Gizmodo says "The Japanese publication Asahi is claiming it'll use one of Sharp's parallax barrier LCDs."
Parallax barrier have been used in cell phones before, although recently people have been getting excited about the 3M system that uses frame-sequential alternating directional light emission (such as in the viewfinder of the Fuji FinePix Real 3D).
Here's something funny: if everyone jointly pays for healthcare and everybody gets treated health costs go down.
Funny, that has never happened [if you can show me an expansion of health care access that didn't result in higher per capita medical costs, let me know!] Health costs go up because there is higher demand for medical care when more people can obtain it.
In every country with universal health care, physician pay is significantly limited (either directly like the NHS/Medicare/Medicaid, or indirectly though "negotiations" between doctors and the government as in Japan, German, France, etc.), and access to newer treatments and drugs is limited. That only slows the rate of medical cost increases though.
A competitive public option would have pushed down insurance company margins and made them actually compete for business
There is no real market for individual insurance in the US because of the WWII-era tax break for employer-provided coverage. Then states make most of the rules on individual insurance including coverage mandates.
You seem to think there is a lot of cuts to be made in the individual insurance industry, in which case you should start your own insurance company as you are a genius. It certainly is not due to profit, as insurance companies rarely have profits much over 3%. The 85% limitation may push some costs like 24x7 call centers into 9x5 call centers and reducing other insurance company services that are not direct medical care.
However the truth is that high US medical costs are due to higher physician pay (double the European average) and greater use of newer treatments and drugs (as defined as three years old or younger).
it will not affect anyone who is currently happy with their insurance.
It will raise my taxes. But it won't end up raising my premiums? Really? We'll see.
Here in the US, we call this "The Free-Market System" and it's the ideal system if you own a corporation. If you have to work, it's somewhat less ideal.
I was the CEO of a corporation. Guess what? I still had to work. And I made less than I do now working for someone else.
I guess the last region to be exploited is Africa. Is it already too late to start buying land?
Land ownership in many African countries is not well respected by the governments. For instance, in Ethiopia most farmers don't own their land, the government does.
Someone I know was running a surface gold mine in a West African country which was expropriated by the government, so he left.
A large corporation could probably bribe an African government into purchasing land, and then keep bribing them to keep it.
While there have definitely been skeptics saying "this is impossible" on every one of them, those people were of all nationalities, including Americans.
Yes, but fortunately bright people sought to immigrate to the US. Italy: Enrico Fermi, Germany: Hans Bethe, Albert Einstein, Wernher von Braun (OK, we kind of took him), Hungary: Edward Teller, Russia: Sergey Brin...
The only thing the US still maintains a hold on is the Media/Entertainment industry.
A US company designed the iPhone (this is the most profitable part of it), although its parts come from early Asian tigers like Singapore, and its assembly occurs in China.
Well at least there is no way to outsource the designing & building of local communications infrastructure.
I worked for a broadcaster that hired a service of Russian VidCAD jockeys to draft up television video documents during our night. Of course that saved us a ton of drafting time, making us more efficient as broadcast engineers.
I wonder if those companies are still getting tax breaks to move jobs overseas?
While corporate service expenses (such as offshore services) are tax deductible by corporations, the US worldwide corporate tax system extends its reach to foreign production and sales income of US-based companies, unlike the systems of most competitor countries.
Moreover, the US corporate tax system contains unfavorable rules for allocating research, development, and administrative expenses when compared to other countries' tax systems.
Except that it costs $8/month for an ISP to actually provide broadband
Do you have data to back up your statement?
Cablevision's net profit margin is only 3.67%. Where is all the "free money" from the monopoly going?
Think about it: A 30 Mbps up/down DOCSIS 2.0 CMTS is $15,000. Optic nodes are $1000. A mile of fiber trenching is $250,000. Not counting install trucks, cherry pickers, coaxial cable (RG58 is $0.20/foot even in bulk), fiber (>$0.30/foot in bulk). That's just the capital for a few thousand subscribers, it doesn't include billing costs, network admins, customer service personnel, maintenance personnel, etc.
If you disagree with the line of business of a particular public company, well, you don't need to hold the stock
For some reason. many people feel it is much more enjoyable to simply buy stock and then bring a stockholder lawsuit...
Being a public company is a pain. SARBOX, stockholder lawsuits, trying to appease 100 stock rating agencies, etc. It is difficult for public companies to be truly innovative.
You still have not defined "middle class". How can one measure the performance of the middle class when there is no definition provided?
Your first article described Median Household Income. That is an interesting statistic, but it is not a definition of the middle class. For example, you could define the middle class could be the 2nd, 3rd, and 4rth quintile of personal income. Or the 3rd quintile of household income. Or whatever. Just put a definition on it, and then we can talk.
Household income is a tricky issue because the number of members of a household have changed over the years because of an expansion of single people marrying later, and different tax incentives for a additional household members to have a job or not.
You may want to look at this graph. Real hourly wages rose from 1995-2002, but stagnated since then. Real hourly compensation (wages plus non-wage compensation such as 401K, health insurance, etc.) on the other hand went up every year from 1995 to 2005.
I'm sure if employer-provided health insurance was not tax deductible due to WWII-era tax policy, it would push much of the added non-wage compensation spent by companies on health insurance today back into wages.
TFA says: In economics, the revisions add Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek, two champions of free-market economic theory, among the usual list of economists to be studied, like Adam Smith, Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes.
First of all, good going on Milton Friedman who was important in ending the draft in the US, co-author of one of the best economic histories of the Great Depression, and has been very influential around the world. Also good for adding F.A. Hayek, the most influential members of the Austrian School of economics.
But in truth, I was never taught anything about Adam Smith or John Maynard Keynes in public school (in one of the best public school systems in the country). Did anyone on Slashdot learn about these guys in public school?
What you really need to know about Hayek and Keynes is in this rap video.
Karl Marx was mentioned, but in a more political way regarding the growth of Communism.
I'm also pretty sure the US does not have "the world's least strict labor regulations."
According to the Employing Workers section of the World Bank's "Doing Business" Report, the only the USA and the Marshall Islands have all zeros in all the indexes: Difficulty of hiring, Rigidity of hours, Difficulty of redundancy, Rigidity of employment, and Redundancy costs (weeks of salary).
There are places in Africa where slavery is still practiced;
And probably in the US as well, but slavery is illegal in all the world's countries.
Indeed, many of the labor regulations in developing countries are not followed in the informal sector, so informal sector "companies" must avoid growing to a size where they may be found out and prosecuted (or they must give bribes), reducing the returns on scale and leading to severe inefficiencies in the economy. In some developing countries, the informal sector is 50% of the labor force.
The US has a large informal sector of illegal immigrants as well.
Pretty soon, there's going to be two huge peaks in an income chart - one at $8/hr for lousy service jobs, and one for the professional ranks.
This is the case today. The issue is that $8/hr for people with no skills is way, way, way more than the average global wage for people with no skills. The reason is that in the US, they have greater access to productive capital technology investments (computers, robots, laser scanners, etc.)
By outsourcing, information technology companies can more quickly and cheaply produce the technology that makes the $8/hr workers more productive, allowing their wages to rise.
Ending global trade would reduce the benefits of trade in producing technological advancement, raising the cost of capital for those $8/hr workers. With less capital, they will make less (see sub-saharan Africa for what happens when poor people with few skills have no capital investment).
On the other hand, we do know that far more people are going to college today in the US than ever. Since the returns to labor have been driven up by access to technological capital, there is more demand by people to become highly educated. Technology is also providing greater access to skill acquisition (such as University of Phoenix Online, Wikipedia, etc.)
There may be some genetic limits to how many people can acquire advanced skills, but perhaps a genetic engineering company that is offshoring some of its IT in China or India can provide the genetic engineering to allow all humans to go to college.
One obvious move would be to not allow anything to be sold in the US that was not manufactured in accordance with US environmental, health and safety, and child labor standards
Since the US has the world's least strict labor regulations on hiring and firing, would you be OK with the rest of the world boycotting our products until our we regulate our labor force to achieve European unemployment rates?
It's awful that these large companies are contributing to unemployment in the process, but do you really think they can be stopped?
The big differences in unemployment around the world have far more to do with local labor regulation than global competition. Kids coming out of college in France can't get jobs, but it has nothing to do with offshoring.
Global free trade in services allows American workers to take on more productive roles, which is good for the economy and leads to further job growth.
I'd love to know what the actual average European Internet speeds are. While very high "last mile" speeds are available, I want to know what actual Internet speeds are.
One could run a bunch of GigE to people's houses, then hook the border router up to IP-over-carrier-pigeon and still argue the customers get a "1 Gbps connection"...
There were even plans afoot to take the bandwidth that would normally carry one high-definition channel and split it into two or more.
I can assure you that if you drop MPEG-2 HD video below ~15 Mbps live encoded, your sports are going to start to look bad. You can't fit two good-looking HD channels with serious motion into 19.39 Mbps. You can sneak an SD of 4-5 Mbps stat muxed in with an HD into 19.39 Mbps, but that is it. I'm not saying people aren't trying to mux 2 HDs into 19.39, just that it doesn't look good.
Someday we might be able to get two good-looking H.264 HDs into 19.39 Mbps, but to tell the truth we aren't quite there with today's live encoders, plus you'd have to change out everyone's STB or tuner to include and H.264 decoder.
I only wish I could remember figures I saw comparing the actual value of the public airwaves versus the price paid for their exclusive use by the broadcasting networks.
I'll put it together for you. The 700 MHz auction for TV channels 52-69 (48 MHz nationally) brought in $20 billion. That is about $500 million per MHz nationally.
(It should be noted that one of the 700 MHz licensees, Qualcomm MediaFLO, bought previous Channel 55 for broadcasting mobile TV).
The US has 8839 broadcast television transmitters (including translators) occupying 270 MHz. Assuming the 700 MHz auction value, that is $135 billion for the entire broadcast band, or $15 million per transmitter.
Of course, the 96 MHz of the VHF broadcast TV spectrum is much less useful for mobile applications. Plus if all 270 MHz were on the table, supply/demand suggests that the spectrum might go for less/hz.
Also politically, no one messes with Barney (the dinosaur) and wins.
For reference, US television station revenues range from $20 billion/year (before the most recent trouble) to $16 billion now.
Slashdot Mirror
The blue glow of death....
Like Cherenkov Radiation...I got to see some in the 250kW University of Maryland training reactor. Pretty cool!
Gizmodo says "The Japanese publication Asahi is claiming it'll use one of Sharp's parallax barrier LCDs."
Parallax barrier have been used in cell phones before, although recently people have been getting excited about the 3M system that uses frame-sequential alternating directional light emission (such as in the viewfinder of the Fuji FinePix Real 3D).
Here's something funny: if everyone jointly pays for healthcare and everybody gets treated health costs go down.
Funny, that has never happened [if you can show me an expansion of health care access that didn't result in higher per capita medical costs, let me know!] Health costs go up because there is higher demand for medical care when more people can obtain it.
In every country with universal health care, physician pay is significantly limited (either directly like the NHS/Medicare/Medicaid, or indirectly though "negotiations" between doctors and the government as in Japan, German, France, etc.), and access to newer treatments and drugs is limited. That only slows the rate of medical cost increases though.
A competitive public option would have pushed down insurance company margins and made them actually compete for business
There is no real market for individual insurance in the US because of the WWII-era tax break for employer-provided coverage. Then states make most of the rules on individual insurance including coverage mandates.
You seem to think there is a lot of cuts to be made in the individual insurance industry, in which case you should start your own insurance company as you are a genius. It certainly is not due to profit, as insurance companies rarely have profits much over 3%. The 85% limitation may push some costs like 24x7 call centers into 9x5 call centers and reducing other insurance company services that are not direct medical care.
However the truth is that high US medical costs are due to higher physician pay (double the European average) and greater use of newer treatments and drugs (as defined as three years old or younger).
it will not affect anyone who is currently happy with their insurance.
It will raise my taxes. But it won't end up raising my premiums? Really? We'll see.
First, 85% of revenue must go towards providing care, which caps administrative costs (and profit) at 15%.
It should be kept in mind that profits for health insurance companies are rarely more than 2%-3%.
Does the 85% limit count state taxes on insurance premiums?
Here in the US, we call this "The Free-Market System" and it's the ideal system if you own a corporation. If you have to work, it's somewhat less ideal.
I was the CEO of a corporation. Guess what? I still had to work. And I made less than I do now working for someone else.
I guess the last region to be exploited is Africa. Is it already too late to start buying land?
Land ownership in many African countries is not well respected by the governments. For instance, in Ethiopia most farmers don't own their land, the government does.
Someone I know was running a surface gold mine in a West African country which was expropriated by the government, so he left.
A large corporation could probably bribe an African government into purchasing land, and then keep bribing them to keep it.
While there have definitely been skeptics saying "this is impossible" on every one of them, those people were of all nationalities, including Americans.
Yes, but fortunately bright people sought to immigrate to the US. Italy: Enrico Fermi, Germany: Hans Bethe, Albert Einstein, Wernher von Braun (OK, we kind of took him), Hungary: Edward Teller, Russia: Sergey Brin...
The only thing the US still maintains a hold on is the Media/Entertainment industry.
A US company designed the iPhone (this is the most profitable part of it), although its parts come from early Asian tigers like Singapore, and its assembly occurs in China.
And how can we forget Microsoft...
Well at least there is no way to outsource the designing & building of local communications infrastructure.
I worked for a broadcaster that hired a service of Russian VidCAD jockeys to draft up television video documents during our night. Of course that saved us a ton of drafting time, making us more efficient as broadcast engineers.
I wonder if those companies are still getting tax breaks to move jobs overseas?
While corporate service expenses (such as offshore services) are tax deductible by corporations, the US worldwide corporate tax system extends its reach to foreign production and sales income of US-based companies, unlike the systems of most competitor countries.
Moreover, the US corporate tax system contains unfavorable rules for allocating research, development, and administrative expenses when compared to other countries' tax systems.
Indeed, I suggest viewing the Keynes vs. Hayek rap video!
Except that it costs $8/month for an ISP to actually provide broadband
Do you have data to back up your statement?
Cablevision's net profit margin is only 3.67%. Where is all the "free money" from the monopoly going?
Think about it: A 30 Mbps up/down DOCSIS 2.0 CMTS is $15,000. Optic nodes are $1000. A mile of fiber trenching is $250,000. Not counting install trucks, cherry pickers, coaxial cable (RG58 is $0.20/foot even in bulk), fiber (>$0.30/foot in bulk). That's just the capital for a few thousand subscribers, it doesn't include billing costs, network admins, customer service personnel, maintenance personnel, etc.
If you disagree with the line of business of a particular public company, well, you don't need to hold the stock
For some reason. many people feel it is much more enjoyable to simply buy stock and then bring a stockholder lawsuit...
Being a public company is a pain. SARBOX, stockholder lawsuits, trying to appease 100 stock rating agencies, etc. It is difficult for public companies to be truly innovative.
If you want your citizens to donate more organs, you simply change the check-box at the DMV from an opt-in question to an opt-out question.
The truth is that your organ donation checkbox does not require your relatives to carry out your desires.
I think opt-out organ donation at the DMV is a good idea. I also think that a market in organs would be beneficial.
You still have not defined "middle class". How can one measure the performance of the middle class when there is no definition provided?
Your first article described Median Household Income. That is an interesting statistic, but it is not a definition of the middle class. For example, you could define the middle class could be the 2nd, 3rd, and 4rth quintile of personal income. Or the 3rd quintile of household income. Or whatever. Just put a definition on it, and then we can talk.
Household income is a tricky issue because the number of members of a household have changed over the years because of an expansion of single people marrying later, and different tax incentives for a additional household members to have a job or not.
You may want to look at this graph. Real hourly wages rose from 1995-2002, but stagnated since then. Real hourly compensation (wages plus non-wage compensation such as 401K, health insurance, etc.) on the other hand went up every year from 1995 to 2005.
I'm sure if employer-provided health insurance was not tax deductible due to WWII-era tax policy, it would push much of the added non-wage compensation spent by companies on health insurance today back into wages.
TFA says: In economics, the revisions add Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek, two champions of free-market economic theory, among the usual list of economists to be studied, like Adam Smith, Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes.
First of all, good going on Milton Friedman who was important in ending the draft in the US, co-author of one of the best economic histories of the Great Depression, and has been very influential around the world. Also good for adding F.A. Hayek, the most influential members of the Austrian School of economics.
But in truth, I was never taught anything about Adam Smith or John Maynard Keynes in public school (in one of the best public school systems in the country). Did anyone on Slashdot learn about these guys in public school?
What you really need to know about Hayek and Keynes is in this rap video.
Karl Marx was mentioned, but in a more political way regarding the growth of Communism.
Thus, these decisions in Texas will influence the education of a very large swath of the US.
Mainly influencing the socialist education systems...
I'm also pretty sure the US does not have "the world's least strict labor regulations."
According to the Employing Workers section of the World Bank's "Doing Business" Report, the only the USA and the Marshall Islands have all zeros in all the indexes: Difficulty of hiring, Rigidity of hours, Difficulty of redundancy, Rigidity of employment, and Redundancy costs (weeks of salary).
There are places in Africa where slavery is still practiced;
And probably in the US as well, but slavery is illegal in all the world's countries.
Indeed, many of the labor regulations in developing countries are not followed in the informal sector, so informal sector "companies" must avoid growing to a size where they may be found out and prosecuted (or they must give bribes), reducing the returns on scale and leading to severe inefficiencies in the economy. In some developing countries, the informal sector is 50% of the labor force.
The US has a large informal sector of illegal immigrants as well.
corporations have successfully robbed and impoverished the middle class in the usa,
Can you define "the middle class" "robbed" and "impoverished" and then present your data on this, or are you just being a demagogue?
Pretty soon, there's going to be two huge peaks in an income chart - one at $8/hr for lousy service jobs, and one for the professional ranks.
This is the case today. The issue is that $8/hr for people with no skills is way, way, way more than the average global wage for people with no skills. The reason is that in the US, they have greater access to productive capital technology investments (computers, robots, laser scanners, etc.)
By outsourcing, information technology companies can more quickly and cheaply produce the technology that makes the $8/hr workers more productive, allowing their wages to rise.
Ending global trade would reduce the benefits of trade in producing technological advancement, raising the cost of capital for those $8/hr workers. With less capital, they will make less (see sub-saharan Africa for what happens when poor people with few skills have no capital investment).
On the other hand, we do know that far more people are going to college today in the US than ever. Since the returns to labor have been driven up by access to technological capital, there is more demand by people to become highly educated. Technology is also providing greater access to skill acquisition (such as University of Phoenix Online, Wikipedia, etc.)
There may be some genetic limits to how many people can acquire advanced skills, but perhaps a genetic engineering company that is offshoring some of its IT in China or India can provide the genetic engineering to allow all humans to go to college.
One obvious move would be to not allow anything to be sold in the US that was not manufactured in accordance with US environmental, health and safety, and child labor standards
Since the US has the world's least strict labor regulations on hiring and firing, would you be OK with the rest of the world boycotting our products until our we regulate our labor force to achieve European unemployment rates?
It's awful that these large companies are contributing to unemployment in the process, but do you really think they can be stopped?
The big differences in unemployment around the world have far more to do with local labor regulation than global competition. Kids coming out of college in France can't get jobs, but it has nothing to do with offshoring.
Global free trade in services allows American workers to take on more productive roles, which is good for the economy and leads to further job growth.
I'd love to know what the actual average European Internet speeds are. While very high "last mile" speeds are available, I want to know what actual Internet speeds are.
One could run a bunch of GigE to people's houses, then hook the border router up to IP-over-carrier-pigeon and still argue the customers get a "1 Gbps connection"...
There were even plans afoot to take the bandwidth that would normally carry one high-definition channel and split it into two or more.
I can assure you that if you drop MPEG-2 HD video below ~15 Mbps live encoded, your sports are going to start to look bad. You can't fit two good-looking HD channels with serious motion into 19.39 Mbps. You can sneak an SD of 4-5 Mbps stat muxed in with an HD into 19.39 Mbps, but that is it. I'm not saying people aren't trying to mux 2 HDs into 19.39, just that it doesn't look good.
Someday we might be able to get two good-looking H.264 HDs into 19.39 Mbps, but to tell the truth we aren't quite there with today's live encoders, plus you'd have to change out everyone's STB or tuner to include and H.264 decoder.
I only wish I could remember figures I saw comparing the actual value of the public airwaves versus the price paid for their exclusive use by the broadcasting networks.
I'll put it together for you. The 700 MHz auction for TV channels 52-69 (48 MHz nationally) brought in $20 billion. That is about $500 million per MHz nationally.
(It should be noted that one of the 700 MHz licensees, Qualcomm MediaFLO, bought previous Channel 55 for broadcasting mobile TV).
The US has 8839 broadcast television transmitters (including translators) occupying 270 MHz. Assuming the 700 MHz auction value, that is $135 billion for the entire broadcast band, or $15 million per transmitter.
Of course, the 96 MHz of the VHF broadcast TV spectrum is much less useful for mobile applications. Plus if all 270 MHz were on the table, supply/demand suggests that the spectrum might go for less/hz.
Also politically, no one messes with Barney (the dinosaur) and wins.
For reference, US television station revenues range from $20 billion/year (before the most recent trouble) to $16 billion now.