Re:Have things changed since I was a child?
on
The ESRB Gets An 'F'
·
· Score: 1
That's because about 10 years ago Faces of Death started being released out and mainstream media reports spooked parents organizing and complaining about lax enforcement of ratings to lawmakers who began proposing all manner of new laws which pushed the theater owners association to begin a far more vigilant system of self regulation. All of which resulted in that run on monstrosity.
So say there is a 20% chance of "making" $100 (or a 2% chance of making $1000 for going out early on the Friday after Thanksgiving. I would say that is worth something near $20 for perhaps 2h of time. You and I might rather pay the full price at noon or the following weekend, but what I am wondering is why that should pose a problem for someone who values their 4-6am time at less than $10/hr?
I'm in agreement that most of the effort and resources spent on presents is deadweight loss and everyone would be better off with a much more limited gift exchange, but if the presents will be bought anyway I don't see much difference between standing in line for 2 hrs and working an extra hr (or using an hour's pay) to buy the presents.
Tuesday mornings closes in January for just this reason. Retail sales remain highly seasonal (more than half their annual profit is earned in the three months Nov-Jan). This may have been true when retail operations were smaller so fixed costs were a larger portion of sales (retail has always been run on a slim margin).
More likely is that for many stores the extra sales means that they cover the year's total costs around the end of November and every sale beyond the current would have much higher profit contribution when examined on an annual basis. To give an example, take a $1 billion in sales retailer that has 25% gross margins and annual operating expenses of $150 million. It is highly likely that the company reaches $600 million in sales around the Friday after Thanksgiving (the point at which cumulative GP for the year is $150 million). While this type of examination violates numerous accounting principles it is an easy connotation for lay business people to make.
Many of those bankruptcies were filed very premptivly (some weren't even behind on payments but filed anyway). From what I've seen this year is shaping up similar to last year, the relativly wealthy will be spending considerably more than last year (Best Buy reported excellent sales, I'll be shocked if Nordstrom's Sak's and Neiman differ), while those of modest means are chasing bargains witness the reversal of Wal-Mart and Target's fortunes after Target was very promotional last year and Wal-Mart was promotional this year.
What's pathetic about differing marginal costs of time? You may argue that they should not give commercial gifts, but still celebrate Christmas in a more meaningful way. However, getting up early on Friday is just a trade of time for money either through outright payments or on purchases that will be made anyway.
Black friday in retail got its name because it was traditionally the day retailers moved "into the black" which means moved from the loss column to the profit column for the year.
Yeah but it provides advantages between screwups, in that Sony can enter a new business and people will recall the quality of their last Sony products (historically quite good) and be more likely to buy the new product vs a brand new brand (even if the new brand is a sub brand of Phillips.
Don't play the slots then. The addictive tendancies in that play on the human drive to continue doing things that give a random result (especially with a wide deviation in the results--80% crap or nothing, 10% ok stuff 8% good stuff,.9% great stuff, 0.09% unbelievable stuff, 0.009% truely amazing stuff, etc to 0.0000001% zod runes.
When you check both sides of the story, the company owns 1,000,000 acres of Canadian forest land (in the business overview section), and per your site clear cut 27,000 acres last year. They further claim to running on an over 40 year [implying 40-45 year]long rotation growing cycle (in the Timberlands section).
Both claims seem to fit 27,000 acres is just over 1/40th of 1,000,000. That sounds an awful lot like a farm to me, but perhaps the longer crop growing cycle makes it something else. They also mention that hardwood logs are sold to veneer manufacturers they are far too valuable to be used in pulp (except the scraps). If someone has an issue with their farming practices on their own land there are dealers making a market in the company daily.
Why don't you have one of my sticks of gum and go talk to the nice man over there. By the way those are really sharp sunglasses you mind if I try them on?
As I understand it, MS guaranteed certain allocations to retailers that were probably a small proportion of what they hoped to ship but a number that they knew they could hit easily. They did this so that even if production issues arose they could meet those sales numbers. Perhaps they told retailers that we can only ensure that we will have 100,000-250,000 units on launch day. Retailers sold those rather quickly as earlier bidding and deposits were used to reduce the quantity demanded. Now as MS gets closer to launch day and production issues were smaller than they potentially could have been MS is able to promise to retailers that they will have 1-3 million in stores at launch.
The problem is one of cost. Why do people want to pay $400 for a device that realistically only plays something you have to pay $2-$3 per episode to see. The ipod was a hit more because it got the blessing of music companies, confering legitimacy on everyones gb stash of pirated music. If not why has Apple sold >20 million players but only a few hundred million songs (roughly 1-2 cds per ipod.
Video players will not take off until there are vast stores of video programming that people have located on their computers (or pr0n is socially acceptable to watch as a commuter).
They transfered wealth from Time Warner shareholders to AOL shareholders. The fact that there appeard to be great value in the AOL company was mostly illusion. That it cost Time Warner about half the company to find that out ranks up there with not getting an exclusive license for MS/DOS and booting Woz from HP. I'm surprised that Case lasted as long as he did, considering he was a constant reminder to everyone at Time Warner that you over paid. I'm not sure if Case figured this out beforehand. I concur with both your second and third statements.
This is speculation, but Safra has been at Larry's side longer than several wives. She and Henley are probably the only two people who can stand him, my guess would be that she is probably equally ruthless and that they enjoy working together (she is rich enough to not need to be there any longer and was not anything close to a day 1 employee).
I'd normally suggest a good Hayne's manual for your car. However, the liquer that will be required each time your homebrew mechanic bashes his knucles on something will easily overtake the cost of doing the work yourself. This could be the worst ask Slashdot in the history of ask Slashdots. If your second opinion doctor cannot get the medical records, it's time to call a lawyer (or at least threaten to).
This reminds me of the time I was at Bastille day last year, someone called a local bar to ask where it was, the bartender told them the address, followed by we are right next to the Bank of America building. Person asked something like, what is the Bank of America building, to which the bartender replied, it's the tallest building in town look for that and walk around til you set all the people.
When the next biggest catagory (besides savings which really isn't an expense) is almost 8 times smaller than the first, I think the adjective vast is fitting. I also do not see why google like targeted ads would not be fitting and could easily allow wiki to double their budget and service levels.
I'm surprised a hardware company has not donated $1 million or so worth of boxes that would be a pretty token effort for Apple, Dell, IBM, HP, or SUN would show immediate benefits and be a cool gesture in the eyes of likely buyers.
Why wouldn't GPL or creative commons work for artwork just as well as source code? How come an ecosystem of software got developed but there is nothing of similar scale in other intangible fields? The engines are under construction or completed, where are the graphics, sounds, and remaining things?
Of course they restrict freedom, but that restriction of freedom is a trade off for complete freedom after a set period of time. The idea is if you cannot restrict freedom of use of your invention, too little effort will be spent developing new things since both the inventor and everyone else gets the full benefits (so everyone free rides and nothing gets invented). Sure the Tesla's of the world might well continue to research, but there are many others who would do something else.
I think debate about the rewards (their size and duration) are highly valid, as even when they were established the period of a patent was set with no real thought behind it. I do not think most people would prefer the society that gives no reward to inventors, but I do think that there should be considerably more debate about what the proper reward structure could be (especially in a much more rapid business setting). 200 years ago, it could well have taken 10 years to build a factory and get the products to national markets, now obtaining factory capacity and national distribtion can be done in less than a year (more importantly obsolesence occurs much more rapidly than when patent law was established). I do not know enough to more than speculate on the proper duration of a patent, but I have learned that the more a subject is exposed to debate, the better off the final decision will be.
YOu make the mistake of thinking politicians are not only rational actors, but seek the best solutions. They are rational actors, but they seek to maximize votes. Right now people are fearful of bird flu, so they are threatening to withhold their votes from administartions that do nothing. Elected politicians in Taiwan is responding to this threat with action (even if the long term costs are signficant). As a corrilary, while it probably would have been dumb (and perhaps illegal) send in the Army and dump a billion pounds of sand in the levys as the hurrican hit, had that been the first action Bush had undertaken once the clouds broke, he probably would have considerably higher job approval ratings right now.
I think the problem here is that governments all want to be able to point to x million doses in the fridges now and Roche is pointing to their existing factories and saying we can produce 100 million doses over the next six months. Markets very efficiently cut demand from 6 billion to 100 million very quickly through price, however that is untenable), but this isn't very popular with the remaining 5.9 billion people who now look to their government to do something. The governments see this type of action as something to point to showing they were proactive on bird flu, regarless of whether or not they can manufacture any doses of the vaccine in time to be useful (normally flu vaccines take time to mature, I do not know if Tamflu can be more rapidly syntisized.
Months ago, when government demand could have given Roche incentives to build factories or license manufacturing to others with capacity, governments were happy to take the risk that bird flu would just go away. Now they are making Roche shoulder the costs of their shortsightedness.
Unless the Taiwanese government wants to undertake research and development of new vaccines this seems to be a case of short term gains for long term pain. The net result of this will be that drug companies will be less likely to research new vaccines, since by the time demand hits, their development is nationalized by all the potential customers (were everyone to follow Taiwan's example.
The government's are all just trying to shift the blame to Roche, as they have known about the potential problem of bird flu years (when they could have stockpiled doses in an orderly fashion, but did not. Now that it looks like it could strike, they all want to steal the development of the drug.
No you don't need a fence if it is just raw land, fences keep you from reaping the benefits of the resources the "landowner" used to improve the land. Early fences (I use fences not as a literal term but as a concept for boundries--cowboys for example were little more than human fences who were also replaced by technlogy, refridgerated trains and barbed wire) kept others from reaping the harvest from cultivation or fertilization, which allowed some of their tribe to do something other than hunt & gather their daily food.
Thant trend continued through industrialization until we spend less than 1% of our human effor on food production and 99% on other applications.
The free market didn't win because it was fair, it won because it most efficiently spreads resources to their most useful causes. The hope is that while some people are dumb lucky, most of them are their due to superior insight, and their insight was rewarded with additional resources to better prepare for a future crisis. If they were to stop applying resources to the most pressing need, they would soon find their resources dwindling rather than growing.
Slashdot Mirror
That's because about 10 years ago Faces of Death started being released out and mainstream media reports spooked parents organizing and complaining about lax enforcement of ratings to lawmakers who began proposing all manner of new laws which pushed the theater owners association to begin a far more vigilant system of self regulation. All of which resulted in that run on monstrosity.
So say there is a 20% chance of "making" $100 (or a 2% chance of making $1000 for going out early on the Friday after Thanksgiving. I would say that is worth something near $20 for perhaps 2h of time. You and I might rather pay the full price at noon or the following weekend, but what I am wondering is why that should pose a problem for someone who values their 4-6am time at less than $10/hr?
I'm in agreement that most of the effort and resources spent on presents is deadweight loss and everyone would be better off with a much more limited gift exchange, but if the presents will be bought anyway I don't see much difference between standing in line for 2 hrs and working an extra hr (or using an hour's pay) to buy the presents.
Tuesday mornings closes in January for just this reason. Retail sales remain highly seasonal (more than half their annual profit is earned in the three months Nov-Jan). This may have been true when retail operations were smaller so fixed costs were a larger portion of sales (retail has always been run on a slim margin).
More likely is that for many stores the extra sales means that they cover the year's total costs around the end of November and every sale beyond the current would have much higher profit contribution when examined on an annual basis. To give an example, take a $1 billion in sales retailer that has 25% gross margins and annual operating expenses of $150 million. It is highly likely that the company reaches $600 million in sales around the Friday after Thanksgiving (the point at which cumulative GP for the year is $150 million). While this type of examination violates numerous accounting principles it is an easy connotation for lay business people to make.
Many of those bankruptcies were filed very premptivly (some weren't even behind on payments but filed anyway). From what I've seen this year is shaping up similar to last year, the relativly wealthy will be spending considerably more than last year (Best Buy reported excellent sales, I'll be shocked if Nordstrom's Sak's and Neiman differ), while those of modest means are chasing bargains witness the reversal of Wal-Mart and Target's fortunes after Target was very promotional last year and Wal-Mart was promotional this year.
What's pathetic about differing marginal costs of time? You may argue that they should not give commercial gifts, but still celebrate Christmas in a more meaningful way. However, getting up early on Friday is just a trade of time for money either through outright payments or on purchases that will be made anyway.
Black friday in retail got its name because it was traditionally the day retailers moved "into the black" which means moved from the loss column to the profit column for the year.
Yeah but it provides advantages between screwups, in that Sony can enter a new business and people will recall the quality of their last Sony products (historically quite good) and be more likely to buy the new product vs a brand new brand (even if the new brand is a sub brand of Phillips.
Don't play the slots then. The addictive tendancies in that play on the human drive to continue doing things that give a random result (especially with a wide deviation in the results--80% crap or nothing, 10% ok stuff 8% good stuff, .9% great stuff, 0.09% unbelievable stuff, 0.009% truely amazing stuff, etc to 0.0000001% zod runes.
When you check both sides of the story, the company owns 1,000,000 acres of Canadian forest land (in the business overview section), and per your site clear cut 27,000 acres last year. They further claim to running on an over 40 year [implying 40-45 year]long rotation growing cycle (in the Timberlands section). Both claims seem to fit 27,000 acres is just over 1/40th of 1,000,000. That sounds an awful lot like a farm to me, but perhaps the longer crop growing cycle makes it something else. They also mention that hardwood logs are sold to veneer manufacturers they are far too valuable to be used in pulp (except the scraps). If someone has an issue with their farming practices on their own land there are dealers making a market in the company daily.
Please mod this up, recycling paper has zero impact on cutting of forests, paper pulp "trees" are grown on farms.
Why don't you have one of my sticks of gum and go talk to the nice man over there. By the way those are really sharp sunglasses you mind if I try them on?
As I understand it, MS guaranteed certain allocations to retailers that were probably a small proportion of what they hoped to ship but a number that they knew they could hit easily. They did this so that even if production issues arose they could meet those sales numbers. Perhaps they told retailers that we can only ensure that we will have 100,000-250,000 units on launch day. Retailers sold those rather quickly as earlier bidding and deposits were used to reduce the quantity demanded. Now as MS gets closer to launch day and production issues were smaller than they potentially could have been MS is able to promise to retailers that they will have 1-3 million in stores at launch.
The problem is one of cost. Why do people want to pay $400 for a device that realistically only plays something you have to pay $2-$3 per episode to see. The ipod was a hit more because it got the blessing of music companies, confering legitimacy on everyones gb stash of pirated music. If not why has Apple sold >20 million players but only a few hundred million songs (roughly 1-2 cds per ipod. Video players will not take off until there are vast stores of video programming that people have located on their computers (or pr0n is socially acceptable to watch as a commuter).
Is the http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/f3800/msjudgex.htm# v>US Govermnent good enough for you, because that action was the basis of the principle finding of the Microsoft Anti-Trust trial?
They transfered wealth from Time Warner shareholders to AOL shareholders. The fact that there appeard to be great value in the AOL company was mostly illusion. That it cost Time Warner about half the company to find that out ranks up there with not getting an exclusive license for MS/DOS and booting Woz from HP. I'm surprised that Case lasted as long as he did, considering he was a constant reminder to everyone at Time Warner that you over paid. I'm not sure if Case figured this out beforehand. I concur with both your second and third statements.
This is speculation, but Safra has been at Larry's side longer than several wives. She and Henley are probably the only two people who can stand him, my guess would be that she is probably equally ruthless and that they enjoy working together (she is rich enough to not need to be there any longer and was not anything close to a day 1 employee).
I'd normally suggest a good Hayne's manual for your car. However, the liquer that will be required each time your homebrew mechanic bashes his knucles on something will easily overtake the cost of doing the work yourself. This could be the worst ask Slashdot in the history of ask Slashdots. If your second opinion doctor cannot get the medical records, it's time to call a lawyer (or at least threaten to).
This reminds me of the time I was at Bastille day last year, someone called a local bar to ask where it was, the bartender told them the address, followed by we are right next to the Bank of America building. Person asked something like, what is the Bank of America building, to which the bartender replied, it's the tallest building in town look for that and walk around til you set all the people.
IMC[oncieted]O, you are equally to blame : )
When the next biggest catagory (besides savings which really isn't an expense) is almost 8 times smaller than the first, I think the adjective vast is fitting. I also do not see why google like targeted ads would not be fitting and could easily allow wiki to double their budget and service levels.
I'm surprised a hardware company has not donated $1 million or so worth of boxes that would be a pretty token effort for Apple, Dell, IBM, HP, or SUN would show immediate benefits and be a cool gesture in the eyes of likely buyers.
Why wouldn't GPL or creative commons work for artwork just as well as source code? How come an ecosystem of software got developed but there is nothing of similar scale in other intangible fields? The engines are under construction or completed, where are the graphics, sounds, and remaining things?
Of course they restrict freedom, but that restriction of freedom is a trade off for complete freedom after a set period of time. The idea is if you cannot restrict freedom of use of your invention, too little effort will be spent developing new things since both the inventor and everyone else gets the full benefits (so everyone free rides and nothing gets invented). Sure the Tesla's of the world might well continue to research, but there are many others who would do something else.
I think debate about the rewards (their size and duration) are highly valid, as even when they were established the period of a patent was set with no real thought behind it. I do not think most people would prefer the society that gives no reward to inventors, but I do think that there should be considerably more debate about what the proper reward structure could be (especially in a much more rapid business setting). 200 years ago, it could well have taken 10 years to build a factory and get the products to national markets, now obtaining factory capacity and national distribtion can be done in less than a year (more importantly obsolesence occurs much more rapidly than when patent law was established). I do not know enough to more than speculate on the proper duration of a patent, but I have learned that the more a subject is exposed to debate, the better off the final decision will be.
YOu make the mistake of thinking politicians are not only rational actors, but seek the best solutions. They are rational actors, but they seek to maximize votes. Right now people are fearful of bird flu, so they are threatening to withhold their votes from administartions that do nothing. Elected politicians in Taiwan is responding to this threat with action (even if the long term costs are signficant). As a corrilary, while it probably would have been dumb (and perhaps illegal) send in the Army and dump a billion pounds of sand in the levys as the hurrican hit, had that been the first action Bush had undertaken once the clouds broke, he probably would have considerably higher job approval ratings right now.
I think the problem here is that governments all want to be able to point to x million doses in the fridges now and Roche is pointing to their existing factories and saying we can produce 100 million doses over the next six months. Markets very efficiently cut demand from 6 billion to 100 million very quickly through price, however that is untenable), but this isn't very popular with the remaining 5.9 billion people who now look to their government to do something. The governments see this type of action as something to point to showing they were proactive on bird flu, regarless of whether or not they can manufacture any doses of the vaccine in time to be useful (normally flu vaccines take time to mature, I do not know if Tamflu can be more rapidly syntisized.
Months ago, when government demand could have given Roche incentives to build factories or license manufacturing to others with capacity, governments were happy to take the risk that bird flu would just go away. Now they are making Roche shoulder the costs of their shortsightedness.
Unless the Taiwanese government wants to undertake research and development of new vaccines this seems to be a case of short term gains for long term pain. The net result of this will be that drug companies will be less likely to research new vaccines, since by the time demand hits, their development is nationalized by all the potential customers (were everyone to follow Taiwan's example.
The government's are all just trying to shift the blame to Roche, as they have known about the potential problem of bird flu years (when they could have stockpiled doses in an orderly fashion, but did not. Now that it looks like it could strike, they all want to steal the development of the drug.
No you don't need a fence if it is just raw land, fences keep you from reaping the benefits of the resources the "landowner" used to improve the land. Early fences (I use fences not as a literal term but as a concept for boundries--cowboys for example were little more than human fences who were also replaced by technlogy, refridgerated trains and barbed wire) kept others from reaping the harvest from cultivation or fertilization, which allowed some of their tribe to do something other than hunt & gather their daily food.
Thant trend continued through industrialization until we spend less than 1% of our human effor on food production and 99% on other applications.
The free market didn't win because it was fair, it won because it most efficiently spreads resources to their most useful causes. The hope is that while some people are dumb lucky, most of them are their due to superior insight, and their insight was rewarded with additional resources to better prepare for a future crisis. If they were to stop applying resources to the most pressing need, they would soon find their resources dwindling rather than growing.