought it obvious since we were talking about spirit, soul, and humans.
It's not life that might be more than a chemical process, it's consciousness that might be more than a chemical process, more than an emergent behavior of a collection of cells.
If consciousness is merely an emergent behavior, then a sufficiently complex computer will eventually become conscious too. That's exciting; but there is still reason to believe (what with higher multiple dimensions and all), that there are physical processes we do not yet know of or understand.
Yes, I understand God of the gaps, but call it a grasped straw for someone who just lost his dad.
I don't think it counts as love when it's dark and twisted. I think it's plenty of other things (obsession, desire, jealousy, etc, but not love.
To be fair, we need to agree to a definition of love to talk about it intelligently, and from all I can tell love is an extension to others the feeling of self valuation one affords the self.
In other words, the generosity and acceptance you give yourself is "love" when you give it to someone else.
Really? It sounds more like the "No true vegetarian eats mean" statement to me.
Love, if defined as wholesome and good, cannot be love if it is negative and destructive.
Someone may call it love as much as they want, but if everyone agrees that love is not negative and destructive then the person who is being negative and destructive is only misleading themselves.
There are some theories that say time DOESN'T end after the universe, too. Or rather, our current view of the universe is the wrong perspective.
And by saying "if there is a vital life force", I do not mean to create some kind of circular logic. I am merely saying I don't know if there is or isn't, the same way you can say, "If there is a Higgs boson", "If there is a gravitron", "If there is a tachyon"... there are theories that propose the existence of multiple higher dimensions, etc, that cannot yet be proven (or disproven), so we can still say, "If there exist..."
So the point is life may be more than just a complex chemical process, and we can say that without being unscientific because right now we actually can't define life, we can only categorize it. Which is about where we were a couple hundred years ago with chemistry, biology, and astronomy.
You also misunderstand when I mention branes and quantum mechanics.
Branes, string theory, and quantum mechanics might explain an afterlife (or rather, a continuous spectrum of life that overlaps our current lifespan).
1) Except for "conservation of energy". If there is a vital life force and if there does exist higher dimensions than our 3/4, there really is a possibility that our soul exists independently of our bodies and only intermingle briefly for the term of our existence.
2) The fact that life exists leads us to believe in an afterlife. Like postulating, what exists after the universe ends? Most likely, the universe exists after the universe ends, it just happens to have a different formulation.
3) No it doesn't. Not if you study branes and higher dimensions, or quantum mechanics and multiverses!
It sounds like you are describing famous foss programs like GIMP, Emacs, OpenOffice, KDE, Mozilla, and GNOME. I think what is apparent is that foss is just a development model, and not that different than closed source, just more distributed.
Um, those numbers include non-smartphones. If you are including only smartphones (which is more reasonable as I think the market for apps is larger on smartphones), you get: http://www.canalys.com/pr/2008/r2008112.htm
Nokia 46.6% Apple 17.3% RIM 15.2% Microsoft 13.6%
MIDP may still be the biggest market, now, but by this time next year if Apple continues to grow and expand aggressively they will probably be the bigger market.
That only matters if the sum of all Android phones outnumbers the iPhone.
If they don't outnumber the iPhone, it will be like comparing the multitude of P4S devices vs the iPod. Proprietary is also a hard term to swallow when the SDK is actually available to download from anywhere to anyone.
Except, unlike a Nigerian scam, you CAN make money in the stock market or a casino. In a casino the odds are defined such that you will likely lose half of anything you bet. In the stock market the odds are defined such that you will likely see a modest 8% gain per year if you play the market for 10 years straight without investing more money into it.
Slashdot Mirror
Easy. QU is the normal english usage for 99.99% of the Q words.
Therefore, querty.
Actually, the land a house sits on goes up because land is a scarce item (there is a finite amount of it and a largely infinite number of uses for it).
In most parts of the world land is not really scarce, only in certain locations (such as California and Hawaii) where weather, business, and local conditions push up demand beyond supply.
How can he make zero sense?
Cash in the bank IS sitting idle. There is no way else to describe that. However, just because it is sitting idle doesn't mean it's wrong, either.
So you are now using your cash, it is no longer sitting idle, you are purchasing gear cheap. You happen to have a different strategy, but you are doing the exact same thing the other guy is describing except you aren't using debt to power your business.
PS, he's not right, either, there are companies out there, publicly held, without debt. Apple comes to mind. I'm sure Microsoft and Google are also (largely) debt free. You know, the hugely successful companies despite the downturn?
I am not an economist but I have owned a couple businesses and consider myself a reasonably practical person.
I have always believed that the vast majority of today's financial instruments have been invented out of thin air for no reason other than to ultimately ensure the employment of bankers and brokers.
Actually, probably not. I suspect (I'm a programmer by nature, so my experience with code may apply here) it's more of each institution and "network" offering redundant services until multiple institutions mature to the point where these services collide and become confusing.
For example, lots of people have a checking account, savings account, credit card, personal line of credit, HELOC, brokerage account, and more.
That wasn't true one generation ago. My parents had only a checking acount, savings account, and credit card.
I see absolutely no reason why a single account could not offer all those features.
With the advent of computers and networks, now it is possible. But 20 years ago? Not possible.
How would a bank know how much equity you had in your house? How would your credit card company know how much you had in the bank? How would your mortgage company know what your investment amount was?
Today, you actually have one company that handles all of it (and in cases where they don't, they can still trade information). So now I can have a HELOC, personal line of credit, credit card, savings account, etc, all tied together, in that credit from one reduces the amount of credit available on another, and all paid from the same account.
The only reason you "need" all that is because the banks created all these funny rules so that they could introduce more and more products and services.
In this case I actually disagree. Different people have different had different "collateral", so different kinds of credit were available to them. That explains why different products exist. Someone with a house vs someone with a strong credit rating vs someone who had lots of money all had access to different products. Now a single person has access to all of them.
This is done so they can charge you more for each of those things, and also to differentiate them from their competitors.
Besides consumer banking, can somebody explain to me why we NEED "commercial paper"? Yes, I've read the wikipedia page and I know how it's used, but I don't understand why it's needed. If you can't make payroll then you're pulling from your credit one way or another - why do we need separate instruments for a 2 week loan versus a longer term loan, or a credit card, or whatever?
As before, commercial paper was "invented" before credit cards (or business lines of credit or whatever) existed. It satisfied a market need that probably doesn't exist today.
And don't even get me started on real estate lending...
It's like freaking starbucks - you can get your banking services just as special as an upside-down triple no foam half calf non fat 160 degree two splenda mocha. But it's one thing for a coffee company to cater to every individual snowflake's desire, and quite another IMHO for something as important as our financial system to become as absurdly complex and fragile as it is.
It's this statement that brought me to this answer. Software is flexible (soft), so it can be molded quite easily to different needs according to different usages. The problem is that after four versions needs have evolved, but the original code has not, so now you have something complex and fragile that was originally quite simple and straightforward.
As for the people who are really benefitting from all this complexity - well, it's only during recession that we all collectively take a good hard look at who's making a contribution to society and who isn't.
So like software, it's only
What English are you using? "Tops" is a verb that means "bests" or "surpasses".
And in this case, the usage is perfect. The iPhone surpasses Windows Mobile Share; or, in other words, "tops".
Not "ip0wn3d"?
Yes, but if you go back 10 years? They've lost 5% of the market and something like 35% in MSFT where AAPL is up over 1000%.
That's the real problem.
My daughter loves pink and Hello Kitty, but she loves cars and train sets too. I think it's more about not restricting her access to boys toys than anything else.
My mother in law was kind of upset when I bought her a train table... she thought I was pushing my toys onto her!
I think your parents were the true heroes here. Anything else is sort of lame. Buy what works well that you can afford. Anything else is just pride.
I fail to see the connection to your shopping habits and Steve Jobs's personality.
Is there some kind of grudge where if someone who acts like a dick ever gets associated with a product, you will never buy it?
Cause that rules out Windows and all Microsoft products, most Chinese made products, most Korean made products, most Japanese products, etc.
Why? What business model would you suggest they follow?
It's not like they can pull a Microsoft and require a license fee for every single phone shipped by AT&T and all their other iPhone vendors (that is what got Microsoft their millions from the PC manufacturers).
Can you name another vendor that sells hardware that monetizes their software, and manages to grow handsomely?
Sun isn't it, they give away their OS that isn't tied to their hardware AND they happen to be going down.
IBM isn't it, they sold their hardware PC divisions, and their computing divisions they do have they aren't monetizing their OS (AIX).
HP isn't it either; HPUX isn't "monetized".
Even Microsoft doesn't do it (for their Zune, their XBox, and XBox 360).
The closest I can think of is Android, but that's still "free", with the monetization coming in from advertising dollars as more handsets connect to the net.
So evolution isn't a lie?
Um, I can do all of that now, without PsyStar.
Bought a game that said it was two player; game is not two player, returned it saying the box-art and instructions are wrong, got my money back.
I also get to run the software I bought on anything I like. It's not like Apple or Microsoft walk into my house when I open up OS X or Word.
And woo, I can even sell my box copies. You know, the same way used software gets sold or used games or used DVDs!
I'm sorry, I should have been more clear, I thought it obvious since we were talking about spirit, soul, and humans.
It's not life that might be more than a chemical process, it's consciousness that might be more than a chemical process, more than an emergent behavior of a collection of cells.
If consciousness is merely an emergent behavior, then a sufficiently complex computer will eventually become conscious too. That's exciting; but there is still reason to believe (what with higher multiple dimensions and all), that there are physical processes we do not yet know of or understand.
Yes, I understand God of the gaps, but call it a grasped straw for someone who just lost his dad.
I don't think it counts as love when it's dark and twisted. I think it's plenty of other things (obsession, desire, jealousy, etc, but not love.
To be fair, we need to agree to a definition of love to talk about it intelligently, and from all I can tell love is an extension to others the feeling of self valuation one affords the self.
In other words, the generosity and acceptance you give yourself is "love" when you give it to someone else.
Really? It sounds more like the "No true vegetarian eats mean" statement to me.
Love, if defined as wholesome and good, cannot be love if it is negative and destructive.
Someone may call it love as much as they want, but if everyone agrees that love is not negative and destructive then the person who is being negative and destructive is only misleading themselves.
There are some theories that say time DOESN'T end after the universe, too. Or rather, our current view of the universe is the wrong perspective.
And by saying "if there is a vital life force", I do not mean to create some kind of circular logic. I am merely saying I don't know if there is or isn't, the same way you can say, "If there is a Higgs boson", "If there is a gravitron", "If there is a tachyon"... there are theories that propose the existence of multiple higher dimensions, etc, that cannot yet be proven (or disproven), so we can still say, "If there exist..."
So the point is life may be more than just a complex chemical process, and we can say that without being unscientific because right now we actually can't define life, we can only categorize it. Which is about where we were a couple hundred years ago with chemistry, biology, and astronomy.
You also misunderstand when I mention branes and quantum mechanics.
Branes, string theory, and quantum mechanics might explain an afterlife (or rather, a continuous spectrum of life that overlaps our current lifespan).
1) Except for "conservation of energy". If there is a vital life force and if there does exist higher dimensions than our 3/4, there really is a possibility that our soul exists independently of our bodies and only intermingle briefly for the term of our existence.
2) The fact that life exists leads us to believe in an afterlife. Like postulating, what exists after the universe ends? Most likely, the universe exists after the universe ends, it just happens to have a different formulation.
3) No it doesn't. Not if you study branes and higher dimensions, or quantum mechanics and multiverses!
It sounds like you are describing famous foss programs like GIMP, Emacs, OpenOffice, KDE, Mozilla, and GNOME. I think what is apparent is that foss is just a development model, and not that different than closed source, just more distributed.
300m Linux devices with web browsers? That is the definition this statistic relies on.
Um, iPhones sold about 11m now, worldwide, which would help push the EEPC effect down.
On top of that, Mac sales are also about 10m, worldwide.
So even if Linux is growing, Mac/iPhone is growing faster.
It's too late. Apple is already shipping laptops and desktops with the iPhone OS.
Um, those numbers include non-smartphones. If you are including only smartphones (which is more reasonable as I think the market for apps is larger on smartphones), you get:
http://www.canalys.com/pr/2008/r2008112.htm
Nokia 46.6%
Apple 17.3%
RIM 15.2%
Microsoft 13.6%
MIDP may still be the biggest market, now, but by this time next year if Apple continues to grow and expand aggressively they will probably be the bigger market.
That only matters if the sum of all Android phones outnumbers the iPhone.
If they don't outnumber the iPhone, it will be like comparing the multitude of P4S devices vs the iPod. Proprietary is also a hard term to swallow when the SDK is actually available to download from anywhere to anyone.
Except, unlike a Nigerian scam, you CAN make money in the stock market or a casino. In a casino the odds are defined such that you will likely lose half of anything you bet. In the stock market the odds are defined such that you will likely see a modest 8% gain per year if you play the market for 10 years straight without investing more money into it.