FYI, some countries like China keep those dollars maintain their exchange rate, of course they ususally buy our debt. Two results of this are strong dollars which keep others investing here, boosting our markets and building factories, and keeping interest rates low, allowing many people to pay a whole lot less for a house. Also, they tried that in the 70s and found that inflation and unemployment can coexist, several people got Nobel prizes for pointing out why the links didn't always work.
Some things are and others aren't cheaper in India, obviously a BMW needs to generate about EUR 30,000 for the manufacturer and shipper, but the car dealer here might need USD5000 and the Indian car dealer might be overjoyed with $500 in Rupees. Other luxury goods require signficantly less foreign manufacture. Take eating out as an example, her a resturant might charge $10-$20/plate, maybe only $1 there. Apartment rent is at a minimum $300/mo here (with roommates), it might be closer to $50 or $100 there. As a result of all the lower costs of inputs, the cost of internally made luxury goods is far enough lower that upper class Indians have more money for foreign luxury goods. Is someone there who can rent a nice place grabs a daily latte, and eats out three times a week for a total of $7,000/year, but makes $20,000 better or worse off than someone here who makes $60,000 but uses $55,000 to have a similar lifestyle, if say Swiss Watches, German cars, and American PCs cost the same in both places after adjusting for currency?
You might want to check out some of the stuff that was written about Japan in the 1980s. They were doing the samething with the then huge growth industries at the time (computers and semiconductors) after already taking a healthy chunk of steel, shipbuilding and cars. Their banks could undercut ours because the people saved money regardless of interest rates and they could make crazy loan provisions on the real estate business that had only gone up for almost 30 years. Finally, their market had been booming for well over a decade (similar to 99-00 but for a much longer period). Incidentally, the bubble broke, Korea and Taiwan got cheaper on steel and shipbuilding and they completely missed the development of software and the internet. The sun rises, the sun sets. We generally win because our culture and education encourage risk taking idea generation rather than optimization of something that already exists. Transitions do suck though.
The employee corrilary is never work in a cost center, always work in a profit center. Meaning if what you do has no possiblity of generating revenue, you might want to rethink your career path at that firm.
One other reason for the very high wages, have you ever met a 50 year old contractor? Unless they moved into managment in their late 30s/early 40s, they have usually physically worn out their bodies. They trade higher wages for a shorter career. There is no free lunch.
Cisco is very much a hardware company. Their hardware requires some software to operate, and they found software licensing terms quite useful when all the failed dotcom hardare was hitting the market cheap, but they are still in the hardware business. It's interesting that this would be so easy to add, and isn't probably because there is a Cisco VoIP router for enterprises that costs 10 times as much and does the same thing.
I have one and bought it in the past few years, I did pick it up on clearance though. There is one reason I have it. I became a RPN addict with my 48G and this was one of two calculators allowed on a popular professional exam series, and the only one that is RPN compatible. It is very slow, I think I can do interest rate calculations on it using the equations by hand faster than it can using it's interest rate calculator.
I doubt that the would be so excited if their monthly bill broke out the cost of the phone that is ammortized over the next three years. If you could find a plan that offered plain jane phones, you could knock about $15-$20 a month off most plans.
ALthough the homebuilt organization rocks (they'd probably want to be known as experimental aircraft organization, though). It's existance likely has more to do with lawsuits that drove the GA industry out of this country in the 70s. Now that aircraft makers have more immunity to crazy class action suits there is a ton of innovation going into new designs. Check out Adam aircraft's new twin push pull design, not exactkt cheap but it sure looks like a nice plane.
There are still machine shops which will custom make screws for you. They won't be cheap and you will probably have to buy a lifetime supply, but you can spec out the slot, head, lenght and everything.
The right market conditions are similar to what the market had in December but lost in January. You want about 6 straight months of up with people basically fear not being in the market and missing out on the upside, rather than I could lose my shirt. IPOs are a very preverse market, similar to used cars in which the people who know the most about a complex transaction are all selling.
The goal of an IPO for a company like Google, is to create a ton of market cap, so early investors can exit, and other companies can be purchased for fewer shares.
Energy, NHT, Tannoy, and Paradigm (note that there are probably many others but I have personally had good results with all four) for example produce excellent sound on a pretty reasonable budget. Yeah you need a sub, but they sound great. I would think that if you spent more than 1k on a speaker, your money didn't buy you a whole lot more than what it did several years ago, but I've yet to find anyone who isn't amazed by the sound these bookshelf units put out. I'd argue that if speaker tech hasn't improved, the cost to buy reasonably good sound has really declined. I'd say that amp technology has really stagnated, my friend's old NAD sounds wonderful compared to anything new, but good speakers have at least moved down in price.
Options are a method of valuing risk. Because everyone has a differnt risk tolerance, valuing options is quite difficult. In the case of corporate options, it's easiest to think of the value in two parts:
1. Intrinsic value--this is the in the money value (An MS employee who can buy 10 shares for $20 has about $7 (rough estimate) of intrinsic value on their options).
2. Time value--This is the sticky part. This is the value placed on the fact that at some time in the future, any option (even some $400 Amazon options). This is the value that is different for each person. If you want to explore theroy on time value the Black-Scholes model approximates this fairly well.
To show why they are so regularly used, lets use an example staring Cisco. Cisco grants an employee an option to buy a share at $26 per share (They closed at $26.20 today, but I like the round numbers will be easier to follow). This option lasts for 10 years, the longer an option is good for the more valuable it is because you have more time to reach a payoff. The employee might assign some value to this option, but probably much less than the $5 that the maket is paying for the time value of a three year option that have a strike of $25. They employee cannot sell his option so it really won't be useful to him until he can excersise it. Anyway Cisco would assign zero expense on their income statement to other shareholders for this option. Once the option is in the money they would include it in their diluted share count. Now after a few years passes, let's say January of 2007, Cisco is trading at $30. They employee is now ready to excersise his option. At this point Cisco takes $25 from the employee and gives him a share of Cisco (reducing everyone's percentage ownership because there is now one additional share, and the same company. The comapny still does not record any expense (in their statements to their owners) associated with this transaction. However they do report a cash increase of $25 for the sale of a share.
However on Cisco's tax return (corporations file them, too) they report a $5 expense in the 2007 tax year. Managemnet increases their cash balance, pays the employee, reduces their taxes, and doesn't report any downside to their owners until the option is in the money (it goes into their share count at that point). Multiply the single share by several million and you can see why managment likes this a lot.
I find the hard drive pretty handy in that I don't need to buy memory cards, or swap them around. I think they see memory cards as a potential place to offset some of the losses generated by the console, which can be produced at a lower cost without a Hard drive. I would guess that everyone else sells them at a profit. Seems like a pretty good idea for them all around.
A contemporary of Edison, who was the inventor of a ton of stuff, he failed because he was his opposite, invented stuff, but didn't sell it. Edison didn't invent much, but he was tenacious about selling it. I think he was responsible for the development of most of the technology that makes our electrical system work using alternating current. Westinghouse was the popularizer of these developments. Goes a long way to show which we value more in the US.
The contrast between Edison and Tesla is similar to the differences between Jobs and Woz (although they never worked together and were bitter rivals), the marketers face and name gets associated with the product even if they had little to do with the development.
One of the tricks they used in the article was almost perfect voice mimics. They could call an executive assistant and the person on the other line would think they were talking to their boss. It's rather amazing how tuned our senses can be if we take the time to hone them.
I might have forgotten, but as a child I loved the Berenstain Bears and don't recall any major socialism. The father worked in a business he owned, why could they have been capitalists?
I think Brother Bear was released only because it was already finished years ago, and was going to make nothing just sitting on the shelf. If it hurt the brand by $100 million is an exercise left to reader.
Wow, I'm envisioning two hours of a giant matrix like 1 flashing over the screen, you better go stoned. I think I'd rather go hit Laser pink floyd or something.
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FYI, some countries like China keep those dollars maintain their exchange rate, of course they ususally buy our debt. Two results of this are strong dollars which keep others investing here, boosting our markets and building factories, and keeping interest rates low, allowing many people to pay a whole lot less for a house. Also, they tried that in the 70s and found that inflation and unemployment can coexist, several people got Nobel prizes for pointing out why the links didn't always work.
Some things are and others aren't cheaper in India, obviously a BMW needs to generate about EUR 30,000 for the manufacturer and shipper, but the car dealer here might need USD5000 and the Indian car dealer might be overjoyed with $500 in Rupees. Other luxury goods require signficantly less foreign manufacture. Take eating out as an example, her a resturant might charge $10-$20/plate, maybe only $1 there. Apartment rent is at a minimum $300/mo here (with roommates), it might be closer to $50 or $100 there. As a result of all the lower costs of inputs, the cost of internally made luxury goods is far enough lower that upper class Indians have more money for foreign luxury goods.
Is someone there who can rent a nice place grabs a daily latte, and eats out three times a week for a total of $7,000/year, but makes $20,000 better or worse off than someone here who makes $60,000 but uses $55,000 to have a similar lifestyle, if say Swiss Watches, German cars, and American PCs cost the same in both places after adjusting for currency?
You might want to check out some of the stuff that was written about Japan in the 1980s. They were doing the samething with the then huge growth industries at the time (computers and semiconductors) after already taking a healthy chunk of steel, shipbuilding and cars. Their banks could undercut ours because the people saved money regardless of interest rates and they could make crazy loan provisions on the real estate business that had only gone up for almost 30 years. Finally, their market had been booming for well over a decade (similar to 99-00 but for a much longer period).
Incidentally, the bubble broke, Korea and Taiwan got cheaper on steel and shipbuilding and they completely missed the development of software and the internet. The sun rises, the sun sets. We generally win because our culture and education encourage risk taking idea generation rather than optimization of something that already exists. Transitions do suck though.
The employee corrilary is never work in a cost center, always work in a profit center. Meaning if what you do has no possiblity of generating revenue, you might want to rethink your career path at that firm.
One other reason for the very high wages, have you ever met a 50 year old contractor? Unless they moved into managment in their late 30s/early 40s, they have usually physically worn out their bodies. They trade higher wages for a shorter career. There is no free lunch.
I want mine to show phases of the moon, too.
Cisco is very much a hardware company. Their hardware requires some software to operate, and they found software licensing terms quite useful when all the failed dotcom hardare was hitting the market cheap, but they are still in the hardware business. It's interesting that this would be so easy to add, and isn't probably because there is a Cisco VoIP router for enterprises that costs 10 times as much and does the same thing.
AMD used to have a link on their site to 360 day betas of win2k3 server for both Opteron and Itanium.
I have one and bought it in the past few years, I did pick it up on clearance though. There is one reason I have it. I became a RPN addict with my 48G and this was one of two calculators allowed on a popular professional exam series, and the only one that is RPN compatible. It is very slow, I think I can do interest rate calculations on it using the equations by hand faster than it can using it's interest rate calculator.
I doubt that the would be so excited if their monthly bill broke out the cost of the phone that is ammortized over the next three years. If you could find a plan that offered plain jane phones, you could knock about $15-$20 a month off most plans.
I don't think sony is planning backwards compatability for their next generation console due on '06, either.
ALthough the homebuilt organization rocks (they'd probably want to be known as experimental aircraft organization, though). It's existance likely has more to do with lawsuits that drove the GA industry out of this country in the 70s. Now that aircraft makers have more immunity to crazy class action suits there is a ton of innovation going into new designs. Check out Adam aircraft's new twin push pull design, not exactkt cheap but it sure looks like a nice plane.
There are still machine shops which will custom make screws for you. They won't be cheap and you will probably have to buy a lifetime supply, but you can spec out the slot, head, lenght and everything.
The right market conditions are similar to what the market had in December but lost in January. You want about 6 straight months of up with people basically fear not being in the market and missing out on the upside, rather than I could lose my shirt. IPOs are a very preverse market, similar to used cars in which the people who know the most about a complex transaction are all selling.
The goal of an IPO for a company like Google, is to create a ton of market cap, so early investors can exit, and other companies can be purchased for fewer shares.
Energy, NHT, Tannoy, and Paradigm (note that there are probably many others but I have personally had good results with all four) for example produce excellent sound on a pretty reasonable budget. Yeah you need a sub, but they sound great. I would think that if you spent more than 1k on a speaker, your money didn't buy you a whole lot more than what it did several years ago, but I've yet to find anyone who isn't amazed by the sound these bookshelf units put out. I'd argue that if speaker tech hasn't improved, the cost to buy reasonably good sound has really declined. I'd say that amp technology has really stagnated, my friend's old NAD sounds wonderful compared to anything new, but good speakers have at least moved down in price.
Options are a method of valuing risk. Because everyone has a differnt risk tolerance, valuing options is quite difficult. In the case of corporate options, it's easiest to think of the value in two parts:
1. Intrinsic value--this is the in the money value (An MS employee who can buy 10 shares for $20 has about $7 (rough estimate) of intrinsic value on their options).
2. Time value--This is the sticky part. This is the value placed on the fact that at some time in the future, any option (even some $400 Amazon options). This is the value that is different for each person. If you want to explore theroy on time value the Black-Scholes model approximates this fairly well.
To show why they are so regularly used, lets use an example staring Cisco. Cisco grants an employee an option to buy a share at $26 per share (They closed at $26.20 today, but I like the round numbers will be easier to follow). This option lasts for 10 years, the longer an option is good for the more valuable it is because you have more time to reach a payoff. The employee might assign some value to this option, but probably much less than the $5 that the maket is paying for the time value of a three year option that have a strike of $25. They employee cannot sell his option so it really won't be useful to him until he can excersise it. Anyway Cisco would assign zero expense on their income statement to other shareholders for this option. Once the option is in the money they would include it in their diluted share count. Now after a few years passes, let's say January of 2007, Cisco is trading at $30. They employee is now ready to excersise his option. At this point Cisco takes $25 from the employee and gives him a share of Cisco (reducing everyone's percentage ownership because there is now one additional share, and the same company. The comapny still does not record any expense (in their statements to their owners) associated with this transaction. However they do report a cash increase of $25 for the sale of a share.
However on Cisco's tax return (corporations file them, too) they report a $5 expense in the 2007 tax year. Managemnet increases their cash balance, pays the employee, reduces their taxes, and doesn't report any downside to their owners until the option is in the money (it goes into their share count at that point). Multiply the single share by several million and you can see why managment likes this a lot.
I find the hard drive pretty handy in that I don't need to buy memory cards, or swap them around. I think they see memory cards as a potential place to offset some of the losses generated by the console, which can be produced at a lower cost without a Hard drive. I would guess that everyone else sells them at a profit. Seems like a pretty good idea for them all around.
A contemporary of Edison, who was the inventor of a ton of stuff, he failed because he was his opposite, invented stuff, but didn't sell it. Edison didn't invent much, but he was tenacious about selling it. I think he was responsible for the development of most of the technology that makes our electrical system work using alternating current. Westinghouse was the popularizer of these developments. Goes a long way to show which we value more in the US.
The contrast between Edison and Tesla is similar to the differences between Jobs and Woz (although they never worked together and were bitter rivals), the marketers face and name gets associated with the product even if they had little to do with the development.
But if they said Tesla and Che Guevara no one would have understood the reference.
One of the tricks they used in the article was almost perfect voice mimics. They could call an executive assistant and the person on the other line would think they were talking to their boss. It's rather amazing how tuned our senses can be if we take the time to hone them.
I might have forgotten, but as a child I loved the Berenstain Bears and don't recall any major socialism. The father worked in a business he owned, why could they have been capitalists?
I think Brother Bear was released only because it was already finished years ago, and was going to make nothing just sitting on the shelf. If it hurt the brand by $100 million is an exercise left to reader.
I thought that Princes Mononoke or a Spirited Away would at least be rivals to Snow White, which is excellent.
The Emporer's New Groove is actually pretty funny, and much better than the rest of your list, which all suck. It's off beat like Lilo and Stich.
Wow, I'm envisioning two hours of a giant matrix like 1 flashing over the screen, you better go stoned. I think I'd rather go hit Laser pink floyd or something.