The generator guy was probably reviled because he made a HUGE profit rather than a more fair one.
Yeah, it's the "fair" that was the tricky bit.
He was driving 700 miles in a rented truck (w/ driver), still some snowstorm activity going on, paying retail in NJ (plus tax which we don't have here), and needed to have some incentive to do the work. Based on the complaints that he was charging $200 more than Sams Club per generator, I figured he was making $2-3000 on a truck load of 50 units after expenses. A reasonable margin, but normal for small businesses.
The odd psychology of the situation was the government people who really weren't doing anything useful, who were calling press conferences to announce investigations into his not selling them for what Sams Club was selling them for before the sold out. Which is an impossible thing to expect, even if he were doing it entirely at cost.
I think there were trying to look like they weren't completely useless, given the crisis, but they did cause actual harm instead, since the guy just gave up fearing prosecution.
I talked to a few people about it who had read the papers and were mad at the 'gouging' but it never took more than two or three questions to get them to understand and usually accept the other side of the story. Our local paper wouldn't ever print something calling into question a prosecutor's motives though.
If I buy 10 of the new Xbox 360 from the local Walmart where there are lots, and sell them on eBay for a profit, is that "scalping" 360s ?
Yes, it is. You took a commodity that was easily available, deliberately created an artificial scarcity and then took a profit from it.
He's talking about moving goods from areas of plenty to areas of scarcity, really just fixing a distribution system problem. He's not buying them in Detroit and selling them in Detroit, he's selling them to Silicon Valley. WalMart sent too many to Detroit and not enough to San Jose. He profits by fixing the supply problem.
People are still trained to revile this kind of behavior. A couple years ago there was a really bad ice storm here in New Hampshire, where one of the regional power companies got burned for doing poor line and tree maintenance. Customers were out for weeks. A few days into the ice storm's aftermath, when all the local stores' generators were sold out, a bright fellow rented a tractor trailer and drove down to New Jersey, and packed up a truck load of generators. He brought those back to New Hampshire and sold them for the cost of goods, plus transportation, plus profit (IIRC, $200-$300 over typical retail). He was excoriated for doing so by the local press and bureaucrats, but the people who bought them were saving the cost of such a trip themselves, plus the cost of replacing burst frozen pipes. He should have been rewarded and continued making those trips every day for the next three weeks - more people would have saved money on the net.
The big box stores got their inventory response squared away about a week after the power went back on.
before you call the kettle black, the US is about to get a Supreme Court Justice who doesn't have a problem with laws that tell people what to eat, under the "Commerce Clause" of the US Constitution (meant to prevent trade wars among States).
when i'm trying to solve a harder design dilemna i take a piece of paper and start writing, drawing lines etc.
Yup. I have a large-format sketchpad I use for user interface design work. Paper and kneeded eraser are just far faster than the available computer tools.
I also carry a graph-paper Moleskine or lab notebook for field work. I switch from notes to diagrams quickly and easily, at very high resolution. The netbook stays in the bag for most meetings.
If OCR actually worked I might be tempted to use a tablet, but for now I'm safe from that temptation. Maybe the resolution will improve about the time OCR is figured out.
Sure they can. It's called "lying". All humans have the capacity, and the last time I looked cops were still human.
Not really - they can lie all they want and be free from prosecution, but normal humans are prosecuted for such things in the system. Watch 10 Rules for Dealing With Police at YouTube and read Constitutional Chaos for advice (former) and academic study of the problem (latter).
Driving is a privilege and therefore can be revoked at any time & any reason, even if no crime was committed. But walking is an innate natural Right and police may not detain you from moving about, unless they charge you or obtain a warrant.
That's the State line, but the Right to Travel is usually recognized as a natural right. Horse and carriage would have been the mode of transportation a hundred years ago, and nobody would have thought about making people walk instead of riding. Mechanized transport was simply used as an excuse for additional power. Drivers' licenses didn't even exist in many places in the first half of the 20th century - you could drive when your father felt it was wise to let you drive his car.
Besides, in many places they've paved over the pedestrian-friendly roads and posted 'No Pedestrians' signs, so you have to drive (or take several days' detours, on foot) to live.
Tron was a kids' movie by Disney. It wasn't meant to appeal to 16 year olds, and no doubt it rarely did. If you were ten at the time, as I was, you'd have thought Tron was awesome.
I was 9 at the time and found it boring. I was just learning VIC-20 assembly, so I didn't know what most of the terminology meant (MCP, users, etc.)
I think you needed to be a 15-year old geek with some exposure to a university lab, and then it was awesome. Fortunately for selection bias, those guys are all here.
Yeah this is a total myth as the other poster said.
Falling rain and especially wet leaves do create ungodly amounts of multipath reflections, which completely hose up many digital modulations. Perhaps that's where the correlation comes from.
If they were smart, they'd trickle in ads and store them in a local cache. Then when you start a new show, start buffering the stream in a thread and play an ad out of cache. When the commercial is done, start playing the stream. The same could even be done for pause, when everybody is sitting on the couch waiting for Uncle Ned to go pee (again).
Roku just shows me a progress bar when it's buffering. People hate buffering waits (remember Quick...buffering...Time?) and I'd venture would rather see an ad than a progress bar.
Be smart about it, kill two birds with one stone, profit.
I quit a job at a medical center when this kind of rationale was employed to avoid paying licensing fees for an EJB container with two-phase commit support.
Dell used to sell more reliable machines. But they had the power leads on the AT connector reversed, so if you plugged in a 3rd-party power supply you'd blow your mobo. DAMHINT.
The strategy that works for Dell shops is this:
Buy the XPS/Business lines
Understand that your failure rate will be 10-20% per year
Have an imaging system
Have a build system
Have a license management system
Buy the Gold support contract - this gets you fast turn around and intelligent local-country support. Also they believe you when you tell them the hard drive toasted, is throwing SMART errors, and they send you a new one instead of suggesting you re-install Windows.
Have on-site spares, one for each build
Store all the data on the server.
Have redundant servers
Now, then, in volume, you can save some money by doing it this way. The support contract even outsources some of IT. But you need a big shop to make this feasible, and you need to be good at coordinating staff. But if you do it right, no user loses more than an couple hours a year to faulty equipment.
If you're a small shop, just build decent systems with parts from Newegg.
Besides the video adding nothing, the computer voices don't either. This would have made a humorous blog post. And I could have wasted 3x less time on that.
Slashdot Mirror
The generator guy was probably reviled because he made a HUGE profit rather than a more fair one.
Yeah, it's the "fair" that was the tricky bit.
He was driving 700 miles in a rented truck (w/ driver), still some snowstorm activity going on, paying retail in NJ (plus tax which we don't have here), and needed to have some incentive to do the work. Based on the complaints that he was charging $200 more than Sams Club per generator, I figured he was making $2-3000 on a truck load of 50 units after expenses. A reasonable margin, but normal for small businesses.
The odd psychology of the situation was the government people who really weren't doing anything useful, who were calling press conferences to announce investigations into his not selling them for what Sams Club was selling them for before the sold out. Which is an impossible thing to expect, even if he were doing it entirely at cost.
I think there were trying to look like they weren't completely useless, given the crisis, but they did cause actual harm instead, since the guy just gave up fearing prosecution.
I talked to a few people about it who had read the papers and were mad at the 'gouging' but it never took more than two or three questions to get them to understand and usually accept the other side of the story. Our local paper wouldn't ever print something calling into question a prosecutor's motives though.
But Ticketmaster provides guaranteed lock-in fees to venues to reduce venues' risks.
How does this work? They pay an up-front $6/seat or so regardless of its eventual sale? Then additional sales profits are split in some way?
If I buy 10 of the new Xbox 360 from the local Walmart where there are lots, and sell them on eBay for a profit, is that "scalping" 360s ?
Yes, it is. You took a commodity that was easily available, deliberately created an artificial scarcity and then took a profit from it.
He's talking about moving goods from areas of plenty to areas of scarcity, really just fixing a distribution system problem. He's not buying them in Detroit and selling them in Detroit, he's selling them to Silicon Valley. WalMart sent too many to Detroit and not enough to San Jose. He profits by fixing the supply problem.
People are still trained to revile this kind of behavior. A couple years ago there was a really bad ice storm here in New Hampshire, where one of the regional power companies got burned for doing poor line and tree maintenance. Customers were out for weeks. A few days into the ice storm's aftermath, when all the local stores' generators were sold out, a bright fellow rented a tractor trailer and drove down to New Jersey, and packed up a truck load of generators. He brought those back to New Hampshire and sold them for the cost of goods, plus transportation, plus profit (IIRC, $200-$300 over typical retail). He was excoriated for doing so by the local press and bureaucrats, but the people who bought them were saving the cost of such a trip themselves, plus the cost of replacing burst frozen pipes. He should have been rewarded and continued making those trips every day for the next three weeks - more people would have saved money on the net.
The big box stores got their inventory response squared away about a week after the power went back on.
any system that would cater to that would be abused by scalpers
There are several ways to avoid that problem. Ticket count limits, refunds, etc.
WHY CAN'T I QUIT YOU????
Slashdotter Extension, duh.
before you call the kettle black, the US is about to get a Supreme Court Justice who doesn't have a problem with laws that tell people what to eat, under the "Commerce Clause" of the US Constitution (meant to prevent trade wars among States).
when i'm trying to solve a harder design dilemna i take a piece of paper and start writing, drawing lines etc.
Yup. I have a large-format sketchpad I use for user interface design work. Paper and kneeded eraser are just far faster than the available computer tools.
I also carry a graph-paper Moleskine or lab notebook for field work. I switch from notes to diagrams quickly and easily, at very high resolution. The netbook stays in the bag for most meetings.
If OCR actually worked I might be tempted to use a tablet, but for now I'm safe from that temptation. Maybe the resolution will improve about the time OCR is figured out.
Sure they can. It's called "lying". All humans have the capacity, and the last time I looked cops were still human.
Not really - they can lie all they want and be free from prosecution, but normal humans are prosecuted for such things in the system. Watch 10 Rules for Dealing With Police at YouTube and read Constitutional Chaos for advice (former) and academic study of the problem (latter).
Driving is a privilege and therefore can be revoked at any time & any reason, even if no crime was committed. But walking is an innate natural Right and police may not detain you from moving about, unless they charge you or obtain a warrant.
That's the State line, but the Right to Travel is usually recognized as a natural right. Horse and carriage would have been the mode of transportation a hundred years ago, and nobody would have thought about making people walk instead of riding. Mechanized transport was simply used as an excuse for additional power. Drivers' licenses didn't even exist in many places in the first half of the 20th century - you could drive when your father felt it was wise to let you drive his car.
Besides, in many places they've paved over the pedestrian-friendly roads and posted 'No Pedestrians' signs, so you have to drive (or take several days' detours, on foot) to live.
ignored variables such as users already being used to reading paper books and not digital ones
But that's the majority of the world, so if you want to know how switching to digital will affect most people, this is OK.
I've probably read 9:1 digital:print in the past decade, but still prefer a paper book for works of significant length.
Anybody else get a little wood from this part? Just me? Okay... I'll be in my bunk.
Is this the 'God hates dildos' verse?
Looks like Leviticus 19:19.
That's good enough to warrant a T-shirt.
Tron was a kids' movie by Disney. It wasn't meant to appeal to 16 year olds, and no doubt it rarely did. If you were ten at the time, as I was, you'd have thought Tron was awesome.
I was 9 at the time and found it boring. I was just learning VIC-20 assembly, so I didn't know what most of the terminology meant (MCP, users, etc.)
I think you needed to be a 15-year old geek with some exposure to a university lab, and then it was awesome. Fortunately for selection bias, those guys are all here.
His call sign was W4NU; I still have one of his cards. Olaf is long since dead and someone else now has that call sign.
Do you get so misty-eyed for his car's license plate?
I never got why HAM geeks, a bristly lot, get so attached to their government-issued ID's. TK421, why aren't you at your post?
So why doesn't the BBC eliminate their broadcast towers and just send everything via the net?
Because they know they don't have the capacity to do it.
Their ISP's may not have the capacity. BBC should be able to handle head-node ops just fine, though.
It seems more likely that:
These will change over time. Head-node bandwidth can't be the problem, though, and any function of that reduces over time as well.
Not so: the ACLU is for collectivist rights. This is incompatible with the principled basis for Liberty, natural rights.
Here's their own position statement on gun rights. Now that Heller is the law of the land, that's taken down.
Yeah this is a total myth as the other poster said.
Falling rain and especially wet leaves do create ungodly amounts of multipath reflections, which completely hose up many digital modulations. Perhaps that's where the correlation comes from.
If they were smart, they'd trickle in ads and store them in a local cache. Then when you start a new show, start buffering the stream in a thread and play an ad out of cache. When the commercial is done, start playing the stream. The same could even be done for pause, when everybody is sitting on the couch waiting for Uncle Ned to go pee (again).
Roku just shows me a progress bar when it's buffering. People hate buffering waits (remember Quick...buffering...Time?) and I'd venture would rather see an ad than a progress bar.
Be smart about it, kill two birds with one stone, profit.
I quit a job at a medical center when this kind of rationale was employed to avoid paying licensing fees for an EJB container with two-phase commit support.
Has Dell ever sold anything but faulty machines?
Dell used to sell more reliable machines. But they had the power leads on the AT connector reversed, so if you plugged in a 3rd-party power supply you'd blow your mobo. DAMHINT.
The strategy that works for Dell shops is this:
Now, then, in volume, you can save some money by doing it this way. The support contract even outsources some of IT. But you need a big shop to make this feasible, and you need to be good at coordinating staff. But if you do it right, no user loses more than an couple hours a year to faulty equipment.
If you're a small shop, just build decent systems with parts from Newegg.
Besides the video adding nothing, the computer voices don't either. This would have made a humorous blog post. And I could have wasted 3x less time on that.
.sex Considered Dangerous
Use a .rubber.
The idea that the BBC should be restricted to radio broadcasting is ridiculous
How do you justify a coercive monopoly without a natural scarcity?
I think the result would still have given each astronaut a little more room than the Gemini capsule had, but not by much.
It's more than you get in coach on US Airways, anyhow.
The internal standard is IE6
A fine example of long-term strategic thinking. It's 2010, please fire your CIO.