Why do you say that? Google did it, and when they started it was little more than a couple of college students.
Yes, but it was corporate money that allowed it to be a great success. It was a combination of their great ideas and serious capital. $25 million in 1999 got them started, and $1.67 billion in 2004 got them where they are today.
I am sorry, you are not going to get a billion dollars to build a non-profit search engine. The OP was correct that you would need a governmental body to accomplish this without corporate money.
If your achievement spying system indicates half your players aren't finishing your game, it's most likely because your game sucks!
One of two things is true:
1) Game developers spend millions of dollars writing games, but then take no effort to do market research to find out why players aren't finishing their games.
2) Game developers spend millions of dollars writing games, and then spend serious money doing market research that shows a significant number of players never finish games even if it is incredibly fun. Therefore they decide not to spend as much time on late game content because they could make more money making another game instead.
Personally, I am betting on #2 being true. In general, people DO NOT PAY FOR QUALITY. People may like to think they do, but they don't. Just like citizens deserve the government they have, gamers deserve the games they are playing.
But for a 'Power User' that uses the keyboard shortcuts, one has to remember the 2003 menu layout and type away blindly. The idea that the ribbon makes things easier for hard-core Excel is laughable.
I would generally agree with you. It is just as laughable as thinking that Microsoft should be placing most of its attention on catering to 'Power Users'. Power users were able to obtain expertise in the previous UI, and they will be able to gain expertise in the new ribbon UI.
Good UI design is primarily about making it easy to use for the masses, and hopefully catering to power users too if possible. I am one of those 'Power Users' and I love the ribbon when working with Word and PowerPoint. It is much less useful in Excel and Access, but it doesn't get in the way after learning the new UI.
Today, proprietary cannot compete with open. Open has far too many advantages. If not for the religious devotion so many display towards proprietary systems, the intense desire for there to be entities who will act in a manner proper and reassuring to those who have stakes of their own, libre software would have won by now.
You do understand that your comments are opinions, right? The proprietary model does have advantages as well, such as providing additional incentive to create software. Even Stallman admits that proprietary software has benefits, but that choosing Free Software is a moral imperitive. Any increased efficiency is just a byproduct of following that moral path.
It is clearly debatable whether free or proprietary software provides the most benefit for society. Its okay that you have taken a side, but don't pretend that the debate is finished.
Teacher's Unions are the biggest problem with the US educational system.
Not even close. The biggest problem in the US educational system is shitty parenting.
The reason we have teachers is because parents usually cannot do a good enough job teaching their children alone. Blaming parents for poor teaching performance is like blaming computer users for poor software productivity.
Bad parents can sure make teaching harder just like computer illiterate users can make user interface design harder. That just means it is the responibility of the education infrastructure to overcome those challenges.
By the way, don't you believe teachers should have the right to collectively bargain? Should they not be allowed to negotiate their best pay package? Don't you trust free markets?
Free markets cannot work without open access to information and with limited ability to "shop around." If parents could get about $10k per year to send their kids to private schools (the average amount spent on public education) then the free market would work much better. But the government is so intertwined with the education system that the free market cannot function. Like khallow said in his post, collective bargaining should probably not exist for public employees (or at least to a much lesser extent).
I do agree that teacher unions are not the real problem though. The problem is teacher pensions. Public jobs in general pay far too much because of overly generous pension programs. Any union that is bargaining with people used to being paid public sector wages is going to have a very easy job.
If I didn't work in a very high paying industry, I would have defintely gotten a career in the public sector (probably teacher). There are very few professions where people can make as much money as teachers. And most high paid professions require much higher level of intelligence and more competitive work environments (doctor, lawyer, engineer, etc).
A high school algebra teacher in Buffalo Grove IL is going to retire making close to or even over $100k per year at the age of 55. Their pension is going to be worth the same as an annuity worth close to $2 million dollars, as opposed to social security which would be worth closer to $500k. (and they only put in about 50% more into their pension, not 200% more)
If it wasn't for overly generous teacher pensions, we could easily hire 25% more teachers in this country. That alone would have a significant impact on education.
The way teachers are paid clearly gives most of the money to those who start at 22 right out of college. The pension is worth about 30% of their salary, so a 50 year old working as a teacher for 30 years is making 10s of thousands of dollars more than a 50 year old only working as a teacher for 15 years.
The teacher pension systems set up around the country are rediculous. No wonder our education system is in shambles when we make it so easy for our most experience teachers to leave the system over 10 years earlier than the standard retirement age. The pension systems cause teachers to be underpaid when they enter the profession after a professional career, but grossly overpays those who started teaching right out of college.
Considering you are so young it is understandable that you do not realize how great teacher pensions are. That pension benefit is worth over 33% of your mother's total pay.
And you must either be a very well paid developer or you mother is a very low paid teacher. Perhaps she never got her Masters or works in a town with a much lower cost of living. I make about $65k/yr after almost 5 years developing, while a retiring teacher in the Masters+ payscale in my area would make about $80k/yr. Counting their pension that salary is closer to $120k/yr in the private sector. Add in excessive vacation days and it is closer to $145k/yr.
Teachers are one of the best paid professions in the country. It is just that very few people are good enough at math to realize how amazing teacher pensions are. This recession is definitely helping lawmakers realize this fact which is why many pension programs are under attack.
Those are all good points, which is why Deloitte Consulting was used to determine if these tax incentives would help drive the costs down. The study has shown that it would not.
The whole point of the article is that the "economy of scale" argument is a fallacy in this particular scenerio. These tax subsidies are not going to help make these cars cheaper.
Increased spending by the government directly on R&D would still be helpful though.
They gave you 45 minutes to write a working web app, in the language of your choice, with no outside references and no way to actually run of test any of the code...
I don't know if it's because of the way I write code or because I've been doing it for a while, but I was just totally blown away that nobody they had interviewed could come up with 400 lines of code that actually ran.
There has to be some major exaggeration being done here. 400 lines of code in 45 minutes? You must be counting white space and lines consisting only of braces. It is very hard to believe your story with such wild claims. You must have written code such as “x = y + z;” just to save keystrokes to hit that kind of speed. (even 400 lines of code like this would consist of 18 wpm of continuous typing over 45 minutes, not counting time to design the app and read and understand the database schema and notice errors)
Writing 400 lines of quality code in a full day’s work is nothing to scoff at. And an industry average programmer (according to Code Complete) would have about 6 – 20 errors in that 400 lines of code. Although not errors cause code to not compile, so writing 400 lines of compiling code on the first try is not completely impossible I guess. But it is still very unlikely without any debugging.
Who would ever assume that it is possible to predict any game of Association Football? When two teams have even slightly comparable skill levels, luck is the largest determining factor of any one game. The better team will probably win best out of 7, but the results of any one game are meaningless when determining who is the superior team.
Any game with such low scoring is the same way. In professional basketball it is possible to have 10-1 favorites because being superior is a far better indicator of who will win. But even in a game like baseball (with far more scoring than assoc. football on average) you usually only see odds of 4-1 at the extreme. And because of the lack of salary caps there is a far bigger discrepency between the skill levels of the best and worse teams in baseball.
If you have been working for 4+ more years than your coworker and he is only making $8k/yr less than you, than he is clearly moving up more rapidly than you are. He is likely to be making more than you soon.
And people wonder why in many top-tier institutions 75% of the graduate students in science are foreign-born?
They wonder? Really? They're cheaper for the same or better results. Same reason everything is being offshored.
I figured the real reason so many graduate students are foreign born was because our universities are still much better than those around the world. 95% of the people on this planet are born outside of the US, so it is little surprise that a large amount of the smartest people in the world (those who want to get educated at the best universities in the world) are also born outside of the US.
Re:Student loan debt not worth it
on
The Real Science Gap
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Between teaching, research grants, and cleaning test tubes, grad school in the sciences will cost you $0 out of pocket for tuition, fees, rent, and food.
That must be nice, but it's not reality where I am. I'm at a university that ranks as about #40 in most science/math/engineering rankings, and the only thing I get waived is tuition. I have to pay ~$750 in fees per year. I get about $1500/mo after tax from my stipend, and I have to pay for 100% of my rent, food, and textbooks out of that.
You can't get a part-time job and still get a stipend, and I don't know anybody that's managed to get a "research grant" that provides them with extra money beyond the stipend for being a teaching or research assistant.
Im confused because your post seems to be confirming the statements you are attempting to refute. The original poster said that you can fairly easily pay $0 out of pocket for tuition, fees, rent, and food. That seems to be the same situation you are in.
$1500/mo after taxes is clearly enough to live on for a college student. That is approximately the same as $10.50/hr full-time (almost 40% above minimum wage). I lived on about $1100 quite easily in 2005 while going to college with only one roommate. Most of my friends lived with 3-4 roommates.
Living through grad-school without alot of debt just means living with roommates, not having expensive girlfriends (ones also in college are more forgiving), and not realizing that there are cars out there worth over $3000.
The fact is that getting paid about $1800/Mth before taxes (your approximate pay) for going to college and getting your masters / phd is a very sweet deal. Since the average public school master's program costs about $15k/yr, you are getting paid around $40k/yr right now (considering your waived tuition is non-taxed income).
Here's a more accurate version: Anyone writing code that doesn't validate input needs to find a new line of work.
How often does this happen in a one-developer situation (outside newbie projects)?
I have worked on multiple e-commerce sites written by other original authors, and developers allowing unvalidated text into SQL queries is more common than I would like to admit. Plenty of small companies pay inexperienced web developer peanuts to put up their websites, and they sure get what they pay for.
I would agree that it doesnt happen often outside of inexperienced web developers, but far too many sites are written by them for it to be discounted as a rare phenomenon.
The fact that keeps whooshing over your head is that a company's value is not purely determined by internal factors. The value of their assets are not even purely determined by internal factors. News about competitors, suppliers, target markets, etc. all affect the company's value. I do not see how you can think that the value of the company is not significantly determined by external factors.
Take the car you own. The condition you keep the car in does have an effect on its worth, but so do a number of other external factors. High gas prices will affect the price of your SUV. The latest Consumer Reports reliability rating could change the fair market price. A major recall on your car's model will also affect the price.
Your argument is that somehow these factors do not affect the value of your car. Your ability to trade in your car is clearly a factor in the value of your car.
Well, suppose your Mom was at a restaurant having dinner, and it got blown up, killing her and most of the rest of the clientele, and you learned that the restaurant was bombed without warning because a "high value target" was supposed to have been there, but wasn't. (This has happened, and it was no accident.) I assume, based on the above, you would feel that "them's the breaks," but I can assure you that many people would conclude that the people dropping the bombs don't really care much as to whether civilians were killed or not, and you don't have to dig very deep to learn that in reality many of the people at the receiving end of such incidents do indeed feel that the people behind the bombs deserve punishment.
Just because you are upset and may want retribution, you are still going to see the distinction between this and someone intentionally killing your mother.
No one said that accidental deaths are meaningless. But jollyreaper was claiming that there is no distinction between the intentional murder and accidental deaths (or even collateral damage). I think stdarg's example was spot on.
There is really little that can be done to stop property taxes from going to schools. One primary reason why property taxes are high in certain areas is because of better schools. If the schools were not as nice, the property taxes wouldnt be as high.
If it wasnt property taxes, then it would come out of some other home association type fee. We just use property taxes because it is easier that way.
We should still do more to make lower income schools better, but I dont think the answer is to take away the middle class's ability to spend extra money to give their children a better education.
I hate it when people are against an idea just because it allows a small percentage of people to manipulate it. If a voucher system can help 5 kids get a better education for every 1 kid that gets a (slightly) worse education, that sounds great to me. Nothing (absolutely nothing) works perfectly for everyone.
Umm, no. Scopes lost in the trial. That said, the public perception of the trial was that the claims made against Scopes were ridiculous. But saying scientists won is wrong from a historical perspective, the judicial decision standpoint, and even the current, modern day standpoint where (the extent of) evolution is still debated today.
The initial trail was lost and Scopes was ordered to pay a $100 fine. But it was thrown out by Appeals Court (on a technicality regarding the fine's amount), so ultimately Scopes did win his case. His conviction was set aside, so he was found innocent. The Butler act was also later repealled, so you definetly could say that science won in the end.
The problem is that it took 40 years for the Butler Act to be repealed. So it goes to show that it often takes a very long time for science to win over idiocy.
The article doesnt say anything about a "one time fee". This is a monthly maintenance fee. It will not be used up because it is an ongoing fee each month.
Someone who does not sell their power back is still getting a lower cost that is subsidized by their neighbors. The power company is claiming that it takes X amount of dollars to maintain the grid whether or not you use 10 kWh or 100 kWh per month. But they currently only have a per kWh fee. I assume that fee is calculated based on average household usage. People who use less power are paying less than their share of these maintenance costs.
I personally think that they should be receiving this "double subsidy", and even more subsidies because of what they are doing to help by installing solar energy. But it isnt the power company's job to give these subsidies. (or at least any more than the government mandates)
To put it in a different way with actual math:
Monthly maintenance fee to keep house connected : $10 Average power usage per household : 700 kWh Cost of power generation pwer kWh : $0.10 Calculated cost per kWh = ($10 / 700 kWh) + $.10 = $0.114
Monthly power used by home with solar panels : 200 kWh Monthly power bill : $22.80 Amount paid for actual power generated = $22.80 - $10 (Maintenance Costs) = $12.80 Amount paid per kWh generated = $12.80 / 200 = $0.064
As you can see, the home with solar panels is paying less for the power they are losing. I just made up the $10 amount, I am sure it is closer to $1 per month, but the math still holds up even if the ratios are wrong.
The power companies are only talking about a fee of around $1.60 per month anyway, so obviously this isnt a huge cost.
They didnt say that it was a "connection fee", it is a "connectivity fee". The on going costs are meant more for maintenance than for the initial connection.
It is still most likely a crock of shit way to increase profit, but you should at least understand what the power company is claiming before you attack it.
You're ignoring the fact that it may not be the SAME small guy that comes into the market. If I'm an entrepeneur with some family money or some other funding source and I see an obviously inflated market that I can go after on cost, guess what business I'm going into? (this is probably responding to the wrong parent, but I already typed it, so:p)
And if you start that business, another price war will likely begin and that price war will definetly favor the larger company. They can simply lower their prices again until you go away. It takes quite a bit of time and money to open up a brick and mortar store. And because the newer store is already at a disadvantage as far as name recognition goes, it can be fairly easy for a larger company to win such a price war.
Starting price wars with larger companies is often a bad idea. It is usually a better idea to offer something better than to simply offer lower prices.
It's the long term behavior that counts - if retailers make a habit of dropping prices to end competition then jack them up other sellers will stay in the market because they know that the. price will rise.
That is simply not true. It is hard now to believe that even you seriously think that is true.
LARGE COMPANIES HAVE MORE MONEY. I normally dont like to yell, but that basic fact is one that you are completely overlooking. Small companies generally have very low cash reserves. They can only operate in the red for relatively short periods of time compared to large companies. The reason that large companies can continue to lower prices to push out small business is because they can outlast them. Smaller retailers already know the prices will eventually go up, but they simply cannot wait the big guys out.
Not only do big companies have larger cash reserves, they have more stores. If the larger corporation has 50 other stores, they can use the profit of those stores to cover the losses in the store that is currently in a price war. A small business cannot do that. It is so simple that it really shouldnt have to be explained.
so if I sell something I didn't create and collect 100% of the profits I'm a criminal?, I guess I won't be able to sell any of my possessions then
Wow, I think you are having trouble with the term Profit. The only way that you can be selling your personal possessions for 100% profit is if you stole them.
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Why do you say that? Google did it, and when they started it was little more than a couple of college students.
Yes, but it was corporate money that allowed it to be a great success. It was a combination of their great ideas and serious capital. $25 million in 1999 got them started, and $1.67 billion in 2004 got them where they are today.
I am sorry, you are not going to get a billion dollars to build a non-profit search engine. The OP was correct that you would need a governmental body to accomplish this without corporate money.
If your achievement spying system indicates half your players aren't finishing your game, it's most likely because your game sucks!
One of two things is true:
1) Game developers spend millions of dollars writing games, but then take no effort to do market research to find out why players aren't finishing their games.
2) Game developers spend millions of dollars writing games, and then spend serious money doing market research that shows a significant number of players never finish games even if it is incredibly fun. Therefore they decide not to spend as much time on late game content because they could make more money making another game instead.
Personally, I am betting on #2 being true. In general, people DO NOT PAY FOR QUALITY. People may like to think they do, but they don't. Just like citizens deserve the government they have, gamers deserve the games they are playing.
But for a 'Power User' that uses the keyboard shortcuts, one has to remember the 2003 menu layout and type away blindly. The idea that the ribbon makes things easier for hard-core Excel is laughable.
I would generally agree with you. It is just as laughable as thinking that Microsoft should be placing most of its attention on catering to 'Power Users'. Power users were able to obtain expertise in the previous UI, and they will be able to gain expertise in the new ribbon UI.
Good UI design is primarily about making it easy to use for the masses, and hopefully catering to power users too if possible. I am one of those 'Power Users' and I love the ribbon when working with Word and PowerPoint. It is much less useful in Excel and Access, but it doesn't get in the way after learning the new UI.
Today, proprietary cannot compete with open. Open has far too many advantages. If not for the religious devotion so many display towards proprietary systems, the intense desire for there to be entities who will act in a manner proper and reassuring to those who have stakes of their own, libre software would have won by now.
You do understand that your comments are opinions, right? The proprietary model does have advantages as well, such as providing additional incentive to create software. Even Stallman admits that proprietary software has benefits, but that choosing Free Software is a moral imperitive. Any increased efficiency is just a byproduct of following that moral path.
It is clearly debatable whether free or proprietary software provides the most benefit for society. Its okay that you have taken a side, but don't pretend that the debate is finished.
Not even close. The biggest problem in the US educational system is shitty parenting.
The reason we have teachers is because parents usually cannot do a good enough job teaching their children alone. Blaming parents for poor teaching performance is like blaming computer users for poor software productivity.
Bad parents can sure make teaching harder just like computer illiterate users can make user interface design harder. That just means it is the responibility of the education infrastructure to overcome those challenges.
By the way, don't you believe teachers should have the right to collectively bargain? Should they not be allowed to negotiate their best pay package? Don't you trust free markets?
Free markets cannot work without open access to information and with limited ability to "shop around." If parents could get about $10k per year to send their kids to private schools (the average amount spent on public education) then the free market would work much better. But the government is so intertwined with the education system that the free market cannot function. Like khallow said in his post, collective bargaining should probably not exist for public employees (or at least to a much lesser extent).
I do agree that teacher unions are not the real problem though. The problem is teacher pensions. Public jobs in general pay far too much because of overly generous pension programs. Any union that is bargaining with people used to being paid public sector wages is going to have a very easy job.
If I didn't work in a very high paying industry, I would have defintely gotten a career in the public sector (probably teacher). There are very few professions where people can make as much money as teachers. And most high paid professions require much higher level of intelligence and more competitive work environments (doctor, lawyer, engineer, etc).
A high school algebra teacher in Buffalo Grove IL is going to retire making close to or even over $100k per year at the age of 55. Their pension is going to be worth the same as an annuity worth close to $2 million dollars, as opposed to social security which would be worth closer to $500k. (and they only put in about 50% more into their pension, not 200% more)
If it wasn't for overly generous teacher pensions, we could easily hire 25% more teachers in this country. That alone would have a significant impact on education.
The way teachers are paid clearly gives most of the money to those who start at 22 right out of college. The pension is worth about 30% of their salary, so a 50 year old working as a teacher for 30 years is making 10s of thousands of dollars more than a 50 year old only working as a teacher for 15 years.
The teacher pension systems set up around the country are rediculous. No wonder our education system is in shambles when we make it so easy for our most experience teachers to leave the system over 10 years earlier than the standard retirement age. The pension systems cause teachers to be underpaid when they enter the profession after a professional career, but grossly overpays those who started teaching right out of college.
Considering you are so young it is understandable that you do not realize how great teacher pensions are. That pension benefit is worth over 33% of your mother's total pay.
And you must either be a very well paid developer or you mother is a very low paid teacher. Perhaps she never got her Masters or works in a town with a much lower cost of living. I make about $65k/yr after almost 5 years developing, while a retiring teacher in the Masters+ payscale in my area would make about $80k/yr. Counting their pension that salary is closer to $120k/yr in the private sector. Add in excessive vacation days and it is closer to $145k/yr.
Teachers are one of the best paid professions in the country. It is just that very few people are good enough at math to realize how amazing teacher pensions are. This recession is definitely helping lawmakers realize this fact which is why many pension programs are under attack.
Those are all good points, which is why Deloitte Consulting was used to determine if these tax incentives would help drive the costs down. The study has shown that it would not.
The whole point of the article is that the "economy of scale" argument is a fallacy in this particular scenerio. These tax subsidies are not going to help make these cars cheaper.
Increased spending by the government directly on R&D would still be helpful though.
They gave you 45 minutes to write a working web app, in the language of your choice, with no outside references and no way to actually run of test any of the code ...
I don't know if it's because of the way I write code or because I've been doing it for a while, but I was just totally blown away that nobody they had interviewed could come up with 400 lines of code that actually ran.
There has to be some major exaggeration being done here. 400 lines of code in 45 minutes? You must be counting white space and lines consisting only of braces. It is very hard to believe your story with such wild claims. You must have written code such as “x = y + z;” just to save keystrokes to hit that kind of speed. (even 400 lines of code like this would consist of 18 wpm of continuous typing over 45 minutes, not counting time to design the app and read and understand the database schema and notice errors)
Writing 400 lines of quality code in a full day’s work is nothing to scoff at. And an industry average programmer (according to Code Complete) would have about 6 – 20 errors in that 400 lines of code. Although not errors cause code to not compile, so writing 400 lines of compiling code on the first try is not completely impossible I guess. But it is still very unlikely without any debugging.
Who would ever assume that it is possible to predict any game of Association Football? When two teams have even slightly comparable skill levels, luck is the largest determining factor of any one game. The better team will probably win best out of 7, but the results of any one game are meaningless when determining who is the superior team.
Any game with such low scoring is the same way. In professional basketball it is possible to have 10-1 favorites because being superior is a far better indicator of who will win. But even in a game like baseball (with far more scoring than assoc. football on average) you usually only see odds of 4-1 at the extreme. And because of the lack of salary caps there is a far bigger discrepency between the skill levels of the best and worse teams in baseball.
If you have been working for 4+ more years than your coworker and he is only making $8k/yr less than you, than he is clearly moving up more rapidly than you are. He is likely to be making more than you soon.
And people wonder why in many top-tier institutions 75% of the graduate students in science are foreign-born?
They wonder? Really? They're cheaper for the same or better results. Same reason everything is being offshored.
I figured the real reason so many graduate students are foreign born was because our universities are still much better than those around the world. 95% of the people on this planet are born outside of the US, so it is little surprise that a large amount of the smartest people in the world (those who want to get educated at the best universities in the world) are also born outside of the US.
Between teaching, research grants, and cleaning test tubes, grad school in the sciences will cost you $0 out of pocket for tuition, fees, rent, and food.
That must be nice, but it's not reality where I am. I'm at a university that ranks as about #40 in most science/math/engineering rankings, and the only thing I get waived is tuition. I have to pay ~$750 in fees per year. I get about $1500/mo after tax from my stipend, and I have to pay for 100% of my rent, food, and textbooks out of that.
You can't get a part-time job and still get a stipend, and I don't know anybody that's managed to get a "research grant" that provides them with extra money beyond the stipend for being a teaching or research assistant.
Im confused because your post seems to be confirming the statements you are attempting to refute. The original poster said that you can fairly easily pay $0 out of pocket for tuition, fees, rent, and food. That seems to be the same situation you are in.
$1500/mo after taxes is clearly enough to live on for a college student. That is approximately the same as $10.50/hr full-time (almost 40% above minimum wage). I lived on about $1100 quite easily in 2005 while going to college with only one roommate. Most of my friends lived with 3-4 roommates.
Living through grad-school without alot of debt just means living with roommates, not having expensive girlfriends (ones also in college are more forgiving), and not realizing that there are cars out there worth over $3000.
The fact is that getting paid about $1800/Mth before taxes (your approximate pay) for going to college and getting your masters / phd is a very sweet deal. Since the average public school master's program costs about $15k/yr, you are getting paid around $40k/yr right now (considering your waived tuition is non-taxed income).
Here's a more accurate version: Anyone writing code that doesn't validate input needs to find a new line of work.
How often does this happen in a one-developer situation (outside newbie projects)?
I have worked on multiple e-commerce sites written by other original authors, and developers allowing unvalidated text into SQL queries is more common than I would like to admit. Plenty of small companies pay inexperienced web developer peanuts to put up their websites, and they sure get what they pay for.
I would agree that it doesnt happen often outside of inexperienced web developers, but far too many sites are written by them for it to be discounted as a rare phenomenon.
The fact that keeps whooshing over your head is that a company's value is not purely determined by internal factors. The value of their assets are not even purely determined by internal factors. News about competitors, suppliers, target markets, etc. all affect the company's value. I do not see how you can think that the value of the company is not significantly determined by external factors.
Take the car you own. The condition you keep the car in does have an effect on its worth, but so do a number of other external factors. High gas prices will affect the price of your SUV. The latest Consumer Reports reliability rating could change the fair market price. A major recall on your car's model will also affect the price.
Your argument is that somehow these factors do not affect the value of your car. Your ability to trade in your car is clearly a factor in the value of your car.
Well, suppose your Mom was at a restaurant having dinner, and it got blown up, killing her and most of the rest of the clientele, and you learned that the restaurant was bombed without warning because a "high value target" was supposed to have been there, but wasn't. (This has happened, and it was no accident.) I assume, based on the above, you would feel that "them's the breaks," but I can assure you that many people would conclude that the people dropping the bombs don't really care much as to whether civilians were killed or not, and you don't have to dig very deep to learn that in reality many of the people at the receiving end of such incidents do indeed feel that the people behind the bombs deserve punishment.
Just because you are upset and may want retribution, you are still going to see the distinction between this and someone intentionally killing your mother.
No one said that accidental deaths are meaningless. But jollyreaper was claiming that there is no distinction between the intentional murder and accidental deaths (or even collateral damage). I think stdarg's example was spot on.
There is really little that can be done to stop property taxes from going to schools. One primary reason why property taxes are high in certain areas is because of better schools. If the schools were not as nice, the property taxes wouldnt be as high.
If it wasnt property taxes, then it would come out of some other home association type fee. We just use property taxes because it is easier that way.
We should still do more to make lower income schools better, but I dont think the answer is to take away the middle class's ability to spend extra money to give their children a better education.
I hate it when people are against an idea just because it allows a small percentage of people to manipulate it. If a voucher system can help 5 kids get a better education for every 1 kid that gets a (slightly) worse education, that sounds great to me. Nothing (absolutely nothing) works perfectly for everyone.
Umm, no. Scopes lost in the trial. That said, the public perception of the trial was that the claims made against Scopes were ridiculous. But saying scientists won is wrong from a historical perspective, the judicial decision standpoint, and even the current, modern day standpoint where (the extent of) evolution is still debated today.
The initial trail was lost and Scopes was ordered to pay a $100 fine. But it was thrown out by Appeals Court (on a technicality regarding the fine's amount), so ultimately Scopes did win his case. His conviction was set aside, so he was found innocent. The Butler act was also later repealled, so you definetly could say that science won in the end.
The problem is that it took 40 years for the Butler Act to be repealed. So it goes to show that it often takes a very long time for science to win over idiocy.
serious certification does require a lot of in depth knowledge
I am guessing that employers dont like people who think that gaining in depth knowledge in something is an unreasonable requirement for an employee.
The article doesnt say anything about a "one time fee". This is a monthly maintenance fee. It will not be used up because it is an ongoing fee each month.
Someone who does not sell their power back is still getting a lower cost that is subsidized by their neighbors. The power company is claiming that it takes X amount of dollars to maintain the grid whether or not you use 10 kWh or 100 kWh per month. But they currently only have a per kWh fee. I assume that fee is calculated based on average household usage. People who use less power are paying less than their share of these maintenance costs.
I personally think that they should be receiving this "double subsidy", and even more subsidies because of what they are doing to help by installing solar energy. But it isnt the power company's job to give these subsidies. (or at least any more than the government mandates)
To put it in a different way with actual math:
Monthly maintenance fee to keep house connected : $10
Average power usage per household : 700 kWh
Cost of power generation pwer kWh : $0.10
Calculated cost per kWh = ($10 / 700 kWh) + $.10 = $0.114
Monthly power used by home with solar panels : 200 kWh
Monthly power bill : $22.80
Amount paid for actual power generated = $22.80 - $10 (Maintenance Costs) = $12.80
Amount paid per kWh generated = $12.80 / 200 = $0.064
As you can see, the home with solar panels is paying less for the power they are losing. I just made up the $10 amount, I am sure it is closer to $1 per month, but the math still holds up even if the ratios are wrong.
The power companies are only talking about a fee of around $1.60 per month anyway, so obviously this isnt a huge cost.
They didnt say that it was a "connection fee", it is a "connectivity fee". The on going costs are meant more for maintenance than for the initial connection.
It is still most likely a crock of shit way to increase profit, but you should at least understand what the power company is claiming before you attack it.
You're ignoring the fact that it may not be the SAME small guy that comes into the market. If I'm an entrepeneur with some family money or some other funding source and I see an obviously inflated market that I can go after on cost, guess what business I'm going into? (this is probably responding to the wrong parent, but I already typed it, so :p)
And if you start that business, another price war will likely begin and that price war will definetly favor the larger company. They can simply lower their prices again until you go away. It takes quite a bit of time and money to open up a brick and mortar store. And because the newer store is already at a disadvantage as far as name recognition goes, it can be fairly easy for a larger company to win such a price war.
Starting price wars with larger companies is often a bad idea. It is usually a better idea to offer something better than to simply offer lower prices.
It's the long term behavior that counts - if retailers make a habit of dropping prices to end competition then jack them up other sellers will stay in the market because they know that the. price will rise.
That is simply not true. It is hard now to believe that even you seriously think that is true.
LARGE COMPANIES HAVE MORE MONEY. I normally dont like to yell, but that basic fact is one that you are completely overlooking. Small companies generally have very low cash reserves. They can only operate in the red for relatively short periods of time compared to large companies. The reason that large companies can continue to lower prices to push out small business is because they can outlast them. Smaller retailers already know the prices will eventually go up, but they simply cannot wait the big guys out.
Not only do big companies have larger cash reserves, they have more stores. If the larger corporation has 50 other stores, they can use the profit of those stores to cover the losses in the store that is currently in a price war. A small business cannot do that. It is so simple that it really shouldnt have to be explained.
so if I sell something I didn't create and collect 100% of the profits I'm a criminal?, I guess I won't be able to sell any of my possessions then
Wow, I think you are having trouble with the term Profit. The only way that you can be selling your personal possessions for 100% profit is if you stole them.