So this will finish the outside. That goes up pretty fast. The slow part of a custom home is the plumbing, the wiring, the trim and the painting and finishing.
The slow part of any home is all the detail work that the systems and details require, regardless of whether it's custom or not.
But yeah, this really is a solution in search of a problem. Concrete homes have so many drawbacks on top of this 'solution' not addressing the expensive bits...
Wow - you're understanding of the "spatula industry" is so far off base, I don't even know where to begin.
To take just *one* glaring error - no store maintains an 'entire logistical chain just to supply spatulas'. They order them a handful at a time from the same vendor they get the remainder of their kitchen tools from. Ditto for the capitol... etc... etc...
I had one of those 1936 homes, constructed by the barely sober laborers for $1/day. When you've got that cheap labor, you can construct wood lathe to go under the browncoat and two layers of plaster, you can afford an oak plank floor with mahogany inlays, and you can make Art-Deco architectural sculpted walls with built in shelving, and you can sell the thing for less than $3,000.
The problem is that while $3k sounds cheap to modern ears - it wasn't in 1936. That $3k house was solidly the province of the upper reaches of the middle class - the top 10-15%. Not to mention, those details you list weren't created by the $1/day laborers - they would have been done by skilled labor just as they are today.
And no, you can't perform a simply minded inflation calculation to come up with the cost of that house today either. Costs are affected by other than things than just inflation - and the costs of skilled labor in particular have skyrocketed since the 1930's. There's a reason why you don't find those details in any but the highest end bespoke houses today.
Kodak died by not getting into the digital "thing" quickly enough and then doing poorly by the time they did. Same with Polaroid, really. Too stubborn to admit that their technology was coming to the end of an era and develop a replacement and instead letting their competitors (and even just random no-name companies at the time) do it for them.
That's a common mythperception - and utterly wrong. Kodak was an early entrant into the digital realm, and a strong leader there for a number of years. Where they failed was in just not being able to keep up - their product cycles were a bit too long for digital/'net era and the steadily fell further and further behind. They still maintained strong sales (especially in the professional segment), but rather than capitalizing on this they started to push products out to meet their competitors release cycles rather than emphasizing quality as they had previously. It only took a couple of generations of this before they'd utterly trashed their reputation.
At least they'll die having done almost nothing but film photography
On the contrary. Kodak remains one of the most important designers and manufacturers of digital sensors in the world. Leica's current crop of top end rangefinders, widely lauded for their image quality feature Kodak designed and manufactured sensors As does a wide range of Olympus equipment and backs for medium format camera's.
But, as with their commercial products, they've started to fall increasingly behind. Their product cycle is still too long and they have continuing problems in converting their (until very recently) world class R&D into products on the shelf.
Photos, I've been convinced for the last few years isn't cost effective to print... you can get prints at an actual photo place for so cheap now, you couldn't buy the ink and paper for what it would cost you. I think the last time I got prints it was about 7 cents/print.
This only work so long as you're content with what you can get for 7 cents/print. Like everything else in the race to the bottom, you get what you pay for - and the 7 cent print is the equivalent of a Big Mac. Cheap, satisfying in the short term, but utter crap.
One of our morning talk show hosts -- who's about as conservative as they come -- devoted most of his program to SOPA and PIPA this morming. As a result, a lot of people who'd never heard of it are now very annoyed and are expressing their displeasure toward their Congress Critters.
And the Congress critters are making meaningless noises of sympathy because it's good PR. But tomorrow, they'll be back to business as usual because Congress knows full well that when folks head to the polls in November, they'll (aided by decades of gerrymandering) send the same rascals right back to Capitol Hill.
I'm actually feeling pretty encouraged this morning. It has been a while since I felt that way.
That's because you, like so many, delude yourself into thinking that this kind of one-off stunt has accomplished anything. It'll be back to business as usual for you (the generic you, not the poster to whom I'm replying) tomorrow too. You'll go back to your stupid forwards and banners and "post this to your [status|signature line]" in the false belief that a few talking heads pretending for the moment to agree to with you means you've actually accomplished something. But, as I said above, in November, in aggregate, you'll just vote for the same rascals and go back to whining when they (predictably to anyone with an IQ over room temperature) behave as they always have.
Making sure that everyone knows what is happening and what is at stake is probably the most useful thing anyone can do.
But that's not (completely) what people are doing. When I see a corporation defending my rights, especially when they have a record of violating them, I have to ask why they would do that. What's in it for them? Just because they appear on the surface agree with you, doesn't mean they have the same reasons or goals as you or your interests at heart.
When you look at Google for example, you have to think of YouTube and the terabytes of copyright violations that they derive ad revenue from. You also have to think of Google Books and their attempts to violate authors rights by forcing them to opt-out if they don't want their material illegally (under current law) served up by Google.
So no, I don't think Google (for just one example) is indulging in their minor protest out of the goodness of their hearts... They're doing it out for their bottom line and for the PR it generates.
Like the grandparent poster, you are really, truly confused about Google's web presence. I do know what money is, and how irrelevant it is to websites going black - as most of Google's income comes from advertisers not from advertisements.
I haven't given any money to Wikipedia in a long time. This seems like a good reason to continue that policy.
There, fixed that for you.
Why haven't I donated? Because of their two faced policy about editing - when it's convenient it's the users who are responsible, but when it's embarrassing Jimbo or and Admin overrides the community. Because of their adverting splashed across every page. (Anyone who doesn't think those "an appeal from some random person I don't care about" banners aren't advertising is deluding themselves.) Because the Wikimedia Foundation continues to prefer Wikipedia The Role Playing Game over Wikipedia The Encyclopedia.
Suspending operations for a political point is just icing on the cake.
Here's a chance to pay a company, which has earned the money, for doing the right thing.
And that's just more of the same - they have indeed become a company, not the community they represent themselves as. And there's no possible way that throwing their weight around (which Microsoft would be pilloried, and Google would br praised, for) can be interpreted as "the right thing". Wikipedia is an encyclopedia (more in theory than in practice) not a political cause.
If by "everbody else" you mean "less than Facebook, let alone Facebook, MSN, Yahoo, etc... combined", then sure. Otherwise... well, no. Google is big in a couple of niches and with a narrow demographic, but nowhere near dominant across the entire 'web or the population at large.
They need more than just another series of murders... They need to have all the murders (I.E. bodies found after a delay will skew the data) and have them correctly attributed to the proper murderer (both missing and extraneous murders will skew the data). I.E. someone like Gary Ridgeway or Ted Bundy will likely either escape detection entirely or have wildly incorrect predictions. Not to mention killers like BTK who stopped entirely...
People in the congregation ask each other for the password (or more likely, ask someone whom they know is on the tech-savvy side) and so those who need it are able to get back on.
You honestly believe this? I just got back from a trip where I spent a week using the wireless network of a parish school across the street - it was widely known in the neighborhood, whether they were parishioners or not. My mom isn't a parishioner, and had the password on a sticky next to her monitor!
You might as well run a network with no password, as that's essentially what you're already doing, and save yourself and your parishioners the trouble.
The word you're looking for is depreceation, and it's been a fact of life in reselling electronics since the dawn of mass consumer digital/electronic devices back in the 1980's.
One division of a cell phone seller that I'm familiar with wipes them with windex, therefore marks the value up on the books to about $150 because its now "reconditioned", donates them to battered women, homeless people, etc, as 911 emergency phones, marks the $150 loss/donation on their tax return, and uses that to balance against their income earned from selling phones and prays like hell that they never get audited.
Never buy a battery (of any sort, not just cellphone) on ebay. Period.
There, fixed that for you.
Seriously, there's so much 'spam' on eBay, that it's become virtually worthless. The last time I tried to buy anything useful from there, I spent so much time sorting through the knockoffs, scams, idiots who put unrelated keywords in their description, etc... that ('paying' myself a fair hourly wage) I wasn't saving all that much money unless I got the item at a low price on the first auction I bid in. (And frequently, there's competition, so it takes multiple attempts, and thus multiple passes at sorting, before winning.)
This reminds me of one of the stories about the Manhattan Project. Before the first (Trinity) test, Enrico Fermi began offering anyone listening a wager on "whether or not the bomb would ignite the atmosphere, and if so, whether it would merely destroy New Mexico or destroy the world." They still went through with it.
That's not quite correct.
Yes, there were concerns raised about the effects of the tests on the atmosphere. So, they studied the problem and ran the numbers and found the concerns to be baseless. Then they went ahead with the test.
Fermi's betting pool was on the yield of the Gadget, not on atmospheric effects.
According to CNN, 80% of Americans are in favor of the mm wave scanners in spite of the fact that they haven't caught a single terrorist.
One word: Deterrence. It's a valuable part of any physical security system.
Or are you suggesting I should leave my house and car doors unlocked because they've never (to my knowledge) stopped anyone? I've never had a circuit breaker pop either, so I can get rid of it and just use light switches? Etc... etc...
Because, other than in local areas, it won't really work. Look at a map of the US and note how far apart major urban areas are - and how many repeaters will be needed to connect them with decent bandwidth and redundancy.
Sounds to me like it's either a pipe-dream or a bluff.
Reading their FAQ, it's neither. It reads like a half thought out late night fantasy that someone decided would be a good idea to widely publicize without having actually decided what it is they're fantasizing about in the first place - let alone run any numbers on the whatever-it-is.
Serious answer SpaceX, they have a really low cost per kilo to launch to LEO
No, they have a really low cost by the standards of space launch costs. But, like a low price on prime rib, those low (by the standards of space launch costs) costs to LEO are still really freakin' expensive - on the order of $5k/kg. In practice, it ends up even more expensive than that because a) it's rare to use the whole capacity so the whole cost is applied to a smaller mass, and b) the paying load has to pay for the non paying portions (like adapters and dispensers) as well.
So now the problem is really architecting your standardized satellite not using a standardized picosat or microsat designed for limited experiments, but something meant to be up there for years handling comms.
The architecture is cheap. Literally lost in the noise when compared to the costs of R&D, engineering, procurement & production, testing & validation, etc... etc... Architecture is just a paperwork drill.
Then bundle them in a multiple satellite payload of some sort and have them spread to their final orbits from there using precious fuel, or get 50 kilos of payload reserved on a lot of other people's launches.
The first idea is one of those things I mentioned that raises costs - sharply. The second likely isn't going to happen, the folks paying for the launch are rarely happy about having a hitchhiker along to potentially cause problems.
Since you're knowledge of the future is so precise - care to tell me the Superbowl scores for the next decade? Seriously, it's easy to know true from false after the fact, not nearly so at the time.
Nobody cares about the NK dictator because he is just a tyrant that enslaves and kills and rapes his people, but he has nothing that US wants - OIL.
That's what the urban legend says. The reality is that less than a third of the oil the US imports comes from the Middle East - most of it comes from Canada or Central and South America.
Slashdot Mirror
The slow part of any home is all the detail work that the systems and details require, regardless of whether it's custom or not.
But yeah, this really is a solution in search of a problem. Concrete homes have so many drawbacks on top of this 'solution' not addressing the expensive bits...
Wow - you're understanding of the "spatula industry" is so far off base, I don't even know where to begin.
To take just *one* glaring error - no store maintains an 'entire logistical chain just to supply spatulas'. They order them a handful at a time from the same vendor they get the remainder of their kitchen tools from. Ditto for the capitol... etc... etc...
The problem is that while $3k sounds cheap to modern ears - it wasn't in 1936. That $3k house was solidly the province of the upper reaches of the middle class - the top 10-15%. Not to mention, those details you list weren't created by the $1/day laborers - they would have been done by skilled labor just as they are today.
And no, you can't perform a simply minded inflation calculation to come up with the cost of that house today either. Costs are affected by other than things than just inflation - and the costs of skilled labor in particular have skyrocketed since the 1930's. There's a reason why you don't find those details in any but the highest end bespoke houses today.
It's an interesting article, but there's enough errors in it that I wouldn't trust it entirely.
That's a common mythperception - and utterly wrong. Kodak was an early entrant into the digital realm, and a strong leader there for a number of years. Where they failed was in just not being able to keep up - their product cycles were a bit too long for digital/'net era and the steadily fell further and further behind. They still maintained strong sales (especially in the professional segment), but rather than capitalizing on this they started to push products out to meet their competitors release cycles rather than emphasizing quality as they had previously. It only took a couple of generations of this before they'd utterly trashed their reputation.
On the contrary. Kodak remains one of the most important designers and manufacturers of digital sensors in the world. Leica's current crop of top end rangefinders, widely lauded for their image quality feature Kodak designed and manufactured sensors As does a wide range of Olympus equipment and backs for medium format camera's.
But, as with their commercial products, they've started to fall increasingly behind. Their product cycle is still too long and they have continuing problems in converting their (until very recently) world class R&D into products on the shelf.
This only work so long as you're content with what you can get for 7 cents/print. Like everything else in the race to the bottom, you get what you pay for - and the 7 cent print is the equivalent of a Big Mac. Cheap, satisfying in the short term, but utter crap.
And the Congress critters are making meaningless noises of sympathy because it's good PR. But tomorrow, they'll be back to business as usual because Congress knows full well that when folks head to the polls in November, they'll (aided by decades of gerrymandering) send the same rascals right back to Capitol Hill.
That's because you, like so many, delude yourself into thinking that this kind of one-off stunt has accomplished anything. It'll be back to business as usual for you (the generic you, not the poster to whom I'm replying) tomorrow too. You'll go back to your stupid forwards and banners and "post this to your [status|signature line]" in the false belief that a few talking heads pretending for the moment to agree to with you means you've actually accomplished something. But, as I said above, in November, in aggregate, you'll just vote for the same rascals and go back to whining when they (predictably to anyone with an IQ over room temperature) behave as they always have.
But that's not (completely) what people are doing. When I see a corporation defending my rights, especially when they have a record of violating them, I have to ask why they would do that. What's in it for them? Just because they appear on the surface agree with you, doesn't mean they have the same reasons or goals as you or your interests at heart.
When you look at Google for example, you have to think of YouTube and the terabytes of copyright violations that they derive ad revenue from. You also have to think of Google Books and their attempts to violate authors rights by forcing them to opt-out if they don't want their material illegally (under current law) served up by Google.
So no, I don't think Google (for just one example) is indulging in their minor protest out of the goodness of their hearts... They're doing it out for their bottom line and for the PR it generates.
Yeah, expressing an unpopular opinion, trolling for sure.
Like the grandparent poster, you are really, truly confused about Google's web presence. I do know what money is, and how irrelevant it is to websites going black - as most of Google's income comes from advertisers not from advertisements.
There, fixed that for you.
Why haven't I donated? Because of their two faced policy about editing - when it's convenient it's the users who are responsible, but when it's embarrassing Jimbo or and Admin overrides the community. Because of their adverting splashed across every page. (Anyone who doesn't think those "an appeal from some random person I don't care about" banners aren't advertising is deluding themselves.) Because the Wikimedia Foundation continues to prefer Wikipedia The Role Playing Game over Wikipedia The Encyclopedia.
Suspending operations for a political point is just icing on the cake.
And that's just more of the same - they have indeed become a company, not the community they represent themselves as. And there's no possible way that throwing their weight around (which Microsoft would be pilloried, and Google would br praised, for) can be interpreted as "the right thing". Wikipedia is an encyclopedia (more in theory than in practice) not a political cause.
If by "everbody else" you mean "less than Facebook, let alone Facebook, MSN, Yahoo, etc... combined", then sure. Otherwise... well, no. Google is big in a couple of niches and with a narrow demographic, but nowhere near dominant across the entire 'web or the population at large.
They need more than just another series of murders... They need to have all the murders (I.E. bodies found after a delay will skew the data) and have them correctly attributed to the proper murderer (both missing and extraneous murders will skew the data). I.E. someone like Gary Ridgeway or Ted Bundy will likely either escape detection entirely or have wildly incorrect predictions. Not to mention killers like BTK who stopped entirely...
You honestly believe this? I just got back from a trip where I spent a week using the wireless network of a parish school across the street - it was widely known in the neighborhood, whether they were parishioners or not. My mom isn't a parishioner, and had the password on a sticky next to her monitor!
You might as well run a network with no password, as that's essentially what you're already doing, and save yourself and your parishioners the trouble.
The word you're looking for is depreceation, and it's been a fact of life in reselling electronics since the dawn of mass consumer digital/electronic devices back in the 1980's.
There, fixed that for you.
There, fixed that for you.
Seriously, there's so much 'spam' on eBay, that it's become virtually worthless. The last time I tried to buy anything useful from there, I spent so much time sorting through the knockoffs, scams, idiots who put unrelated keywords in their description, etc... that ('paying' myself a fair hourly wage) I wasn't saving all that much money unless I got the item at a low price on the first auction I bid in. (And frequently, there's competition, so it takes multiple attempts, and thus multiple passes at sorting, before winning.)
That's not quite correct.
Yes, there were concerns raised about the effects of the tests on the atmosphere. So, they studied the problem and ran the numbers and found the concerns to be baseless. Then they went ahead with the test.
Fermi's betting pool was on the yield of the Gadget, not on atmospheric effects.
One word: Deterrence. It's a valuable part of any physical security system.
Or are you suggesting I should leave my house and car doors unlocked because they've never (to my knowledge) stopped anyone? I've never had a circuit breaker pop either, so I can get rid of it and just use light switches? Etc... etc...
As I said - look at a map of the US and the distances between major urban centers and start doing the math.
Because, other than in local areas, it won't really work. Look at a map of the US and note how far apart major urban areas are - and how many repeaters will be needed to connect them with decent bandwidth and redundancy.
Reading their FAQ, it's neither. It reads like a half thought out late night fantasy that someone decided would be a good idea to widely publicize without having actually decided what it is they're fantasizing about in the first place - let alone run any numbers on the whatever-it-is.
No, they have a really low cost by the standards of space launch costs. But, like a low price on prime rib, those low (by the standards of space launch costs) costs to LEO are still really freakin' expensive - on the order of $5k/kg. In practice, it ends up even more expensive than that because a) it's rare to use the whole capacity so the whole cost is applied to a smaller mass, and b) the paying load has to pay for the non paying portions (like adapters and dispensers) as well.
The architecture is cheap. Literally lost in the noise when compared to the costs of R&D, engineering, procurement & production, testing & validation, etc... etc... Architecture is just a paperwork drill.
The first idea is one of those things I mentioned that raises costs - sharply. The second likely isn't going to happen, the folks paying for the launch are rarely happy about having a hitchhiker along to potentially cause problems.
Since you're knowledge of the future is so precise - care to tell me the Superbowl scores for the next decade? Seriously, it's easy to know true from false after the fact, not nearly so at the time.
That's what the urban legend says. The reality is that less than a third of the oil the US imports comes from the Middle East - most of it comes from Canada or Central and South America.