No worries, although I miss the color of a good CRT, I haven't used one in almost 5 years now. I stole it from an article posted here a few years ago, because I thought it was silly. The sad part is I don't even remember what the article was about.
You're correct we can do much better today. I'm basing the clothing amounts on the 3x3 origninal closets in my 1951 house (there's only room for about 4-6 dresses/shirts/pants and a few suits) and today even poor people consider that a small house in the DC burbs. Another big difference between 1950 and today was that a single mortgage and a single car loan were frequently the only credit obtained by people (you did without and saved or bought used). Many habits common today were the provence of the rich in the 50s (big homes, air travel, frequently refreshed fashionable wardrobe, multiple TVs/Computers, long distance phone calls etc). Many of these things are done today to keep up with the status race rather than because they're truly necessary.
You make a good point, but the issue is probably bigger in the bond markets than the stock markets. It will be the opposite of the recent "global savings glut".
I've heard that boomers probably haven't saved enough that they'll ever be fully out of shares (because they'll need the excess return), so it's likely that will damp things somewhat. Plus the melinnial generation is big and will be entering peak savings years.
One of the reasons I was early to noticing the housing bubble was the same fundamental reason (retirees don't need the same size or location houses as workers).
Pensions and 401(k) plans largely. There's a huge amount of wealth in those. Ironically, the only pensions that act like they give a damn about what they own are the union plans.
You actually could have a life of comparative leisure relative to the past, but humanity spends huge amounts of time competing with status displays which have become vastly more important to personal happiness in the more "relaxed" world.
If you're willing to live a 1950s lifestyle you should be able to have far more leisure time than the 1950s person. Remember though that you'll never leave your home country for travel, live in ~300 sq/person house, share a household immediately after college, and you would probably only own 3-4 suits of clothes.
I suspect that most of health care is that Americans have terrible diet and excercise habits, so our health care looks bad. If you have a nation that would be dead at 60 but kept alive to 74 and competitive with other nations whose health habits would keep them alive to 70 but with healthcare live to 75 the traditional metric used to judge health care is going to look pretty similar (slightly worse for the first country) especially if the costs are much higher in the first country.
It was a soft top convertible, locks are pretty irrelevant. The roof of the car is waxed canvas, so anyone with any thing stronger than a stick can get through in seconds (and do more damage to his car than the value of any of the contents of the car). Sometimes security is more costly than crime, when that's the case, you shouldn't spend on the security.
I knew a guy with an old convertible soft top who generally left the top down, since if a thief wanted the radio/valuables in the glovebox etc, he was going to get it anyway and that saved him a slashed soft top (which aren't cheap to replace). You might want to leave your doors unlocked if you're regularly replacing windows that get broken.
Yes but they have limited pricing power. If you want a copy of MarioKart Wii you have to buy it from Nintendo, perhaps another Kart racing game will be an effective substitute but perhaps it won't. This means that if you raise the price you lose sales, but if you lower the price you pick up sales, so you price the item in a way that the extra profit from the higher sales price is less than the lost sales.
I'm a good example of that, my wife and I buy perhaps 1-2 new games a year (trauma center was the most recent one). I fish 30+ old X-box games out of the bargin bin for about $5 each. I probably wouldn't vary the new purchases if used sales disappeared so my game spending would decline pretty drastically (and moving up the chain, someone is missing out on $30-50 in credit to buy an extra game when upgrading from an X-Box to a 360).
I'm not surprised you had trouble with accounting, it's hard for people who have lots of math to regress and throw away all the math they've learned. Accounting was developed to allow 13th century peddlers to track their business while keeping the math as simple as possible (most of what you do is add with only rarely a small amount of subtraction). There's an enormous amount of complexity created to enable the math to be so easy. If you know the math they're skipping, most of accounting is wondering why they don't just solve an equation or two and be done for the day.
They only want to switch because they've been told that in a national health care they'd have unlimited access to the same health care system for no additional expenditures, it's not true (the cost will rise or service levels will decline or both).
Yeah and there's quite a few differences between a SUN enterprise server and a bunch of PCs clustered together, but for a surprisingly large number of jobs they'll both work quite well. Realizing that too late to be meaningful cost SUN it's independence.
I over estimated the peak time minutes. It's more like 500-1000 depending on the other features you get. Evenings (usually 9 pm to 7 am) and weekends are generally free. Many plans will add calls within their network and some include a selection of numbers with unlimited minutes for a small surcharge making plans with a small number of minutes a decent deal. My $50/mo (before about 10 in taxes) plan is ostensibly a 300 minute/month plan but because of in network calling, evenings, weekends, and 5 free numbers, I usually use 800-1200 minutes without a surcharge. Of those minutes only about 60 count toward my 300 minute limit, and I can use my phone anywhere in the country and call any US number with no surcharge (so long as I have available minutes). I moved cross country so many frequently called numbers are across the nation.
It's rare in the US to have a prepaid plan (buying SIMs) because they rarely include free evening/weekend minutes which for most people will end end up being cheaper than even low rate plans.
That usually includes national long distance and several thousand minutes a month. Normal cell plans generally cost $40-$50/mo here (you pay for incoming calls but get lots of outgoing calls in your plan). What would a plan in Netherlands cost that included 2000 minutes of calls to any other Eurozone number plus unlimited data and unmetered evening weekend calls to any Eurozone number?
Um, unless there will soon be a massive number of new religions created in about 30 years in the Southwest, I don't think ever-pregnant and virgins can go together.
You would think that a guy who lives in a building that gets evacuated when a Cessna flies a little too close (something like a mile) would learn to be more careful with where he flies his jet.
Especially in the era where a big budge superhero film is not only supposed to be profitable but act as a "tentpole" to showcase future films from your studio and create a franchise (Spiderman/TDK/X-Men) that will allow you to make several very profitable films (the security of those profits then frees you up to make additional bets on other films).
I was excited to see it, until I read near universal negative reviews (even from reviewers who liked the source material).
Don't forget marketing, the watchmen had a very large ad budget. This varies by film and studio, but some big budget films spend more on marketing than they did on production.
I could care less what his title is, I've never seen a company more in thrall to anyone than Oracle to Ellison. Jobs and Apple maybe, but my observation there was that Steve seemed more mythical than a day to day presense.
Montana has 2 of the most beautiful parks in the world, as well as the Gallatin and Flathead valleys which have a huge number of the truly rich' second homes. Lots of folks summer there, and because they reside elsewhere pay very little in taxes, a sales tax would tax the relatively large population of non-residents relative to residents for the part of the year they're in the state. However, since the residents are predominantly Social Security recipients, who have low income but high spending, they consistently vote down a sales tax.
Slashdot Mirror
No worries, although I miss the color of a good CRT, I haven't used one in almost 5 years now. I stole it from an article posted here a few years ago, because I thought it was silly. The sad part is I don't even remember what the article was about.
You're correct we can do much better today. I'm basing the clothing amounts on the 3x3 origninal closets in my 1951 house (there's only room for about 4-6 dresses/shirts/pants and a few suits) and today even poor people consider that a small house in the DC burbs. Another big difference between 1950 and today was that a single mortgage and a single car loan were frequently the only credit obtained by people (you did without and saved or bought used). Many habits common today were the provence of the rich in the 50s (big homes, air travel, frequently refreshed fashionable wardrobe, multiple TVs/Computers, long distance phone calls etc). Many of these things are done today to keep up with the status race rather than because they're truly necessary.
You make a good point, but the issue is probably bigger in the bond markets than the stock markets. It will be the opposite of the recent "global savings glut".
I've heard that boomers probably haven't saved enough that they'll ever be fully out of shares (because they'll need the excess return), so it's likely that will damp things somewhat. Plus the melinnial generation is big and will be entering peak savings years.
One of the reasons I was early to noticing the housing bubble was the same fundamental reason (retirees don't need the same size or location houses as workers).
Pensions and 401(k) plans largely. There's a huge amount of wealth in those. Ironically, the only pensions that act like they give a damn about what they own are the union plans.
You actually could have a life of comparative leisure relative to the past, but humanity spends huge amounts of time competing with status displays which have become vastly more important to personal happiness in the more "relaxed" world. If you're willing to live a 1950s lifestyle you should be able to have far more leisure time than the 1950s person. Remember though that you'll never leave your home country for travel, live in ~300 sq/person house, share a household immediately after college, and you would probably only own 3-4 suits of clothes.
I suspect that most of health care is that Americans have terrible diet and excercise habits, so our health care looks bad. If you have a nation that would be dead at 60 but kept alive to 74 and competitive with other nations whose health habits would keep them alive to 70 but with healthcare live to 75 the traditional metric used to judge health care is going to look pretty similar (slightly worse for the first country) especially if the costs are much higher in the first country.
It was a soft top convertible, locks are pretty irrelevant. The roof of the car is waxed canvas, so anyone with any thing stronger than a stick can get through in seconds (and do more damage to his car than the value of any of the contents of the car). Sometimes security is more costly than crime, when that's the case, you shouldn't spend on the security.
I knew a guy with an old convertible soft top who generally left the top down, since if a thief wanted the radio/valuables in the glovebox etc, he was going to get it anyway and that saved him a slashed soft top (which aren't cheap to replace). You might want to leave your doors unlocked if you're regularly replacing windows that get broken.
If it had a better plot and characters than Casablanca, I'd be first in line.
Yes but they have limited pricing power. If you want a copy of MarioKart Wii you have to buy it from Nintendo, perhaps another Kart racing game will be an effective substitute but perhaps it won't. This means that if you raise the price you lose sales, but if you lower the price you pick up sales, so you price the item in a way that the extra profit from the higher sales price is less than the lost sales.
I'm a good example of that, my wife and I buy perhaps 1-2 new games a year (trauma center was the most recent one). I fish 30+ old X-box games out of the bargin bin for about $5 each. I probably wouldn't vary the new purchases if used sales disappeared so my game spending would decline pretty drastically (and moving up the chain, someone is missing out on $30-50 in credit to buy an extra game when upgrading from an X-Box to a 360).
In it's original design, but the protoit got mission creeped into adding some machine guns for a fighter role.
I'm not surprised you had trouble with accounting, it's hard for people who have lots of math to regress and throw away all the math they've learned. Accounting was developed to allow 13th century peddlers to track their business while keeping the math as simple as possible (most of what you do is add with only rarely a small amount of subtraction). There's an enormous amount of complexity created to enable the math to be so easy. If you know the math they're skipping, most of accounting is wondering why they don't just solve an equation or two and be done for the day.
Yep, I think Snap On gives away stickers for your tool box to deflect the idiots who can't figure that out.
No but when I can find a phone booth I can change into Captain Obvious!!
They only want to switch because they've been told that in a national health care they'd have unlimited access to the same health care system for no additional expenditures, it's not true (the cost will rise or service levels will decline or both).
Yeah and there's quite a few differences between a SUN enterprise server and a bunch of PCs clustered together, but for a surprisingly large number of jobs they'll both work quite well. Realizing that too late to be meaningful cost SUN it's independence.
I over estimated the peak time minutes. It's more like 500-1000 depending on the other features you get. Evenings (usually 9 pm to 7 am) and weekends are generally free. Many plans will add calls within their network and some include a selection of numbers with unlimited minutes for a small surcharge making plans with a small number of minutes a decent deal. My $50/mo (before about 10 in taxes) plan is ostensibly a 300 minute/month plan but because of in network calling, evenings, weekends, and 5 free numbers, I usually use 800-1200 minutes without a surcharge. Of those minutes only about 60 count toward my 300 minute limit, and I can use my phone anywhere in the country and call any US number with no surcharge (so long as I have available minutes). I moved cross country so many frequently called numbers are across the nation. It's rare in the US to have a prepaid plan (buying SIMs) because they rarely include free evening/weekend minutes which for most people will end end up being cheaper than even low rate plans.
That usually includes national long distance and several thousand minutes a month. Normal cell plans generally cost $40-$50/mo here (you pay for incoming calls but get lots of outgoing calls in your plan). What would a plan in Netherlands cost that included 2000 minutes of calls to any other Eurozone number plus unlimited data and unmetered evening weekend calls to any Eurozone number?
So it's basically 24 in space.
Um, unless there will soon be a massive number of new religions created in about 30 years in the Southwest, I don't think ever-pregnant and virgins can go together.
You would think that a guy who lives in a building that gets evacuated when a Cessna flies a little too close (something like a mile) would learn to be more careful with where he flies his jet.
It's pretty slim something like 300 in 50000 but each time they take a crew and get paid, you're dealing with more and better equiped pirates.
Especially in the era where a big budge superhero film is not only supposed to be profitable but act as a "tentpole" to showcase future films from your studio and create a franchise (Spiderman/TDK/X-Men) that will allow you to make several very profitable films (the security of those profits then frees you up to make additional bets on other films). I was excited to see it, until I read near universal negative reviews (even from reviewers who liked the source material).
Don't forget marketing, the watchmen had a very large ad budget. This varies by film and studio, but some big budget films spend more on marketing than they did on production.
I could care less what his title is, I've never seen a company more in thrall to anyone than Oracle to Ellison. Jobs and Apple maybe, but my observation there was that Steve seemed more mythical than a day to day presense.
Montana has 2 of the most beautiful parks in the world, as well as the Gallatin and Flathead valleys which have a huge number of the truly rich' second homes. Lots of folks summer there, and because they reside elsewhere pay very little in taxes, a sales tax would tax the relatively large population of non-residents relative to residents for the part of the year they're in the state. However, since the residents are predominantly Social Security recipients, who have low income but high spending, they consistently vote down a sales tax.