I do wonder if this is an important point. Those of us who read Slashdot hear about astrology fairly frequently, mainly when we're scoffing at it. People who get their information from mainstream news, on the other hand, hear about horoscopes. I've never heard anyone ask someone else what their "astrological sign" was, but I have occasionally heard talk about the Zodiac or "Zodiac signs." It seems possible that some of the survey respondents have simply not heard much about astrology, at least under that name. It seems like an interesting question - I really don't know whether it would be a factor or not.
I think that what you meant to say was "I can assure you your depiction of free education bears no relation to reality in Britain, while I was in school ~25 years ago."
In the present day United States, many if not most state schools are (relatively) cheap to residents of that state, if not quite free. The state school I taught at a couple of years ago while I was getting my graduate degree had a nominal tuition fee of $7800 for in-state students (not including dorm fees or meal plans, but the majority of students lived off campus). The large majority of in-state students qualified for the $5000 per year lottery scholarship, leaving an effective tuition of $2800 per year. Not free, but hardly expensive either.
The problem is that such schools tend to also have admissions standards that are too low. Thus, an extremely high number of unqualified students decide, incorrectly, that they should attend college because it's "free" - loans will take care of that extra $2,800, and loans are free money, right? - and these unqualified students take up a disproportionate amount of university's resources but then don't actually graduate. At the above mentioned university, less than 40% of the entering freshmen class graduated within four years, and I can guarantee you that a good three quarters of my time and resources as a teacher were spent on students in the never-going-to-graduate category.
The point that the grandparent is making is that if the U.S. is going to give so much money to college students, there has to be some incentive to actually get a degree. In theory the best way to do that would be to only admit students with abundant academic talent, and indeed, many private colleges and a few state colleges still do this (but they tend to be the more expensive ones too). But since many state schools have given up on that quaint notion, financial incentives are the easiest tool for encouraging students to either get a degree or get out.
Admittedly, financial incentives (or disincentives in this case) are a crude and unfairly discriminatory tool. The part of me that believes in equality of opportunity for all dislikes the idea of making anyone pay for college. But the part of me that was an actual college teacher for a couple of years would like to point out that free and non-selective universities without an incentive to graduate quickly are unworkable in practice, as noble as they may sound in theory.
Not to be pedantic, but this mistake always annoys me. Carbon dioxide is not deadly, except in the sense that if you try to breathe nothing but CO_2 you would die from lack of oxygen. I believe you are thinking of carbon monoxide, which is indeed toxic in sufficient concentration.
Credit cards are almost always better for a U.S. cardholder than debit cards for the following reasons:
-Credit cards often have a reward for use when debit cards do not. My credit card gives me a 1 dollar credit on my Amazon account for every 100$, plus bonus credit in some cases. -Credit cards grant the option, but not the obligation, of deferring payment, when debit cards don't. I've never paid a cent in credit card interest since I turned 18, so obviously this option isn't worth much to me, but it is there in the incredibly unlikely event that I need it. -If you try to spend funds you don't have with a debit card, the bank may overdraft your account and charge you a penalty, instead of denying the transaction. This penalty is usually higher than the equivalent interest rate on a credit card. As of 2010, this is not really an issue anymore, because the customer now has to be dumb enough to voluntarily agree to this arrangement. -Other than the above, there's no functional difference (to the cardholder) between the two types . Fraud protection is the same, payment processing is the same, etc. This includes prices - very, very few merchants charge credit card users extra, although they are allowed to now.
Given that, the only reasons to avoid credit cards in the U.S. are moral objections or lack of self control to handle them responsibly. Rational consumers will use a credit card every time. Of course, this says nothing about what's best for merchants or banks, but that wasn't your question.
I don't know about Europe, but in the U.S., credit cards are always the superior option for the cardholder. That is not the case for the merchant taking the card. The only two reasons to use debit cards are 1) for ATM withdrawals 2) lack of emotional control. If you're interested here is a slightly dated but still mostly accurate opinion piece about why credit cards are the better choice.
I know that your question is derisive, but the Wall Street Journal provides some pretty valid reasons:
"There’s a historical view to this. In the past, other markets migrated for two reasons. First, there were higher fraud rates in some other markets, and they wanted to make this move [to chip and PIN] to combat fraud. Second, this system can operate in offline mode – the card and the terminal can authorize a transaction independent of communication with the bank’s systems. In some other markets they struggled with robust telephony networks, so this offline capacity was attractive. Both those factors were not driving factors here in America."
To put that statement into context, as of 2010, merchants were experiencing losses from credit card fraud at a rate 6 cents per $100 of credit card charges (in the US, merchants pretty much always bear all costs of credit card fraud). So for a busy retail location that did $10,000,000 in card transaction per year, card fraud losses would be $6,000 per year. Even in the highly unlikely event that moving to chip and PIN would cut fraud in half, that would be a savings of $3,000 per year. That's hardly compelling, since it's at least an order of magnitude less than what a store that size would lose from employee theft alone. From a practical, financial perspective, credit card fraud is just not an issue in the U.S. It's only important in terms of public opinion.
The WSJ article also mentions the very large size, maturity, and complexity of the American card network relative to other markets, and a certain amount of weirdness caused by the way the Durbin Amendment forces processors to handle debit card transactions.
I would also add that, as I alluded to earlier, end consumer protection from card fraud in the U.S. has always been extremely strong - it's very, very unlikely for the cardholder themselves to lose money from fraud. This meant that there was little impetus from consumers for a switch. There was also some worry that moving to chip and PIN would be used as an excuse to shift some of the liability for fraud to the cardholder, so ironically the old system was seen as safer (for consumers, at the merchant's expense). As the American chip and PIN system has been rolling out, it's becoming clear that this last concern is a non-issue.
I'm having a hard time deciding whether to argue with you or not. On the one hand, a great deal of consulting work is not bullshit, and is very valuable to the client company. Most companies would find it astonishingly stupid to pay a six figure salary to a full time actuary just to calculate their workers compensation reserves once a quarter, when they could pay a consultant (like me) four figures for the same service.
On the other hand, IBM's consultants are so incredibly expensive and useless that, in the context of this article, you are absolutely spot on. I count it as a great blessing that I work for a small firm that never has to deal with IBM or their ilk.
According to Motley Fool, only 14% of IBM's sales are from hardware. And that 14% is including the x86 server business that they just sold. And yet, between 2002 and 2012, their sales grew 28% and their earnings per share grew a whopping 7x (total earnings grew much less because of huge share buybacks, but it's earnings per share that matter). IBM is a software and services company. They keep selling some "big iron" to promote lock-in for their software and services - essentially their hardware is the corporate version of Amazon's Kindle Fire. Cool stuff like Watson notwithstanding, IBM usually tends to dump hardware divisions around the time when that division can no longer provide any reliable software or services lock-in.
I'm fairly sure that I know what you're trying to do with Beta crap. You're trying to lure in a younger, more hip readership that's less technical but brings in more revenue. In other words, this "Web 2.0" redesign is trying to attract people exactly like me. I'm young, male, middle-class, and (possibly) looking for a new job, which I suspect is exactly the demographic you're aiming the Beta at. I'm also less technically inclined - I'm an actuary, not a programmer or an IT guy. As you can see from my posting history, I've only been here a short time, although I read and posted anonymously for a while at first.
But I hate Slashdot Beta every bit as much as the old fogies who are complaining above me. I don't come to Slashdot for flamebait articles or glitzy graphics, I come here because I want to learn about and discuss technical topics that I don't encounter in my day-to-day work. I read the discussions here so that I can understand the technical stuff that my office's IT lady tells me, and so that I can better understand the technology that I interact with. I comment in discussions here because I want to avoid the teenage, brain dead, narcissistic, color vomiting "new new internet" bullshit twittering that's infecting discourse on the rest of the internet.
I've just started participating in the Slashdot community. I'm pretty sure that I'm the exact demographic you want to attract. You had such a good opportunity to reel me in permanently. Yet you've utterly failed with Slashdot Beta. I've already abandoned a fair number of web communities after they gutted their discussion system or went too far with the Web 2.0 nonsense. Likewise, I'll regretfully, but quickly, abandon Slashdot if I'm forced into this Beta bullshit against my will and against the obvious will of the community here.
Sincerely, hendrips, a representative member of your target audience
That's only guaranteed to be true if you coverage needs are the same as the plan your former employer offered, and if you are as risky or riskier than the average employee. To use myself as an example, I was laid off a couple of years ago from an employer which had a high average age and a high smoking rate (average age: late 40s to early 50s, 10%-20% smoked, if I had to guess). Their health plan had a 300$ per year deductible. As a result, their COBRA premiums were about $1500 per month for a couple. Pre-ACA that's probably still a better rate than a pair of 50 years old smokers in questionable health would have gotten on the individual market.
My wife and I, on the other hand, were nonsmokers in our 20s with no preexisting conditions. We also have a sizable emergency fund saved up because I hate spending money, so a $300 deductible would have been ridiculous for us. When we bought open market insurance, it cost us less than $200 per month. Obviously, that's just an anecdote, but it illustrates how hard it is to make blanket statements about American health insurance*.
*Other than "it sucks," which I think everyone on both sides of the spectrum would agree on, even if they argue about why or what to do.
I'm seeing quite a few comments about how this is really a good thing because will make customers angry about DRM, but I'm not sure. It seems to me that no-one in any of the following groups will be visibly affected:
-Anyone who buys e-books from Amazon - they don't use Adobe -Anyone who uses buys books for a Nook, iDevice, Kobo, etc. using the official bookstores - they'll make sure they're in compliance because they have no choice -Anyone with an objection to DRM - they're presumably only buying DRM free books anyway -Pirates - they're pirates, so of course this isn't going to affect them
Is there a meaningful number of ebook consumers that don't fall into one of those categories? It seems to me like there's very little pushback against DRM in ebooks, because in practice it just doesn't affect enough customers. That's a different situation than we had 10-15 years ago, when DRM in music really did (temporarily) inconvenience a large segment of the buying public.
I'm not entirely unsympathetic to your point, but slaves, serfs and very early steel workers are poor examples. Sure, they weren't happy, by and large, but then again they also weren't very productive either. Which is exactly what he was claiming.
RAM would be a great example. It costs less than a tenth of what it did 10 years ago for the same capacity, and the DDR3 - soon to be DDR4 - standard is objectively better than the original DDR from 10 years ago. Of course, computer buyers don't end up saving any money, because now computers come with 8 GB standard instead of 512 MB.
That actually illustrates a good point - the CPI (how the US measures inflation) is just, in aggregate, the amount of items that consumers buy times the price of those items. So it is possible for the CPI to increase even if aggregate prices decrease, if consumption increases as well. Our cost of living wouldn't be nearly so high if we were all willing to accept the same standard of living we had in 1960. However, we tend to increase our consumption over time without noticing.
Cars are another good example of this phenomenon. I think if you asked most Americans whether their car consumption has changed over the last 40 years, they would largely say no, because they still buy 1 new midsize economy sedan (or whatever their preference is) every 10 years, just like always. But their consumption has increased, because compared to today's cars, those older models were inefficient, uncomfortable death traps. So on average, Americans may be paying more than ever for cars, but they're also buying more car than ever.
How is this insightful? In general the people who directly shop for insurance online tend to be more savvy than average. The idiots are the customers who let an insurance agent (commissioned salesman) do the shopping for them. I don't know about the OP's employer, though - he may not even be maintaining websites for customers.
Apparently, however, "you guys" think grammar is a sin...
As someone who's lived in the Deep South myself, I'll accept your criticism - as soon as everyone up north learns to handle tornadoes, hurricanes, and earthquake proofing just as well as we're supposed to handle driving in snow. I currently live in an area where tornadoes can occur, and a distressing number of New England transplants don't understand why they're not safe in their cars, or why hiding in a windowless basement is a sound idea. For a while I lived in a hurricane prone area, and the northerners that I knew didn't understand basic concepts like storm shutters, or evacuation preparedness.
I never blamed the northerners I knew for their ignorance. These were situations they had never encountered before. Likewise I'm not sure why you're blaming the people from Atlanta for reacting poorly to a situation that they basically never have to deal with, and that they can't practice dealing with.
Besides, the main problem that the storm caused in Atlanta was gridlock. Which is the opposite of driving too fast.
When I last checked, the lowest priced Tesla available was $80,000 (Tesla's website says $70,000 but that seems to be assuming $10,000 in tax credits). I'm struggling to see how that's affordable to any segment of the "mass market." That's not to knock Tesla - it's an extremely nice, very expensive luxury car. But it is still a very expensive luxury car.
Unlike you (I assume), I play Starcraft II fairly avidly, and I have no idea what you're talking about. You seem to be implying that Blizzard has some sort of consumer hostile activation system that ties your account to a specific PC. This is not true; you can install the Starcraft II client on as many computers as you want*, and play on as many computers as you want, all with the same account.
In fact, after having lost and repurchased the original Starcraft game twice (computer died, couldn't find the disks), I consider online activation to be a very positive feature. I understand if you oppose online activation in general on ideological grounds, but don't try to tell me that you oppose this particular activation scheme because it's inconvenient. It is absolutely not.
*As far as I know. I've played on at least 3 or 4 different PCs, but if someone knows better please correct me.
If you trust Gartner's numbers, Lenovo's absolute sales increased by about 6% year-over-year. This increased their market share from 16% to 18% because the rest of the PC industry is shrinking. So Lenovo is continuing to grow the PC business. Take those numbers with a grain of salt, of course, since Gartner is not always completely reliable.
Lenovo has "dual headquarters" in Beijing and Morrisville, North Carolina, but it is definitely a Chinese company - stock is traded in Hong Kong, the directors are Chinese, etc. That said, Lenovo isn't really a state-backed enterprise to the same degree as companies like Huawei; they probably don't receive much more government interference than, say, Apple or HP. Admittedly, that's not much comfort...
Checking accounts are not cheap for a bank to run. I know something about this because I am a member of a credit union, and, being a finance nerd, looked through their books. It is pretty likely that even at $8 per month in fees, a bank would actually be subsidizing a depositor if they didn't also have an account besides checking. The reason that banks were willing to offer large subsidies for checking, ATM use, etc. in the 80's was because it was easier to create lock-in. If you had a checking account and ATM card at a bank, you were pretty likely to also get a savings account, CD, and mortgage from the same bank - you might even be interested in insurance or brokerage services. Banks were willing to swallow the non-trivial costs of offering free checking because they were, essentially, marketing expenses. Also, it should be mentioned that it wasn't quite as expensive before 9-11, since "Know-your-customer" and other anti-terrorism measures didn't exist. Now, it's much easier for customers to comparison shop, especially for CD rates and insurance prices, so it's not as viable for banks to rely on cross-selling.
That's a bit of revisionist history - declining employment in many of those sectors has less to do with "exporting jobs", and more to do with those industries just not needing as many employees. Of course, that's still a problem, but not a problem that protectionism is going to help much. I'll pick the steel industry for an example.
According to Wikipedia, between 1974 and 1999, employment in the worldwide steel industry (not just the US) decreased by 1.5 million. As far as I can tell that would be about a 50% to 60% drop in employment. Over that same time period, the amount of steel produced worldwide increased by about 150 million tons, a 20% to 25% increase in production. See here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G... for details.
Besides, when Americans talk about the "missing" steel industry, they're usually thinking of US Steel, the quintessential American steel company from Pittsburgh. It is indeed a shell of its former self. But the largest factor (and there were many) in US Steel's downfall was a reliance on massive blast furnaces which had to be continuously operated, preventing the company from aligning production with demand. Arguably, this complacency occurred because they were making so much money from their oil & gas operations that they neglected to invest in modern steel foundries.
Even after the "collapse" of the US steel industry, it's still in 3rd place worldwide for steel production, trailing only China and Japan. Much of that steel is produced at companies like Nucor, in North Carolina rather than the Rust Belt, using small electric arc furnaces. These foundries are safer, (somewhat) more environmentally friendly, more profitable, and much more efficient than the "steel industry" that you're picturing. They just don't require many employees to operate.
You may be old enough that you aren't familiar with schools these days. I can assure you that for very many young "nerds", the world is actively and openly hostile towards intelligence, which makes it rather hard to develop those social skills. Now, I pretty much agree with your comments when applied to the adult world. Intelligent adults are (relatively) highly valued and successful, on average. But social skills are largely developed in youth, and it's rather hard to develop social skills when no one wants to talk to you for the first 18 years of your life, for fear of having their popularity tainted by association.
Among young people with undeveloped empathy and social skills, this can be a hard social situation at times but it doesn't mean "nerds" have it worse than anyone else. I assure you that it is no easier to be socially adept but academically challenged - different but no easier.
I find that extremely unlikely. Perhaps you mean that in the sense that both challenges require equally difficult amounts of work to overcome? That might be true. But if you're trying to tell me that struggling with schoolwork is as emotionally painful as struggling socially, I absolutely disagree. A socially adept bad student has, by definition, plenty of friends and support to fall back on, and his peers won't think any less of him for his poor education (until he graduates, at least). On the other hand, a nerd has few or no friends, and is openly derided and shunned by his peers.
Of course, none of this is true universally. I was very lucky, because my parents took me out of the local public school where intelligence and "nerdy" behavior were reviled, and could afford to put me in a private school where intelligence was highly valued. I am very fortunate that I had that luxury - most kids don't. Maybe you were lucky enough to go to a school where the jocks didn't make the nerds' life hell - again, many smart kids aren't so lucky.
What? Dividends (or share buybacks, which are functionally similar) are the obvious answer to that. Dividends inject money back into the economy far more directly than any other activity a corporation can take. Personal anecdote - when my grandmother was alive, she had a fair chunk of shares of a regional bank. When I was young, I would always look forward to the one day every three months when her dividend check arrived, because she would take the whole family out for a nice dinner, and then would take me shopping at the local bookstore.
I have seen a couple of studies that indicate money paid as dividends is about 7% more economically productive than money retained as cash holdings or expended on investments (either capital improvements or acquisitions). I know there was a slightly informal study by Arnott & Asness with this conclusion, and there was a much more rigorous study by a guy whose name I can't remember right now (something Llosa something?) which said the same thing.
I know dividends are an alien concept to many tech companies, but Intel can manage to pay out 47% of its profits as dividends, while still funding massive fab and R&D investments with very little debt. If Intel can do that, Google can, and should, do the same unless they can make an extremely convincing argument that acquisitions will be more beneficial. And the problem with Google is that most of the voting stock is owned by Sergei, Larry, and Eric, so they're not really accountable to their shareholders (or anyone else).
Maybe this is the problem with keyboard design. I absolutely love that keyboard. When I got a new computer at work, I specifically requested that keyboard model, and I use a similar model at home. The actual office drones like me who have to use these keyboards seem to have different needs in practice than what your theoretical expertise claims. I certainly use the LCD calculator constantly, and I have no idea how I'm supposed to be giving myself hand cramps with it. As far as I can tell, Logitech has discontinued this model, so I'll be clinging to desperately to the one I have. But, to echo one of the other replies, I don't teach "mechatronic design," I'm just a lowly actuary who has to use the damn thing every day, so what do I know?
Slashdot Mirror
I do wonder if this is an important point. Those of us who read Slashdot hear about astrology fairly frequently, mainly when we're scoffing at it. People who get their information from mainstream news, on the other hand, hear about horoscopes. I've never heard anyone ask someone else what their "astrological sign" was, but I have occasionally heard talk about the Zodiac or "Zodiac signs." It seems possible that some of the survey respondents have simply not heard much about astrology, at least under that name. It seems like an interesting question - I really don't know whether it would be a factor or not.
I think that what you meant to say was "I can assure you your depiction of free education bears no relation to reality in Britain, while I was in school ~25 years ago."
In the present day United States, many if not most state schools are (relatively) cheap to residents of that state, if not quite free. The state school I taught at a couple of years ago while I was getting my graduate degree had a nominal tuition fee of $7800 for in-state students (not including dorm fees or meal plans, but the majority of students lived off campus). The large majority of in-state students qualified for the $5000 per year lottery scholarship, leaving an effective tuition of $2800 per year. Not free, but hardly expensive either.
The problem is that such schools tend to also have admissions standards that are too low. Thus, an extremely high number of unqualified students decide, incorrectly, that they should attend college because it's "free" - loans will take care of that extra $2,800, and loans are free money, right? - and these unqualified students take up a disproportionate amount of university's resources but then don't actually graduate. At the above mentioned university, less than 40% of the entering freshmen class graduated within four years, and I can guarantee you that a good three quarters of my time and resources as a teacher were spent on students in the never-going-to-graduate category.
The point that the grandparent is making is that if the U.S. is going to give so much money to college students, there has to be some incentive to actually get a degree. In theory the best way to do that would be to only admit students with abundant academic talent, and indeed, many private colleges and a few state colleges still do this (but they tend to be the more expensive ones too). But since many state schools have given up on that quaint notion, financial incentives are the easiest tool for encouraging students to either get a degree or get out.
Admittedly, financial incentives (or disincentives in this case) are a crude and unfairly discriminatory tool. The part of me that believes in equality of opportunity for all dislikes the idea of making anyone pay for college. But the part of me that was an actual college teacher for a couple of years would like to point out that free and non-selective universities without an incentive to graduate quickly are unworkable in practice, as noble as they may sound in theory.
Not to be pedantic, but this mistake always annoys me. Carbon dioxide is not deadly, except in the sense that if you try to breathe nothing but CO_2 you would die from lack of oxygen. I believe you are thinking of carbon monoxide, which is indeed toxic in sufficient concentration.
Credit cards are almost always better for a U.S. cardholder than debit cards for the following reasons:
-Credit cards often have a reward for use when debit cards do not. My credit card gives me a 1 dollar credit on my Amazon account for every 100$, plus bonus credit in some cases.
-Credit cards grant the option, but not the obligation, of deferring payment, when debit cards don't. I've never paid a cent in credit card interest since I turned 18, so obviously this option isn't worth much to me, but it is there in the incredibly unlikely event that I need it.
-If you try to spend funds you don't have with a debit card, the bank may overdraft your account and charge you a penalty, instead of denying the transaction. This penalty is usually higher than the equivalent interest rate on a credit card. As of 2010, this is not really an issue anymore, because the customer now has to be dumb enough to voluntarily agree to this arrangement.
-Other than the above, there's no functional difference (to the cardholder) between the two types . Fraud protection is the same, payment processing is the same, etc. This includes prices - very, very few merchants charge credit card users extra, although they are allowed to now.
Given that, the only reasons to avoid credit cards in the U.S. are moral objections or lack of self control to handle them responsibly. Rational consumers will use a credit card every time. Of course, this says nothing about what's best for merchants or banks, but that wasn't your question.
I don't know about Europe, but in the U.S., credit cards are always the superior option for the cardholder. That is not the case for the merchant taking the card. The only two reasons to use debit cards are 1) for ATM withdrawals 2) lack of emotional control. If you're interested here is a slightly dated but still mostly accurate opinion piece about why credit cards are the better choice.
I know that your question is derisive, but the Wall Street Journal provides some pretty valid reasons:
"There’s a historical view to this. In the past, other markets migrated for two reasons. First, there were higher fraud rates in some other markets, and they wanted to make this move [to chip and PIN] to combat fraud. Second, this system can operate in offline mode – the card and the terminal can authorize a transaction independent of communication with the bank’s systems. In some other markets they struggled with robust telephony networks, so this offline capacity was attractive. Both those factors were not driving factors here in America."
To put that statement into context, as of 2010, merchants were experiencing losses from credit card fraud at a rate 6 cents per $100 of credit card charges (in the US, merchants pretty much always bear all costs of credit card fraud). So for a busy retail location that did $10,000,000 in card transaction per year, card fraud losses would be $6,000 per year. Even in the highly unlikely event that moving to chip and PIN would cut fraud in half, that would be a savings of $3,000 per year. That's hardly compelling, since it's at least an order of magnitude less than what a store that size would lose from employee theft alone. From a practical, financial perspective, credit card fraud is just not an issue in the U.S. It's only important in terms of public opinion.
The WSJ article also mentions the very large size, maturity, and complexity of the American card network relative to other markets, and a certain amount of weirdness caused by the way the Durbin Amendment forces processors to handle debit card transactions.
I would also add that, as I alluded to earlier, end consumer protection from card fraud in the U.S. has always been extremely strong - it's very, very unlikely for the cardholder themselves to lose money from fraud. This meant that there was little impetus from consumers for a switch. There was also some worry that moving to chip and PIN would be used as an excuse to shift some of the liability for fraud to the cardholder, so ironically the old system was seen as safer (for consumers, at the merchant's expense). As the American chip and PIN system has been rolling out, it's becoming clear that this last concern is a non-issue.
I'm having a hard time deciding whether to argue with you or not. On the one hand, a great deal of consulting work is not bullshit, and is very valuable to the client company. Most companies would find it astonishingly stupid to pay a six figure salary to a full time actuary just to calculate their workers compensation reserves once a quarter, when they could pay a consultant (like me) four figures for the same service.
On the other hand, IBM's consultants are so incredibly expensive and useless that, in the context of this article, you are absolutely spot on. I count it as a great blessing that I work for a small firm that never has to deal with IBM or their ilk.
According to Motley Fool, only 14% of IBM's sales are from hardware. And that 14% is including the x86 server business that they just sold. And yet, between 2002 and 2012, their sales grew 28% and their earnings per share grew a whopping 7x (total earnings grew much less because of huge share buybacks, but it's earnings per share that matter). IBM is a software and services company. They keep selling some "big iron" to promote lock-in for their software and services - essentially their hardware is the corporate version of Amazon's Kindle Fire. Cool stuff like Watson notwithstanding, IBM usually tends to dump hardware divisions around the time when that division can no longer provide any reliable software or services lock-in.
Dear Slashdot,
I'm fairly sure that I know what you're trying to do with Beta crap. You're trying to lure in a younger, more hip readership that's less technical but brings in more revenue. In other words, this "Web 2.0" redesign is trying to attract people exactly like me. I'm young, male, middle-class, and (possibly) looking for a new job, which I suspect is exactly the demographic you're aiming the Beta at. I'm also less technically inclined - I'm an actuary, not a programmer or an IT guy. As you can see from my posting history, I've only been here a short time, although I read and posted anonymously for a while at first.
But I hate Slashdot Beta every bit as much as the old fogies who are complaining above me. I don't come to Slashdot for flamebait articles or glitzy graphics, I come here because I want to learn about and discuss technical topics that I don't encounter in my day-to-day work. I read the discussions here so that I can understand the technical stuff that my office's IT lady tells me, and so that I can better understand the technology that I interact with. I comment in discussions here because I want to avoid the teenage, brain dead, narcissistic, color vomiting "new new internet" bullshit twittering that's infecting discourse on the rest of the internet.
I've just started participating in the Slashdot community. I'm pretty sure that I'm the exact demographic you want to attract. You had such a good opportunity to reel me in permanently. Yet you've utterly failed with Slashdot Beta. I've already abandoned a fair number of web communities after they gutted their discussion system or went too far with the Web 2.0 nonsense. Likewise, I'll regretfully, but quickly, abandon Slashdot if I'm forced into this Beta bullshit against my will and against the obvious will of the community here.
Sincerely,
hendrips, a representative member of your target audience
That's only guaranteed to be true if you coverage needs are the same as the plan your former employer offered, and if you are as risky or riskier than the average employee. To use myself as an example, I was laid off a couple of years ago from an employer which had a high average age and a high smoking rate (average age: late 40s to early 50s, 10%-20% smoked, if I had to guess). Their health plan had a 300$ per year deductible. As a result, their COBRA premiums were about $1500 per month for a couple. Pre-ACA that's probably still a better rate than a pair of 50 years old smokers in questionable health would have gotten on the individual market.
My wife and I, on the other hand, were nonsmokers in our 20s with no preexisting conditions. We also have a sizable emergency fund saved up because I hate spending money, so a $300 deductible would have been ridiculous for us. When we bought open market insurance, it cost us less than $200 per month. Obviously, that's just an anecdote, but it illustrates how hard it is to make blanket statements about American health insurance*.
*Other than "it sucks," which I think everyone on both sides of the spectrum would agree on, even if they argue about why or what to do.
I'm seeing quite a few comments about how this is really a good thing because will make customers angry about DRM, but I'm not sure. It seems to me that no-one in any of the following groups will be visibly affected:
-Anyone who buys e-books from Amazon - they don't use Adobe
-Anyone who uses buys books for a Nook, iDevice, Kobo, etc. using the official bookstores - they'll make sure they're in compliance because they have no choice
-Anyone with an objection to DRM - they're presumably only buying DRM free books anyway
-Pirates - they're pirates, so of course this isn't going to affect them
Is there a meaningful number of ebook consumers that don't fall into one of those categories? It seems to me like there's very little pushback against DRM in ebooks, because in practice it just doesn't affect enough customers. That's a different situation than we had 10-15 years ago, when DRM in music really did (temporarily) inconvenience a large segment of the buying public.
I'm not entirely unsympathetic to your point, but slaves, serfs and very early steel workers are poor examples. Sure, they weren't happy, by and large, but then again they also weren't very productive either. Which is exactly what he was claiming.
RAM would be a great example. It costs less than a tenth of what it did 10 years ago for the same capacity, and the DDR3 - soon to be DDR4 - standard is objectively better than the original DDR from 10 years ago. Of course, computer buyers don't end up saving any money, because now computers come with 8 GB standard instead of 512 MB.
That actually illustrates a good point - the CPI (how the US measures inflation) is just, in aggregate, the amount of items that consumers buy times the price of those items. So it is possible for the CPI to increase even if aggregate prices decrease, if consumption increases as well. Our cost of living wouldn't be nearly so high if we were all willing to accept the same standard of living we had in 1960. However, we tend to increase our consumption over time without noticing.
Cars are another good example of this phenomenon. I think if you asked most Americans whether their car consumption has changed over the last 40 years, they would largely say no, because they still buy 1 new midsize economy sedan (or whatever their preference is) every 10 years, just like always. But their consumption has increased, because compared to today's cars, those older models were inefficient, uncomfortable death traps. So on average, Americans may be paying more than ever for cars, but they're also buying more car than ever.
How is this insightful? In general the people who directly shop for insurance online tend to be more savvy than average. The idiots are the customers who let an insurance agent (commissioned salesman) do the shopping for them. I don't know about the OP's employer, though - he may not even be maintaining websites for customers.
get's
Apparently, however, "you guys" think grammar is a sin...
As someone who's lived in the Deep South myself, I'll accept your criticism - as soon as everyone up north learns to handle tornadoes, hurricanes, and earthquake proofing just as well as we're supposed to handle driving in snow. I currently live in an area where tornadoes can occur, and a distressing number of New England transplants don't understand why they're not safe in their cars, or why hiding in a windowless basement is a sound idea. For a while I lived in a hurricane prone area, and the northerners that I knew didn't understand basic concepts like storm shutters, or evacuation preparedness.
I never blamed the northerners I knew for their ignorance. These were situations they had never encountered before. Likewise I'm not sure why you're blaming the people from Atlanta for reacting poorly to a situation that they basically never have to deal with, and that they can't practice dealing with.
Besides, the main problem that the storm caused in Atlanta was gridlock. Which is the opposite of driving too fast.
When I last checked, the lowest priced Tesla available was $80,000 (Tesla's website says $70,000 but that seems to be assuming $10,000 in tax credits). I'm struggling to see how that's affordable to any segment of the "mass market." That's not to knock Tesla - it's an extremely nice, very expensive luxury car. But it is still a very expensive luxury car.
Unlike you (I assume), I play Starcraft II fairly avidly, and I have no idea what you're talking about. You seem to be implying that Blizzard has some sort of consumer hostile activation system that ties your account to a specific PC. This is not true; you can install the Starcraft II client on as many computers as you want*, and play on as many computers as you want, all with the same account.
In fact, after having lost and repurchased the original Starcraft game twice (computer died, couldn't find the disks), I consider online activation to be a very positive feature. I understand if you oppose online activation in general on ideological grounds, but don't try to tell me that you oppose this particular activation scheme because it's inconvenient. It is absolutely not.
*As far as I know. I've played on at least 3 or 4 different PCs, but if someone knows better please correct me.
If you trust Gartner's numbers, Lenovo's absolute sales increased by about 6% year-over-year. This increased their market share from 16% to 18% because the rest of the PC industry is shrinking. So Lenovo is continuing to grow the PC business. Take those numbers with a grain of salt, of course, since Gartner is not always completely reliable.
Lenovo has "dual headquarters" in Beijing and Morrisville, North Carolina, but it is definitely a Chinese company - stock is traded in Hong Kong, the directors are Chinese, etc. That said, Lenovo isn't really a state-backed enterprise to the same degree as companies like Huawei; they probably don't receive much more government interference than, say, Apple or HP. Admittedly, that's not much comfort...
Checking accounts are not cheap for a bank to run. I know something about this because I am a member of a credit union, and, being a finance nerd, looked through their books. It is pretty likely that even at $8 per month in fees, a bank would actually be subsidizing a depositor if they didn't also have an account besides checking. The reason that banks were willing to offer large subsidies for checking, ATM use, etc. in the 80's was because it was easier to create lock-in. If you had a checking account and ATM card at a bank, you were pretty likely to also get a savings account, CD, and mortgage from the same bank - you might even be interested in insurance or brokerage services. Banks were willing to swallow the non-trivial costs of offering free checking because they were, essentially, marketing expenses. Also, it should be mentioned that it wasn't quite as expensive before 9-11, since "Know-your-customer" and other anti-terrorism measures didn't exist. Now, it's much easier for customers to comparison shop, especially for CD rates and insurance prices, so it's not as viable for banks to rely on cross-selling.
That's a bit of revisionist history - declining employment in many of those sectors has less to do with "exporting jobs", and more to do with those industries just not needing as many employees. Of course, that's still a problem, but not a problem that protectionism is going to help much. I'll pick the steel industry for an example.
According to Wikipedia, between 1974 and 1999, employment in the worldwide steel industry (not just the US) decreased by 1.5 million. As far as I can tell that would be about a 50% to 60% drop in employment. Over that same time period, the amount of steel produced worldwide increased by about 150 million tons, a 20% to 25% increase in production. See here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G... for details.
Besides, when Americans talk about the "missing" steel industry, they're usually thinking of US Steel, the quintessential American steel company from Pittsburgh. It is indeed a shell of its former self. But the largest factor (and there were many) in US Steel's downfall was a reliance on massive blast furnaces which had to be continuously operated, preventing the company from aligning production with demand. Arguably, this complacency occurred because they were making so much money from their oil & gas operations that they neglected to invest in modern steel foundries.
Even after the "collapse" of the US steel industry, it's still in 3rd place worldwide for steel production, trailing only China and Japan. Much of that steel is produced at companies like Nucor, in North Carolina rather than the Rust Belt, using small electric arc furnaces. These foundries are safer, (somewhat) more environmentally friendly, more profitable, and much more efficient than the "steel industry" that you're picturing. They just don't require many employees to operate.
You may be old enough that you aren't familiar with schools these days. I can assure you that for very many young "nerds", the world is actively and openly hostile towards intelligence, which makes it rather hard to develop those social skills. Now, I pretty much agree with your comments when applied to the adult world. Intelligent adults are (relatively) highly valued and successful, on average. But social skills are largely developed in youth, and it's rather hard to develop social skills when no one wants to talk to you for the first 18 years of your life, for fear of having their popularity tainted by association.
Among young people with undeveloped empathy and social skills, this can be a hard social situation at times but it doesn't mean "nerds" have it worse than anyone else. I assure you that it is no easier to be socially adept but academically challenged - different but no easier.
I find that extremely unlikely. Perhaps you mean that in the sense that both challenges require equally difficult amounts of work to overcome? That might be true. But if you're trying to tell me that struggling with schoolwork is as emotionally painful as struggling socially, I absolutely disagree. A socially adept bad student has, by definition, plenty of friends and support to fall back on, and his peers won't think any less of him for his poor education (until he graduates, at least). On the other hand, a nerd has few or no friends, and is openly derided and shunned by his peers.
Of course, none of this is true universally. I was very lucky, because my parents took me out of the local public school where intelligence and "nerdy" behavior were reviled, and could afford to put me in a private school where intelligence was highly valued. I am very fortunate that I had that luxury - most kids don't. Maybe you were lucky enough to go to a school where the jocks didn't make the nerds' life hell - again, many smart kids aren't so lucky.
It's a co-operative. There's no profit to be had, by definition. Well, unless the directors are committing fraud, but that's already illegal.
What? Dividends (or share buybacks, which are functionally similar) are the obvious answer to that. Dividends inject money back into the economy far more directly than any other activity a corporation can take. Personal anecdote - when my grandmother was alive, she had a fair chunk of shares of a regional bank. When I was young, I would always look forward to the one day every three months when her dividend check arrived, because she would take the whole family out for a nice dinner, and then would take me shopping at the local bookstore.
I have seen a couple of studies that indicate money paid as dividends is about 7% more economically productive than money retained as cash holdings or expended on investments (either capital improvements or acquisitions). I know there was a slightly informal study by Arnott & Asness with this conclusion, and there was a much more rigorous study by a guy whose name I can't remember right now (something Llosa something?) which said the same thing.
I know dividends are an alien concept to many tech companies, but Intel can manage to pay out 47% of its profits as dividends, while still funding massive fab and R&D investments with very little debt. If Intel can do that, Google can, and should, do the same unless they can make an extremely convincing argument that acquisitions will be more beneficial. And the problem with Google is that most of the voting stock is owned by Sergei, Larry, and Eric, so they're not really accountable to their shareholders (or anyone else).
Maybe this is the problem with keyboard design. I absolutely love that keyboard. When I got a new computer at work, I specifically requested that keyboard model, and I use a similar model at home. The actual office drones like me who have to use these keyboards seem to have different needs in practice than what your theoretical expertise claims. I certainly use the LCD calculator constantly, and I have no idea how I'm supposed to be giving myself hand cramps with it. As far as I can tell, Logitech has discontinued this model, so I'll be clinging to desperately to the one I have. But, to echo one of the other replies, I don't teach "mechatronic design," I'm just a lowly actuary who has to use the damn thing every day, so what do I know?