BestBuy actually sells more electronics than Walmart about $20 billion vs $15 billion. Also, Costco is an interesting case, they effectivly sell everything at cost (after employee overhead and such) and make money on their memberships. The whole focus of their store is to minimize costs. Interestingly, Costco maintains the same percentage of sales on employees as Wal-Mart but pays signficantly more, they make up the difference in considerably lower turnover and training costs. Wal-Mart turns over employees once a year (some positions turn over several times a year while others last longer). The main dislike I have for Wal-Mart is that they are too crowded (compared to Target or K-Mart) and their produce goes bad far more quickly than the grocers. Being single I want my produce to last longer than a week, this may not be as true for families.
They sell those things because that's what their customers want. That's Wal-Mart's real secret. They got started at the same time Target was and the first K-Mart store opened, but Wal-Mart outgrew each because they were better able to provide what their customers wanted. Don't blame Wal-Mart for exposing the extremely shortsightedness of the average American consumer.
Walmart is only about 1 out of 10 average things (they are about 8-9% of US retail sales. It's no surprise that they are above average in a loss leader catagory though. Size of a company is an odd measure, Walmart is huge in sales they swap with Exxon Mobil for most revenue, but Microsoft consistently makes more money than Walmart (on about 1/4 the revenues). Exxon generally makes more than both.
Keep in mind that the music market has historically operated with small costly stores (in malls and such) that stock a wide variety of albums (to get people in the stores) but make their money on say the top 200 selling albums that turnover (sell through inventory) much more rapidly than the others. Walmart tries to stock only the albums that sell (letting online sellers fulfill the remaining orders) and sells them below cost (also to get people in the store) in order to make money on all the high margin items they are selling. Nearly every business does this they sell certain things cheaply in order to increase sales of higher margin items. Fast food joints give away the burgers to make money on soda and fries. Fancier resturants try to break even on the food and make their money on wine. In software the real money is made on maintenance contracts rather than licensing. What surprises me is how much music Wal-Mart sells when so many titles are edited. Seems kinda pointless for Wal-Mart to even have a rap section, but I guess you never go broke underestimating American smarts.
I liked Washington (along with Oregon one of the more progressive voter rights states) they allowed you to vote in either primary on a position by position basis ie you could vote the democratic candidates for governor and the republicans for lt gov (not the same ticket in Washington) and on down the list. In Montana it's a bit mroe restricted one side of the primary ballot has Democrats the other has Republicans. You can vote either one, but at the end you have to choose which side you want to count.
I'm curions why investor value is not a good measure of the ownership of the license value in your mind. I'd agree that a better measure would the value of the company if a large bloc of stock were sold (say 10% of the company or more) as that would get rid of the liquidity premium that public companies have, but other than that it seems like a fine method to me.
Keep in mind they aren't just giving it away under a BSD style license, they are giving it away for no dollar consideration but a signficant concession on the part of users and other developers, "you must share any distributed changes." That concession has value, and elimiation of that concession in exchange for monitary consideration is possible at a certain rate. Given the market values of certain software companies with competing products, I'd be hard pressed to put the monetary value of elimination of that concession at several billion (look at sun which is pretty much solaris and a pile of cash), if you could eliminate all the current GPL competition. Since this offer wouldn't (nor would it stop further GPL development) the $600 million figure might be low (i'd still say ~1 billion), but is probably pretty close.
I'm 80% libertarian pure, must purge the remaining authoritarianism. Kind of a neat little tool, wish that it was more like Slate's whack-a-mole democratic primary selector.
I've heard that yoghurt can help rebuild the flora in the gut, and tried to eat as much as I could after a bout with staph and some antibiotics that did a number on my own microorganism friends.
Hey even though I live on the eastern foothills of the rockies, I want to join the western half of the country please don't split it on the contenental divide.
They should come to Montana as most folk here came specifically to live in a state with as little government influence as possible. This was the state where when they had to enforce a 55 mph speed limit the ticket was $5 and it didn't go on your insurance. If you had a national effort to get out the libertarian principles I'd guess that well over half the population of Montana would agree with more of them than with most other parties. While cool, the house chooses the president in a plurality of electoral votes.
I was actually one micro class (I think half our department did some schooling at Chicago or U of Washington), but to paraphrase the Remington guy, I liked it so much I stayed for the degree.
As a former dittohead Lib (an economics degree cures almost anyone of most party pursuasions) I'm not sure where the vote is coming from but I suspect most of us wouldn't have voted for either candidate without the libertarian party.
Cyclical means that the industry is very sensitive to overbuilding. A cyclical industry could (but does not usually) experience a down cycle in the middle of a very robust cycle. Memory has on occasion seen crashing prices even as the economy is getting stronger, and rising prices when it is getting weaker. Think of it not interms of economic cycles, but in terms of capacity addition cycles (if we underbuild prices rise, if we overbuild prices fall) add to that if we underbuild before a boom our competitors will benefit from rising prices, if we overbuild in a boom the current management will be out a job.
Yeah, while Helena is certainly not a hot housing market by any streach it seems to have simmered down a bit, deals are falling through more regularly than earlier in the summer and houses are staying on the market longer not in say $150-$200k single families (which are still pretty hot) but other segments are starting to stay on the market for a couple of months. I've been browsing for a nice multi-family that I can buy to lock in rates and hopefully not boost my net monthly housing payment, but haven't found much yet. Until then its high yield junk bonds (hoping that short duration limit the impact of rising rates) and I don't get caught in a credit trap if the economy slows.
Moreso than the dotcoms was the bubble in telecom spending as corporations added networks at the same time many startups all began shooting for 10% of AT&T's commercial long distance network. No one stood back and said, hm 15 companies all targeting 10% of the commercial data haul market might be a problem, so investors kept funding them until their networks were completed. Greenspan's strategy of inflating another bubble (housing) as one pops has been interesting to say the least, if I weren't a player, this would be a very enjoyable situation to watch.
Normally a cyclical industry is one that involves large capacity additions which make up both a signficant amount of the productive capacity and a signficant portion of the cost of each unit. Semiconductors and tankers are both classically cyclical industries. In real terms let us imagine that you and I have built a brand new fab, we perhaps raised $500 million in equity, got grants of $500 million and borrowed $2 billion. Perhaps we decide to compete in memory manufacture. Prior to our fab going on line let us say that capacity was 100/k 8" wafers per month. Following our fab now capacity is 140k 8" wafers per month. Each month to pay for our fab we need to generate sales of about $1600 per wafer to cover our fabs cost. If we did our market research well we should be able to cover that cost if we didn't (perhaps price declines signficantly at 145k wafers and one of our competitors increased their capacity by 20k wafers while we built our fab. Now everyone is producing to shut someone down (or waiting for demand to grow so that we can produce 160k wafers profitably (which could take several years). Upturns are caused by longer waiting by all competitors downturns are caused by capacity being added more quickly than demand, and the most money to be made is accomplished by being the only one to build before an upturn. Under those three rules (with no collusion) you will always have big upturns then overbuilding then downturns then upturns and you have a nice sine wave cycle. The overall trend of the sine wave is up, but the sinewave has a big amplitude.
In processors and other high value chips this is less true (as engineering and design talent reduces the number of competitors you are dealing with allowing more normal capacity increases to take place. Over the last thirty years only three big semiconductor companies have reliably generated more cash than is required to build for the next cycle (Intel, Analog Devices, and Linear Technologies) all three compete with very few competitors and their products require a considerable amount of design before manufacture can take place.
Please don't make the mistake of judging the economy by the stock market. Also the Dow is a poor (but well branded) index of 30 companies. If you are going to judge the economy by the stock market at least use the S&P 500 (or better yet the Wilshire. Jobs or other economic statistics are much better (but usually have a significant time lag). Also, Presidents shouldn't be judged by how the economy did. They have very little control over the economy. If anyone should get the blame it's the Fed, but Alan & co were also responsible for the boom so they get a pass. If anything they should be judged by the difference they made in the economy (ie how good or bad would it have been without them) but since that is impossible pundits settle for what direction is it moving. I'm not giving Bush a free ride here (the deficit spending and Medicare drug vote grab were terrible in my book) but don't blame him that jobs aren't being created.
Hint, the same factors that lead to offshoring are just as big in other industries where we don't even control the figurehead positions and do not go away for several decades unless the dollar gets a whole lot cheaper (which is signficantly worse).
While they are sort of a blend of the two parties (Democratic social values with Republican fiscal values) it seems like more Libertarians arrive via the fiscal route or more dissatisfied Democrats join the Green or Socialist parties rather than the Libertarian party.
War is a very, very serious idea. With a true draft that is reinforced since your best and brightest will be off prosecuting that war. While an all volenteer force is certainly better for morale and efficiency, the point of a draft force is that war should only be an option if and when enough of the country is behind the war that a draft force really isn't needed. While a draft was certainly in place in world war II was it really used? One statistic that changed my mind about the draft (even though I'm draft aged, single and fit enough to go straight to boot camp) was that under a draft we engaged in very few military actions. With a volenteer force the number of actions we send our military to has exploded (the theory was that since decison makers aren't risking their kids the standard of what is a just war is lower).
You just gave even more support to his main point (that a roundly lopsided vote has a very long lasting effect). Crap the main point of the bill could have been to give $1 billion to ketchup studies but there isn't a senator who will associate their name (and take the political pounding that will come with it) with resurecting the Kyoto treaty.
Doesn't France still have the French foreign leigon? I would think that with several famous deployments to the Sahara they would be ideal troops with experience in both desert, Islamic, and peacekeeping roles.
The separation between editorial staff and news staff is generally well preserved. One of the two Washington dailies is/was owned by the Rev. Sun Ming Moon. For some time IIRC, he had a crony editorial staff espoused his rather strange ideas. The remainder of the paper was generally pretty good. Anther good example is the Wall St. Journal. Their news organization is top notch (especially on business topics) and only slightly tilted pro-business. The editorial staff vacillates between rabid pro-business interests and libertarianism (with the token Albert Hunt balancing the mix).
1)2 songs (One is an obscure Christmas album that I've never seen and isn't on iTMS)
2)None, but I do have a gift cert for 10 songs from iTMS.
3)None
4)99% I rip most of my CDs so I don't have to change discs in the changer, wore one out on random after too many summer days in my hot apartment. Oh and I like better audio than you can usually find downloading.
5)None.
At one point in the past I downloaded about 50 songs from a friend for a party but deleted them shortly afterward. I don't have an iPod or other music player the rips are mostly to allow more CDs in the mix than my changer. Oddly I sort of gave up downloading music once it moved off the pirate FTP sites. I do buy mostly used CDs so the RIAA probably still hates me.
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BestBuy actually sells more electronics than Walmart about $20 billion vs $15 billion. Also, Costco is an interesting case, they effectivly sell everything at cost (after employee overhead and such) and make money on their memberships. The whole focus of their store is to minimize costs. Interestingly, Costco maintains the same percentage of sales on employees as Wal-Mart but pays signficantly more, they make up the difference in considerably lower turnover and training costs. Wal-Mart turns over employees once a year (some positions turn over several times a year while others last longer). The main dislike I have for Wal-Mart is that they are too crowded (compared to Target or K-Mart) and their produce goes bad far more quickly than the grocers. Being single I want my produce to last longer than a week, this may not be as true for families.
They sell those things because that's what their customers want. That's Wal-Mart's real secret. They got started at the same time Target was and the first K-Mart store opened, but Wal-Mart outgrew each because they were better able to provide what their customers wanted. Don't blame Wal-Mart for exposing the extremely shortsightedness of the average American consumer.
Walmart is only about 1 out of 10 average things (they are about 8-9% of US retail sales. It's no surprise that they are above average in a loss leader catagory though. Size of a company is an odd measure, Walmart is huge in sales they swap with Exxon Mobil for most revenue, but Microsoft consistently makes more money than Walmart (on about 1/4 the revenues). Exxon generally makes more than both.
Keep in mind that the music market has historically operated with small costly stores (in malls and such) that stock a wide variety of albums (to get people in the stores) but make their money on say the top 200 selling albums that turnover (sell through inventory) much more rapidly than the others. Walmart tries to stock only the albums that sell (letting online sellers fulfill the remaining orders) and sells them below cost (also to get people in the store) in order to make money on all the high margin items they are selling. Nearly every business does this they sell certain things cheaply in order to increase sales of higher margin items. Fast food joints give away the burgers to make money on soda and fries. Fancier resturants try to break even on the food and make their money on wine. In software the real money is made on maintenance contracts rather than licensing. What surprises me is how much music Wal-Mart sells when so many titles are edited. Seems kinda pointless for Wal-Mart to even have a rap section, but I guess you never go broke underestimating American smarts.
I'll be your vote swap (I live in a safe state for Bush, Montana) and already planned to vote Libertarian, too.
I liked Washington (along with Oregon one of the more progressive voter rights states) they allowed you to vote in either primary on a position by position basis ie you could vote the democratic candidates for governor and the republicans for lt gov (not the same ticket in Washington) and on down the list. In Montana it's a bit mroe restricted one side of the primary ballot has Democrats the other has Republicans. You can vote either one, but at the end you have to choose which side you want to count.
I'm curions why investor value is not a good measure of the ownership of the license value in your mind. I'd agree that a better measure would the value of the company if a large bloc of stock were sold (say 10% of the company or more) as that would get rid of the liquidity premium that public companies have, but other than that it seems like a fine method to me.
Keep in mind they aren't just giving it away under a BSD style license, they are giving it away for no dollar consideration but a signficant concession on the part of users and other developers, "you must share any distributed changes." That concession has value, and elimiation of that concession in exchange for monitary consideration is possible at a certain rate. Given the market values of certain software companies with competing products, I'd be hard pressed to put the monetary value of elimination of that concession at several billion (look at sun which is pretty much solaris and a pile of cash), if you could eliminate all the current GPL competition. Since this offer wouldn't (nor would it stop further GPL development) the $600 million figure might be low (i'd still say ~1 billion), but is probably pretty close.
I'm 80% libertarian pure, must purge the remaining authoritarianism. Kind of a neat little tool, wish that it was more like Slate's whack-a-mole democratic primary selector.
I've heard that yoghurt can help rebuild the flora in the gut, and tried to eat as much as I could after a bout with staph and some antibiotics that did a number on my own microorganism friends.
I think Tom's was responsible for the recall of the first 1 GHz PIIIs, too.
Hey even though I live on the eastern foothills of the rockies, I want to join the western half of the country please don't split it on the contenental divide.
They should come to Montana as most folk here came specifically to live in a state with as little government influence as possible. This was the state where when they had to enforce a 55 mph speed limit the ticket was $5 and it didn't go on your insurance. If you had a national effort to get out the libertarian principles I'd guess that well over half the population of Montana would agree with more of them than with most other parties. While cool, the house chooses the president in a plurality of electoral votes.
I was actually one micro class (I think half our department did some schooling at Chicago or U of Washington), but to paraphrase the Remington guy, I liked it so much I stayed for the degree.
As a former dittohead Lib (an economics degree cures almost anyone of most party pursuasions) I'm not sure where the vote is coming from but I suspect most of us wouldn't have voted for either candidate without the libertarian party.
Cyclical means that the industry is very sensitive to overbuilding. A cyclical industry could (but does not usually) experience a down cycle in the middle of a very robust cycle. Memory has on occasion seen crashing prices even as the economy is getting stronger, and rising prices when it is getting weaker. Think of it not interms of economic cycles, but in terms of capacity addition cycles (if we underbuild prices rise, if we overbuild prices fall) add to that if we underbuild before a boom our competitors will benefit from rising prices, if we overbuild in a boom the current management will be out a job.
Yeah, while Helena is certainly not a hot housing market by any streach it seems to have simmered down a bit, deals are falling through more regularly than earlier in the summer and houses are staying on the market longer not in say $150-$200k single families (which are still pretty hot) but other segments are starting to stay on the market for a couple of months. I've been browsing for a nice multi-family that I can buy to lock in rates and hopefully not boost my net monthly housing payment, but haven't found much yet. Until then its high yield junk bonds (hoping that short duration limit the impact of rising rates) and I don't get caught in a credit trap if the economy slows.
Moreso than the dotcoms was the bubble in telecom spending as corporations added networks at the same time many startups all began shooting for 10% of AT&T's commercial long distance network. No one stood back and said, hm 15 companies all targeting 10% of the commercial data haul market might be a problem, so investors kept funding them until their networks were completed. Greenspan's strategy of inflating another bubble (housing) as one pops has been interesting to say the least, if I weren't a player, this would be a very enjoyable situation to watch.
Normally a cyclical industry is one that involves large capacity additions which make up both a signficant amount of the productive capacity and a signficant portion of the cost of each unit. Semiconductors and tankers are both classically cyclical industries. In real terms let us imagine that you and I have built a brand new fab, we perhaps raised $500 million in equity, got grants of $500 million and borrowed $2 billion. Perhaps we decide to compete in memory manufacture. Prior to our fab going on line let us say that capacity was 100/k 8" wafers per month. Following our fab now capacity is 140k 8" wafers per month. Each month to pay for our fab we need to generate sales of about $1600 per wafer to cover our fabs cost. If we did our market research well we should be able to cover that cost if we didn't (perhaps price declines signficantly at 145k wafers and one of our competitors increased their capacity by 20k wafers while we built our fab. Now everyone is producing to shut someone down (or waiting for demand to grow so that we can produce 160k wafers profitably (which could take several years). Upturns are caused by longer waiting by all competitors downturns are caused by capacity being added more quickly than demand, and the most money to be made is accomplished by being the only one to build before an upturn. Under those three rules (with no collusion) you will always have big upturns then overbuilding then downturns then upturns and you have a nice sine wave cycle. The overall trend of the sine wave is up, but the sinewave has a big amplitude.
In processors and other high value chips this is less true (as engineering and design talent reduces the number of competitors you are dealing with allowing more normal capacity increases to take place. Over the last thirty years only three big semiconductor companies have reliably generated more cash than is required to build for the next cycle (Intel, Analog Devices, and Linear Technologies) all three compete with very few competitors and their products require a considerable amount of design before manufacture can take place.
Please don't make the mistake of judging the economy by the stock market. Also the Dow is a poor (but well branded) index of 30 companies. If you are going to judge the economy by the stock market at least use the S&P 500 (or better yet the Wilshire. Jobs or other economic statistics are much better (but usually have a significant time lag). Also, Presidents shouldn't be judged by how the economy did. They have very little control over the economy. If anyone should get the blame it's the Fed, but Alan & co were also responsible for the boom so they get a pass. If anything they should be judged by the difference they made in the economy (ie how good or bad would it have been without them) but since that is impossible pundits settle for what direction is it moving.
I'm not giving Bush a free ride here (the deficit spending and Medicare drug vote grab were terrible in my book) but don't blame him that jobs aren't being created.
Hint, the same factors that lead to offshoring are just as big in other industries where we don't even control the figurehead positions and do not go away for several decades unless the dollar gets a whole lot cheaper (which is signficantly worse).
While they are sort of a blend of the two parties (Democratic social values with Republican fiscal values) it seems like more Libertarians arrive via the fiscal route or more dissatisfied Democrats join the Green or Socialist parties rather than the Libertarian party.
War is a very, very serious idea. With a true draft that is reinforced since your best and brightest will be off prosecuting that war. While an all volenteer force is certainly better for morale and efficiency, the point of a draft force is that war should only be an option if and when enough of the country is behind the war that a draft force really isn't needed. While a draft was certainly in place in world war II was it really used? One statistic that changed my mind about the draft (even though I'm draft aged, single and fit enough to go straight to boot camp) was that under a draft we engaged in very few military actions. With a volenteer force the number of actions we send our military to has exploded (the theory was that since decison makers aren't risking their kids the standard of what is a just war is lower).
You just gave even more support to his main point (that a roundly lopsided vote has a very long lasting effect). Crap the main point of the bill could have been to give $1 billion to ketchup studies but there isn't a senator who will associate their name (and take the political pounding that will come with it) with resurecting the Kyoto treaty.
Doesn't France still have the French foreign leigon? I would think that with several famous deployments to the Sahara they would be ideal troops with experience in both desert, Islamic, and peacekeeping roles.
The separation between editorial staff and news staff is generally well preserved. One of the two Washington dailies is/was owned by the Rev. Sun Ming Moon. For some time IIRC, he had a crony editorial staff espoused his rather strange ideas. The remainder of the paper was generally pretty good. Anther good example is the Wall St. Journal. Their news organization is top notch (especially on business topics) and only slightly tilted pro-business. The editorial staff vacillates between rabid pro-business interests and libertarianism (with the token Albert Hunt balancing the mix).
1)2 songs (One is an obscure Christmas album that I've never seen and isn't on iTMS) 2)None, but I do have a gift cert for 10 songs from iTMS.
3)None
4)99% I rip most of my CDs so I don't have to change discs in the changer, wore one out on random after too many summer days in my hot apartment. Oh and I like better audio than you can usually find downloading.
5)None.
At one point in the past I downloaded about 50 songs from a friend for a party but deleted them shortly afterward. I don't have an iPod or other music player the rips are mostly to allow more CDs in the mix than my changer. Oddly I sort of gave up downloading music once it moved off the pirate FTP sites. I do buy mostly used CDs so the RIAA probably still hates me.