Neither are cars. I have a trunk full of climbing gear in there right now.
The lack of innovative thinking in your post is astounding. If this is really a problem for enough customers, car manufacturers could sell bins that are easily loaded into cars. Maybe 25% of parking lot space remains to store these bins. It is a childishly easy problem to solve if the industry actually shifted this way.
The car companies already realize all of this, which is why they are also getting into the autonomous car and ride sharing business. They are late though, and they will probably move too slowly because of fear of cannibalizing existing sales. But they at least see the writing on the wall so time will tell if they can get their act together in time.
That's one of the reasons why many big co's are cash-rich: they don't expand because there are not enough consumers (with money) to buy their products if they expanded. Thus, they sit on cash, using it as an emergency or future strategic fund.
That cannot possibly be correct because there are no companies which have exhausted all potential customers in every potential industry. They sit on the money because they have not identified a way to create a competitive advantage to gain market share against current or potential competitors.
If they did have more customers for their existing profitable products, those new customers would only give them a larger cash stockpile.
I don't think many people keeping up with advances in machine learning were surprised.
Most people even involved with Alpha Go were surprised at how quickly they were able to dominate human Go champions. From what I have read only Hassabis was confident they could do it in a few years. In most cases even AI researchers are often wrong about how quickly AI is getting better.
Humans are not very good at comprehending exponential increases in capability, even in their chosen fields. People have been spending too much time worrying about the end of Moore's law, and ignoring that exponential increase in algorithm performance has been much faster than even Moore's law.
There will probably be some things we assume are easy which will still elude us in 50 years (like flying cars). But most things we think will take 100 years will probably take less than 20.
I still laugh at Organic Salt. Salt isn't Organic.
There are no organic salts I know of considering the USDA classifies it as a mineral. There are companies with the word organic in their name which sell salt, but they aren't marketed as organic salt. Although I'm sure they are okay with misleading people into thinking the salt is organic.
The problem is that it's always *packed* with shoppers. The aisles are congested, and sometimes I can't even find parking. Every day is Apocalypse preparation day there. At times I've had to wait twenty minutes for deli service
Isn't all of that solved by just opening more locations?
No it doesn't. Who says government backed research will be public domain and not patented? Such a naive idiot.
Who says it has to be public domain to be a benefit to the public? I use many products whose IP are not in the public domain, and they still provide me more utility than the money I spend on them (or else I wouldn't buy them).
Considering the average developer salaries were around $50k, they can't be that great. Who is even paying junior developers that little? I can't get a competent developer for under six figures even in the Midwest suburbs.
That lasted about 5 years, at which point the anti-gun lobby neutered the safe handling requirements, dumbed down the test, raised the fee by a lot, and made it expire after 5 years.
I don't know the specifics of this law, but it is odd that the anti-gun lobby reduced safe handling requirements and dumbed down the test. What sounds more likely is the pro-gun lobby reduced safe handling requirements and dumbed down the test while the anti-gun lobby raised the fee and made it expire after 5 years. I could be wrong though but through Google I can't find any details on when and how the certificate test was dumbed down and what lobbyist groups were behind it (I didn't look for long though).
I hope they quit supporting the idea of every nut job having a gun.
Only if every auto accident is an argument to ban automobiles...
Unfortunately the people who have responded to your inappropriate comment have done it with their own inaccurate statements, but their central message about how irrelevant your comment is still rings true.
First off, you compare not wanting every nut job having a gun with banning automobiles. That isn't even remotely the same thing. It is like if I said toddlers should not have their own cell phone and you claiming I actually want to ban all cell phones. Nearly all gun control advocates only want more sensible restrictions on gun ownership and usage, ironically similar to what we have for automobiles (although admittedly more strict than we have for automobiles).
Second, you are comparing incidents where there was intent to harm with accidental harm. Guns are not merely a problem because people can be accidentally harmed by guns, but because one of their primary purposes is to harm. This is not the case with automobiles. If you really want to fairly compare automobile and gun deaths you should compare vehicular homicide (300/year) to gun related homicide (10,000/year). As you can see there is little comparison here.
Finally, cars have a far more useful role in the hands of civilians than guns do. I'm not even going to begin to estimate the economic value added by the automotive industry, but it is certainly in the trillions of dollars per year in the US alone, even after accounting for the cost of the pollution they cause. While I'm not going to claim guns provide no value, it is certainly no where near as high. There is hunting which is a $30 billion industry, although that includes fishing and non-gun related hunting. There are also a few hundred gun related justified homicides per year which likely save hundreds of lives. But considering there are 10,000 homicides per year, and EPA/FDA/DoT put the value of a human life at around $7-$9 million, that equates to $70-$90 billion in negative value per year. All together civilian gun ownership is likely a drain on our economy.
While it shouldn't take more than a passing thought to realize your comment is ridiculous, sadly many people think like you do. And it is a completely indefensible opinion to hold.
the Supreme Court will be in hardline conservative hands for a generation.
I'll repeat what was already said: "Never" is a long time. The US will probably stand as a country long after every current Supreme Court justice is dead. It will probably stand as a country long after every Supreme Court justice who is nominated in this century is long dead. So the current makeup of the government and Supreme Court is irrelevant when making statements about what could happen in this country in the long term. By your same logic I'm sure if you took a detailed look at our country in 1820 you could have concluded that slavery was never going away as long as the US stands as a country, and you would be equally wrong. We may have political problems in this country today, but if countries like Germany, Italy, and Spain survived their political problems in the middle of the 20th century I think it is foolish to believe the US will not exist for a very long time.
While what I am about to say is only my opinion, I think it is safe to assume that most aspects of the US which are significantly different than other developed Western Democracies will change with time. It will someday become common for our President to be a woman, like it is in most western democracies. We will eventually have universal healthcare and more financially accessible higher education just like most other western democracies. And we will eventually realize that the need to have a well regulated militia in 1791 has little to do with a civilian's need to own firearms in the 21st century.
Nearly nothing will stop these things from coming to pass eventually, and in my opinion before this century is complete. But I will agree that a shift in the Supreme Court's interpretation of the 2nd Amendment will almost certainly be the last of these predictions to come true.
He was also white, male, over 60, and plenty of other things. Probably a Christian too based purely on the significant probability that is true. So considering I'm a white male liberal, in your eyes I need to own that white people, males, and liberals are capable of hateful violence. Sure, I can own that. Anything else?
Sure, there were some people that worked in a factory their whole life in the 1960s, but that was not common, and many more people were day laborers moving from job to job.
This is why just looking at average job tenure doesn't tell the whole story, and is in fact very misleading. Two massive changes on the opposite end of the spectrum caused the average to stay mostly unchanged. On one end there are less people working at one company for 20+ years with a defined benefit retirement plan. On the other end there are less people working as day laborers or other jack of all trade workers who move from job to job perhaps many times in the same year.
None of that changes the fact there has been a large shift in the workplace, even if the averages don't show it.
If working for the same company for 7 years and a bit sounds like an extraordinary achievement, then I weep for the future.
Going back to a day when someone works at the same company for 40 years sounds like going back to a day when someone rarely left their home town their whole life. It certainly doesn't sound like a good thing. Cross pollination of ideas and labor market fluidity are good things.
If leaving your company in under 7 years for better opportunities ever sounds like a volatile career, then I weep for the future.
The problem scientists have is a lack of a public voice over their own research.
Public discussion is not the best or even appropriate context for the debates you are discussing. That is best done between scientists, not between scientists and the public. The public only needs to know the result of these discussions. Laymen do not need an explanation for why one model is thrown out while the other is used; they just need to know the vast majority of scientists in the field agree with this decision.
Too many people get confused about the role of consensus in science. Scientific consensus should not be a factor in any single experiment, but consensus is the cornerstone of how scientific progress is made. Eventually consensus becomes strong enough that engineers can start developing products and politicians can start developing policy. Things only break down when laymen start ignoring this consensus. Scientists should always continue to expand upon and revise their consensus, but there is no place for that in the public arena.
The only thing breaking down the interface between scientists and the public is political partisanship. It happens on both sides, whether you are talking about climate change or organic foods. But certainly climate change denial is a much worse situation than people wasting money on organic fruit.
While I agree with the motivation for discouraging universities from disinviting invited speakers, penalizing the practice may discourage universities from inviting even potentially controversial speakers in the first place, and so the effect of the law might be the exact opposite of what is intended: allowing a diversity of opinions and ideas to be expressed.
That wouldn't affect the intent of the law at all. In fact it would only enhance it. The intention of the law is to rile up the political right base and give them justifications for why they need to be in power. If colleges stop inviting controversial speakers it is just another thing to add to their stump speeches.
It is the politically correct shunning that they are trying to stop, the bill in itself shows how bad things are, weather it becomes law or not.
No, it only shows how bad politicians want to make things seem so they can rile up their base and win elections. It's no different than us spending so much time worrying about terrorism and immigration. Without these bogeymen the US political right has no platform capable of winning elections.
All opinions should be accepted or rejected based on careful consideration.
The problem we have now is that after the science community has carefully considered a particular "interpretation" and has rejected it, a large portion of our populace ignores this.
How would you feel if you were downsized, but still forced to show up at the office at 9am or risk wage claw-backs or lawsuits?
A similar situation exists for contractors where they need to do work they are not billing for. I will grant you the common employee relationship doesn't work this way, but not everything fits into the standard. Some cases are fundamentally different than others, and for those the employee contracts will also be different.
The idea that your past employer can dictate your future is abhorrent.
Your past employer is not dictating your future. You are when you sign the non-compete agreement. You are accepting a job under a set of conditions. Would you consider it abhorrent if an employer dictates when you come to work, where you work, or what projects you work on? If it is some form of slavery or coercion then it certainly is abhorrent, but as long as both parties agree I see no problem with any of these scenarios.
Hire people, get the work you need out of them and move on.
Some people are hired to manage long term strategy and curate long term competitive advantage. Part of what you may need out of them is also long term discretion.
I think what you're getting hung up on is Java is used to refer to both the platform (JVM) and the language. They are often used interchangeably but they are not the same thing. For example, in your example, you might find a Scala programmer on the Java team. Why? Because it's a JVM language.
Considering we don't have a Java team, or anything on the JVM platform, I don't think I'm getting hung up on that. I do agree though that we would refer to a JVM team in the same way we refer to a.Net team. But that has more to do with the fact the.Net platform is not significantly used outside of C# and VB (and even VB use is marginal). That is not the case with JVM.
So is this a case where we should be happy because a guy with the resources to fight the legality of a non-compete agreement is being sued?
Sarcasm aside I think you sum it up quite well. Non-compete clauses are not universally bad, but they are easily abused. They are not as easily abused when both parties have the means to fight it over in court. I'm not sure how much Gene Farrell is worth, but as long as it's in the multi-million dollar level then I believe the courts are an appropriate way to settle this matter fairly.
Non-Compete Deal should be full pay with the same COL / pay raises that you should of gotten and full benefits for the term.
I would rather non-compete clauses require arbitration to settle if the terms are enforceable. They should look at the pay of the employee and severance in determining if the clause can be enforced. In short arbitration should ensure the employee is being given a fair shake.
Companies should have a way to ensure key employees cannot take their knowledge to competitors. But they should have to pay for the privilege. For instance my specialized knowledge probably makes me around $50k-$75k (in salary) more valuable than if I took a software developer job in other industry and technology stack. And it would likely take me about 5 years, or maybe a little more, to reach my current level of pay in another domain. So getting me to sign a non-compete would probably cost the company around $400k in extra pay (paid out over a few years) and/or severance. If keeping my knowledge secret from competitors is actually important then this would be a very fair arrangement in my opinion.
For a VP or executive of a large company, that turns into millions of dollars. If this Gene Farrell guy was making $1M/year I would probably side with Amazon on this one. If he was just another middle manager making $300k/year I cannot see how Amazon could expect him to never work in his chosen field again.
Touche, I have to admit that my children haven't gotten to an allowance age and I never had one as a kid so my viewpoint here could be quite off. I know that even at the age of 12 I had a hard time even saving up $10 (around $20 in 2017 dollars) but I grew up in a working class family. I concede my children will probably not have that problem living in an upper middle class suburb and if they so choose could likely buy their own legos. Probably not the $100+ sets, but there are plenty of $10-$25 sets as well.
The biggest struggle we have is keeping their mother from her habit of occasionally scooping random handfuls of parts into the trash to try to keep the supply down. I try to tell her that more parts equals more creative potential.
Ha, I'm glad I'm not the only one. My daughters have about $300 worth of Duplos right now and my wife gets upset every time another $50 set arrives from Amazon. I concede there are a lot of bricks, but my nearly 3 year old daughter loves building large buildings or zoos on her building plates and that takes a lot of bricks.
Slashdot Mirror
Late to the party and didn't bring the ice
Facebook was very late the party as well, so first to the gate doesn't always mean failure.
Neither are cars. I have a trunk full of climbing gear in there right now.
The lack of innovative thinking in your post is astounding. If this is really a problem for enough customers, car manufacturers could sell bins that are easily loaded into cars. Maybe 25% of parking lot space remains to store these bins. It is a childishly easy problem to solve if the industry actually shifted this way.
The car companies already realize all of this, which is why they are also getting into the autonomous car and ride sharing business. They are late though, and they will probably move too slowly because of fear of cannibalizing existing sales. But they at least see the writing on the wall so time will tell if they can get their act together in time.
That's one of the reasons why many big co's are cash-rich: they don't expand because there are not enough consumers (with money) to buy their products if they expanded. Thus, they sit on cash, using it as an emergency or future strategic fund.
That cannot possibly be correct because there are no companies which have exhausted all potential customers in every potential industry. They sit on the money because they have not identified a way to create a competitive advantage to gain market share against current or potential competitors.
If they did have more customers for their existing profitable products, those new customers would only give them a larger cash stockpile.
I don't think many people keeping up with advances in machine learning were surprised.
Most people even involved with Alpha Go were surprised at how quickly they were able to dominate human Go champions. From what I have read only Hassabis was confident they could do it in a few years. In most cases even AI researchers are often wrong about how quickly AI is getting better.
Humans are not very good at comprehending exponential increases in capability, even in their chosen fields. People have been spending too much time worrying about the end of Moore's law, and ignoring that exponential increase in algorithm performance has been much faster than even Moore's law.
There will probably be some things we assume are easy which will still elude us in 50 years (like flying cars). But most things we think will take 100 years will probably take less than 20.
I still laugh at Organic Salt. Salt isn't Organic.
There are no organic salts I know of considering the USDA classifies it as a mineral. There are companies with the word organic in their name which sell salt, but they aren't marketed as organic salt. Although I'm sure they are okay with misleading people into thinking the salt is organic.
The problem is that it's always *packed* with shoppers. The aisles are congested, and sometimes I can't even find parking. Every day is Apocalypse preparation day there. At times I've had to wait twenty minutes for deli service
Isn't all of that solved by just opening more locations?
No it doesn't. Who says government backed research will be public domain and not patented? Such a naive idiot.
Who says it has to be public domain to be a benefit to the public? I use many products whose IP are not in the public domain, and they still provide me more utility than the money I spend on them (or else I wouldn't buy them).
Considering the average developer salaries were around $50k, they can't be that great. Who is even paying junior developers that little? I can't get a competent developer for under six figures even in the Midwest suburbs.
That lasted about 5 years, at which point the anti-gun lobby neutered the safe handling requirements, dumbed down the test, raised the fee by a lot, and made it expire after 5 years.
I don't know the specifics of this law, but it is odd that the anti-gun lobby reduced safe handling requirements and dumbed down the test. What sounds more likely is the pro-gun lobby reduced safe handling requirements and dumbed down the test while the anti-gun lobby raised the fee and made it expire after 5 years. I could be wrong though but through Google I can't find any details on when and how the certificate test was dumbed down and what lobbyist groups were behind it (I didn't look for long though).
Only if every auto accident is an argument to ban automobiles...
Unfortunately the people who have responded to your inappropriate comment have done it with their own inaccurate statements, but their central message about how irrelevant your comment is still rings true.
First off, you compare not wanting every nut job having a gun with banning automobiles. That isn't even remotely the same thing. It is like if I said toddlers should not have their own cell phone and you claiming I actually want to ban all cell phones. Nearly all gun control advocates only want more sensible restrictions on gun ownership and usage, ironically similar to what we have for automobiles (although admittedly more strict than we have for automobiles).
Second, you are comparing incidents where there was intent to harm with accidental harm. Guns are not merely a problem because people can be accidentally harmed by guns, but because one of their primary purposes is to harm. This is not the case with automobiles. If you really want to fairly compare automobile and gun deaths you should compare vehicular homicide (300/year) to gun related homicide (10,000/year). As you can see there is little comparison here.
Finally, cars have a far more useful role in the hands of civilians than guns do. I'm not even going to begin to estimate the economic value added by the automotive industry, but it is certainly in the trillions of dollars per year in the US alone, even after accounting for the cost of the pollution they cause. While I'm not going to claim guns provide no value, it is certainly no where near as high. There is hunting which is a $30 billion industry, although that includes fishing and non-gun related hunting. There are also a few hundred gun related justified homicides per year which likely save hundreds of lives. But considering there are 10,000 homicides per year, and EPA/FDA/DoT put the value of a human life at around $7-$9 million, that equates to $70-$90 billion in negative value per year. All together civilian gun ownership is likely a drain on our economy.
While it shouldn't take more than a passing thought to realize your comment is ridiculous, sadly many people think like you do. And it is a completely indefensible opinion to hold.
the Supreme Court will be in hardline conservative hands for a generation.
I'll repeat what was already said: "Never" is a long time. The US will probably stand as a country long after every current Supreme Court justice is dead. It will probably stand as a country long after every Supreme Court justice who is nominated in this century is long dead. So the current makeup of the government and Supreme Court is irrelevant when making statements about what could happen in this country in the long term. By your same logic I'm sure if you took a detailed look at our country in 1820 you could have concluded that slavery was never going away as long as the US stands as a country, and you would be equally wrong. We may have political problems in this country today, but if countries like Germany, Italy, and Spain survived their political problems in the middle of the 20th century I think it is foolish to believe the US will not exist for a very long time.
While what I am about to say is only my opinion, I think it is safe to assume that most aspects of the US which are significantly different than other developed Western Democracies will change with time. It will someday become common for our President to be a woman, like it is in most western democracies. We will eventually have universal healthcare and more financially accessible higher education just like most other western democracies. And we will eventually realize that the need to have a well regulated militia in 1791 has little to do with a civilian's need to own firearms in the 21st century.
Nearly nothing will stop these things from coming to pass eventually, and in my opinion before this century is complete. But I will agree that a shift in the Supreme Court's interpretation of the 2nd Amendment will almost certainly be the last of these predictions to come true.
He was also white, male, over 60, and plenty of other things. Probably a Christian too based purely on the significant probability that is true. So considering I'm a white male liberal, in your eyes I need to own that white people, males, and liberals are capable of hateful violence. Sure, I can own that. Anything else?
Sure, there were some people that worked in a factory their whole life in the 1960s, but that was not common, and many more people were day laborers moving from job to job.
This is why just looking at average job tenure doesn't tell the whole story, and is in fact very misleading. Two massive changes on the opposite end of the spectrum caused the average to stay mostly unchanged. On one end there are less people working at one company for 20+ years with a defined benefit retirement plan. On the other end there are less people working as day laborers or other jack of all trade workers who move from job to job perhaps many times in the same year.
None of that changes the fact there has been a large shift in the workplace, even if the averages don't show it.
If working for the same company for 7 years and a bit sounds like an extraordinary achievement, then I weep for the future.
Going back to a day when someone works at the same company for 40 years sounds like going back to a day when someone rarely left their home town their whole life. It certainly doesn't sound like a good thing. Cross pollination of ideas and labor market fluidity are good things.
If leaving your company in under 7 years for better opportunities ever sounds like a volatile career, then I weep for the future.
The problem scientists have is a lack of a public voice over their own research.
Public discussion is not the best or even appropriate context for the debates you are discussing. That is best done between scientists, not between scientists and the public. The public only needs to know the result of these discussions. Laymen do not need an explanation for why one model is thrown out while the other is used; they just need to know the vast majority of scientists in the field agree with this decision.
Too many people get confused about the role of consensus in science. Scientific consensus should not be a factor in any single experiment, but consensus is the cornerstone of how scientific progress is made. Eventually consensus becomes strong enough that engineers can start developing products and politicians can start developing policy. Things only break down when laymen start ignoring this consensus. Scientists should always continue to expand upon and revise their consensus, but there is no place for that in the public arena.
The only thing breaking down the interface between scientists and the public is political partisanship. It happens on both sides, whether you are talking about climate change or organic foods. But certainly climate change denial is a much worse situation than people wasting money on organic fruit.
While I agree with the motivation for discouraging universities from disinviting invited speakers, penalizing the practice may discourage universities from inviting even potentially controversial speakers in the first place, and so the effect of the law might be the exact opposite of what is intended: allowing a diversity of opinions and ideas to be expressed.
That wouldn't affect the intent of the law at all. In fact it would only enhance it. The intention of the law is to rile up the political right base and give them justifications for why they need to be in power. If colleges stop inviting controversial speakers it is just another thing to add to their stump speeches.
It is the politically correct shunning that they are trying to stop, the bill in itself shows how bad things are, weather it becomes law or not.
No, it only shows how bad politicians want to make things seem so they can rile up their base and win elections. It's no different than us spending so much time worrying about terrorism and immigration. Without these bogeymen the US political right has no platform capable of winning elections.
All opinions should be accepted or rejected based on careful consideration.
The problem we have now is that after the science community has carefully considered a particular "interpretation" and has rejected it, a large portion of our populace ignores this.
How would you feel if you were downsized, but still forced to show up at the office at 9am or risk wage claw-backs or lawsuits?
A similar situation exists for contractors where they need to do work they are not billing for. I will grant you the common employee relationship doesn't work this way, but not everything fits into the standard. Some cases are fundamentally different than others, and for those the employee contracts will also be different.
The idea that your past employer can dictate your future is abhorrent.
Your past employer is not dictating your future. You are when you sign the non-compete agreement. You are accepting a job under a set of conditions. Would you consider it abhorrent if an employer dictates when you come to work, where you work, or what projects you work on? If it is some form of slavery or coercion then it certainly is abhorrent, but as long as both parties agree I see no problem with any of these scenarios.
Hire people, get the work you need out of them and move on.
Some people are hired to manage long term strategy and curate long term competitive advantage. Part of what you may need out of them is also long term discretion.
I think what you're getting hung up on is Java is used to refer to both the platform (JVM) and the language. They are often used interchangeably but they are not the same thing. For example, in your example, you might find a Scala programmer on the Java team. Why? Because it's a JVM language.
Considering we don't have a Java team, or anything on the JVM platform, I don't think I'm getting hung up on that. I do agree though that we would refer to a JVM team in the same way we refer to a .Net team. But that has more to do with the fact the .Net platform is not significantly used outside of C# and VB (and even VB use is marginal). That is not the case with JVM.
So is this a case where we should be happy because a guy with the resources to fight the legality of a non-compete agreement is being sued?
Sarcasm aside I think you sum it up quite well. Non-compete clauses are not universally bad, but they are easily abused. They are not as easily abused when both parties have the means to fight it over in court. I'm not sure how much Gene Farrell is worth, but as long as it's in the multi-million dollar level then I believe the courts are an appropriate way to settle this matter fairly.
Non-Compete Deal should be full pay with the same COL / pay raises that you should of gotten and full benefits for the term.
I would rather non-compete clauses require arbitration to settle if the terms are enforceable. They should look at the pay of the employee and severance in determining if the clause can be enforced. In short arbitration should ensure the employee is being given a fair shake.
Companies should have a way to ensure key employees cannot take their knowledge to competitors. But they should have to pay for the privilege. For instance my specialized knowledge probably makes me around $50k-$75k (in salary) more valuable than if I took a software developer job in other industry and technology stack. And it would likely take me about 5 years, or maybe a little more, to reach my current level of pay in another domain. So getting me to sign a non-compete would probably cost the company around $400k in extra pay (paid out over a few years) and/or severance. If keeping my knowledge secret from competitors is actually important then this would be a very fair arrangement in my opinion.
For a VP or executive of a large company, that turns into millions of dollars. If this Gene Farrell guy was making $1M/year I would probably side with Amazon on this one. If he was just another middle manager making $300k/year I cannot see how Amazon could expect him to never work in his chosen field again.
Touche, I have to admit that my children haven't gotten to an allowance age and I never had one as a kid so my viewpoint here could be quite off. I know that even at the age of 12 I had a hard time even saving up $10 (around $20 in 2017 dollars) but I grew up in a working class family. I concede my children will probably not have that problem living in an upper middle class suburb and if they so choose could likely buy their own legos. Probably not the $100+ sets, but there are plenty of $10-$25 sets as well.
The biggest struggle we have is keeping their mother from her habit of occasionally scooping random handfuls of parts into the trash to try to keep the supply down. I try to tell her that more parts equals more creative potential.
Ha, I'm glad I'm not the only one. My daughters have about $300 worth of Duplos right now and my wife gets upset every time another $50 set arrives from Amazon. I concede there are a lot of bricks, but my nearly 3 year old daughter loves building large buildings or zoos on her building plates and that takes a lot of bricks.