The problem isn't just (or necessarily) a lack of common sense, it can also be cost. Shooting ranges aren't cheap, especially the indoor ones, and they can also be crowded, with a waiting period. People wanting to go shooting cheaply usually try to find free outdoor places like this for this very reason. There might also not be very many of them available nearby, especially in rural areas.
Again, cost IS a big problem. It costs a lot to excavate earth (a lot more than to just pour a slab right on top of the ground). We actually have a very, very tiny number of houses here in Arizona with basements; I looked at one subdivision back during the boom. There, all the houses had a finished basement option; it added $80k to the cost. It was cheaper by the square foot to just get a 2-story (above ground, on slab), so of course not that many people opted for the basement, even though the (finished) basement would save enormously on A/C costs over having a 2nd story above-ground. And we don't have any clay-pushing problems here.
I don't know the situation with Texas, but again I'm quite sure that excavation in Texas isn't any cheaper than in Arizona. The earth qualities, however, I'm sure are different, but again are surely not the same over the entire state. The climate in Houston is worlds apart from the climate in El Paso or Amarillo or Lubbock. Houston and El Paso are as far away from each other as San Francisco and Portland OR. I don't think tornadoes are a problem in El Paso. I imagine Houston is a lot like Lousiana, where there's a lot of moisture in the ground, so I can see why basement implosion might be a possibility there.
Giving tax cuts to the rich didn't help the situation at all.
And Obama's administration hasn't been a failure at all. Look at all the giant corporations that got no-strings bailouts and "stimulus funds". Lots of important people have gotten paid off by Obama's administration. The "I blame Bush" stuff is just so he'll get re-elected so he can give out lots more federal money to his cronies. Of course, if Romney gets elected instead, his cronies will get lots of free federal money, and Romney will then blame his administration's "failure" on Obama.
Back on the east coast, even modest houses have some storage room somewhere; under the stairs, in the back of the garage (which is larger than the bare minimum for a modern car, and has extra room), or best of all, a basement. Arizona houses don't have any of this, and they don't cost any less than houses in the east.
Hell, the difference between Clinton (higher taxes, reduced debt, economic boom) with shrub who inhereted the windfall economy then by removing taxes caused a worldwide recession, and with Obama's spineless kowtowing to the rabid right-wing whereby stalling the economy even further because idiotic parasites like you whine and bitch about government, should show you your unthinking and poisonous mental garbage proposition is PROVEN FALSE.
Your view of history is slightly distorted. For one thing, it wasn't Shrub's tax cuts that caused a worldwide recession, it was the Dot-Com bust that did that. That's what happens when bubbles burst. Shrub's tax cuts certainly didn't help the situation (they made it worse), but they weren't the cause. Clinton's policies probably didn't help here; worse, Clinton's to blame for the 2008 recession since he signed the (Republican-authored) bill in 2000 that repealed the Depression-era Glass-Steagal act which would have prevented the real estate boom and bust.
Second, Obama isn't spineless; he just acts that way so he can blame the Republicans for everything that's going wrong. Both the Democrats and the Republicans are equally to blame for the current mess. Just look at this stupid staffer that's trying to promote SOPA: she's a Democrat. It's the Democrats that were big fans of SOPA. It's the Democrats (in Congress; they had a majority there during Shrub's last two years) that wanted to bail out all the giant financial companies and banks. Yes, the Republicans are idiotic parasites too, but the Democrats are just as bad, they just serve different industries.
The main problem with bashing Capitalism is that you need to promote something that you think is better. I haven't seen anything that is; the Russians and Chinese tried Stalinist communism and planned economies, and they were a disaster. China's been industrializing at an amazing rate since they threw off the yoke of planned economies and switched to a free(er) market. The way I see it, the problem with capitalism is when it's either completely unchecked by government, which has a duty to regulate things to maintain healthy competition and prevent monopolies, or in cases where they're unavoidable (water utilities, for example), strictly regulate them or provide them as government services directly, or worse the government is utterly corrupt and bought out by large companies, which is exactly what we have here in America. That's called "Crony Capitalism". The hybrid socialist/capitalist systems they had (and still have, to an extent) in many places in Western Europe seem to be the best systems in terms of stability and fairness.
Maybe, maybe not. Probably depends on exactly where in Texas you're located (near Houston, your comment is probably exactly right; around El Paso or Amarillo, probably not). The real reason is cost: basements cost money, and it's a lot cheaper to just pour a concrete slab and build the house on top of that. The reason basements were invented is because your house's foundation needs to be deeper than the "frost line": this is the depth the ground will freeze to in the wintertime. If you don't, your foundation will crack with the freeze/thaw cycles. In the northern parts of the country, this meant houses needed to have their foundations dug at least 4 feet deep. Well, if you're already digging 4 feet deep, it really isn't much more money to dig an extra 4 feet, and turn the whole thing into another level of living or storage space (or place to put the boiler/furnace/etc.). However, if there's no requirement to dig at all, then it's cheaper to just pour a concrete slab. In places where the ground never freezes (i.e., desert, like here in Arizona), there's no requirement to dig a deep foundation, so the builders simply don't. It's not until you move in and suddenly realize "shit! there's no place to store my stuff!" that you realize how much this situation sucks.
I don't know about Texas, but houses in Arizona (Phoenix area) are NOT "seriously huge", in fact they're pretty small, and they also do not have basements. Where do you put your shit? You pile it up in your house, and it looks ghetto. The builders are all too fucking cheap to build basements, and they're not required since the water table is so deep and the ground never freezes, so the house's quotes square footage is really all you get, there is absolutely ZERO extra storage room anywhere, except MAYBE in the attic in some houses (and the roofs are pretty flat, so the attic is only 4 feet high at the very highest point).
Just in case anyone's thinking about moving to Arizona, you should know this. They never tell you this before you start looking at houses here. The garages are also super-tiny (if there's a garage); you can get an economy car (or two, or three for the big three-car garage houses) in there, and that's about it. There's no extra room in there for your stuff, unless you leave your cars outside.
MS Office Home and Student for Windows and OSX consistently tops the software bestseller lists at Amazon.com, Walmart.com, etc., etc., etc. The price of the Home edition has never been an obstacle to sales.
You don't know that, because you don't know how many people didn't buy it because of the high price. For all we know, if they cut the price in half, four times as many people might buy it. Yes, it might be a bestseller, but it's also something that most people with a computer think they need to have, even if it's "just in case". Most other software items (except OSes and browsers) are things that only a fraction of computer users will need or want.
The truth is that the real cost of an office suite is in consumables. Ink, toner and paper.
Only if you have a printer, and actually print stuff. Some people just don't need to print things much, and others just save it up and print it out at work on their employer's dime. If you're talking lower-income people or especially students, they'll frequently go to lengths like this to save money. $99 is a lot of money for a struggling student; not all of them are trust-fund babies.
When LibreOffice is free and does most of the same stuff, $99 sounds like a rip-off to me. I can do a lot of things with $99; why should I spend it on some office software that I rarely use?
Go to China and ask the factory workers there if USD$99 sounds like a "reasonable" price to them.
Interesting, I would have expected a 2000sf house in the Bay Area to cost much more than that. Maybe you need to include all this info in your recruitment emails to out-of-state prospects to avoid having them dismiss your offer out-of-hand, to show them that they won't take a step down in living quality by accepting a job with you, if your numbers are accurate.
but by most quality of life surveys and measures we actually are located in a much better area.
Actually, you don't, if people can't actually afford to live there, and they have to move 2 hours away and commute 4 hours every day.
You may be right that those outside the area are not even considering our jobs because they believe they can't afford to live here, but that doesn't necessarily make them right.
Sure they are. You thinking it's wonderful there doesn't make it so; it's a matter of opinion. They're looking at the 2000 sf. (or whatever) house they're living in in Omaha or wherever now, and how they have an affordable mortgage, and if they try to buy a similar-size house in your location, they'll have to win the lottery since you're not going to pay them enough to afford a $2M (or whatever; I haven't checked the actual house prices per s.f.) mortgage. I seriously doubt you're paying enough to make up for that differential. Don't forget the much higher taxes that go along with living in your area, compared to much of the rest of the country.
Obviously, you're missing a lot of people who are unwilling to consider that area, because they don't want to take a huge step down in either living space, or a huge step up in commuting time.
So no, you're not desperate enough. If you're not profitable enough to buy people $2M houses, then what you're doing business-wise isn't successful enough, and you need to rethink your entire business plan. I'd like to start a business that would allow me to buy a Hawaiian island within a year by having a large team of employees who all work for pennies, but obviously that business plan is stupid and isn't going to work (mostly because I won't get anyone to work for that rate), so I need to revise my expectations. If dev salaries are your largest expense and you still can't hire enough people, and you can't afford to jack up those salaries another 20 or 50 or 100 percent or more, then you're doing something wrong. Maybe you need to relocate your company someplace cheaper, or find a more profitable market, or maybe just lower your expectations and do less so that you can break even.
lawyers are too expensive to consider just for being turned down for a job (does that really happen at all outside of truly blatant racial or sexual discrimination?).
I really don't know how much this actually happens, since I don't work in the legal field. However, many times lawyers here take a case on "contingency", where they do it for free, with the agreement that they'll take 1/3 of the proceeds if they win (and nothing if they lose). So if a lawyer thinks a case is extremely solid and likely to win (or even more likely, the defense will settle with a little convincing of how bad their case is), you can get them to take it on contingency because even though it's riskier than just billing by the hour, it also has a higher possible payout if the defendant has "deep pockets". Of course, this is also why small companies can get away with a lot of bullshit that the huge companies can't; you won't get a lawyer to take your case against a small company unless you pay for it out-of-pocket, and the money you'll get awarded probably isn't that much, or if it is, the company will just declare bankruptcy and you probably won't get anything. You don't have to worry about that with a huge company like Oracle or Microsoft; even if they get slapped with a (cue Dr. Evil) $1 Billion! judgment, they can actually afford to pay that. Some little 20-employee company can't and would just fold.
That could be too; if the goal is to dominate chipsets, then both actions are logical (making it hard for the competition, and offering features that render the competition's product unnecessary for as many users as possible).
Sure there is. Intel peformance sucks and there are features missing from the driver. It doesn't matter how "open" it is. It is not the "best-supported" on Linux.
BS. I already said the performance sucks compared to the others, but that's orthogonal to "best supported". Intel is the best supported, hands-down. There is absolutely no room to argue on this; only a fool or a shill would disagree. With Intel, there's open source drivers available that get the best performance out of the hardware, and are well-integrated with the rest of the Linux distro. With the others, this simply does not exist. You can either get a proprietary driver that performs well but the integration is total crap, or you can get an open-source driver that integrates well, but the performance is horrid.
Intel's HW absolutely IS the best supported on Linux. This cannot be argued.
They don't really need to; they've already succeeded at getting a giant majority of the chipset market by having an integrated GPU that sucks, but is good enough for average users who do little besides surf the web and maybe use MS Word.
Saying they need to make a GFX chipset that competes with Nvidia's and AMD's mid-to-high-end offerings is like saying KIA needs to make a car that competes with Ferrari. Not that it wouldn't be nice (since Intel's open-source support is so superior to the other guys'), but it's probably not exactly high on their priority list when they're already making buckets of money by covering the low-end market.
I don't think this is quite correct. I used to work at Intel, so maybe things have changed a little since I was there, but as I saw it, the main reasons they entered the 3D market was two-fold: 1) to secure their position in chipsets, and 2) to make money. When I was there (over 6 years ago), they were the world's largest GPU manufacturer. I imagine that hasn't changed. Yes, their GPUs were low-performance compared to the competition, but that wasn't all that important; their goal was to dominate chipsets, and they did then and I believe they still do now (honestly, it seems like very little has changed in the PC world in 6 years; lots has changed in mobile devices (phones, tablets), but not in PCs or laptops). Most PCs don't need high-end GPUs; most PCs are bought from places like Dell, in large quantities, and used in offices for corporate drones to read their Outlook email, write MS Word documents, etc. They only need 3D so they can run the graphical effects in Windows. Many more PCs (probably more laptops these days) are sold to individuals and corporate users, who again use them to read their email, use MS Office, and use a web browser. They only need 3D for graphical effects and to watch videos with GPU rendering. Some might play a low-end game here or there, but most don't. The people who do want to play games probably quickly find out that integrated graphics aren't very good for that, and upgrade to an Nvidia/AMD card, if they didn't do so from the outset.
By having a GPU built-in to their chipsets, they were able to get a lock on much of the chipset market. Instead of a PC buyer need to buy a motherboard w/ chipset, and then a separate graphics card, they could spend a couple bucks more, and get a motherboard with integrated graphics, and forgo the graphics card altogether, saving a bunch of money. Remember, before Intel got into 3D graphics, there were a bunch of chipset makers; these days, many of them seem to have withered away. They couldn't satisfy the low-end users by building an acceptable GPU into their chipsets, so everyone just switched to Intel.
It's not shilling; I point this out from time to time myself. If you want the best-supported GPU on Linux, it's simple: buy Intel. There's absolutely no room to argue this either; it's a plain fact. With the other two, you get either a proprietary driver that may perform well, but doesn't integrate well with the rest of the distro as you've found out the hard way (breaks every time you apply security updates to X or kernel, doesn't support KMS, etc.), or you get an open-source driver that does integrate nicely and support KMS, but the performance is total crap. With Intel, you get excellent performance (relative to the GPU's potential), and excellent integration, because it's all open-sourced by Intel.
Of course, the downside is that Intel GPUs have terrible performance compared to the other two (because of the hardware itself).
However, there's some possible caveats here: the Intel GPUs are dirt-cheap (integrated into motherboard chipset), they don't use much power (the other two are usually power hogs), and the performance of a mid-range Nvidia GPU running the open-source Nouveau driver is probably equivalent to a recent Intel GPU running its open-source driver (because the Nouveau driver gets such terrible performance), while the Intel will get much better power efficiency getting that lackluster performance. Finally, the Intel GPU is probably perfectly adequate for the needs of most desktop/laptop users who are only doing things like watching videos, and using 3D effects on their desktop environment; obviously, you're not going to have a good experience playing a recent FPS game with an Intel, but if that's not part of your requirements list, then you probably have little reason to bother with Nvidia or AMD.
It's not shilling to point out that a cheap, low-performance option that's extremely well-supported is probably a better choice than a more expensive option that's so poorly supported that you can't realize anything near its performance potential.
It's not just American dollars (though those are a giant factor); they make stuff for the entire developed world. It's not like the Europeans are getting their cheap junk from somewhere else, and there's 50% more Europeans in the EU than Americans in the US.
As I said before, the Chinese middle class is growing by leaps and bounds. Streets that used to be packed with bicycles are now packed with cars (and strangely, a lot of Buicks) and cyclists are relegated to the side. Obviously, your average factory worker doesn't have one of these cars, but the many new small business owners or managers do.
Yes, there's a lot of poor people working in factories; when you have 1.2 billion people to work with, that's a lot of potential factory workers. That doesn't mean the whole population is like that; the middle class is huge. According to this article, their middle class is already at 230 million people, which is probably about the size of America's middle class.
As for ridiculous debt, you keep ignoring that the US government is doing the exact same thing with all its "stimulus" spending and bailouts. Our debt as a nation makes China's debt look puny.
No, the problem is you aren't paying enough to attract people to the area. Sure, the few people who want to (or already live in) the area will take your offers, but there's lots more people outside the area that simply refuse to even consider the job because of where it is and the living costs there. Double your offers and aggressively recruit people from out-of-state, give them a giant relocation bonus, and pay them enough to live in the same size house as they already live in in Iowa or wherever, and you might be able to get them to move. Maybe you should buy the house for them even, and make that part of the offer, though it'll probably cost you $1-2 million. But if you're really that desperate, buying someone a $2M house as a sign-on bonus shouldn't be a problem; if it is, then you're really not that desperate.
And that's worse than the US how? Their economy is rising, not collapsing, so they'll be able to afford that blunder, whereas we keep spending insane amounts of money on a bloated military even while our economy is going down and unemployment is at nearly 25% (the official numbers are lies) and rising. Meanwhile, we're producing less and less and doing very little real work, as that's all being outsourced since companies here think they'll get rich outsourcing everything and keeping the management in-house; pretty soon the Chinese companies that do the real work will just get rid of them (like HTC did; they used to be a contract manufacturer) and do it all themselves.
Many of them probably did, they just didn't spell it that way (at least not the literate ones writing laws). Written speech is frequently quite different from colloquial spoken speech done by the same person.
Actually, that's not necessarily completely accurate. I'm pretty sure I saw an article (probably here on Slashdot) a couple weeks ago that there's now a new theory that modern humans all came from Asia first, then all migrated to Africa for some odd reason, then some of those migrated from there out to everywhere else (including back to Asia).
It could be a lot of things, depending on the company and particular job.
It could be 1c) there's qualified people, but they're already employed, so if you want to tempt them away from their current jobs you need to make yours more attractive with more money, or 1d) there's qualified people, but they're not quite that desperate, or already employed, and they don't really like where your job is located, so again you need to make your offer more attractive with more money. I'm thinking right now of a job I saw a while ago in Fargo, ND of all places, which stayed posted for a very long time; who the heck wants to move there?
We used to have references on our resumes too, long long ago. Later, it became fashionable to say "References: Available upon request", since this saved space and many employers didn't bother. These days, it's fashionable to just leave it out altogether, and perhaps mention that they're available upon request in your cover letter, or if the employer wants them, they'll say so.
References aren't the same as calling your previous employer and asking for the scoop on you. References are people you've worked with before, who you're pretty sure will put in a good word for you. There's no real legal issues here, since these are people you yourself have hand-picked to say good things about you; what kind of moron would put someone in their references list who's going to say bad things about them? But for that exact reason, many employers simply don't bother much any more; what's the point, if you're just going to talk to a bunch of yes-people who say "Johnny's a great employee!", since they've all mutually agreed to give each other good references? Of course, it's not quite that simplistic; if you have some references who were former supervisors you worked with, that looks pretty good, because obviously if you were a crappy employee, you wouldn't have any former supervisors on your references list, so maybe employers are looking for that.
But to reiterate, I'm pretty sure the reason people don't bother with references on their resume any more is simply because most employers don't bother with it, those who do will simply come right out and ask, and there's limited space on your resume anyway so anything that isn't critical is a target for deletion (the general rule is you must keep it to one page if you have under perhaps 5 years experience, and 2 pages if you're senior level; very few people get to have 3 pages; people who have excessively long resumes don't look good).
Heck, I'm even hearing now that it's fashionable to leave out the "Objectives" section (where you say what kind of job you're looking for), whereas that was mandatory for me when I first started less than 15 years ago. Again, this is probably simply about saving space, and eliminating something that few bother to read and is mostly redundant self-promoting BS (obviously, you're looking for a job in line with your qualifications, and you're applying for the job you've applied to because you think you can do it).
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The problem isn't just (or necessarily) a lack of common sense, it can also be cost. Shooting ranges aren't cheap, especially the indoor ones, and they can also be crowded, with a waiting period. People wanting to go shooting cheaply usually try to find free outdoor places like this for this very reason. There might also not be very many of them available nearby, especially in rural areas.
Again, cost IS a big problem. It costs a lot to excavate earth (a lot more than to just pour a slab right on top of the ground). We actually have a very, very tiny number of houses here in Arizona with basements; I looked at one subdivision back during the boom. There, all the houses had a finished basement option; it added $80k to the cost. It was cheaper by the square foot to just get a 2-story (above ground, on slab), so of course not that many people opted for the basement, even though the (finished) basement would save enormously on A/C costs over having a 2nd story above-ground. And we don't have any clay-pushing problems here.
I don't know the situation with Texas, but again I'm quite sure that excavation in Texas isn't any cheaper than in Arizona. The earth qualities, however, I'm sure are different, but again are surely not the same over the entire state. The climate in Houston is worlds apart from the climate in El Paso or Amarillo or Lubbock. Houston and El Paso are as far away from each other as San Francisco and Portland OR. I don't think tornadoes are a problem in El Paso. I imagine Houston is a lot like Lousiana, where there's a lot of moisture in the ground, so I can see why basement implosion might be a possibility there.
Giving tax cuts to the rich didn't help the situation at all.
And Obama's administration hasn't been a failure at all. Look at all the giant corporations that got no-strings bailouts and "stimulus funds". Lots of important people have gotten paid off by Obama's administration. The "I blame Bush" stuff is just so he'll get re-elected so he can give out lots more federal money to his cronies. Of course, if Romney gets elected instead, his cronies will get lots of free federal money, and Romney will then blame his administration's "failure" on Obama.
Maybe you should go fuck yourself.
Back on the east coast, even modest houses have some storage room somewhere; under the stairs, in the back of the garage (which is larger than the bare minimum for a modern car, and has extra room), or best of all, a basement. Arizona houses don't have any of this, and they don't cost any less than houses in the east.
Hell, the difference between Clinton (higher taxes, reduced debt, economic boom) with shrub who inhereted the windfall economy then by removing taxes caused a worldwide recession, and with Obama's spineless kowtowing to the rabid right-wing whereby stalling the economy even further because idiotic parasites like you whine and bitch about government, should show you your unthinking and poisonous mental garbage proposition is PROVEN FALSE.
Your view of history is slightly distorted. For one thing, it wasn't Shrub's tax cuts that caused a worldwide recession, it was the Dot-Com bust that did that. That's what happens when bubbles burst. Shrub's tax cuts certainly didn't help the situation (they made it worse), but they weren't the cause. Clinton's policies probably didn't help here; worse, Clinton's to blame for the 2008 recession since he signed the (Republican-authored) bill in 2000 that repealed the Depression-era Glass-Steagal act which would have prevented the real estate boom and bust.
Second, Obama isn't spineless; he just acts that way so he can blame the Republicans for everything that's going wrong. Both the Democrats and the Republicans are equally to blame for the current mess. Just look at this stupid staffer that's trying to promote SOPA: she's a Democrat. It's the Democrats that were big fans of SOPA. It's the Democrats (in Congress; they had a majority there during Shrub's last two years) that wanted to bail out all the giant financial companies and banks. Yes, the Republicans are idiotic parasites too, but the Democrats are just as bad, they just serve different industries.
The main problem with bashing Capitalism is that you need to promote something that you think is better. I haven't seen anything that is; the Russians and Chinese tried Stalinist communism and planned economies, and they were a disaster. China's been industrializing at an amazing rate since they threw off the yoke of planned economies and switched to a free(er) market. The way I see it, the problem with capitalism is when it's either completely unchecked by government, which has a duty to regulate things to maintain healthy competition and prevent monopolies, or in cases where they're unavoidable (water utilities, for example), strictly regulate them or provide them as government services directly, or worse the government is utterly corrupt and bought out by large companies, which is exactly what we have here in America. That's called "Crony Capitalism". The hybrid socialist/capitalist systems they had (and still have, to an extent) in many places in Western Europe seem to be the best systems in terms of stability and fairness.
Maybe, maybe not. Probably depends on exactly where in Texas you're located (near Houston, your comment is probably exactly right; around El Paso or Amarillo, probably not). The real reason is cost: basements cost money, and it's a lot cheaper to just pour a concrete slab and build the house on top of that. The reason basements were invented is because your house's foundation needs to be deeper than the "frost line": this is the depth the ground will freeze to in the wintertime. If you don't, your foundation will crack with the freeze/thaw cycles. In the northern parts of the country, this meant houses needed to have their foundations dug at least 4 feet deep. Well, if you're already digging 4 feet deep, it really isn't much more money to dig an extra 4 feet, and turn the whole thing into another level of living or storage space (or place to put the boiler/furnace/etc.). However, if there's no requirement to dig at all, then it's cheaper to just pour a concrete slab. In places where the ground never freezes (i.e., desert, like here in Arizona), there's no requirement to dig a deep foundation, so the builders simply don't. It's not until you move in and suddenly realize "shit! there's no place to store my stuff!" that you realize how much this situation sucks.
I don't know about Texas, but houses in Arizona (Phoenix area) are NOT "seriously huge", in fact they're pretty small, and they also do not have basements. Where do you put your shit? You pile it up in your house, and it looks ghetto. The builders are all too fucking cheap to build basements, and they're not required since the water table is so deep and the ground never freezes, so the house's quotes square footage is really all you get, there is absolutely ZERO extra storage room anywhere, except MAYBE in the attic in some houses (and the roofs are pretty flat, so the attic is only 4 feet high at the very highest point).
Just in case anyone's thinking about moving to Arizona, you should know this. They never tell you this before you start looking at houses here. The garages are also super-tiny (if there's a garage); you can get an economy car (or two, or three for the big three-car garage houses) in there, and that's about it. There's no extra room in there for your stuff, unless you leave your cars outside.
MS Office Home and Student for Windows and OSX consistently tops the software bestseller lists at Amazon.com, Walmart.com, etc., etc., etc. The price of the Home edition has never been an obstacle to sales.
You don't know that, because you don't know how many people didn't buy it because of the high price. For all we know, if they cut the price in half, four times as many people might buy it. Yes, it might be a bestseller, but it's also something that most people with a computer think they need to have, even if it's "just in case". Most other software items (except OSes and browsers) are things that only a fraction of computer users will need or want.
The truth is that the real cost of an office suite is in consumables. Ink, toner and paper.
Only if you have a printer, and actually print stuff. Some people just don't need to print things much, and others just save it up and print it out at work on their employer's dime. If you're talking lower-income people or especially students, they'll frequently go to lengths like this to save money. $99 is a lot of money for a struggling student; not all of them are trust-fund babies.
When LibreOffice is free and does most of the same stuff, $99 sounds like a rip-off to me. I can do a lot of things with $99; why should I spend it on some office software that I rarely use?
Go to China and ask the factory workers there if USD$99 sounds like a "reasonable" price to them.
Interesting, I would have expected a 2000sf house in the Bay Area to cost much more than that. Maybe you need to include all this info in your recruitment emails to out-of-state prospects to avoid having them dismiss your offer out-of-hand, to show them that they won't take a step down in living quality by accepting a job with you, if your numbers are accurate.
but by most quality of life surveys and measures we actually are located in a much better area.
Actually, you don't, if people can't actually afford to live there, and they have to move 2 hours away and commute 4 hours every day.
You may be right that those outside the area are not even considering our jobs because they believe they can't afford to live here, but that doesn't necessarily make them right.
Sure they are. You thinking it's wonderful there doesn't make it so; it's a matter of opinion. They're looking at the 2000 sf. (or whatever) house they're living in in Omaha or wherever now, and how they have an affordable mortgage, and if they try to buy a similar-size house in your location, they'll have to win the lottery since you're not going to pay them enough to afford a $2M (or whatever; I haven't checked the actual house prices per s.f.) mortgage. I seriously doubt you're paying enough to make up for that differential. Don't forget the much higher taxes that go along with living in your area, compared to much of the rest of the country.
Obviously, you're missing a lot of people who are unwilling to consider that area, because they don't want to take a huge step down in either living space, or a huge step up in commuting time.
So no, you're not desperate enough. If you're not profitable enough to buy people $2M houses, then what you're doing business-wise isn't successful enough, and you need to rethink your entire business plan. I'd like to start a business that would allow me to buy a Hawaiian island within a year by having a large team of employees who all work for pennies, but obviously that business plan is stupid and isn't going to work (mostly because I won't get anyone to work for that rate), so I need to revise my expectations. If dev salaries are your largest expense and you still can't hire enough people, and you can't afford to jack up those salaries another 20 or 50 or 100 percent or more, then you're doing something wrong. Maybe you need to relocate your company someplace cheaper, or find a more profitable market, or maybe just lower your expectations and do less so that you can break even.
lawyers are too expensive to consider just for being turned down for a job (does that really happen at all outside of truly blatant racial or sexual discrimination?).
I really don't know how much this actually happens, since I don't work in the legal field. However, many times lawyers here take a case on "contingency", where they do it for free, with the agreement that they'll take 1/3 of the proceeds if they win (and nothing if they lose). So if a lawyer thinks a case is extremely solid and likely to win (or even more likely, the defense will settle with a little convincing of how bad their case is), you can get them to take it on contingency because even though it's riskier than just billing by the hour, it also has a higher possible payout if the defendant has "deep pockets". Of course, this is also why small companies can get away with a lot of bullshit that the huge companies can't; you won't get a lawyer to take your case against a small company unless you pay for it out-of-pocket, and the money you'll get awarded probably isn't that much, or if it is, the company will just declare bankruptcy and you probably won't get anything. You don't have to worry about that with a huge company like Oracle or Microsoft; even if they get slapped with a (cue Dr. Evil) $1 Billion! judgment, they can actually afford to pay that. Some little 20-employee company can't and would just fold.
That could be too; if the goal is to dominate chipsets, then both actions are logical (making it hard for the competition, and offering features that render the competition's product unnecessary for as many users as possible).
Sure there is. Intel peformance sucks and there are features missing from the driver. It doesn't matter how "open" it is.
It is not the "best-supported" on Linux.
BS. I already said the performance sucks compared to the others, but that's orthogonal to "best supported". Intel is the best supported, hands-down. There is absolutely no room to argue on this; only a fool or a shill would disagree. With Intel, there's open source drivers available that get the best performance out of the hardware, and are well-integrated with the rest of the Linux distro. With the others, this simply does not exist. You can either get a proprietary driver that performs well but the integration is total crap, or you can get an open-source driver that integrates well, but the performance is horrid.
Intel's HW absolutely IS the best supported on Linux. This cannot be argued.
They don't really need to; they've already succeeded at getting a giant majority of the chipset market by having an integrated GPU that sucks, but is good enough for average users who do little besides surf the web and maybe use MS Word.
Saying they need to make a GFX chipset that competes with Nvidia's and AMD's mid-to-high-end offerings is like saying KIA needs to make a car that competes with Ferrari. Not that it wouldn't be nice (since Intel's open-source support is so superior to the other guys'), but it's probably not exactly high on their priority list when they're already making buckets of money by covering the low-end market.
I don't think this is quite correct. I used to work at Intel, so maybe things have changed a little since I was there, but as I saw it, the main reasons they entered the 3D market was two-fold: 1) to secure their position in chipsets, and 2) to make money. When I was there (over 6 years ago), they were the world's largest GPU manufacturer. I imagine that hasn't changed. Yes, their GPUs were low-performance compared to the competition, but that wasn't all that important; their goal was to dominate chipsets, and they did then and I believe they still do now (honestly, it seems like very little has changed in the PC world in 6 years; lots has changed in mobile devices (phones, tablets), but not in PCs or laptops). Most PCs don't need high-end GPUs; most PCs are bought from places like Dell, in large quantities, and used in offices for corporate drones to read their Outlook email, write MS Word documents, etc. They only need 3D so they can run the graphical effects in Windows. Many more PCs (probably more laptops these days) are sold to individuals and corporate users, who again use them to read their email, use MS Office, and use a web browser. They only need 3D for graphical effects and to watch videos with GPU rendering. Some might play a low-end game here or there, but most don't. The people who do want to play games probably quickly find out that integrated graphics aren't very good for that, and upgrade to an Nvidia/AMD card, if they didn't do so from the outset.
By having a GPU built-in to their chipsets, they were able to get a lock on much of the chipset market. Instead of a PC buyer need to buy a motherboard w/ chipset, and then a separate graphics card, they could spend a couple bucks more, and get a motherboard with integrated graphics, and forgo the graphics card altogether, saving a bunch of money. Remember, before Intel got into 3D graphics, there were a bunch of chipset makers; these days, many of them seem to have withered away. They couldn't satisfy the low-end users by building an acceptable GPU into their chipsets, so everyone just switched to Intel.
It's not shilling; I point this out from time to time myself. If you want the best-supported GPU on Linux, it's simple: buy Intel. There's absolutely no room to argue this either; it's a plain fact. With the other two, you get either a proprietary driver that may perform well, but doesn't integrate well with the rest of the distro as you've found out the hard way (breaks every time you apply security updates to X or kernel, doesn't support KMS, etc.), or you get an open-source driver that does integrate nicely and support KMS, but the performance is total crap. With Intel, you get excellent performance (relative to the GPU's potential), and excellent integration, because it's all open-sourced by Intel.
Of course, the downside is that Intel GPUs have terrible performance compared to the other two (because of the hardware itself).
However, there's some possible caveats here: the Intel GPUs are dirt-cheap (integrated into motherboard chipset), they don't use much power (the other two are usually power hogs), and the performance of a mid-range Nvidia GPU running the open-source Nouveau driver is probably equivalent to a recent Intel GPU running its open-source driver (because the Nouveau driver gets such terrible performance), while the Intel will get much better power efficiency getting that lackluster performance. Finally, the Intel GPU is probably perfectly adequate for the needs of most desktop/laptop users who are only doing things like watching videos, and using 3D effects on their desktop environment; obviously, you're not going to have a good experience playing a recent FPS game with an Intel, but if that's not part of your requirements list, then you probably have little reason to bother with Nvidia or AMD.
It's not shilling to point out that a cheap, low-performance option that's extremely well-supported is probably a better choice than a more expensive option that's so poorly supported that you can't realize anything near its performance potential.
It's not just American dollars (though those are a giant factor); they make stuff for the entire developed world. It's not like the Europeans are getting their cheap junk from somewhere else, and there's 50% more Europeans in the EU than Americans in the US.
As I said before, the Chinese middle class is growing by leaps and bounds. Streets that used to be packed with bicycles are now packed with cars (and strangely, a lot of Buicks) and cyclists are relegated to the side. Obviously, your average factory worker doesn't have one of these cars, but the many new small business owners or managers do.
Yes, there's a lot of poor people working in factories; when you have 1.2 billion people to work with, that's a lot of potential factory workers. That doesn't mean the whole population is like that; the middle class is huge. According to this article, their middle class is already at 230 million people, which is probably about the size of America's middle class.
As for ridiculous debt, you keep ignoring that the US government is doing the exact same thing with all its "stimulus" spending and bailouts. Our debt as a nation makes China's debt look puny.
No, the problem is you aren't paying enough to attract people to the area. Sure, the few people who want to (or already live in) the area will take your offers, but there's lots more people outside the area that simply refuse to even consider the job because of where it is and the living costs there. Double your offers and aggressively recruit people from out-of-state, give them a giant relocation bonus, and pay them enough to live in the same size house as they already live in in Iowa or wherever, and you might be able to get them to move. Maybe you should buy the house for them even, and make that part of the offer, though it'll probably cost you $1-2 million. But if you're really that desperate, buying someone a $2M house as a sign-on bonus shouldn't be a problem; if it is, then you're really not that desperate.
And that's worse than the US how? Their economy is rising, not collapsing, so they'll be able to afford that blunder, whereas we keep spending insane amounts of money on a bloated military even while our economy is going down and unemployment is at nearly 25% (the official numbers are lies) and rising. Meanwhile, we're producing less and less and doing very little real work, as that's all being outsourced since companies here think they'll get rich outsourcing everything and keeping the management in-house; pretty soon the Chinese companies that do the real work will just get rid of them (like HTC did; they used to be a contract manufacturer) and do it all themselves.
Many of them probably did, they just didn't spell it that way (at least not the literate ones writing laws). Written speech is frequently quite different from colloquial spoken speech done by the same person.
Actually, that's not necessarily completely accurate. I'm pretty sure I saw an article (probably here on Slashdot) a couple weeks ago that there's now a new theory that modern humans all came from Asia first, then all migrated to Africa for some odd reason, then some of those migrated from there out to everywhere else (including back to Asia).
It could be a lot of things, depending on the company and particular job.
It could be 1c) there's qualified people, but they're already employed, so if you want to tempt them away from their current jobs you need to make yours more attractive with more money, or 1d) there's qualified people, but they're not quite that desperate, or already employed, and they don't really like where your job is located, so again you need to make your offer more attractive with more money. I'm thinking right now of a job I saw a while ago in Fargo, ND of all places, which stayed posted for a very long time; who the heck wants to move there?
No, it's blatantly obvious that you're a fucking asshole who wants to tell other people how to spend their free time. Fuck you.
I don't think that's quite the same thing.
We used to have references on our resumes too, long long ago. Later, it became fashionable to say "References: Available upon request", since this saved space and many employers didn't bother. These days, it's fashionable to just leave it out altogether, and perhaps mention that they're available upon request in your cover letter, or if the employer wants them, they'll say so.
References aren't the same as calling your previous employer and asking for the scoop on you. References are people you've worked with before, who you're pretty sure will put in a good word for you. There's no real legal issues here, since these are people you yourself have hand-picked to say good things about you; what kind of moron would put someone in their references list who's going to say bad things about them? But for that exact reason, many employers simply don't bother much any more; what's the point, if you're just going to talk to a bunch of yes-people who say "Johnny's a great employee!", since they've all mutually agreed to give each other good references? Of course, it's not quite that simplistic; if you have some references who were former supervisors you worked with, that looks pretty good, because obviously if you were a crappy employee, you wouldn't have any former supervisors on your references list, so maybe employers are looking for that.
But to reiterate, I'm pretty sure the reason people don't bother with references on their resume any more is simply because most employers don't bother with it, those who do will simply come right out and ask, and there's limited space on your resume anyway so anything that isn't critical is a target for deletion (the general rule is you must keep it to one page if you have under perhaps 5 years experience, and 2 pages if you're senior level; very few people get to have 3 pages; people who have excessively long resumes don't look good).
Heck, I'm even hearing now that it's fashionable to leave out the "Objectives" section (where you say what kind of job you're looking for), whereas that was mandatory for me when I first started less than 15 years ago. Again, this is probably simply about saving space, and eliminating something that few bother to read and is mostly redundant self-promoting BS (obviously, you're looking for a job in line with your qualifications, and you're applying for the job you've applied to because you think you can do it).