Yup, for me the experience that left me with this kind of sense was getting a $20 gift card and browsing the store to spend it. I realized that for almost anything I cared to buy I'd pay more at BB than I'd pay online, even AFTER subtracting the gift card.
And I wasn't looking at $5k TVs or something like that. I'd understand the margin being higher there. I'm talking about $50-150 items.
Might be dumb incentives from on high. If a manager gets $0 bonus for selling an extra $1M in product, but they get a $10k bonus for increasing their protection plan rate by a few percent, then they will gladly sacrifice the former to obtain the latter.
Many dumb metrics will give you a bigger bonus for selling 3 items with 3 service plans than you'll get for selling 1000 items with 100 service plans.
The irony is that my local Best Buy won't price match to online competitors, but they will price match to the somewhat-local Micro Center. If I need a $50 item in a hurry and don't want to spend 2 hours on the road I grab the recent ad from Micro Center. If I'm buying anything more substantial I'll try to give them my business, unless I'm just ordering online.
I really like having them around, but the problem even with Micro Center is that if I'm buying components then the last thing I am looking at is the physical object - I'm shopping on specs and reviews, and I'm doing that online anyway, so why not just hit the buy button?
Why poke fun at broccoli -- is it unusual in the US?
It is fairly common. Many people (myself included) hate it with a passion. As far as I can tell this largely has to do with how your taste buds work. Studies have shown that ability to taste PTC (a simple mendelian trait) is strongly correlated with aversion to broccoli, especially in children.
The genes involved are reasonably well-understood - just look it up on SNPedia. I'd be interested in comparative frequency in the UK based on what you say.
No issues with that. There is nothing wrong with stabbing around in the dark when you're doing research. The problem is when those results are heralded as "discoveries" - especially when all kinds of people change their behavior as a result.
Sure, it is possible to correct for multiple comparisons. The problem is that it is almost impossible for anybody else to verify whether you did it or not. You say you checked for 3 things and you accounted for that. How do I know that you didn't check for 347 things, pick the 3 most interesting, and then account for only those?
Registering clinical trials is a relatively new trend, and I'm not sure how often it actually happens. It is supposed to happen with FDA-regulated areas, but I don't see anything in the article linked in this story that references any kind of pre-registration.
You can make more money milking a brand than innovating it - for a few years.
Why do people buy Hondas, often paying a few thousand more for a comparable product? Simple, Hondas are perceived to be of higher quality, so people will pay more for them. If the car isn't truly of higher quality it won't affect the sales figures at all - TODAY. So, the typical 1-year-bonus-schedule manager has incentive to cut corners and sell a cheaper "high quality" car.
The main thing that has been saving the Japanese companies is that the culture there encourages long-term relationships between companies and employees. So, my example wasn't a great one, but an American company wouldn't be taken seriously since those car manufacturers all did this years ago and are reaping their damaged reputations today (even if perhaps their quality has improved - once bitten twice shy).
Maybe the downfall started on Carly's watch, but she was laughing about it all the way to the bank.
Yeah, but contract terms that lack consideration or which are unconscionable are generally not enforceable.
A requirement to support Itanium so long as it is produced is a requirement to perform a potentially infinite amount of work. What are they getting for that? If the compensation isn't comparable to the work, then it probably can't be enforced.
If I signed an agreement with you at the age of 20 that you could buy anything I owned for $10k, and you held onto it until I was the majority shareholder for some huge startup, chances are you wouldn't get anything for it, unless you asked for a modest car. Sure, I signed it, and perhaps I was foolish to sign something with such open-ended terms, but courts generally don't punish people simply for being foolish, especially when the other side is taking great advantage over it. They might be willing to let me lose a little more than $10k in value, but they aren't going to let a $10k deal 20 years ago allow a billion dollars to change hands, unless that $10k was actually a direct investment in the company at issue at a time when it represented a significant at-risk stake.
Sure, maybe HP will get some money, but they aren't going to get all the money their CEO dreams that they could make from Itanium in some hypothetical universe where it actually becomes popular and takes back the IT world.
Actually, there have been publications that MOST observational studies produce erroneous results. My thinking is that this means that an arbitrary statement is MORE likely to be true if it has no scientific backing at all, than if it is backed by a peer-reviewed observational study.
The main issue is that you can keep testing hypothesis until you find something that sticks and never report negative results. That is no different than doing a survey, throwing out all the answers you don't like, and then reporting the results has having unanimous support.
However, significance is only accurate if you propose a hypothesis BEFORE you collect data, or you account for the number of hypotheses that you COULD have tested when you started hunting for correlations.
If you ask 100 people for a list of everything they do and eat and everything wrong with them, and find a correlation, I don't care what test you claim you've done, it isn't going to truly be significant.
If you want to determine if caffeine prevents lung cancer, survey 100 people and just ask about caffeine intake and lung cancer, then MAYBE I might believe claims you've made. However, I will only do so if you didn't just survey 100 people the week before about orange juice and heart disease without publishing the negative result.
The problem with most hypothesis testing is that people rarely account for all of their negative results. This is why clinical trials are one of the most unreliable forms of data in science (the problem is that nobody has a better alternative, though some reforms like advance registrations of trials might help).
Assume for the sake of argument that nobody in the US really does have these skills. Wouldn't the best solution be to fix that problem, rather than just importing in people with those skills?
Of course, what they really mean is that nobody willing to work for just above minimum wage has those skills. And if they succeed in filling positions at those wages the supply will drop even lower.
This is like typical corporate thinking - hire for your immediate needs, and when your needs change fire your existing employees. The concept of retaining talent and developing employees is very out of fashion right now. We don't want people who can learn how to code web apps in dart, we want people who claim to have been doing it for at least 8 years.
You're still paying for the launch, and you're paying for it every time this thing comes back down to earth.
I'm not convinced it could evade a missile any better than a satellite could either. This think is travelling over 10k mph in a line - how much thrust is needed to change its trajectory appreciably? Quite a bit! And the missile gets to pick where it goes, since it hasn't made the energy investment yet, so you need to change trajectory faster than the missile does at the very end of its boost (any energy spent on changing trajectory before the missile launches is a waste, unless you can avoid the launch site altogether, which just means that the other side bides their time for a few more orbits while you burn through fuel). There is no reason that you can't build a missile with more terminal delta-V capacity than this drone - the missile payload has to be a lot lighter.
The issue with IEDs isn't that the vehicles are obsolete so much as they weren't designed for prolonged operations in anti-vehicle minefields.
Normally the model is that you sweep a path, and then send the force through it. Maybe you lose a few vehicles, but compared to what the USSR is doing to you that is statistical noise.
The problem is that this model depends on forward progress and a defined line of battle (bad guys on one side, good guys on the other). Against an insurrection this breaks down.
As far as Humvees go - they have their place. They were never intended to be lead vehicles in some armored assault. However, if you depend on things like MBTs for resupply then you'll be stopped every time you hit a bridge with a 10-ton weight limit and fuel stops every 20 miles.
MBTs are used to make forward progress blowing up everything that moves in your path. Humvees are used as a substitute for horses and jeeps for getting people/food where they need to be outside of general combat. Neither are all that useful in quelling rebellions unless you're willing to blow up everything that moves in your path (see MBT). In fact, I've seen little in the way of equipment which is actually useful for putting down rebellions - that is more a matter of willingness to embrace rather nasty tactics, and just another reason not to deploy the army in unfriendly territory where they aren't actively busy killing anything that moves.
MBTs and light vehicles will always have a place in any country that does not wish to be ruled by those who retain them.
Hey now, don't forget the hordes of masseuses, pedicurists, HVAC and cable TV technicians.
At work sometimes I think half of our problems stem from the fact that in the huge wave of cost cutting it has been forgotten that sometimes this kind of stuff pays for itself.
If you want to get work done you need competent employees (a premise that many companies no longer buy into). If you want competent employees then you need to motivate them to show up for work. The biggest motivator is obviously the paycheck, but there are other reasons that people work. If you pay enough, you can hire just about anybody to do just about anything. However, if you actually make the experience somewhat pleasant you don't have to pay them nearly as much. Google spends $10/day on an employee that they are probably spending a total of $400 or so just on compensation/benefits, and who knows how much on overhead. When people talk about working at Google, I tend to hear a lot more about the food than the pay, though it is just one aspect of the whole package and general atmosphere. How much would they have to spend on direct compensation to get that kind of talent?
If you're going to lock guys up in a sub or station them at an airbase in the middle of a desert, it will be a lot cheaper to get volunteers to hire a haircutter and have cable TV than to pay people $500k to put up with the boredom and waist-length hair.
Yup. The military actually does need training. Granted, we seem to employ them so often these days blowing people up, that hasn't been in short supply. However, during peacetime giving the military something productive to do isn't all that big of a waste. They'd be sailing all over the ocean anyway - might as well give them something useful to do while they're at it.
Yeah, it is kind of hard to imagine going on a cross-ocean flight in those days without knowing morse code, and at least carrying a sextant or something.
Even commercial airliners and bombers used to carry those until relatively recently.
Yeah, people at work talk about that all the time.
Try that with me sometime. When you arrive at my desk you'll see that I'm on the phone, in a meeting. When I'm free, chances are you're on the phone, in a meeting.
Nah, the one I dealt with was pretty nice. I hated paying the bill though, especially since they were loathe to email. That meant lots of 30min phone calls...
Well, she can ASK for a takedown for her logo, but the site owner can claim fair use and have the site restored. Potentially they could go after her for any disruption, but that is harder than simply winning any case she files (assuming she bothers).
She might own trademark and copyright on the logo, but that doesn't mean she can prevent all use of that logo by third parties. If a TV station is talking about a proposed merger between Exxon and Burger King, and they show both corporate logos on the screen during the segment, there would be almost no grounds for a lawsuit. On the other hand, if a TV station were just talking about the general hazards of fast food while interviewing a McDonald's employee and they showed a Burger King logo on the screen, they might be found guilty of a number of things. The difference is that the first use uses the logos to represent actions by the actual companies in question, and the latter creates confusion, mixes brands, and slanders the mark in the process.
Likewise, I just used a few trademarks in this post. Chances are no harm could come to me, since I don't claim to represent any of these companies, the use is incidental, and these uses have no real impact on the market for the products made by these companies.
A pertinent illustration in a news article is almost certainly fair use, no matter how many logos it contains. It would only be an issue if they modified the image so that it misrepresented the facts.
Well, the big issue with insurance in the US is that the system is opaque to consumers, and consumers have almost no choice.
In the US 95% of people with private health insurance get it from their employer. My insurance is great and I've never had the issues you describe - probably better than what you get in Europe. Many others do NOT have that experience. The problem is that it is almost impossible to comparison shop plans, and even if you could, the only way you could pick the plan of your choice is to change employers.
As far as banning treatments goes - this happens for two reasons generally. The usual stated reason (which may or may not be the case) is that the treatment has not been proven to be effective. This is usually grounds for rejection in Europe as well, and rightly so (why make others pay for a treatment that isn't even proven to work?). The other reason (usually under the guise of the first) is that the company simply doesn't want to pay for it. Usually the latter comes up if your employer opts for the cheap plan. Again, for the consumer it is almost impossible to evaluate.
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Yeah, but the guys running Radio Shack have been doing everything they can do to ditch that section.
The only reason it is there is that it is about the only thing that differentiates them, and they hate it. Go figure...
Yup, for me the experience that left me with this kind of sense was getting a $20 gift card and browsing the store to spend it. I realized that for almost anything I cared to buy I'd pay more at BB than I'd pay online, even AFTER subtracting the gift card.
And I wasn't looking at $5k TVs or something like that. I'd understand the margin being higher there. I'm talking about $50-150 items.
Might be dumb incentives from on high. If a manager gets $0 bonus for selling an extra $1M in product, but they get a $10k bonus for increasing their protection plan rate by a few percent, then they will gladly sacrifice the former to obtain the latter.
Many dumb metrics will give you a bigger bonus for selling 3 items with 3 service plans than you'll get for selling 1000 items with 100 service plans.
The irony is that my local Best Buy won't price match to online competitors, but they will price match to the somewhat-local Micro Center. If I need a $50 item in a hurry and don't want to spend 2 hours on the road I grab the recent ad from Micro Center. If I'm buying anything more substantial I'll try to give them my business, unless I'm just ordering online.
I really like having them around, but the problem even with Micro Center is that if I'm buying components then the last thing I am looking at is the physical object - I'm shopping on specs and reviews, and I'm doing that online anyway, so why not just hit the buy button?
Why poke fun at broccoli -- is it unusual in the US?
It is fairly common. Many people (myself included) hate it with a passion. As far as I can tell this largely has to do with how your taste buds work. Studies have shown that ability to taste PTC (a simple mendelian trait) is strongly correlated with aversion to broccoli, especially in children.
The genes involved are reasonably well-understood - just look it up on SNPedia. I'd be interested in comparative frequency in the UK based on what you say.
No issues with that. There is nothing wrong with stabbing around in the dark when you're doing research. The problem is when those results are heralded as "discoveries" - especially when all kinds of people change their behavior as a result.
Sure, it is possible to correct for multiple comparisons. The problem is that it is almost impossible for anybody else to verify whether you did it or not. You say you checked for 3 things and you accounted for that. How do I know that you didn't check for 347 things, pick the 3 most interesting, and then account for only those?
Registering clinical trials is a relatively new trend, and I'm not sure how often it actually happens. It is supposed to happen with FDA-regulated areas, but I don't see anything in the article linked in this story that references any kind of pre-registration.
You can make more money milking a brand than innovating it - for a few years.
Why do people buy Hondas, often paying a few thousand more for a comparable product? Simple, Hondas are perceived to be of higher quality, so people will pay more for them. If the car isn't truly of higher quality it won't affect the sales figures at all - TODAY. So, the typical 1-year-bonus-schedule manager has incentive to cut corners and sell a cheaper "high quality" car.
The main thing that has been saving the Japanese companies is that the culture there encourages long-term relationships between companies and employees. So, my example wasn't a great one, but an American company wouldn't be taken seriously since those car manufacturers all did this years ago and are reaping their damaged reputations today (even if perhaps their quality has improved - once bitten twice shy).
Maybe the downfall started on Carly's watch, but she was laughing about it all the way to the bank.
Yeah, but contract terms that lack consideration or which are unconscionable are generally not enforceable.
A requirement to support Itanium so long as it is produced is a requirement to perform a potentially infinite amount of work. What are they getting for that? If the compensation isn't comparable to the work, then it probably can't be enforced.
If I signed an agreement with you at the age of 20 that you could buy anything I owned for $10k, and you held onto it until I was the majority shareholder for some huge startup, chances are you wouldn't get anything for it, unless you asked for a modest car. Sure, I signed it, and perhaps I was foolish to sign something with such open-ended terms, but courts generally don't punish people simply for being foolish, especially when the other side is taking great advantage over it. They might be willing to let me lose a little more than $10k in value, but they aren't going to let a $10k deal 20 years ago allow a billion dollars to change hands, unless that $10k was actually a direct investment in the company at issue at a time when it represented a significant at-risk stake.
Sure, maybe HP will get some money, but they aren't going to get all the money their CEO dreams that they could make from Itanium in some hypothetical universe where it actually becomes popular and takes back the IT world.
Actually, there have been publications that MOST observational studies produce erroneous results. My thinking is that this means that an arbitrary statement is MORE likely to be true if it has no scientific backing at all, than if it is backed by a peer-reviewed observational study.
The main issue is that you can keep testing hypothesis until you find something that sticks and never report negative results. That is no different than doing a survey, throwing out all the answers you don't like, and then reporting the results has having unanimous support.
However, significance is only accurate if you propose a hypothesis BEFORE you collect data, or you account for the number of hypotheses that you COULD have tested when you started hunting for correlations.
If you ask 100 people for a list of everything they do and eat and everything wrong with them, and find a correlation, I don't care what test you claim you've done, it isn't going to truly be significant.
If you want to determine if caffeine prevents lung cancer, survey 100 people and just ask about caffeine intake and lung cancer, then MAYBE I might believe claims you've made. However, I will only do so if you didn't just survey 100 people the week before about orange juice and heart disease without publishing the negative result.
The problem with most hypothesis testing is that people rarely account for all of their negative results. This is why clinical trials are one of the most unreliable forms of data in science (the problem is that nobody has a better alternative, though some reforms like advance registrations of trials might help).
Assume for the sake of argument that nobody in the US really does have these skills. Wouldn't the best solution be to fix that problem, rather than just importing in people with those skills?
Of course, what they really mean is that nobody willing to work for just above minimum wage has those skills. And if they succeed in filling positions at those wages the supply will drop even lower.
This is like typical corporate thinking - hire for your immediate needs, and when your needs change fire your existing employees. The concept of retaining talent and developing employees is very out of fashion right now. We don't want people who can learn how to code web apps in dart, we want people who claim to have been doing it for at least 8 years.
I guess that will work well, as long as you have a machine that talks to Windows Update and not Flame Update.
You're still paying for the launch, and you're paying for it every time this thing comes back down to earth.
I'm not convinced it could evade a missile any better than a satellite could either. This think is travelling over 10k mph in a line - how much thrust is needed to change its trajectory appreciably? Quite a bit! And the missile gets to pick where it goes, since it hasn't made the energy investment yet, so you need to change trajectory faster than the missile does at the very end of its boost (any energy spent on changing trajectory before the missile launches is a waste, unless you can avoid the launch site altogether, which just means that the other side bides their time for a few more orbits while you burn through fuel). There is no reason that you can't build a missile with more terminal delta-V capacity than this drone - the missile payload has to be a lot lighter.
The issue with IEDs isn't that the vehicles are obsolete so much as they weren't designed for prolonged operations in anti-vehicle minefields.
Normally the model is that you sweep a path, and then send the force through it. Maybe you lose a few vehicles, but compared to what the USSR is doing to you that is statistical noise.
The problem is that this model depends on forward progress and a defined line of battle (bad guys on one side, good guys on the other). Against an insurrection this breaks down.
As far as Humvees go - they have their place. They were never intended to be lead vehicles in some armored assault. However, if you depend on things like MBTs for resupply then you'll be stopped every time you hit a bridge with a 10-ton weight limit and fuel stops every 20 miles.
MBTs are used to make forward progress blowing up everything that moves in your path. Humvees are used as a substitute for horses and jeeps for getting people/food where they need to be outside of general combat. Neither are all that useful in quelling rebellions unless you're willing to blow up everything that moves in your path (see MBT). In fact, I've seen little in the way of equipment which is actually useful for putting down rebellions - that is more a matter of willingness to embrace rather nasty tactics, and just another reason not to deploy the army in unfriendly territory where they aren't actively busy killing anything that moves.
MBTs and light vehicles will always have a place in any country that does not wish to be ruled by those who retain them.
True, and I can't imagine that a court would be terribly lenient on a lawyer of all people who failed to do so...
Hey now, don't forget the hordes of masseuses, pedicurists, HVAC and cable TV technicians.
At work sometimes I think half of our problems stem from the fact that in the huge wave of cost cutting it has been forgotten that sometimes this kind of stuff pays for itself.
If you want to get work done you need competent employees (a premise that many companies no longer buy into). If you want competent employees then you need to motivate them to show up for work. The biggest motivator is obviously the paycheck, but there are other reasons that people work. If you pay enough, you can hire just about anybody to do just about anything. However, if you actually make the experience somewhat pleasant you don't have to pay them nearly as much. Google spends $10/day on an employee that they are probably spending a total of $400 or so just on compensation/benefits, and who knows how much on overhead. When people talk about working at Google, I tend to hear a lot more about the food than the pay, though it is just one aspect of the whole package and general atmosphere. How much would they have to spend on direct compensation to get that kind of talent?
If you're going to lock guys up in a sub or station them at an airbase in the middle of a desert, it will be a lot cheaper to get volunteers to hire a haircutter and have cable TV than to pay people $500k to put up with the boredom and waist-length hair.
Yup. The military actually does need training. Granted, we seem to employ them so often these days blowing people up, that hasn't been in short supply. However, during peacetime giving the military something productive to do isn't all that big of a waste. They'd be sailing all over the ocean anyway - might as well give them something useful to do while they're at it.
Yeah, it is kind of hard to imagine going on a cross-ocean flight in those days without knowing morse code, and at least carrying a sextant or something.
Even commercial airliners and bombers used to carry those until relatively recently.
Yeah, people at work talk about that all the time.
Try that with me sometime. When you arrive at my desk you'll see that I'm on the phone, in a meeting. When I'm free, chances are you're on the phone, in a meeting.
It sounds great in theory.
Yup, clearly quitting did her in... :)
Did you watch mythbusters? They built a still and it made maybe a few thimbles of water per day.
Nah, the one I dealt with was pretty nice. I hated paying the bill though, especially since they were loathe to email. That meant lots of 30min phone calls...
Well, she can ASK for a takedown for her logo, but the site owner can claim fair use and have the site restored. Potentially they could go after her for any disruption, but that is harder than simply winning any case she files (assuming she bothers).
She might own trademark and copyright on the logo, but that doesn't mean she can prevent all use of that logo by third parties. If a TV station is talking about a proposed merger between Exxon and Burger King, and they show both corporate logos on the screen during the segment, there would be almost no grounds for a lawsuit. On the other hand, if a TV station were just talking about the general hazards of fast food while interviewing a McDonald's employee and they showed a Burger King logo on the screen, they might be found guilty of a number of things. The difference is that the first use uses the logos to represent actions by the actual companies in question, and the latter creates confusion, mixes brands, and slanders the mark in the process.
Likewise, I just used a few trademarks in this post. Chances are no harm could come to me, since I don't claim to represent any of these companies, the use is incidental, and these uses have no real impact on the market for the products made by these companies.
A pertinent illustration in a news article is almost certainly fair use, no matter how many logos it contains. It would only be an issue if they modified the image so that it misrepresented the facts.
Well, the big issue with insurance in the US is that the system is opaque to consumers, and consumers have almost no choice.
In the US 95% of people with private health insurance get it from their employer. My insurance is great and I've never had the issues you describe - probably better than what you get in Europe. Many others do NOT have that experience. The problem is that it is almost impossible to comparison shop plans, and even if you could, the only way you could pick the plan of your choice is to change employers.
As far as banning treatments goes - this happens for two reasons generally. The usual stated reason (which may or may not be the case) is that the treatment has not been proven to be effective. This is usually grounds for rejection in Europe as well, and rightly so (why make others pay for a treatment that isn't even proven to work?). The other reason (usually under the guise of the first) is that the company simply doesn't want to pay for it. Usually the latter comes up if your employer opts for the cheap plan. Again, for the consumer it is almost impossible to evaluate.