Door to door sales, and plastics kid, plastics. On a more serious note, tech support was generally tough to get an answer from long before it was outsourced to India, since the goal was shorter call times. One job that might come into vouge is personal tech support. I knew plenty of people who scored beer money doing the occasional tech job, and have seen more than a few rent a geek operations start up, and remain in business. I would think that Joe user might be interested in paying a reasonable fee for higher quality tech support.
One company that has always had tip top support is Bloomberg, I can't remember ever waiting on hold with them, and the staff fixes the problem even when problem exists between keyboard and chair. Of course at the prices they get, you better get something other than the script, if you work there keep up the great work.
Actually it can, lets say you have a huge factory that kicks out 1000 airplanes a year (enough to be a meaningful part of GDP, say 10%). One day this bright kid figures out that if you switch the order from putting wings on while you attach the engines you could produce 1100 planes a year, same people puting wings on and putting engines on, they just work at the same time and you added 10% to production. You just expanded national GDP by 1% without a single new job, although you might want to give the kid a promotion. That's measured by productivity, and it has grown immensly in several segments (retail and finance have been huge beneficiaries of technology). Rather than having people keep track of and count shares or cans of corn a computer does it.
I'm looking forward to Eternal Sunshine of a Guiltless Mind, it looks interesting. I can't say I've liked everything he did, he seems to be trying too hard to win an oscar lately, but Liar, Liar and Dumb and Dumber were both retty good. I keep meaning to check out Man on the Moon, too.
I usually get a kick out of reading a few of those risks on the way down to the financials and (notes where the really important stuff is). I love the boilerplate ones were the comapny states that all their customers might well just up and stop purchasing their products. Incidentally, there was a pretty funny column on Slate a while ago that grabbed an old filing for Martha Stewart Omnimedia, that detailed the material risk that Martha might do something stupid and tarnish her image and thereby impact the value of the company.
As with most class action suits, the lead plaintiffs attorneys got 1/3 of the settlement amount, and split the remaining 2/3 amoung the rest of us. So they have a huge incentive to keep the system the same. The defendants much prefer a lumping as well, rather than defending tens of thousands of suits (not everyone who collected a check would have suit, but some of the people would have) requireing several thousand dollars each, or settling out of court. The only people who would benefit from class action reform are the little guys, and we only have say if we all group together. There are many other situations similar to this. Sugar quotas are also easy to see the beneifits flowing to a small few, while the costs are spread over the many. I think it costs the average consumer a few dollars a year, a healthy amount is lost, and the few sugar farmers in the US get a small part of the benefits consumers lost, but since the benefits accrue to say 1000 farmers, it's a huge amount to each of them.
One game that did a pretty good job of keeping a script while giving the player more control was Deus Ex, although I would have appreciated the central plot choice offering two very different paths. For those who have played it, the airplane bit with Anna and other guy. It would have rocked to have been able to make either choicen and play a whole different plotline. Another old one was Alien Legacy, an old Sierra game, where you were colonizing a new solar system. The plot was similar to System Shock, you were learning why the earlier colonies were missing, and it seemed pretty open ended, but still had a plot.
One hobby of mine is financial history, it was pretty funny to read the sages of Tulipmania and compare their stataments with analysts in 1999-2000, if you had replaced tuplips with IT, telecom, or the internet and put a company on the top, you could have saved a whole lot of cost, and put out investment research surprisingly similar to major investment banks.
Just as mathmaticians and pool sharks are usually two different groups with some crossove, economists and rich people usually have some crossover but remain distinct groups. My favorite dilbert leads with an economist beginning his talk with "I will now explain to you how even though I know all about money, I still dress like a flood victim." But yes you are generally right when you say that people on TV either aren't the best at finance, or if they are, don't really have time to give you the all the information you need to make a good decision.
AFAIK, the only things with sunset provisions are tax breaks. Because one side can campaign on we will review these fat cat tax breaks, and the other can say we know no one will give up a tax break, lets make these tax cuts permanent. It's a win/win situation for the pols.
Short answer yes, leverage can really burn you. Long answer the great depression was triggered by a market crash, that toppled a few banks who issued too many loans to speculators who lost their shirts and the losses were quick and large enough to cause the loans to not be repaid. (I didn't mention that banks run at about 20:1 leverage ratios) so the banks began to fail, which caused a run on banks that wouldn't have failed, but didn't have enough liquidity (banks never do, in a true run). However, it was also exacerbated by a Fed decision to cut liquidity and raise interest rates at the start of this. Ultimately the depression was people sitting on currency because of fear, rather than spending or saving it. Macroeconomics is a lot like the weather, there are a ton of very complex variables that lead to effects.
Oddly enough risky investments are sometimes ok to borrow against, it's a matter of the level of risk tolerance you are comfortable with. Real Estate is ultimately a risky asset, but most of us are comfortable borrowing and lending against it, as there are considerable forces absorbing and reducing that risk. Oh, and the only risk free investment are government treasury bonds (The US seems to be the gold standard, although I'm be comfortable with Euro zone and Japanese bonds, too especially last year with the nice currency boost) banks are only as good as the government that insures them. Ultimately governments can print money so they will always pay their debts, although the currency might not be worth much, as a bunch of pensioners are learning about Argentina's bonds. Finally, it's very hard to find people who will loan money to a startup, if you do you have a very good friend.
At least on average the majority of the profit (if not most of the revenue) goes to the record label that owns the copyright to the music be they RIAA afiliated or not. I'm not sure if the terms are very different between indie labels and major labels on the revenue split with Apple, but would assume them to be similar. Suffice to say that for the average purchase the record label gets most of the money, while apple gets enough from that sale to cover advertising, development, bandwidth, serving, and other costs associated with iTMS. However, they are much more likely to sell an iPod that makes Apple a ton of money.
Generally bonds must be purchased on the market at the going price unless there is a term allowing the borrower to repay the bond early (called a call option or callable bond). Since rates have been low and Apple is less risky they they have been in the past, it would have cost them more to repay them prior to their maturity (when they repay at face value).
Debt is leverage, it amplifies your returns to owners. This is great if you do well, but it is bad if you do poorly. Most people experience this when with mortgages (because of a ton of very favorable laws and a reasonably good housing market since wwII lenders will give an amazing amount of leverage on a house). Which is why they thing real estate is such a good investment, houses have actually been out performed by most other asset classes, but nothing else allows the same measure of leverage. For a simple example lets look at buying stock on margin. Take Microsoft, let's say Bill and Steve each have $1000 to invest in MS and the current share price is $25. Bill chooses to buy 40 shares for $1000 (ignoring commissions), while steve listened to his MBA friend and bought 80 shares, taking a loan for $1000 and puting up his own $1000. The next day MS comes out better than expected earnings and the price pops to $30 per share. Both sell their stock. Bill gets $1200 (40x$30) while Steve gets $1400 (80x30-1000) I'm rounding off the $0.11 in interest expenses.
Now if the news had been bad, and the stock fell to $20, the opposite would have happened, Bill would have $800 (40x$20), while Steve would have $600 (80x$20-1000), again ignoring the $0.11 in daily interest.
With debt financing you multiply the regular returns by the inverse of the percentage you put up. (If you put up one fifth of the intial capital you will recieve five times the return on the asset (before interest expenses), if it returns 10% annually the owner will get more like 50% annually, if it returns -5% annually, the owner will get -25% annually (again before interest expenses). In our examples above the asset returned 20% but due to the differences in financing the investors got very different returns.
Armed with this knowledge the optimal situation would be nearly no owner investment and almost all debt financing, assuming an investment is likely to produce returns. However, lenders will require a higher interest rate to projects that have less owner investment decreasing the returns (the asset must return more than the interst rate for this to work, it becomes increasingly difficult to find investments that will do this. In the stock market there are regulations limiting you to debt equal to your starting capital, and if you start to loose money the broker will issue a call requireing either additonal investments or he will sell your asset to bring it back in line with the rules. With a big successful company lenders stop at about 3/4 of total investment (3:1 leverage). Houses allow a ton of leverage (the old rules were for 20% (5:1 leverage) down but I know of people who put less than 10% down (10:1 leverage). Feel free to ask any further questions, this format is not ideal for math topics
Most technology firms are not in debt, or carry a token amount. There are three major reasons for this. First, successful technology firms generally mint money. Dell, Intel, MS, Oracle, and a whole host of others generated well over 1 billion in cash last year (and the year before, and before, etc), so they can fund expansion projects with retained cash. Second equity buyers have been happy to give them money with no expectation for a dividend for an increasingly small part of the company. Effectivly share increases mean that investors are willing to accept a smaller part of the company for the same amount of money. Finally, the rating agencies (the companies that issue opinions about how risky debt is, which are used by lenders to establish the rate at which they will loan money for) treat technology firms like late paying poor people. My personal rule of thumb is that technology firms will have a rating at least 3 notches or one full grade below a company with the same credit statistics in any other industry. Credit agencies look at a host of ratios for the basis of a rating. Two examples are Apple and Oracle both have well more than 10 times more cash than debt, and both have a long history of generating relativly stable operating cash, (more important to lenders than profits). If they operated in any other industry they would be at least AA (credit ratings go down from AAA, AA, A, BBB, BB, B, CCC, CC, C with + and - modifers on each rating, and D is a special rating for in default, ie not paying even the interest on the debt and no modifers). BB is the beginning of junk bonds. Apple's credit rating was BB and Oracle's was A-, to give you an some comparisons Qwest is B (they were touch and go on bankruptcy for the better part of 2002 and 2003). MS would likely not get a AAA rating with almost 60 billion in cash, and a two decade history of positive cash flows. Generally the rating agencies perceive a ton of operational risk in all firms that are involved in technology.
IANAL, but I have been involved in a few real estate transactions. Generally there is a clause in the sales contract that lets the agent collect a commission if real estate sells a certain number of months after it was removed from the market. If there was no clause, you would get a bad rep, and might have trouble finding an agent next time, but you would likely be in the clear, depending on your juristiction's laws.
Knowing my addiction, I would likely dump a serious amount of cash into a Gran Turisom arcade game that was a car simulation. Complete with bounces, engine roar, several screens (front, side, and rear windows), and was multiplayer. If it can somehow simulate accelleration and deceleration, I'd be in heaven. Oh and it needs a memory card interface, so I can save my game (or better yet bring cars from a home game).
Chile elected a pretty far left on the socialist scale government, in a fair election, and things went well until the US had had enough of communisim in the Americas and toppled him. Many countries in Europe have socialist coalition led governments (parlimentary systems allow much more diversity in the party system then our representative system). Coalitions must be formed, so all the left of center groups bundle together and all the right of center groups joint together, and each woos the centerist groups. This is similar to platform building by each party here, but viewpoints all have to be expressed in a more public setting and if the ruling coalition loses the support of a major block (either in the middle or at the extreeme) they tumble and a new coalition calls the shots for a while.
Cingular was formed after BellSouth and SBC compbined their respective wireless operations. BellSouth owns 45% and SBC owns 55%, I don't day to day operations are highly tied together between the parents and the wireless company, but they do offer a few freatures for those with landlines. Mostly you can reroute minutes between your hardline and cell plan.
I think the US got about 60-80 million of those phones, and about half would be GSM. However, one important note is that they probably accounted for more than 1/3 of global phone revenues, a Chinese phone that is sold to a pre-paid customer is going to have a wholesale price as low as possible (likely well below $100). A camera phone sold here to someone with a 1-2 yr contract might cost $300 or more wholesale (they actually mark them down to sell them to you).
AT&T is very much a TDMA transitioning to GSM (might be substantially complete). I'm not sure on the frequencies, but the network similarities is one of the big reasons Cingular is the buyer. Verizon, Sprint, and AllTel use CDMA. Cingular, AT&T, and T-Mobile all eventually plan to use GSM, and have been testing/trial running GPRS in places. Nextel uses iDEN which is the oddball, I think it's based on CDMA in parts, and built from the older radio networks.
Vodafone's plan here was to get Cingular to overpay, their stock dropped because investors began believing the rhetoric that management was putting out, cut and dry, it would be stupid to sell a nice minority stake in the biggest and best performing wireless company for ownership and brand extention in the third best. Cingular can consolodate networks and many other costs, Vodafone wouldn't have already owned a network and would have had much smaller savings opprotunities, mostly large purchase agreements that they have with handset and network providers.
It's like the linux airline, you get there, and it has the coolest, safest rollercoaster ever. New rides are tested daily, admission is low, but to ride the rollercoaster, you are handed a blueprint, parts, and a socket wrench. Parking is large, but a speedy mass transit gets you to and from your car quickly and easily. The food is good, the souvineers are resonably priced. When you get home and tell everyone they stare incredulously and ask "You had to do what with your seat?"
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You only need a single DBMS and it will be included in the next point release of emacs.
Door to door sales, and plastics kid, plastics. On a more serious note, tech support was generally tough to get an answer from long before it was outsourced to India, since the goal was shorter call times. One job that might come into vouge is personal tech support. I knew plenty of people who scored beer money doing the occasional tech job, and have seen more than a few rent a geek operations start up, and remain in business. I would think that Joe user might be interested in paying a reasonable fee for higher quality tech support.
One company that has always had tip top support is Bloomberg, I can't remember ever waiting on hold with them, and the staff fixes the problem even when problem exists between keyboard and chair. Of course at the prices they get, you better get something other than the script, if you work there keep up the great work.
Actually it can, lets say you have a huge factory that kicks out 1000 airplanes a year (enough to be a meaningful part of GDP, say 10%). One day this bright kid figures out that if you switch the order from putting wings on while you attach the engines you could produce 1100 planes a year, same people puting wings on and putting engines on, they just work at the same time and you added 10% to production. You just expanded national GDP by 1% without a single new job, although you might want to give the kid a promotion. That's measured by productivity, and it has grown immensly in several segments (retail and finance have been huge beneficiaries of technology). Rather than having people keep track of and count shares or cans of corn a computer does it.
Negative, I am a meat popsicle.
I'm looking forward to Eternal Sunshine of a Guiltless Mind, it looks interesting. I can't say I've liked everything he did, he seems to be trying too hard to win an oscar lately, but Liar, Liar and Dumb and Dumber were both retty good. I keep meaning to check out Man on the Moon, too.
I usually get a kick out of reading a few of those risks on the way down to the financials and (notes where the really important stuff is). I love the boilerplate ones were the comapny states that all their customers might well just up and stop purchasing their products. Incidentally, there was a pretty funny column on Slate a while ago that grabbed an old filing for Martha Stewart Omnimedia, that detailed the material risk that Martha might do something stupid and tarnish her image and thereby impact the value of the company.
As with most class action suits, the lead plaintiffs attorneys got 1/3 of the settlement amount, and split the remaining 2/3 amoung the rest of us. So they have a huge incentive to keep the system the same. The defendants much prefer a lumping as well, rather than defending tens of thousands of suits (not everyone who collected a check would have suit, but some of the people would have) requireing several thousand dollars each, or settling out of court. The only people who would benefit from class action reform are the little guys, and we only have say if we all group together. There are many other situations similar to this. Sugar quotas are also easy to see the beneifits flowing to a small few, while the costs are spread over the many. I think it costs the average consumer a few dollars a year, a healthy amount is lost, and the few sugar farmers in the US get a small part of the benefits consumers lost, but since the benefits accrue to say 1000 farmers, it's a huge amount to each of them.
One game that did a pretty good job of keeping a script while giving the player more control was Deus Ex, although I would have appreciated the central plot choice offering two very different paths. For those who have played it, the airplane bit with Anna and other guy. It would have rocked to have been able to make either choicen and play a whole different plotline. Another old one was Alien Legacy, an old Sierra game, where you were colonizing a new solar system. The plot was similar to System Shock, you were learning why the earlier colonies were missing, and it seemed pretty open ended, but still had a plot.
One hobby of mine is financial history, it was pretty funny to read the sages of Tulipmania and compare their stataments with analysts in 1999-2000, if you had replaced tuplips with IT, telecom, or the internet and put a company on the top, you could have saved a whole lot of cost, and put out investment research surprisingly similar to major investment banks.
Just as mathmaticians and pool sharks are usually two different groups with some crossove, economists and rich people usually have some crossover but remain distinct groups. My favorite dilbert leads with an economist beginning his talk with "I will now explain to you how even though I know all about money, I still dress like a flood victim." But yes you are generally right when you say that people on TV either aren't the best at finance, or if they are, don't really have time to give you the all the information you need to make a good decision.
AFAIK, the only things with sunset provisions are tax breaks. Because one side can campaign on we will review these fat cat tax breaks, and the other can say we know no one will give up a tax break, lets make these tax cuts permanent. It's a win/win situation for the pols.
If certain drinking establishments had a breathalizer I'd guess there would be a high score sheet next to it.
Short answer yes, leverage can really burn you. Long answer the great depression was triggered by a market crash, that toppled a few banks who issued too many loans to speculators who lost their shirts and the losses were quick and large enough to cause the loans to not be repaid. (I didn't mention that banks run at about 20:1 leverage ratios) so the banks began to fail, which caused a run on banks that wouldn't have failed, but didn't have enough liquidity (banks never do, in a true run). However, it was also exacerbated by a Fed decision to cut liquidity and raise interest rates at the start of this. Ultimately the depression was people sitting on currency because of fear, rather than spending or saving it. Macroeconomics is a lot like the weather, there are a ton of very complex variables that lead to effects.
Oddly enough risky investments are sometimes ok to borrow against, it's a matter of the level of risk tolerance you are comfortable with. Real Estate is ultimately a risky asset, but most of us are comfortable borrowing and lending against it, as there are considerable forces absorbing and reducing that risk. Oh, and the only risk free investment are government treasury bonds (The US seems to be the gold standard, although I'm be comfortable with Euro zone and Japanese bonds, too especially last year with the nice currency boost) banks are only as good as the government that insures them. Ultimately governments can print money so they will always pay their debts, although the currency might not be worth much, as a bunch of pensioners are learning about Argentina's bonds. Finally, it's very hard to find people who will loan money to a startup, if you do you have a very good friend.
At least on average the majority of the profit (if not most of the revenue) goes to the record label that owns the copyright to the music be they RIAA afiliated or not. I'm not sure if the terms are very different between indie labels and major labels on the revenue split with Apple, but would assume them to be similar. Suffice to say that for the average purchase the record label gets most of the money, while apple gets enough from that sale to cover advertising, development, bandwidth, serving, and other costs associated with iTMS. However, they are much more likely to sell an iPod that makes Apple a ton of money.
Generally bonds must be purchased on the market at the going price unless there is a term allowing the borrower to repay the bond early (called a call option or callable bond). Since rates have been low and Apple is less risky they they have been in the past, it would have cost them more to repay them prior to their maturity (when they repay at face value).
Debt is leverage, it amplifies your returns to owners. This is great if you do well, but it is bad if you do poorly. Most people experience this when with mortgages (because of a ton of very favorable laws and a reasonably good housing market since wwII lenders will give an amazing amount of leverage on a house). Which is why they thing real estate is such a good investment, houses have actually been out performed by most other asset classes, but nothing else allows the same measure of leverage.
For a simple example lets look at buying stock on margin. Take Microsoft, let's say Bill and Steve each have $1000 to invest in MS and the current share price is $25. Bill chooses to buy 40 shares for $1000 (ignoring commissions), while steve listened to his MBA friend and bought 80 shares, taking a loan for $1000 and puting up his own $1000. The next day MS comes out better than expected earnings and the price pops to $30 per share. Both sell their stock. Bill gets $1200 (40x$30) while Steve gets $1400 (80x30-1000) I'm rounding off the $0.11 in interest expenses.
Now if the news had been bad, and the stock fell to $20, the opposite would have happened, Bill would have $800 (40x$20), while Steve would have $600 (80x$20-1000), again ignoring the $0.11 in daily interest.
With debt financing you multiply the regular returns by the inverse of the percentage you put up. (If you put up one fifth of the intial capital you will recieve five times the return on the asset (before interest expenses), if it returns 10% annually the owner will get more like 50% annually, if it returns -5% annually, the owner will get -25% annually (again before interest expenses). In our examples above the asset returned 20% but due to the differences in financing the investors got very different returns.
Armed with this knowledge the optimal situation would be nearly no owner investment and almost all debt financing, assuming an investment is likely to produce returns. However, lenders will require a higher interest rate to projects that have less owner investment decreasing the returns (the asset must return more than the interst rate for this to work, it becomes increasingly difficult to find investments that will do this. In the stock market there are regulations limiting you to debt equal to your starting capital, and if you start to loose money the broker will issue a call requireing either additonal investments or he will sell your asset to bring it back in line with the rules. With a big successful company lenders stop at about 3/4 of total investment (3:1 leverage). Houses allow a ton of leverage (the old rules were for 20% (5:1 leverage) down but I know of people who put less than 10% down (10:1 leverage). Feel free to ask any further questions, this format is not ideal for math topics
Most technology firms are not in debt, or carry a token amount. There are three major reasons for this. First, successful technology firms generally mint money. Dell, Intel, MS, Oracle, and a whole host of others generated well over 1 billion in cash last year (and the year before, and before, etc), so they can fund expansion projects with retained cash. Second equity buyers have been happy to give them money with no expectation for a dividend for an increasingly small part of the company. Effectivly share increases mean that investors are willing to accept a smaller part of the company for the same amount of money. Finally, the rating agencies (the companies that issue opinions about how risky debt is, which are used by lenders to establish the rate at which they will loan money for) treat technology firms like late paying poor people. My personal rule of thumb is that technology firms will have a rating at least 3 notches or one full grade below a company with the same credit statistics in any other industry. Credit agencies look at a host of ratios for the basis of a rating. Two examples are Apple and Oracle both have well more than 10 times more cash than debt, and both have a long history of generating relativly stable operating cash, (more important to lenders than profits). If they operated in any other industry they would be at least AA (credit ratings go down from AAA, AA, A, BBB, BB, B, CCC, CC, C with + and - modifers on each rating, and D is a special rating for in default, ie not paying even the interest on the debt and no modifers). BB is the beginning of junk bonds. Apple's credit rating was BB and Oracle's was A-, to give you an some comparisons Qwest is B (they were touch and go on bankruptcy for the better part of 2002 and 2003). MS would likely not get a AAA rating with almost 60 billion in cash, and a two decade history of positive cash flows. Generally the rating agencies perceive a ton of operational risk in all firms that are involved in technology.
IANAL, but I have been involved in a few real estate transactions. Generally there is a clause in the sales contract that lets the agent collect a commission if real estate sells a certain number of months after it was removed from the market. If there was no clause, you would get a bad rep, and might have trouble finding an agent next time, but you would likely be in the clear, depending on your juristiction's laws.
Knowing my addiction, I would likely dump a serious amount of cash into a Gran Turisom arcade game that was a car simulation. Complete with bounces, engine roar, several screens (front, side, and rear windows), and was multiplayer. If it can somehow simulate accelleration and deceleration, I'd be in heaven. Oh and it needs a memory card interface, so I can save my game (or better yet bring cars from a home game).
Chile elected a pretty far left on the socialist scale government, in a fair election, and things went well until the US had had enough of communisim in the Americas and toppled him.
Many countries in Europe have socialist coalition led governments (parlimentary systems allow much more diversity in the party system then our representative system). Coalitions must be formed, so all the left of center groups bundle together and all the right of center groups joint together, and each woos the centerist groups. This is similar to platform building by each party here, but viewpoints all have to be expressed in a more public setting and if the ruling coalition loses the support of a major block (either in the middle or at the extreeme) they tumble and a new coalition calls the shots for a while.
Cingular was formed after BellSouth and SBC compbined their respective wireless operations. BellSouth owns 45% and SBC owns 55%, I don't day to day operations are highly tied together between the parents and the wireless company, but they do offer a few freatures for those with landlines. Mostly you can reroute minutes between your hardline and cell plan.
I think the US got about 60-80 million of those phones, and about half would be GSM. However, one important note is that they probably accounted for more than 1/3 of global phone revenues, a Chinese phone that is sold to a pre-paid customer is going to have a wholesale price as low as possible (likely well below $100). A camera phone sold here to someone with a 1-2 yr contract might cost $300 or more wholesale (they actually mark them down to sell them to you).
AT&T is very much a TDMA transitioning to GSM (might be substantially complete). I'm not sure on the frequencies, but the network similarities is one of the big reasons Cingular is the buyer. Verizon, Sprint, and AllTel use CDMA. Cingular, AT&T, and T-Mobile all eventually plan to use GSM, and have been testing/trial running GPRS in places. Nextel uses iDEN which is the oddball, I think it's based on CDMA in parts, and built from the older radio networks.
Vodafone's plan here was to get Cingular to overpay, their stock dropped because investors began believing the rhetoric that management was putting out, cut and dry, it would be stupid to sell a nice minority stake in the biggest and best performing wireless company for ownership and brand extention in the third best. Cingular can consolodate networks and many other costs, Vodafone wouldn't have already owned a network and would have had much smaller savings opprotunities, mostly large purchase agreements that they have with handset and network providers.
It's like the linux airline, you get there, and it has the coolest, safest rollercoaster ever. New rides are tested daily, admission is low, but to ride the rollercoaster, you are handed a blueprint, parts, and a socket wrench. Parking is large, but a speedy mass transit gets you to and from your car quickly and easily. The food is good, the souvineers are resonably priced. When you get home and tell everyone they stare incredulously and ask "You had to do what with your seat?"