In the current legal climate, thats true. But then I'm of the opinion that the current legal climate is a mess.
Corporations should be proxies for the owners. But only when the transaction being undertaken would be unfeasible if every individual owner had to personally sign off on the decision. The corporation purchases, sells, negotiates contracts, and whatnot on behalf of the owners. Thats fine. But because we, in the US, treat corporations as fictitious entities, that means they are also permitted to do things as make contributions to political campaigns and lobbies. Something I don't believe they should be permitted to do. At all. If the owners of said corporations want to make such contributions, let them. With their dividends. Would that increase the administrative cost of lobbies? Probably, a little. But those costs would be born by only the individuals who believe in the objectives of the lobby or politician.
As far as externalities goes, stockholders cede most of their decision making rights to the executives of the corporation. If and when those executives make decisions that are illegal or negligent the executives responsible should bear the costs of their decisions. Not the corporation, who will pass the losses on to their end consumers, employees, or stockholders (or some combination of the three). So if some energy exec okays a shoddy nuclear plant design, he should be held responsible. Will his net assets be great enough to cover the damages? Probably not. But you tell me, if you were in such a position and you knew if a failure occured you'd be flat broke and probably pretty unemployable, would you go ahead with shoddy decisions?
Again it isn't the way things are, but I'm of the opinion that the way things are is all sorts of idiotic.
Preventing the actual signing would entail a President that understands the treaty and the Constitution. And a willingness to not violate the latter. Which, I'll note, is a rarity in a President.
Or it would require some other agency to pre-emptively exert a higher authority than the President's on the matter. Something that isn't likely to happen.
Right. Because the economic devestation, not to mention the pure waste of having to rebuild 2/3s of a city (and the attendant pollution with that construction) is completely feasible.
Actually, I fail to see yours. The giftee doesn't care at all about price of a console he doesn't have to pay for. He wants the console he wants. The gifter doesn't get to think "hm.. well he wanted an Xbox360 or a Wii, but I'm going to get him a PS2 because its cheaper." Well, the gifter does get to. But that won't suddenly make the giftee want a ps2. End result of that kind of decision making? A return. The decision the giver faces is whether or not to give a console, given the price of the console desired.
Price is only a real factor for deciding between consoles when more than one console will do, and that can only be determined by the end user not the gift giver.
If somewhat tardy? If you'd been a scientist as long as this guy has, I'd be willing to bet that you'd have quite a few papers in the academic wilds. You probably won't bother to go back and periodically read everything you've ever written, looking for errors.
He didn't retract the paper for either reason alone. Creationists quoted his paper, prompting the guy to re-read the paper he wrote a long time ago. In so doing, he found errors. Retraction followed.
Absent either event (quote by creationists) or (found errors) no retraction gets made.
Smokers already do pay more. In health insurance premiums, in vice taxes levied on the cigarettes, and by dying earlier and not collecting the full portion of their FICA benefits (for US smokers, anyway).
Whether or not the extra that they pay is roughly equivalant to the costs they impose on the system, I don't know. Thats a lot of numbers that need to be discounted based on how far into the future they are and such.
Actually, I hated the taskbar for just the reasons you seem to want it. When I don't have that many windows open, I don't forget what I have open. If I happen to need a bunch open, having the taskbar cluttered was of no use to me. Having the taskbar cluttered was more of a hinderance. I also like that cmd-tab flips applications, whereas cmd-~ flips windows within the application. Much nicer (to me) than having alt-tab flip through every open window.
I don't know why your column view settings don't hold. Mine does.
Thats probably still true in most states. Even if you saw someone outside of your home, you're probably unlikely to ever be able to convince a jury that you, or others inside, were in immediate danger. Not all jurisdictions have that requirement in order to justify lethal force when on your own property. There are actually some jurisdictions where lethal force is justified in defense of property. Other jurisdictions have so-called castle doctrines, where the threat of immediate danger is assumed to be true just from the prescence of an intruder.
And yet option 2, to actually work, requires a critical mass of users that are perfectly willing to go without cell service at all rather than not receive discounted service when using a paid-for phone.
Right now, the choice is between owning a locked phone that was acquired cheaply, paying some month rate, or owning an unlocked phone acquired at high cost, paying the exact same monthly rate. Means the optimal choice, under current conditions, is to always change carriers at the end of your contract. At least, thats my analysis. New contracts get better deals than current customers. So I get better phones at lower prices (usually I get more in rebates than I pay out) by changing carriers than by sticking around. And since I"m going to pay a number portability fee regardless, I may as well port my number. I happen to like the carrier I have right now. Won't stop me from hopping to another carrier when the contract is up, though. There are 2 I absolutely won't use, ever. That still leaves me with 2 national carriers and a handful of regionals to pick from.
Oh.. I suppose I should note that this applies to the US cellular market. I have no idea if companies in other markets actually want to retain customers and show it in the rates or incentives offered to current customers. Or if other markets have number portability fees that show up as part of their monthly service fee.
Uh.. given that a vehicle is technology, obviously when operating one you will be depending upon technology. As for knowing when I'm going too fast without a speedometer, yes I do in fact know that. I know what gear I'm in, and I can tell how many RPMs the engine is turning just from the noise. It isn't necessarily as precise a method as possible. But then analog tachometers and speedometers sacrifice a certain amount of precision as well. And I've never gotten a speeding ticket, so it seems to be good enough. A temperature gauge failure would leave me in a bad spot (in fact, it has in the past). As for the gas gauge not operating, it isn't an issue. I know what type of miles I've been driving, and the trip odometer tells me how many of them I've done. So yes, I do know when I'm running low on gas without needing to consult the fuel gauge.
I'm guessing this isn't quite the response you were looking for. Not that your question is exactly relevant given the nature of the post I was responding to. It would be more accurate to ask if I would know how fast I was actually travelling if my speedometer was off by say 12 mph without my knowledge. It isn't that the instrument ceases to exist when there is a powered NDS radio on the plane. The issue is that the instrument may issue a false reading and I rely upon it to operate the vehicle. I don't rely on either the speedometer or fuel gauges (or indeed the tach) to operate my car. However, I'm still pretty confident that barring some sort of major failure in multiple systems, pilots aren't going to be landing planes in fields or over the ocean, thinking they're touching down at an airport. The radio would have to be either inoperative or unusable due to interference, the GPS nav and RDF navs would have to be giving the same erroneous location of an airport, as well as erroneous ILS radio marker information. And pilot visibility would have to be severely low to preclude the pilots being wise to not being at an airport due to the lack of the landing lights. It is possible. But the issues involved are certainly larger than navaid interference. Lack of maintenence or highly statistically unlikely bad luck for instance.
Granted. Do they also land planes on instruments alone without communicating with the tower? Probably not. So I still stand by my comment of having much bigger issues, if pilots are putting planes down in the ocean or on some field. Additionally, just because a plane is landing at night is certainly no excuse for putting down anywhere in the ocean (as the post I was originally replying to suggested). You are relying on instruments to not crater the aircraft to be sure. But if your GPS nav says the field is 10 miles out and you don't see any landing lights, or any lights at all then a pilot that believes the GPS is bloody insane.
And yes I am aware that not all pilots ferry passengers. And they may indeed be putting down at airports without towers. I have little enough concern for them, as they a) don't have passenger's cell phones that may potentially disrupt their instruments and b) are not flying me anywhere.
If the pilots of aircraft you fly on can mistake a farmer's field or an ocean for an airport, I think you have issues bigger than interference with GPS and other nav systems.
How students possible learn a native language like German and hope to speak it correctly with the proper articles if they don't even the grammar rules of a language with commonalities with the language that they would like to learn?
Emphasis mine.
If you're going to rant about grammar, please vet your post before you submit. That is all.
What you are failing to recognize is that there are no industries without consumers. The fact that the government is not forcing you nor me to buy gasoline, cars, or airline tickets means that such purchases are voluntary. Whatever the price that gets paid for them is voluntary. No one is getting "milked" because buyers wanted whatever they bought and valued it at least as much as the money they paid for it.
But that's not what we have in the US, and the politics are precisely what has allowed this sort of collusion to occur.
Clearly it is you who is taking the oversimplified and naive approach.
And clearly you didn't bother to read past the first sentence of that paragraph. Because, as I went on to say, when politics can't be removed from the marketplace, politics becomes a marketplace. And its one where consumers aren't bothering to go. Because gasoline is comparably cheap and they just can't be bothered.
Again.. You're essentially asserting that people who buy gasoline are being coerced into buying it. Which is quite frankly not the case. Or at least, I find it very hard to believe, given that no one I have ever met or have ever heard of in my entire life has made such a report. Since it is not the case that people are being coerced into buying gasoline, they must be doing so voluntarily. That is to say that buyers value the gasoline they buy at at least the value of the money they fork over to pay for it. How this is milking the American population any more than any other corporation turning a profit, I can't fathom. I guess Honda, Toys R US, Google, Panasonic, and IKEA are milking Americans for their own personal greed too. Oil companies provide something that Americans want. An energy source for their vehicles that allows Americans to get where they want to go in a timely fashion. Anything the oil companies do to stifle alternative fuels, competitive providers (although I'm far more inclined to believe that the massive startup costs are stifling more competitive providers than anything incumbent companies could do), and buying politicians are options only so long as the American masses implicitly allow it. Which the American masses are currently doing. Sure, the general public grumbles about it and media outlets can publish stories. But the prices currently aren't getting the public up in arms. They really aren't demanding that we devote a lot of resources to alternative fuels. Little public outrage makes politicians buyable. Or at the very least, a lot cheaper to be bought.
As an aside, the Constitution was written by men asserting their right to be free from English monarchy. The document says a great deal about how the Federal government should keep its big nose out of its citizen's business and very little about competitive markets.
If you want competitive markets, keep politics out of them. Oil companies may collude, but if they didn't have the weight of federal legislation to keep out new companies or impose large extra costs for opening new facilities or whatever, I can pretty well guarantee you that the lure of increased profits would induce one or more to break a collusion agreement.
Given that no one can keep politics out of markets, politics itself becomes a marketplace. And as I said before, its a market the american public isn't trading in much. There just isn't enough reason yet. Not that that surprises me. After all the price of gas is in the $3-4/gallon range. And yet we're still blowing through $4-5/pint on beer in quite ridiculous quantities. Heck, not only would not going to the bar save us from paying for heavily marked up alcohol, but we'd save the money on gas by not driving. Yet we still do a lot of both. Because its still relatively pretty cheap.
Tell your advisor he can pay for the convenience of having you available to communicate if he needs to. Otherwise you can just get your work done and take your paycheck.
Not that that'll work or go over well. But it would be nice..
I'm... not quite sure how you figure "instead of" at the same time you say "most of the difference". That says to me that there is a high tax which may (or may not) be going back to the taxpayers on top of big retirement packages. Not $400 million, because of the decreased consumption. Definitely not chump change, though.
I don't know about this 100 mile figure thing. It happens, I'm sure. but probably not as widespread as the GP implies. It'll happen in places like parts of California, where assessed values of tiny lots with maybe 1400-1500 sq feet are over $1 million. Gas may be a little pricier in those areas (probably at/over $4 now) but.. making that long commute, you pay a little extra in gas and you do so a couple of times a week. Rather than paying a very hefty sum once a month paying the interest on the tiny, expensive house.
That's one component of the "I'm not buying it". People have been pumping fuel out of the ground for, what, a little over one hundred years? It's been an extraordinarily profitable commodity product since at least the first decade of the 1900s. There is probably enough petroleum product stored up, around the globe, to last us all for at least a year or two. That's more than plenty time to adjust production and refining rates. This is about government protected profiteering.
Except that if we really do have that much petroleum stored up around the globe, its because the people who store it believe it to be more advantageous to store it than release it. They've already allocated their resources in what they believe to be the best way possible. There isn't any motivation for them to drain their stores while we retool the globe's production and refining capacities. Unless you'd be willing to pay them more for gas while we do so. I'm thinking thats probably not what you had in mind.
That's a very astute observation and the Wall Street market fund managers who invest in various segments of the petroleum industry know it every bit as well as you do--and they're leveraging that need, guaranteed because people are (conveniently) in debt (due to systems which the same market fund managers and bankers also happen to conveniently control), against the population using government protected trusts and monopolies (which are in reality but due to some accounting technicality legally aren't).
I can't even begin to comprehend what you're talking about. From what I can tell, somehow Wall Street is forcing people to incur debt and to buy copious quantities of gas. How they manage to do that, I don't know. Here I was under the impression that every cent of debt I'm carrying was incurred voluntarily. Not to mention that every gallon of gas that goes in my car was quite my own decision.. I guess I'm just that strange exception and everybody else has some Wall Street thug strongarming them in their decisions.
Only because the financial game is rigged. In decades past many groups have expressed interest in shoring up our refining capacity and making it redundant. Those moves have been blocked on both the business and the political sides by already existant vested money interests.
That may or may not be the case. I don't look too hard into this segment of legislation. It wouldn't surprise me terribly if the oil companies were pretty supportive of environmental legislation that blocked new capacity by making it excessively expensive. Thats kind of been the history of "protective" legislation in the US. Whatever was trying to be protected is barely better off, if at all, and the businesses that get grandfathered in see their margins increase.
Yet demand never has gone down. This further illustrates (and debunks) the complete idiocy with which people attempt to apply supply/demand/price explanations to a major global real world market. It may work for apples and oranges in the classroom, it may work for five cent lemonade stands in the streets, but it damn sure doesn't work that simply within a socially stratified society.
I see you're thinking demand as going down only when raw quantity demanded shrinks. That isn't the whole of what economics would consider as "down". When prices go up, demand really does go "down". The quantity of gallons consumed may be up this year from last year and 5 years ago. However, if prices now were the same as last year's or 5 years ago the gallons consumed would be even higher now than they currently are. If you wish to use a gradeschooler's understanding, then lots of things don't work they way they should. Kinda how physics says that a 10 lb bowling ball and 10 lbs of feathers will hit the ground at the same time when dropped from the same height. If you actually try, though, the ball hits first. Because physics assumes you make th
It is illegal in my locality for drivers of a certain age range (I don't recall exactly, but they'd be relatively new drivers) to be on cell phones, handsfree devices or no, while driving.
Apparently there is a magic age where driving while using a cell phone ceases to be an issue around here.
Its funny how the audubon society opposes drilling in the ANWR.. Yet they allow oil drilling in their own privately owned wildlife preserves. Of course they do get paid for that..
A gun is a pre-packaged, guaranteed, method of inflicting deadly injuries.
You, apparently, haven't done much shooting. Especially with a pistol. You may know that the bang switch makes the gun fire. However, pulling the trigger doesn't mean the bullet goes where you want it to go. Trigger control, breath control, sight picture, grip, stance.. all of these contribute to aim. They are not all obvious. You'd be surprised at how far off target a pistol round can get just by slapping the trigger, even over very short ranges.
That's why you have a bazillion posts just here explaining how somebody were shopping at 6AM just to find somebody else were even earlier.
What's your point? Thats an indicator of demand for Wiis, and is nothing probative about Nintendo's motivations, or indeed any other console maker's motivations. Consumers have a price they're willing to pay. Nintendo can't make people pay more than they're willing. Especially not by not having product to sell them. Some non-traditional gamer might be willing to enter the market because they've discovered the Wii is fun. But I can pretty well promise you that they'd be willing to enter the market at $250 if there wasn't a shortage of units, as well. According to you, all console makers should set the price high (although in actual practice thats rare) in order to extract extra revenue. But if that was the strategy to follow, you should see price cuts much sooner, more frequently, and of smaller magnitude. That way each console is closer to the ideal of selling every console to every customer at their reservation price. You don't see that, because your strategy isn't the one to follow. Which is why I said that isn't how the console market works. Because it isn't.
And that's exactly what I already told.
No. No it isn't exactly what you already "told." You stated that console makers should sell a small fraction of units at a high price and then cut prices down the road to capture the vast majority of the market. That isn't what happens. The price is set at launch and then many, many, many months down the road the price gets cut. After a significant portion of the market has already purchased the product.
Not surprisingly, high initial prices is a bad strategy because it scares off potential customers. Which is why Sony and Microsoft are selling the hardware at a loss. They would love to sell you nothing but software, stuff they actually make money on. However, if you don't have the hardware thats a pretty hard sell.
At a slower pace, that's what I said.
Actually, you said the second round of sales (the 7 units) is at a slower pace. You said nothing about the 90 units. However, the numbers you use indicate an unusually long useful life in the console, if the 90 units is at an even slower pace than the 7. Actually, even if the 90 sells at the same pace as the 7, thats still an unusually long console life.
Not that the console market works like that. Console prices don't fall at retail until well after production is sufficient to meet demand. While some Wiis do get sold at a considerable markup, Nintendo doesn't capture the benefits. eBay, Amazon's zShops, and what have you benefit. As do the individuals who sell through those sites.
Production capacity is expensive to maintain. If you have it and don't use it, you don't get a discount on the costs of the facilities. If, in your first scenario, they sell the 100 units and the market is saturated Nintendo should then immediately sell their facilities to get rid of the costs of owning (but not using) them. In your second scenario, you need a production capacity to make the 90 unit supply. But you don't use it for the first few shipping cycles. The phantom benefits you describe get obliterated by the excessive costs.
Slashdot Mirror
In the current legal climate, thats true. But then I'm of the opinion that the current legal climate is a mess.
Corporations should be proxies for the owners. But only when the transaction being undertaken would be unfeasible if every individual owner had to personally sign off on the decision. The corporation purchases, sells, negotiates contracts, and whatnot on behalf of the owners. Thats fine. But because we, in the US, treat corporations as fictitious entities, that means they are also permitted to do things as make contributions to political campaigns and lobbies. Something I don't believe they should be permitted to do. At all. If the owners of said corporations want to make such contributions, let them. With their dividends. Would that increase the administrative cost of lobbies? Probably, a little. But those costs would be born by only the individuals who believe in the objectives of the lobby or politician.
As far as externalities goes, stockholders cede most of their decision making rights to the executives of the corporation. If and when those executives make decisions that are illegal or negligent the executives responsible should bear the costs of their decisions. Not the corporation, who will pass the losses on to their end consumers, employees, or stockholders (or some combination of the three). So if some energy exec okays a shoddy nuclear plant design, he should be held responsible. Will his net assets be great enough to cover the damages? Probably not. But you tell me, if you were in such a position and you knew if a failure occured you'd be flat broke and probably pretty unemployable, would you go ahead with shoddy decisions?
Again it isn't the way things are, but I'm of the opinion that the way things are is all sorts of idiotic.
Preventing the actual signing would entail a President that understands the treaty and the Constitution. And a willingness to not violate the latter. Which, I'll note, is a rarity in a President.
Or it would require some other agency to pre-emptively exert a higher authority than the President's on the matter. Something that isn't likely to happen.
Right. Because the economic devestation, not to mention the pure waste of having to rebuild 2/3s of a city (and the attendant pollution with that construction) is completely feasible.
Actually, I fail to see yours. The giftee doesn't care at all about price of a console he doesn't have to pay for. He wants the console he wants. The gifter doesn't get to think "hm.. well he wanted an Xbox360 or a Wii, but I'm going to get him a PS2 because its cheaper." Well, the gifter does get to. But that won't suddenly make the giftee want a ps2. End result of that kind of decision making? A return. The decision the giver faces is whether or not to give a console, given the price of the console desired.
Price is only a real factor for deciding between consoles when more than one console will do, and that can only be determined by the end user not the gift giver.
If somewhat tardy? If you'd been a scientist as long as this guy has, I'd be willing to bet that you'd have quite a few papers in the academic wilds. You probably won't bother to go back and periodically read everything you've ever written, looking for errors.
He didn't retract the paper for either reason alone. Creationists quoted his paper, prompting the guy to re-read the paper he wrote a long time ago. In so doing, he found errors. Retraction followed.
Absent either event (quote by creationists) or (found errors) no retraction gets made.
Smokers already do pay more. In health insurance premiums, in vice taxes levied on the cigarettes, and by dying earlier and not collecting the full portion of their FICA benefits (for US smokers, anyway).
Whether or not the extra that they pay is roughly equivalant to the costs they impose on the system, I don't know. Thats a lot of numbers that need to be discounted based on how far into the future they are and such.
Actually, I hated the taskbar for just the reasons you seem to want it. When I don't have that many windows open, I don't forget what I have open. If I happen to need a bunch open, having the taskbar cluttered was of no use to me. Having the taskbar cluttered was more of a hinderance. I also like that cmd-tab flips applications, whereas cmd-~ flips windows within the application. Much nicer (to me) than having alt-tab flip through every open window.
I don't know why your column view settings don't hold. Mine does.
Thats probably still true in most states. Even if you saw someone outside of your home, you're probably unlikely to ever be able to convince a jury that you, or others inside, were in immediate danger. Not all jurisdictions have that requirement in order to justify lethal force when on your own property. There are actually some jurisdictions where lethal force is justified in defense of property. Other jurisdictions have so-called castle doctrines, where the threat of immediate danger is assumed to be true just from the prescence of an intruder.
And yet option 2, to actually work, requires a critical mass of users that are perfectly willing to go without cell service at all rather than not receive discounted service when using a paid-for phone.
Right now, the choice is between owning a locked phone that was acquired cheaply, paying some month rate, or owning an unlocked phone acquired at high cost, paying the exact same monthly rate. Means the optimal choice, under current conditions, is to always change carriers at the end of your contract. At least, thats my analysis. New contracts get better deals than current customers. So I get better phones at lower prices (usually I get more in rebates than I pay out) by changing carriers than by sticking around. And since I"m going to pay a number portability fee regardless, I may as well port my number. I happen to like the carrier I have right now. Won't stop me from hopping to another carrier when the contract is up, though. There are 2 I absolutely won't use, ever. That still leaves me with 2 national carriers and a handful of regionals to pick from.
Oh.. I suppose I should note that this applies to the US cellular market. I have no idea if companies in other markets actually want to retain customers and show it in the rates or incentives offered to current customers. Or if other markets have number portability fees that show up as part of their monthly service fee.
Uh.. given that a vehicle is technology, obviously when operating one you will be depending upon technology. As for knowing when I'm going too fast without a speedometer, yes I do in fact know that. I know what gear I'm in, and I can tell how many RPMs the engine is turning just from the noise. It isn't necessarily as precise a method as possible. But then analog tachometers and speedometers sacrifice a certain amount of precision as well. And I've never gotten a speeding ticket, so it seems to be good enough. A temperature gauge failure would leave me in a bad spot (in fact, it has in the past). As for the gas gauge not operating, it isn't an issue. I know what type of miles I've been driving, and the trip odometer tells me how many of them I've done. So yes, I do know when I'm running low on gas without needing to consult the fuel gauge.
I'm guessing this isn't quite the response you were looking for. Not that your question is exactly relevant given the nature of the post I was responding to. It would be more accurate to ask if I would know how fast I was actually travelling if my speedometer was off by say 12 mph without my knowledge. It isn't that the instrument ceases to exist when there is a powered NDS radio on the plane. The issue is that the instrument may issue a false reading and I rely upon it to operate the vehicle. I don't rely on either the speedometer or fuel gauges (or indeed the tach) to operate my car. However, I'm still pretty confident that barring some sort of major failure in multiple systems, pilots aren't going to be landing planes in fields or over the ocean, thinking they're touching down at an airport. The radio would have to be either inoperative or unusable due to interference, the GPS nav and RDF navs would have to be giving the same erroneous location of an airport, as well as erroneous ILS radio marker information. And pilot visibility would have to be severely low to preclude the pilots being wise to not being at an airport due to the lack of the landing lights. It is possible. But the issues involved are certainly larger than navaid interference. Lack of maintenence or highly statistically unlikely bad luck for instance.
Granted. Do they also land planes on instruments alone without communicating with the tower? Probably not. So I still stand by my comment of having much bigger issues, if pilots are putting planes down in the ocean or on some field. Additionally, just because a plane is landing at night is certainly no excuse for putting down anywhere in the ocean (as the post I was originally replying to suggested). You are relying on instruments to not crater the aircraft to be sure. But if your GPS nav says the field is 10 miles out and you don't see any landing lights, or any lights at all then a pilot that believes the GPS is bloody insane.
And yes I am aware that not all pilots ferry passengers. And they may indeed be putting down at airports without towers. I have little enough concern for them, as they a) don't have passenger's cell phones that may potentially disrupt their instruments and b) are not flying me anywhere.
If the pilots of aircraft you fly on can mistake a farmer's field or an ocean for an airport, I think you have issues bigger than interference with GPS and other nav systems.
If you're going to rant about grammar, please vet your post before you submit. That is all.
And clearly you didn't bother to read past the first sentence of that paragraph. Because, as I went on to say, when politics can't be removed from the marketplace, politics becomes a marketplace. And its one where consumers aren't bothering to go. Because gasoline is comparably cheap and they just can't be bothered.
Again.. You're essentially asserting that people who buy gasoline are being coerced into buying it. Which is quite frankly not the case. Or at least, I find it very hard to believe, given that no one I have ever met or have ever heard of in my entire life has made such a report. Since it is not the case that people are being coerced into buying gasoline, they must be doing so voluntarily. That is to say that buyers value the gasoline they buy at at least the value of the money they fork over to pay for it. How this is milking the American population any more than any other corporation turning a profit, I can't fathom. I guess Honda, Toys R US, Google, Panasonic, and IKEA are milking Americans for their own personal greed too. Oil companies provide something that Americans want. An energy source for their vehicles that allows Americans to get where they want to go in a timely fashion. Anything the oil companies do to stifle alternative fuels, competitive providers (although I'm far more inclined to believe that the massive startup costs are stifling more competitive providers than anything incumbent companies could do), and buying politicians are options only so long as the American masses implicitly allow it. Which the American masses are currently doing. Sure, the general public grumbles about it and media outlets can publish stories. But the prices currently aren't getting the public up in arms. They really aren't demanding that we devote a lot of resources to alternative fuels. Little public outrage makes politicians buyable. Or at the very least, a lot cheaper to be bought.
As an aside, the Constitution was written by men asserting their right to be free from English monarchy. The document says a great deal about how the Federal government should keep its big nose out of its citizen's business and very little about competitive markets.
If you want competitive markets, keep politics out of them. Oil companies may collude, but if they didn't have the weight of federal legislation to keep out new companies or impose large extra costs for opening new facilities or whatever, I can pretty well guarantee you that the lure of increased profits would induce one or more to break a collusion agreement.
Given that no one can keep politics out of markets, politics itself becomes a marketplace. And as I said before, its a market the american public isn't trading in much. There just isn't enough reason yet. Not that that surprises me. After all the price of gas is in the $3-4/gallon range. And yet we're still blowing through $4-5/pint on beer in quite ridiculous quantities. Heck, not only would not going to the bar save us from paying for heavily marked up alcohol, but we'd save the money on gas by not driving. Yet we still do a lot of both. Because its still relatively pretty cheap.
Tell your advisor he can pay for the convenience of having you available to communicate if he needs to. Otherwise you can just get your work done and take your paycheck.
Not that that'll work or go over well. But it would be nice..
I'm... not quite sure how you figure "instead of" at the same time you say "most of the difference". That says to me that there is a high tax which may (or may not) be going back to the taxpayers on top of big retirement packages. Not $400 million, because of the decreased consumption. Definitely not chump change, though.
I don't know about this 100 mile figure thing. It happens, I'm sure. but probably not as widespread as the GP implies. It'll happen in places like parts of California, where assessed values of tiny lots with maybe 1400-1500 sq feet are over $1 million. Gas may be a little pricier in those areas (probably at/over $4 now) but.. making that long commute, you pay a little extra in gas and you do so a couple of times a week. Rather than paying a very hefty sum once a month paying the interest on the tiny, expensive house.
Except that if we really do have that much petroleum stored up around the globe, its because the people who store it believe it to be more advantageous to store it than release it. They've already allocated their resources in what they believe to be the best way possible. There isn't any motivation for them to drain their stores while we retool the globe's production and refining capacities. Unless you'd be willing to pay them more for gas while we do so. I'm thinking thats probably not what you had in mind.
I can't even begin to comprehend what you're talking about. From what I can tell, somehow Wall Street is forcing people to incur debt and to buy copious quantities of gas. How they manage to do that, I don't know. Here I was under the impression that every cent of debt I'm carrying was incurred voluntarily. Not to mention that every gallon of gas that goes in my car was quite my own decision.. I guess I'm just that strange exception and everybody else has some Wall Street thug strongarming them in their decisions.
That may or may not be the case. I don't look too hard into this segment of legislation. It wouldn't surprise me terribly if the oil companies were pretty supportive of environmental legislation that blocked new capacity by making it excessively expensive. Thats kind of been the history of "protective" legislation in the US. Whatever was trying to be protected is barely better off, if at all, and the businesses that get grandfathered in see their margins increase.
I see you're thinking demand as going down only when raw quantity demanded shrinks. That isn't the whole of what economics would consider as "down". When prices go up, demand really does go "down". The quantity of gallons consumed may be up this year from last year and 5 years ago. However, if prices now were the same as last year's or 5 years ago the gallons consumed would be even higher now than they currently are. If you wish to use a gradeschooler's understanding, then lots of things don't work they way they should. Kinda how physics says that a 10 lb bowling ball and 10 lbs of feathers will hit the ground at the same time when dropped from the same height. If you actually try, though, the ball hits first. Because physics assumes you make th
Or... they'll have big guns and a yearning to use them on the heathen humans. Kinda like on earth!
It is illegal in my locality for drivers of a certain age range (I don't recall exactly, but they'd be relatively new drivers) to be on cell phones, handsfree devices or no, while driving.
Apparently there is a magic age where driving while using a cell phone ceases to be an issue around here.
Its funny how the audubon society opposes drilling in the ANWR.. Yet they allow oil drilling in their own privately owned wildlife preserves. Of course they do get paid for that..
You, apparently, haven't done much shooting. Especially with a pistol. You may know that the bang switch makes the gun fire. However, pulling the trigger doesn't mean the bullet goes where you want it to go. Trigger control, breath control, sight picture, grip, stance.. all of these contribute to aim. They are not all obvious. You'd be surprised at how far off target a pistol round can get just by slapping the trigger, even over very short ranges.
What's your point? Thats an indicator of demand for Wiis, and is nothing probative about Nintendo's motivations, or indeed any other console maker's motivations. Consumers have a price they're willing to pay. Nintendo can't make people pay more than they're willing. Especially not by not having product to sell them. Some non-traditional gamer might be willing to enter the market because they've discovered the Wii is fun. But I can pretty well promise you that they'd be willing to enter the market at $250 if there wasn't a shortage of units, as well. According to you, all console makers should set the price high (although in actual practice thats rare) in order to extract extra revenue. But if that was the strategy to follow, you should see price cuts much sooner, more frequently, and of smaller magnitude. That way each console is closer to the ideal of selling every console to every customer at their reservation price. You don't see that, because your strategy isn't the one to follow. Which is why I said that isn't how the console market works. Because it isn't.
No. No it isn't exactly what you already "told." You stated that console makers should sell a small fraction of units at a high price and then cut prices down the road to capture the vast majority of the market. That isn't what happens. The price is set at launch and then many, many, many months down the road the price gets cut. After a significant portion of the market has already purchased the product.
Not surprisingly, high initial prices is a bad strategy because it scares off potential customers. Which is why Sony and Microsoft are selling the hardware at a loss. They would love to sell you nothing but software, stuff they actually make money on. However, if you don't have the hardware thats a pretty hard sell.
Actually, you said the second round of sales (the 7 units) is at a slower pace. You said nothing about the 90 units. However, the numbers you use indicate an unusually long useful life in the console, if the 90 units is at an even slower pace than the 7. Actually, even if the 90 sells at the same pace as the 7, thats still an unusually long console life.
Not that the console market works like that. Console prices don't fall at retail until well after production is sufficient to meet demand. While some Wiis do get sold at a considerable markup, Nintendo doesn't capture the benefits. eBay, Amazon's zShops, and what have you benefit. As do the individuals who sell through those sites.
Production capacity is expensive to maintain. If you have it and don't use it, you don't get a discount on the costs of the facilities. If, in your first scenario, they sell the 100 units and the market is saturated Nintendo should then immediately sell their facilities to get rid of the costs of owning (but not using) them. In your second scenario, you need a production capacity to make the 90 unit supply. But you don't use it for the first few shipping cycles. The phantom benefits you describe get obliterated by the excessive costs.