One person died, you troll. Slashdot doesn't report the news, or natural disasters in general. It reports mostly technological issues, and a TLD going away forever is definitely tech news.
Sega ships the Saturn before Sony ships the PS1 -- Sega gets dominated (despite the fact that the Saturn was a superior console in terms of hardware).
(Take this with a grain of salt, I am a Sega fan) The Saturn may have technicly had superior hardware, but it was extremely difficult to program for (it had 2 Hitachi SH2 processors running parallel, and could do 50 MIPS compared to PSX's 30).
I suppose it could be partly blamed on bad marketing, but the real problem was that Sega never had any real franchise titles on the Saturn or Dreamcast (despite the Sonic rehashes). Sony will dominate for years to come, simply because they have the best titles -- the FF and GTA series' alone will sell millions of PS3 boxes.
Sega got dominated for the same reasons time and again, lack of 3rd party support and horrible, horrible marketing. FF and GTA are 3rd party titles. GTA2 was on the Dreamcast, but its nothing compared to GTA3. Sega has always made great games for their consoles. Nights, Panzer Dragoon 1/Zwei/Saga, Virtua Fighter 2, Virtua Cop, Sega Rally, Shining Force 3, Radiant Silvergun, House of the Dead, and Grandia were all great games for the Saturn. And most of those were first-party titles. On the Dreamcast you had Soul Calibur, the NFL2k series, Grandia 2, Skies of Arcadia, Jet Grind Radio, Crazy Taxi, Shenmue, Rez, and Phantasy Star Online. Never heard of some of these games? Thats Sega's marketing for you. Sony's hypemachine could sell ice to an eskimo. And Sega still hasn't figured it out. Look at Panzer Dragoon Orta and Otogi. Both very good games, and nobodys played them. Sega is very good at making very good games. They just don't know how to sell them.
there is nothing illegal about China manipulating it's currency btw(how could there? they make their laws obviously, if you take it any other way then the whole system in there is 'illegal').
China joined the WTO, and the IMF. The WTO and the IMF both have regulations and laws against exactly what they're doing with their currency. Did you hear something in the news lately about the WTO enforcing sanctions against us soon for putting tarriffs on steel? If they can sanction us, they can certainly sanction China. IF the US decides to push the issue.
You'd opt to have Chinese workers treated like shit just so you can have your precious DVD player dirt cheap. Shows what kind of person you are. No wonder you post a/c.
The IMF and WTO both have regulations against the currency manipulating which China is doing. WTO = international law. If they don't change a thing about how much their workers make, and just stop manipulating the currency, it will give American companies at least a slight chance of exporting things into China.
The excess really has nothing to do with me. I pay them $2.13 an hour because that's what minimum wage says.
Yes, that may be true. But the argument was not about what the company pays. The argument was about what the employee gets. The employee effectively gets at least 6.75 either way.
Perhaps workers are simply uninformed of their rights? If so, we should work to educate the Chinese of the rights given to them by their government.
I'm not excusing the Chinese government for any of this. In fact, my main complaint is with them. They need to do better. Factories still abuse their workers all the time, and its China's job to put a stop to it. And yes, the person in question being a migrant worker is part of the problem, like you said, we have migrant workers in the US in similar situations.
It's sad, really, it is. But education has always been the government's job, in China, and pretty much anywhere else. Not a factory's job.
Thats true. China fails there again. Doesn't make it right for the factories to take advantage of uneducated people though.
Do they get to roam the streets in the evenings, or are they working until midnight?
They are roaming the streets in the evening, after midnight, probably on their way home. After midnight might be considered morning but thats more poor writing than anything.
If they get to quit in the evenings, and get those breaks, the work sounds challenging, but only a bit more than what one can expect from an average American factory.
The shift described is a 16 hour shift, minus 2 hours for breaks. If the breaks are unpaid, then 14*6=84 hours a week (if they get the 1 day off they're supposed to.) 84 hours a week in an American factory is unheard of.
That's nothing. A furniture factory in my hometown will dock you FIVE DAYS pay if you show up LATE on Christmas Eve
It violates the rules of the IMF for one, of which China is a member.
China benefits from this by keeping the massive trade deficit in place. Their cheap exported goods can continue to flood our market, and not only our costs, which are higher by themselves, but the exchange rate makes it impossible for us to export anything there.
That's if you include reliance on donations to keep your job (an employer used to paying $2.13 an hour is not suddenly going to drop their pants and pay you thrice that if business levels). I personally don't count those, but hey, whatever floats your boat.
What donations? They are REQUIRED BY LAW to pay at least $6.75. Let me explain this to you again since you didn't get it the first time. They can pay $6.75, or pay $2.13 to workers who make the majority of their income in tips. If the tips plus the $2.13 do not equal $6.75 per hour, the employer is REQUIRED BY LAW to pay the difference. You can not make less than $6.75 either way. Not legally. Employers are not 'used to' paying $2.13. They've always had to operate this way.
Then the typical Chinese company operates outside the law.
They often do. Chinese labor laws, while on the books, are for the most part not enforced. Here's another article, from the Washington Post.. (Mirrored elsewhere, the Post charges money for archived stories beyond 2 weeks).
Eh, no. It's 6.75 per hour. The $2.13 per hour minimum your looking at is for tipped workers, who make a very high percentage of their income from tips. And if the employee's tips + wage is less than their hours * the real minimum wage ($6.75), the employer must pay the difference. So yes, in either case, the minimum wage in this state is $6.75, and it's not the highest in the country either. I think Washington state has the highest at $8.
The minimum wage in China that you're referring to, is only for ONE CITY. A major city. Not even its suburbs. Other places recieve far less. But that aside, the fact remains that there are no child labor laws, very little safety requirements, and no overtime. And you're basing that 44 cents an hour on a 35 hour workweek. A typical Chinese workweek exceeds 60 hours and often will exceed 80+.
But I'll play along - lets take that 44 cents an hour, and divide 6.75 by it. We get about 15. 15 * 6.75 is 101.25. Even with your inflated hourly rate, there is still no comparison between the US and China, and the US and Luxembourg, who I assume you chose because it had a disproportionately high minimum wage.
Let's look at Spain's minimum wage - less than 2 Euros an hour. The average minimum wage in the EU is about 5.65 EU, or approximately $7. Looks very similar to my minimum wage.
I'm not saying we should stop buying Chinese products totally. But we need to end these unfair (and illegal) trade and labor practices. We can't compete with that. No one can.
China may or maynot be manipulating their currency but isn't it important to note that it positivelly impacts far more American's than it does negatively? That currency benefits ALL Americans, just step into WalMart and think about that $9 toaster or $49 tv.
A trade deficit as massive as ours is with China is never a good thing. Sure we're getting cheap electronics a lot cheaper, but how are you going to afford that $40 DVD player if you're out of a job? And with China keeping their currency low, it makes it almost impossible to export goods into their market, even if otherwise we had a 'competitive advantage'
China is still recieving favorable loans from the World Bank, even though it has over 200 billion in the bank. Us not doing anything about China doing this reflects on our current and previous administrations' pandering to China. We don't have to allow them to buy as much of our currency as they do in order to artificially de-value their own currency, but we are, and it's providing China a lot of leverage in future negotiations, by holding a lot of our currency, they have the ability to signifigantly de-value the dollar, and disrupt the US economy, simply by selling off large amounts of those holdings. We shouldn't be allowing them to do this because it hurts us in not one but two ways.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=91447&threshol d=0&commentsort=0&tid=98&mode=thread&pid=7871969#7 871992
Sorry, wont let me post the same thing twice.
Sorry, wont let me post the same thing twice.
Article IV of the IMF Articles of Agreement states that members shall, "avoid manipulating exchange rates to gain an unfair competitive advantage," and, under IMF surveillance procedures, a principal indicator of such manipulation is "protracted large scale intervention in one direction in the exchange market."
Funny... if you replace China with the US, its true compared to most of western Europe. But that's different, right?
So if a factory worker in China makes 5 cents an hour (a high estimate), and the minimum wage in my state is 6.75, that means that we're paying 135 times more. So if the comparison is true, your minimum wage is $911.25/hour? Or 729 euros per hour? Even if working conditions are markedly better in Europe than they are here (they're not, except for vacation time), they don't compare to that.
England didn't have a minimum wage at all until 2000.
Maybe you should take a look at the Eastern European members of the EU if you want to see some substandard working conditions. But they're not on the level of China. Few are.
>China's artificial (and illegal) manipulation of its currency.
Care to elaborate?
Sure. I think this testimony to a Senate Committee should explain it well enough. Some key excerpts (make that some long-ass paragraphs):
Chinese exchange rate policy is an important special case which spells currency manipulation in a different way. The Chinese currency has a fixed rate to the dollar but is nonconvertible on capital account. Over the past year, there has been a $25 billion trade surplus, a $45 billion net inflow of foreign direct investment--which also puts upward market pressures on the exchange rate--and over $50 billion of central bank purchases of foreign exchange. In this case, the central bank purchases offset almost three-quarters of market-generated upward pressure on the yuan from the trade surplus and the FDI inflow combined. Moreover, these official foreign exchange purchases may have been even larger except for an unfolding financial scandal involving billions of dollars of missing reserves.
Based on the IMF definition, China has clearly been manipulating its currency for mercantilist purposes. The Bank of China has made protracted large scale purchases of foreign exchange--$150 billion since 1995--in order to maintain a large trade surplus as an offset to poor growth performance in the domestic economy. A direct measure of the manipulation is not possible because of the nonconvertible fixed exchange rate. There is no doubt, however, that if the central bank had not purchased $50 billion in 2001, there would have been strong upward pressures on the yuan in formal and informal markets. The bottom line is that the Chinese yuan is substantially undervalued and should certainly not be devalued as the Chinese government occasionally threatens to do.
The unique form of Chinese currency manipulation provides a mix of benefits and costs for China and for the United States. The most direct result is a larger trade surplus for China, which means more export-oriented jobs in the Chinese economy. From the U.S. point of view, of course, it means a larger trade deficit with China and the loss of export-oriented and import-competing jobs. In 2001, U.S. imports from China were $102 billion, or more than five times larger than the $19 billion of U.S. exports to China.
...
A similar conclusion can and should be drawn about China as an economic aid "graduate." There is no longer any justification for China to receive several billion dollars per year in long-term loans on favorable terms from the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and some bilateral donors, when there are $220 billion of unutilized funds stashed away in the central bank. And yet the development banks continue to lend large sums to China!
...
Finally, and more speculatively, China at some future point could use its official dollar holdings as foreign policy leverage against the United States by threatening to sell large quantities of dollars on the market, or merely shift its reserves away from dollars and into euros and yen. This will not happen anytime soon because the result would be a decline in the dollar and an adverse impact on Chinese exports. At some future point, however, if China were to become less dependent on exports to the United States for economic growth, such a threat could become credible. For example, the threat of substantial Chinese sales of dollars, with its implications for a disruptive decline in the dollar and the U.S. stock market, especially during a downward phase in the U.S. economy and/or an election year, could influence the course of U.S. policy toward Taiwan. Chinese military officers, in fact, in their studies of nonconventional defense strategies, include reference to George Soros and his attack on the British pound in 1992 as a template for disrupting a rival's (i.e., the United States) economic system.
It's cheaper in China because of the near slave labor conditions, lack of labor, safety, and minimum wage laws, and China's artificial (and illegal) manipulation of its currency. We shouldn't have to compete with that. Unfortunately we do. But I might actually -want- to play a little more for a DVD player made in the USA, or at least a country with better working conditions, to 'vote with my dollars' against this stuff. Theres nothing wrong with it not being made in the USA, but there IS something wrong with how things are in China right now.
Stickers are irrelivant. Read the game's rating on the lower left-hand side of the box. They're rated just like movies are, and both games are rated 'M'. And just like an 'R' movie, people under 17 aren't allowed to buy them. It is very clear and obvious, and the retailer is supposed to enforce the rating. And I don't think a little kid has $50 bucks for a game. Or even $20 for a budget game. The problem is parents not doing their job, then looking to blame someone else for their negligence.
For more information about the video game rating system, go to esrb.org
Mod parent down. He's claimed to be all sorts of things and is just a pain in the ass. He's not even funny. Jesus man, at least be a funny troll. Or good. You're neither.
They -should- make better ads. But they're taking the easy way out and doing product placement everywhere. It will become so blatant and disgusting that network tv will become unwatchable. It's already there in a lot of shows and movies, but it's getting to the point where one of the characters will stop and do a spot for something mid-scene. Way past the level of even the Back to the Future movies.
Actually, the first person through recieved an official Big Dig hat, and a map of the big dig, autographed by Mayor Menino and Mass Turnpike chairman Matt Amorello. It was just some woman on her way home, who probably didn't want to be stopped on the middle of a bridge by a couple of politicians. Maybe that'll be worth something in 100 years when its replaced by something else.
Warshaw was the guy that made the worst 2600 game ever (E.T.), and the best 2600 game ever (Yar's Revenge). If you need a tiebreaker, he also made Raiders of the Lost Ark, which was a pretty good game.
Little Timmy should not be playing a game called "King of Fighters". Little Timmy probably also watches a lot of MTV. If we have to worry about Little Timmy when we want to have games meant for adults, does that mean that we have to think about Little Timmy when we want R rated movies? Or porn? "Hey Tina, when Dirk is pounding you from behind, try not to have your boobs bounce so much, Little Timmy might be watching." It is not the responsibility of game companies, or the movie industry, or the porn industry to keep things made and intended for adults from children. It is the PARENTS responsibility to make sure Little Timmy isn't watching pornography, or Rambo 3, or playing a video game that is meant for older teens and adults. I am sick and tired of parents not taking responsibility for their children, and instead blaming the industry and demanding that they censor themselves in ADULT video games.
Who do you think buys Little Timmy's videogames? Little Timmy sure doesn't have $50 to buy violent videogames behind his parent's back. If Mom herself bought him the game, then its his dumb mother's fault. If Mom is buying her kid pornography, she might lose custody of her kid. It's her responsibility as a parent to know what she is buying for her child. As if its not blatantly obvious.
Slashdot Mirror
One person died, you troll. Slashdot doesn't report the news, or natural disasters in general. It reports mostly technological issues, and a TLD going away forever is definitely tech news.
...Cross the T-52 Support Dragon with the Honda Asimo maybe we'll get This?
...Zack, the Legomaniac? I think he's available.
Sega ships the Saturn before Sony ships the PS1 -- Sega gets dominated (despite the fact that the Saturn was a superior console in terms of hardware).
(Take this with a grain of salt, I am a Sega fan)
The Saturn may have technicly had superior hardware, but it was extremely difficult to program for (it had 2 Hitachi SH2 processors running parallel, and could do 50 MIPS compared to PSX's 30).
I suppose it could be partly blamed on bad marketing, but the real problem was that Sega never had any real franchise titles on the Saturn or Dreamcast (despite the Sonic rehashes). Sony will dominate for years to come, simply because they have the best titles -- the FF and GTA series' alone will sell millions of PS3 boxes.
Sega got dominated for the same reasons time and again, lack of 3rd party support and horrible, horrible marketing. FF and GTA are 3rd party titles. GTA2 was on the Dreamcast, but its nothing compared to GTA3. Sega has always made great games for their consoles. Nights, Panzer Dragoon 1/Zwei/Saga, Virtua Fighter 2, Virtua Cop, Sega Rally, Shining Force 3, Radiant Silvergun, House of the Dead, and Grandia were all great games for the Saturn. And most of those were first-party titles. On the Dreamcast you had Soul Calibur, the NFL2k series, Grandia 2, Skies of Arcadia, Jet Grind Radio, Crazy Taxi, Shenmue, Rez, and Phantasy Star Online. Never heard of some of these games? Thats Sega's marketing for you. Sony's hypemachine could sell ice to an eskimo. And Sega still hasn't figured it out. Look at Panzer Dragoon Orta and Otogi. Both very good games, and nobodys played them. Sega is very good at making very good games. They just don't know how to sell them.
there is nothing illegal about China manipulating it's currency btw(how could there? they make their laws obviously, if you take it any other way then the whole system in there is 'illegal').
China joined the WTO, and the IMF. The WTO and the IMF both have regulations and laws against exactly what they're doing with their currency. Did you hear something in the news lately about the WTO enforcing sanctions against us soon for putting tarriffs on steel? If they can sanction us, they can certainly sanction China. IF the US decides to push the issue.
You'd opt to have Chinese workers treated like shit just so you can have your precious DVD player dirt cheap. Shows what kind of person you are. No wonder you post a/c. The IMF and WTO both have regulations against the currency manipulating which China is doing. WTO = international law. If they don't change a thing about how much their workers make, and just stop manipulating the currency, it will give American companies at least a slight chance of exporting things into China.
The excess really has nothing to do with me. I pay them $2.13 an hour because that's what minimum wage says.
Yes, that may be true. But the argument was not about what the company pays. The argument was about what the employee gets. The employee effectively gets at least 6.75 either way.
Perhaps workers are simply uninformed of their rights? If so, we should work to educate the Chinese of the rights given to them by their government.
I'm not excusing the Chinese government for any of this. In fact, my main complaint is with them. They need to do better. Factories still abuse their workers all the time, and its China's job to put a stop to it. And yes, the person in question being a migrant worker is part of the problem, like you said, we have migrant workers in the US in similar situations.
It's sad, really, it is. But education has always been the government's job, in China, and pretty much anywhere else. Not a factory's job.
Thats true. China fails there again. Doesn't make it right for the factories to take advantage of uneducated people though.
Do they get to roam the streets in the evenings, or are they working until midnight?
They are roaming the streets in the evening, after midnight, probably on their way home. After midnight might be considered morning but thats more poor writing than anything.
If they get to quit in the evenings, and get those breaks, the work sounds challenging, but only a bit more than what one can expect from an average American factory.
The shift described is a 16 hour shift, minus 2 hours for breaks. If the breaks are unpaid, then 14*6=84 hours a week (if they get the 1 day off they're supposed to.) 84 hours a week in an American factory is unheard of.
That's nothing. A furniture factory in my hometown will dock you FIVE DAYS pay if you show up LATE on Christmas Eve
That's illegal here, I dunno where you are.
The China Act will make it illegal, if it passes.
Considering it was written by 3 Republicans, I think it has a chance.
Okay, how is it illegal?
It violates the rules of the IMF for one, of which China is a member.
China benefits from this by keeping the massive trade deficit in place. Their cheap exported goods can continue to flood our market, and not only our costs, which are higher by themselves, but the exchange rate makes it impossible for us to export anything there.
That's if you include reliance on donations to keep your job (an employer used to paying $2.13 an hour is not suddenly going to drop their pants and pay you thrice that if business levels). I personally don't count those, but hey, whatever floats your boat.
What donations? They are REQUIRED BY LAW to pay at least $6.75. Let me explain this to you again since you didn't get it the first time. They can pay $6.75, or pay $2.13 to workers who make the majority of their income in tips. If the tips plus the $2.13 do not equal $6.75 per hour, the employer is REQUIRED BY LAW to pay the difference. You can not make less than $6.75 either way. Not legally. Employers are not 'used to' paying $2.13. They've always had to operate this way.
Then the typical Chinese company operates outside the law.
They often do. Chinese labor laws, while on the books, are for the most part not enforced. Here's another article, from the Washington Post.. (Mirrored elsewhere, the Post charges money for archived stories beyond 2 weeks).
If only! It's actually $2.13 per hour.
Eh, no. It's 6.75 per hour. The $2.13 per hour minimum your looking at is for tipped workers, who make a very high percentage of their income from tips. And if the employee's tips + wage is less than their hours * the real minimum wage ($6.75), the employer must pay the difference. So yes, in either case, the minimum wage in this state is $6.75, and it's not the highest in the country either. I think Washington state has the highest at $8.
The minimum wage in China that you're referring to, is only for ONE CITY. A major city. Not even its suburbs. Other places recieve far less. But that aside, the fact remains that there are no child labor laws, very little safety requirements, and no overtime. And you're basing that 44 cents an hour on a 35 hour workweek. A typical Chinese workweek exceeds 60 hours and often will exceed 80+. But I'll play along - lets take that 44 cents an hour, and divide 6.75 by it. We get about 15. 15 * 6.75 is 101.25. Even with your inflated hourly rate, there is still no comparison between the US and China, and the US and Luxembourg, who I assume you chose because it had a disproportionately high minimum wage.
Let's look at Spain's minimum wage - less than 2 Euros an hour. The average minimum wage in the EU is about 5.65 EU, or approximately $7. Looks very similar to my minimum wage.
I'm not saying we should stop buying Chinese products totally. But we need to end these unfair (and illegal) trade and labor practices. We can't compete with that. No one can.
China may or maynot be manipulating their currency but isn't it important to note that it positivelly impacts far more American's than it does negatively? That currency benefits ALL Americans, just step into WalMart and think about that $9 toaster or $49 tv.
A trade deficit as massive as ours is with China is never a good thing. Sure we're getting cheap electronics a lot cheaper, but how are you going to afford that $40 DVD player if you're out of a job? And with China keeping their currency low, it makes it almost impossible to export goods into their market, even if otherwise we had a 'competitive advantage'
China is still recieving favorable loans from the World Bank, even though it has over 200 billion in the bank. Us not doing anything about China doing this reflects on our current and previous administrations' pandering to China. We don't have to allow them to buy as much of our currency as they do in order to artificially de-value their own currency, but we are, and it's providing China a lot of leverage in future negotiations, by holding a lot of our currency, they have the ability to signifigantly de-value the dollar, and disrupt the US economy, simply by selling off large amounts of those holdings. We shouldn't be allowing them to do this because it hurts us in not one but two ways.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=91447&threshol d=0&commentsort=0&tid=98&mode=thread&pid=7871969#7 871992
Sorry, wont let me post the same thing twice.
Sorry, wont let me post the same thing twice.
Article IV of the IMF Articles of Agreement states that members shall, "avoid manipulating exchange rates to gain an unfair competitive advantage," and, under IMF surveillance procedures, a principal indicator of such manipulation is "protracted large scale intervention in one direction in the exchange market."
Funny ... if you replace China with the US, its true compared to most of western Europe. But that's different, right?
So if a factory worker in China makes 5 cents an hour (a high estimate), and the minimum wage in my state is 6.75, that means that we're paying 135 times more. So if the comparison is true, your minimum wage is $911.25/hour? Or 729 euros per hour? Even if working conditions are markedly better in Europe than they are here (they're not, except for vacation time), they don't compare to that.
England didn't have a minimum wage at all until 2000.
Maybe you should take a look at the Eastern European members of the EU if you want to see some substandard working conditions. But they're not on the level of China. Few are.
>China's artificial (and illegal) manipulation of its currency. Care to elaborate?
...
...
Sure. I think this testimony to a Senate Committee should explain it well enough. Some key excerpts (make that some long-ass paragraphs):
Chinese exchange rate policy is an important special case which spells currency manipulation in a different way. The Chinese currency has a fixed rate to the dollar but is nonconvertible on capital account. Over the past year, there has been a $25 billion trade surplus, a $45 billion net inflow of foreign direct investment--which also puts upward market pressures on the exchange rate--and over $50 billion of central bank purchases of foreign exchange. In this case, the central bank purchases offset almost three-quarters of market-generated upward pressure on the yuan from the trade surplus and the FDI inflow combined. Moreover, these official foreign exchange purchases may have been even larger except for an unfolding financial scandal involving billions of dollars of missing reserves.
Based on the IMF definition, China has clearly been manipulating its currency for mercantilist purposes. The Bank of China has made protracted large scale purchases of foreign exchange--$150 billion since 1995--in order to maintain a large trade surplus as an offset to poor growth performance in the domestic economy. A direct measure of the manipulation is not possible because of the nonconvertible fixed exchange rate. There is no doubt, however, that if the central bank had not purchased $50 billion in 2001, there would have been strong upward pressures on the yuan in formal and informal markets. The bottom line is that the Chinese yuan is substantially undervalued and should certainly not be devalued as the Chinese government occasionally threatens to do.
The unique form of Chinese currency manipulation provides a mix of benefits and costs for China and for the United States. The most direct result is a larger trade surplus for China, which means more export-oriented jobs in the Chinese economy. From the U.S. point of view, of course, it means a larger trade deficit with China and the loss of export-oriented and import-competing jobs. In 2001, U.S. imports from China were $102 billion, or more than five times larger than the $19 billion of U.S. exports to China.
A similar conclusion can and should be drawn about China as an economic aid "graduate." There is no longer any justification for China to receive several billion dollars per year in long-term loans on favorable terms from the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and some bilateral donors, when there are $220 billion of unutilized funds stashed away in the central bank. And yet the development banks continue to lend large sums to China!
Finally, and more speculatively, China at some future point could use its official dollar holdings as foreign policy leverage against the United States by threatening to sell large quantities of dollars on the market, or merely shift its reserves away from dollars and into euros and yen. This will not happen anytime soon because the result would be a decline in the dollar and an adverse impact on Chinese exports. At some future point, however, if China were to become less dependent on exports to the United States for economic growth, such a threat could become credible. For example, the threat of substantial Chinese sales of dollars, with its implications for a disruptive decline in the dollar and the U.S. stock market, especially during a downward phase in the U.S. economy and/or an election year, could influence the course of U.S. policy toward Taiwan. Chinese military officers, in fact, in their studies of nonconventional defense strategies, include reference to George Soros and his attack on the British pound in 1992 as a template for disrupting a rival's (i.e., the United States) economic system.
It's cheaper in China because of the near slave labor conditions, lack of labor, safety, and minimum wage laws, and China's artificial (and illegal) manipulation of its currency. We shouldn't have to compete with that. Unfortunately we do. But I might actually -want- to play a little more for a DVD player made in the USA, or at least a country with better working conditions, to 'vote with my dollars' against this stuff. Theres nothing wrong with it not being made in the USA, but there IS something wrong with how things are in China right now.
You must not think the concept of freedom is good in real life if you have that rediculous petition in your sig.
Stickers are irrelivant. Read the game's rating on the lower left-hand side of the box. They're rated just like movies are, and both games are rated 'M'. And just like an 'R' movie, people under 17 aren't allowed to buy them. It is very clear and obvious, and the retailer is supposed to enforce the rating. And I don't think a little kid has $50 bucks for a game. Or even $20 for a budget game. The problem is parents not doing their job, then looking to blame someone else for their negligence.
For more information about the video game rating system, go to esrb.org
Mod parent down. He's claimed to be all sorts of things and is just a pain in the ass. He's not even funny. Jesus man, at least be a funny troll. Or good. You're neither.
They -should- make better ads. But they're taking the easy way out and doing product placement everywhere. It will become so blatant and disgusting that network tv will become unwatchable. It's already there in a lot of shows and movies, but it's getting to the point where one of the characters will stop and do a spot for something mid-scene. Way past the level of even the Back to the Future movies.
Actually, the first person through recieved an official Big Dig hat, and a map of the big dig, autographed by Mayor Menino and Mass Turnpike chairman Matt Amorello. It was just some woman on her way home, who probably didn't want to be stopped on the middle of a bridge by a couple of politicians. Maybe that'll be worth something in 100 years when its replaced by something else.
Warshaw was the guy that made the worst 2600 game ever (E.T.), and the best 2600 game ever (Yar's Revenge). If you need a tiebreaker, he also made Raiders of the Lost Ark, which was a pretty good game.
Little Timmy should not be playing a game called "King of Fighters". Little Timmy probably also watches a lot of MTV. If we have to worry about Little Timmy when we want to have games meant for adults, does that mean that we have to think about Little Timmy when we want R rated movies? Or porn? "Hey Tina, when Dirk is pounding you from behind, try not to have your boobs bounce so much, Little Timmy might be watching." It is not the responsibility of game companies, or the movie industry, or the porn industry to keep things made and intended for adults from children. It is the PARENTS responsibility to make sure Little Timmy isn't watching pornography, or Rambo 3, or playing a video game that is meant for older teens and adults. I am sick and tired of parents not taking responsibility for their children, and instead blaming the industry and demanding that they censor themselves in ADULT video games.
Who do you think buys Little Timmy's videogames? Little Timmy sure doesn't have $50 to buy violent videogames behind his parent's back. If Mom herself bought him the game, then its his dumb mother's fault. If Mom is buying her kid pornography, she might lose custody of her kid. It's her responsibility as a parent to know what she is buying for her child. As if its not blatantly obvious.