There's no doubt that outsourcing is bad for the people who lose their jobs. But you're ignoring the other side of the equation. The money that is saved on programming jobs gets distributed into the whole of society in one of three ways:
The companies who save money outsourcing buy other things - increasing jobs for those companies who sell those other things
The companies put the money into the bank - increasinng the money supply, causing interest rates to lower, resulting in more loans. More loans means people use that money to buy stuff that they want - increasing jobs for those companies who sell the stuff people want.
The companies put that money into increased profits for the owners of the company, who then turn around and do one of the two things above - resulting in increased jobs for whereever that money gets spent.
Outsourcing transfers jobs from those who are overpriced (for the available market) to those who are underpriced (i.e. to where there's demand - increasing the price of those jobs). Yes, it stinks for those who lose their jobs, but in the long run even they benefit by the overall economic increase in efficiency.
Yes, but that misses the point, doesn't it? Microsoft went to great lengths to claim that IE is integral to the OS in such a way that it can't be seperated. If they suddenly agree that it can be seperated enough to isolate the source code (and open source it), then they wouldn't they be admitting that they lied to the court during their antitrust trial?
Whether they can technically do this or not, I doubt that they can politically do it.
I think the most interesting part of the article was this:
The Result Would be a system that is both lightweight and fast. Everything
could move at the speed of a finely tuned video game. Advances
in rendering pipelines and library design would be easy to
accommodate. This window system design isn't particularly
radical: it's more just pointing out that this is the way that X is
going already, given the increasing predominance of applicationside
rendering libraries. Once you accept that fact and admit that
it's actually the right way to go, the design falls out, simply by
stripping away legacy stuff that isn't needed any more.
I can't count how many times I hear on/. someone saying that X is too bulky, etc, etc. And here's Gosling saying (2 years ago) that X is headed in the direction of slim and lightweight.
I agree with the grandparent post, that DirecTiVo's are slow - especially in comparison to SA TiVo's. I would not agree that it's as bad as he makes it out to be. It's not great, but it's certainly better than watching live TV.
But I almost entirely disagree with your post. I originally had an SA TiVo and switched to a DirecTiVo. The DirecTiVo doesn't switch channels any faster than the SA did. And you've got a TiVo, there's no need to surf - browse your "Now Playing" list and find something you know you're going to like. But even if you must channel surf, a much more effective way of doing is it guide surfing. Don't switch channels! Pause live TV, bring up the guide and figure out what's ACTUALLY ON instead of hitting commercials 50% of the time and not knowing. Then when you find something you like, switch the channel once.
As far as asking TiVo to stop recording spanish language movies, that's a relatively trivial thing to fix by removing the spanish language channels from your "Channels I receive" list. TiVo will never record a suggestion off of a channel it doesn't think you get. This will also fix the problem of recording from channels that you don't receive.
As for me, personally, there are two features that I can't give up with my DirecTiVo:
Perfect picture quality - based on the already digitally encoded DirecTV signal instead of the wimpy hardware encoder that comes in the standalone.
Dual tuner - I can record two things at once VASTLY cutting down on the number of conflicts.
My SA TiVo was great for introducing me to the technology, but IMHO, my DTiVo is the way DVRs ought to be.
It's not the interface that makes IDE drives less reliable
Maybe not, but I've noticed that SCSI drives ARE more reliable than IDE drives. And personally, I think it's because people who buy SCSI demand reliability so the manufactureres provide it. The tradeoff is that you don't have 250GB SCSI drives. Meanwhile, customers of IDE drives demand size, because they're downloading songs and movies and whatever. The tradeoff is reliability.
Personally, I'd just like a nice reliable 40GB drive at the $.50 per GB price point. I'd buy 4 of them today if I could. But I can't. In order to get to that price point, I have to purchase a 120GB drive which has 80GB more than I need, artificially skewing the perception that larger is in higher demand.
One would think that as the development costs and demand lowers on 40 GB drives, that the price would go down, but it hasn't. Heck, I'd be happy with a 20GB drive, if I had any confidence that it would last longer than 1 year!
I won't use Raid-0 on my desktop unless I have a short term need for extra performance. Desktop based hard drives are just too unreliable to lose ALL of your data if you lose one of the striped drives.
In the two computers I have at my house, I've lost 4 IDE hard drives in the last 6 months! Maybe RAID-1, but even then I'd prefer a backup solution instead of a real-time data redundancy solution. (It's hard to restore a file that you *accidentally* deleted from a RAID based solution.)
Until SCSI gets cheaper or IDE gets more reliable, neither of which I see happening any time soon, I am unlikely to use RAID on the desktop in any sort as any sort of long term solution.
I think that depends on the feature set that's important to you. For me, perfect picture quality from my TV provider is really quite important. In which case the DirecTiVo is the clear winner. No F/OSS PVR can currently offer that. Hopefully, when CableCARD is implemented everywhere, that will change.
Our current PTSN works as well as it does because it's regulated
Regulation of our current PSTN is a necessary evil bourne out of the fact that market forces are artifically removed from the situation. Which is to say, when there's no competition in a market, and a high barrier to entry into that market, regulation is necessary in order to ensure standards. This is exactly the case with the PSTN, where the ILECs would rule with an iron fist in absence of regulation.
However, in a competitive market, regulation is unnecessary. The market will define, through competition, the standards that it wants most. And moreover, with competition, you get to choose which standards are most important to you, instead of being spoon fed a single set of standards that you don't care about.
Put another way: competition is a regulatory force that costs less then governmental regulation because it requires no government to implement.
and this is just more one example of how VoIP companies won't implement correctly things they aren't required to implement correctly.
Quite right, but there's more than one way to impose requirements than just turning to a government. In the VoIP market, if you don't like the permissiveness of your provider, call them up, tell them why you don't like them, and switch to someone else who isn't as permissive. If enough people do this, then the provider will either change or die. Exactly the same result as if a government were to regulate it, with the added benefit of being cheaper to our society.
If 1 simple 'no' would have sufficed, having 5 people confront me probably wouldn't be so bad. But when you have to tell each person no at least 3 times, it gets a little old.
So what you're saying is that BB is paying people to spend time trying to get you to buy something that you don't want. I think you're looking at this wrong. Either, this is effective and makes money for Best Buy or it isn't. If it's effective, it's because enough customers are willing to pay for it - resulting in a profitable practice for BB. This profit then goes into subsidizing cheap "advertised specials". BB intentially lowers the profit margin on their product so that they can get a higher profit margin on service plans. Which works for me. I don't have to buy the low value service plan. But because BB advertised their special, they have to sell me the low margin product. If someone else is spending money on a service plan which subsidizes my low margin product, my reaction is, "Hey thanks!" And not only that, "Thanks to you BB for putting this deal together... and I'll pass on the service plan."
On the other hand, if pushy sales reps turns out to be unprofitable in the long run, it's because most people are annoyed with it and won't buy those plans. BB will figure this out and stop doing it. Which means that they'll have to build more profit margin into their products. Which means that I'll lose a lot of the great deals that they advertise. Again, this is no problem for me. If BB doesn't actually have the best deals, I'll go somewhere else.
And I may be an anomaly, but I've been playing the rebate game with BB for nearly 10 years. I have received the correct rebate that was due to me every single time. From my point of view, for some products, I have a really hard time finding better deals than what BB offers. I'm more than happy to say "No thank you" 10 times to get those deals.
if I thought that it "sucked," I would definitely try to offer constructive criticism.
Agreed. However, this isn't the forum for offering that level of detail. The purpose of my post was a bit more general than that: to identify that the real battle for PFM is between Quicken & Money.
If you're curious about why I don't like gnucash, I can summarize in two words: double entry. I just don't think about my money like that. First, it confuses the heck out of me, and second, I spent a ton of time trying to get split transactiosn to work properly. Beyond that, the reports were limited, the ability to forecast cashflow wasn't there, and the ability to maintain a budget wasn't there.
Personally, I have a lot of hope for gnucash. But it takes too much effort to use today - especially in comparison to Money.
It sounds like you enter all your payments and deposits by hand, the same as I do. And from your statement, it sounds like you enter more information than the bank supplies (again, just like I do).
So all you get from the "support" at the bank is the chance to fix the mistakes that makes when it downloads the data from the bank and guesses wrong.
Well, I'm not that guy, but when I download a transaction from my bank, all that the bank knows is how much has been deposited or w/drawn from the account. Let's use a paycheck as an example, and imagine that I get paid $100/mo. Well, of course, after taxes, contributions to a 401(k), health insurance deductions, etc, the final deposited sum is only $62. What the bank knows is that it got a deposit of $62 and who it came from.
What I do in Money is I pre-enter what my paychecks look like. I pre-enter that my paycheck is $100 worth of income - $20 for taxes - $10 for 401(k) - $8 for healthinsurnace. Now, all I have to do is tell Money, "Hey I got paid today", and it enters that paycheck with all of the totals pre-categorized. Every month, I simply click on that pre-defined transaction and it enters it into my register for me. Then, when I download transactions from my bank, it gueses that the $62 deposit that it sees is my paycheck and asks, "Should I match this $62 transaction to the one that you already have in there?" 99% of the time my answer is, "Yes, thank you."
Now, if my paycheck were different everytime I received it, this pattern wouldn't work. I'd have to manually enter all of the tax information everytime. And, of course, I wouldn't expect my bank to know all of that information. And there's no way the software can know all of that information. So I have to tell it.
I have a couple of accounts that don't support electronic transaction downloads. I hate those accounts. Keeping track of them is a TON more work. Fortunately, they only see activity once or twice a month. If this were my credit card (which sees LOTS of activity) then I'd switch banks until I found one that supported electronic transaction downloads.
Personally, I can't imagine going back to a spreadsheet to manage my finances. Already you spend 200% more time managing your transactions than I spend.
If the banks TRULY supported those apps, they would be keyed on unique transaction numbers.
But both the banks and the software supports unique transaction id's. See? Says so here, too. (You gotta search for "FITID" word doc.) Gnucash supports them, too.
It's only if you use the old QIF format that you don't get unique transaction IDs. Which is, of course, why MS Money only imports OFX and doesn't export OFX. It only exports QIF. So that if you've got your data in MS Money and you try to import it into some other program (gnucash or quicken) you'll have to deal with duplicates.
The toughest part of my original switch to MS Money was the fact that choosing to use a Microsoft product made me feel a bit dirty =/
Me too! But I have to admit that it's a really good product. I've used it since Money 2001, and I've used just about every feature available in the "Deluxe" version. I use it daily to track my finances, and run reports periodically to ensure that my spending doesn't eclipse my earning.
I'd love to try a competitive package. Gnucash is just too hard. I spend a week every so often with the latest version of gnucash to see if it's gotten better... and it has, but it's still way behind. I'd love to try Quicken, but Intuit doesn't seem to have a trial version. Moneydance is ok, but it's basic and doesn't do all that I need.
It's been about 8 months since I tried gnucash, maybe I should give it another try...
I hate to admit it (as a Linux user) that I use Microsoft Money. I've used MS Money since 2001, and the reason? Because I could try it before I bought it. As far as I can tell there's no way to try the latest version of Quicken without first plunking down some cash. And then if I don't like it, I'm stuck with something that I don't like.
I've tried gnucash and Moneydance. Frankly, they suck. I would love to see a usable personal finance software package from the F/OSS crowd that will run on my linux boxes. But I haven't found one yet. The only two options (IMHO) are Quicken and MS Money. And I'm not going to pay for Quicken until I'm sure that it will meet my needs. And personal financial management software is absolutely critical in my ability to maintain what I espouse in my signature. I use MS Money every day. I skip a day every week or so. But if I ever skipped a week, I'd feel very uncomfortable about my personal finances.
So, I'd much prefer to use a F/OSS package that accomplishes what I can do in MS Money. And, in lieu of that, I'd prefer one that was platform independant. But nothing that I've tried yet has come even close.
That assumes that universal broadband is universally wanted. Right now, broadband isn't universally subscribed to in the areas where it's available. Why should anyone spend the time and money trying to do this really difficult thing which would only enjoy relatively low demand?
I know that this isn't a very satisfying answer, but there's much easier solutions for any individual who wants to get broadband and it's not available to them right now:
All of these are much easier and cheaper alternatives to deploying broadband over powerlines. If you're a company that's going to take a risk on this thing, it better have really high demand. If it doesn't have really high demand, it better not be a very expensive gamble.
If this wasn't so investing on the stock-markets would on the average be a loosing proposition, and so it'd be stupid to do it.
I don't think that's true. The stock markets represent human decisions and analysis. The market is constantly moving towards the successful companies. The failures in the market fall out of the market. Thus the overall stock market can continue to succeed because the entire purpose of it is to weed out the failures. Which means, that if you pick a random sampling of stocks, you're going to get both future winners and future losers. You have to be mobile enough to cut your losses from the losers at the appropriate time, and move them to the winners.
I see you've fallen into a common trap. You claim that there are well-known, simple things to do that if you fail to do them will net you a poorer ROI, and if you do them will help;
I didn't mean to suggest that these things were simple. In fact, I meant to suggest that they take effort and are hard enough to be considered work. Such that if you don't do the work, you'll lose your investment.
Thing is, diversification doesn't change the average ROI. It changes only the risk.
Huh? Risk is measured by the potential to lose your investment. How can it not impact the average ROI? Or put another way, the only reason that I would invest in a risky stock (i.e. potentially lose lots of money) is because it has significantly higher ROI potential. Changing the risk changes the ROI potential.
Diversification is a hedging strategy. It ensures that I don't put all of my eggs into a stock. If that stock drops, I can go broke. But the thing with diversification is this, if that stock takes off, it only improves what I've put in to it. The rest of the money in my diversified portfolio stays pat. So diversification, lowers the risk profile of the portfolio at the cost of also lowering the potential ROI for that portfolio.
Risk and ROI are related. You can't change one without also changing the other.
Just because something's hard doesn't mean it shouldn't be done. Otherwise, why would you go to the moon or do those other things?
Giving up on something that is hard is a good idea when there's an easier way to achieve the exact same thing. Delivery of high speed internet over powerlines is hard. But it's pointless in the face of cable, DSL and satellite internet.
My previous car was a '93 Ford Probe. It consistantly beat the EPA fuel mileage estimates by about 3-5 MPG My current car is an '02 Dodge Neon. It's consistantly worse than the EPA estimates by about 3-5 MPG.
Reading some of the other posts, it seems that older cars beat the EPA mileage and newer cars do not. Is it possible that the EPA changed their methods for estimating mileage?
Sure, at some point your parents, or their parents, or someone else probably had to do real work to earn that money, but *you* don't have to.
I should really address this, too.
The fact that there exists in our society voluntary unemployment is not evidence that our economic system is failing. It's evidence that it's succeeding. And it doesn't matter that I'm voluntarily unemployed as a result of working my entire life and then retiring, or that my children are voluntarily unemployed as a result of my work. What matters is that our economic system succeeds so well that some of us become unnecessary to sustain all of us. And that success is bred of one thing: continuous efficiency improvements.
And those continuous efficiency improvements do not just benefit the super rich. They benefit everyone. Anyone who went to school was voluntarily unemployed. The vast majority of us don't start employment until our teenage years. Our economic system is so successful that (very nearly) everyone experiences many years of voluntary unemployment. Compare and contrast this with life 100 years ago, when child labor was rapant. Or compare with current third world countries, in which children can't go to school because they have to stay home to work the land to produce food. Voluntary unemployment in a society is evidence of the wealth of that entire society.
The mistake is in thinking that because I'm voluntarily unemployed as a result of my work or my parents' work, that it's your work that continues to sustain me. That's true only if welfare or social security is the basis of my sustenance. In that case, those who are working are sustaining those who are not. But if I've retired off of my own saved income, then your work has nothing to do with me... unless, of course, I hire you. Then I would be paying you, and not the other way around.
Spreading the million you inherited randomly over the worlds stock-markets
Considering that 95% of new businesses fail, spreading your inheritance randomly is probably a losing strategy. Of course, probability being what it is, there is a possibility that this strategy could hit the right combination. But the odds aren't good.
In order to improve the odds, the investor must:
Investigate the risks
Make calculated risk decisions
Diversify their portfolio
Rebalance it on a regular basis
Keep abreast of changes in the market that might make their asset allocation unfavorable.
On average, randomly investing will do much worse, and will likely lose all of the investor's money.
As they say, most of us need to run pretty hard to stay where we are.
This is the part that I disagree with. IMHO, running to stay in place is (for the most part) a function of the choices that a person makes in their spending. Which is to say that the vast majority of us don't "need" to run to stay where we are, we "choose" it by our spending patterns.
However, what is also true is that if you're able to earn even a moderate sum more than you spend, you can reasonably manage to get off the treadmill
Exactly! And, with the exception of an extremely small number of people, anyone can earn a moderate sum more than they spend - simply by cutting their spending. (I don't know if you turn off signatures in your/. preferences but mine is meant to address this.) I've known a family of 5, who lived on a salary of $30k, who saved enough in 10 years to buy their own $150k house in CASH. They did this through a steadfast commitment not to spend money unless absolutely necessary. IMHO, they'd have been better off taking a loan on the house and investing the money (-5% on loan + 10% on investments = +5% overall). But that was their choice.
I remain unconvinced that anyone (but for an incredibly small number of people) is forced to live paycheck to paycheck with no oppurtunity for saving and investing. And MOREOVER, I'm unconvinced that even those that are in that situation (whether forced or not) are harmed in the long run by the introduction of an efficiency. Which, popping the discussion stack until it's empty, is the point that I was originally trying to make.
Ok. But it's not true that there's no cost to this strategy. They are taking on risk, and as a consequence are being compensated for it. It's not like they're running out and buying a pair of shoes and getting something immediately for that expense. They're buying the possibility that they could get nothing for their expense and the possibility that they could get some increase for their expense. What's more, this risk isn't exclusively offered to the million dollar portfolio club. Anyone can take on this risk, and be paid for it simply by purchasing a stock (or several). So even if this is the only mechansim by which an efficiency benefits society, it's still open to everyone.
The main point that the OP was trying to make is this: an efficiency that is produced only benefits some in a society. In the short term, that may be true, but I don't think it's true for the long term. The short term benefits of an efficiency go to the company in terms of additional dollars saved. That benefit will be passed on to the rest of society in one of three ways:
The company will lower the cost of its goods, or
The company will expand its business, thus paying for more of whatever technology created the efficiency. The jobs lost at the company are made up for by increased jobs at the technology producer, or
The company turns the dollars into higher profits for its executives, etc and they spend it. The jobs lost at the company are made up for by increased jobs at whereever the company owners spend their money.
No matter how I frame the question, I can't see how an efficiency doesn't benefit all of society in the long term. Of course, I've got this impacting my thoughts - so maybe I'm biased.
Of course, if the rent is covering the mortgage and upkeep, then the difference is profit. Just like, when I work for a salary and spend less than I earn, the difference is profit. That doesn't mean that a landlord gets to do nothing to continue to make a profit.
But if you're talking about stockholders and employees, I don't see those as necessarily seperate groups either. I'm an employee as well as a stock holder - I hold stock in the company I work for as well as other companies. Becoming a stockholder is a function of deciding to take the risk. Which is to say that anyone can become a stockholder, and can take advantage of a company producing an efficiency.
But even if you don't become a stockholder, I'm not yet convinced that a company producing an efficiency hurts anyone in the long term. In the short term, yes the people who lose their job are hurt. But the longer term benefits to the rest of society eventually offset that hurt.
And this is what we're talking about. Whether or not society as a whole benefits from the creation of an efficiency. I say it does. And I'm not alone.
"In a healthy, flexible economy these adjustments are always taking place. Some industries are expanding while others are shrinking, either absolutely or comparatively. It is necessary that workers and capital transfer from the shrinking to the expanding industries. Some workers are forced to do this because they are laid off."
- Henry Hazlitt
"One implication of free markets is that a company not only can, but should fire every worker possible... the value of the fired employee's job gets returned to society in the form of lower prices for the product he (wasn't helping to) produce... [Also,] when one business fires a worker who is not being productive, another business will go looking for that worker to be productive in their business."
- The Angry Economist
I suspect I could come up with other examples, but I'm only trying to make one point: the creation of an efficiency, even one that results in loss of jobs, is always of long term benefit to society. Yes, in the short term, some people suffer, but even they benefit in the long term.
The distinction I was trying to draw was between those who have to keep running to stay where they are, and those who can sit back and watch the money coming in.
Again, I'm not sure that such a distinction really exists. No one can sit back and just watch the money coming in. In the tennants and landlords example, at first glance it looks like the landlords can just sit back and collect. But it ignores the fact that they are indebted to a mortgage. It ignores the fact that the landlord is responsible for maintenance and upkeep. Landlords must continue to produce or they'll lose the value of their property and their tennants will move somewhere else.
Is there a better example of someone who can sit back, without producing, and continuously earn money?
In a very broad sense (but a real one also) we are all landlords or tennants within society.
Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that we're all landlords and tennants within society?
When something is done in a new and more efficient way then in a sense, society benefits. However, those who really benefit are 'owning' segment of the population, not the 'workers.'
I'm not sure that distinction really exists. 'Workers' only work for money. And they then use that money to purchase and own things. So, anyone who works, also owns. Consequently, if efficiencies benefit owners, then they benefit workers.
Slashdot Mirror
- The companies who save money outsourcing buy other things - increasing jobs for those companies who sell those other things
- The companies put the money into the bank - increasinng the money supply, causing interest rates to lower, resulting in more loans. More loans means people use that money to buy stuff that they want - increasing jobs for those companies who sell the stuff people want.
- The companies put that money into increased profits for the owners of the company, who then turn around and do one of the two things above - resulting in increased jobs for whereever that money gets spent.
Outsourcing transfers jobs from those who are overpriced (for the available market) to those who are underpriced (i.e. to where there's demand - increasing the price of those jobs). Yes, it stinks for those who lose their jobs, but in the long run even they benefit by the overall economic increase in efficiency.$.02
Yes, but that misses the point, doesn't it? Microsoft went to great lengths to claim that IE is integral to the OS in such a way that it can't be seperated. If they suddenly agree that it can be seperated enough to isolate the source code (and open source it), then they wouldn't they be admitting that they lied to the court during their antitrust trial?
Whether they can technically do this or not, I doubt that they can politically do it.
$.02
I can't count how many times I hear on /. someone saying that X is too bulky, etc, etc. And here's Gosling saying (2 years ago) that X is headed in the direction of slim and lightweight.
Am I misreading what he's saying?
But I almost entirely disagree with your post. I originally had an SA TiVo and switched to a DirecTiVo. The DirecTiVo doesn't switch channels any faster than the SA did. And you've got a TiVo, there's no need to surf - browse your "Now Playing" list and find something you know you're going to like. But even if you must channel surf, a much more effective way of doing is it guide surfing. Don't switch channels! Pause live TV, bring up the guide and figure out what's ACTUALLY ON instead of hitting commercials 50% of the time and not knowing. Then when you find something you like, switch the channel once.
As far as asking TiVo to stop recording spanish language movies, that's a relatively trivial thing to fix by removing the spanish language channels from your "Channels I receive" list. TiVo will never record a suggestion off of a channel it doesn't think you get. This will also fix the problem of recording from channels that you don't receive.
As for me, personally, there are two features that I can't give up with my DirecTiVo:
- Perfect picture quality - based on the already digitally encoded DirecTV signal instead of the wimpy hardware encoder that comes in the standalone.
- Dual tuner - I can record two things at once VASTLY cutting down on the number of conflicts.
My SA TiVo was great for introducing me to the technology, but IMHO, my DTiVo is the way DVRs ought to be.This reminds me of a joke from my Comp Sci department:
What do you call a woman in the Comp Sci department?
A visitor.
What do you call an attractive woman in the Comp Sci department?
Lost.
Maybe not, but I've noticed that SCSI drives ARE more reliable than IDE drives. And personally, I think it's because people who buy SCSI demand reliability so the manufactureres provide it. The tradeoff is that you don't have 250GB SCSI drives. Meanwhile, customers of IDE drives demand size, because they're downloading songs and movies and whatever. The tradeoff is reliability.
Personally, I'd just like a nice reliable 40GB drive at the $.50 per GB price point. I'd buy 4 of them today if I could. But I can't. In order to get to that price point, I have to purchase a 120GB drive which has 80GB more than I need, artificially skewing the perception that larger is in higher demand.
One would think that as the development costs and demand lowers on 40 GB drives, that the price would go down, but it hasn't. Heck, I'd be happy with a 20GB drive, if I had any confidence that it would last longer than 1 year!
I won't use Raid-0 on my desktop unless I have a short term need for extra performance. Desktop based hard drives are just too unreliable to lose ALL of your data if you lose one of the striped drives.
In the two computers I have at my house, I've lost 4 IDE hard drives in the last 6 months! Maybe RAID-1, but even then I'd prefer a backup solution instead of a real-time data redundancy solution. (It's hard to restore a file that you *accidentally* deleted from a RAID based solution.)
Until SCSI gets cheaper or IDE gets more reliable, neither of which I see happening any time soon, I am unlikely to use RAID on the desktop in any sort as any sort of long term solution.
I think that depends on the feature set that's important to you. For me, perfect picture quality from my TV provider is really quite important. In which case the DirecTiVo is the clear winner. No F/OSS PVR can currently offer that. Hopefully, when CableCARD is implemented everywhere, that will change.
Regulation of our current PSTN is a necessary evil bourne out of the fact that market forces are artifically removed from the situation. Which is to say, when there's no competition in a market, and a high barrier to entry into that market, regulation is necessary in order to ensure standards. This is exactly the case with the PSTN, where the ILECs would rule with an iron fist in absence of regulation.
However, in a competitive market, regulation is unnecessary. The market will define, through competition, the standards that it wants most. And moreover, with competition, you get to choose which standards are most important to you, instead of being spoon fed a single set of standards that you don't care about.
Put another way: competition is a regulatory force that costs less then governmental regulation because it requires no government to implement.
Quite right, but there's more than one way to impose requirements than just turning to a government. In the VoIP market, if you don't like the permissiveness of your provider, call them up, tell them why you don't like them, and switch to someone else who isn't as permissive. If enough people do this, then the provider will either change or die. Exactly the same result as if a government were to regulate it, with the added benefit of being cheaper to our society.
So what you're saying is that BB is paying people to spend time trying to get you to buy something that you don't want. I think you're looking at this wrong. Either, this is effective and makes money for Best Buy or it isn't. If it's effective, it's because enough customers are willing to pay for it - resulting in a profitable practice for BB. This profit then goes into subsidizing cheap "advertised specials". BB intentially lowers the profit margin on their product so that they can get a higher profit margin on service plans. Which works for me. I don't have to buy the low value service plan. But because BB advertised their special, they have to sell me the low margin product. If someone else is spending money on a service plan which subsidizes my low margin product, my reaction is, "Hey thanks!" And not only that, "Thanks to you BB for putting this deal together ... and I'll pass on the service plan."
On the other hand, if pushy sales reps turns out to be unprofitable in the long run, it's because most people are annoyed with it and won't buy those plans. BB will figure this out and stop doing it. Which means that they'll have to build more profit margin into their products. Which means that I'll lose a lot of the great deals that they advertise. Again, this is no problem for me. If BB doesn't actually have the best deals, I'll go somewhere else.
And I may be an anomaly, but I've been playing the rebate game with BB for nearly 10 years. I have received the correct rebate that was due to me every single time. From my point of view, for some products, I have a really hard time finding better deals than what BB offers. I'm more than happy to say "No thank you" 10 times to get those deals.
Agreed. However, this isn't the forum for offering that level of detail. The purpose of my post was a bit more general than that: to identify that the real battle for PFM is between Quicken & Money.
If you're curious about why I don't like gnucash, I can summarize in two words: double entry. I just don't think about my money like that. First, it confuses the heck out of me, and second, I spent a ton of time trying to get split transactiosn to work properly. Beyond that, the reports were limited, the ability to forecast cashflow wasn't there, and the ability to maintain a budget wasn't there.
Personally, I have a lot of hope for gnucash. But it takes too much effort to use today - especially in comparison to Money.
Well, I'm not that guy, but when I download a transaction from my bank, all that the bank knows is how much has been deposited or w/drawn from the account. Let's use a paycheck as an example, and imagine that I get paid $100/mo. Well, of course, after taxes, contributions to a 401(k), health insurance deductions, etc, the final deposited sum is only $62. What the bank knows is that it got a deposit of $62 and who it came from.
What I do in Money is I pre-enter what my paychecks look like. I pre-enter that my paycheck is $100 worth of income - $20 for taxes - $10 for 401(k) - $8 for healthinsurnace. Now, all I have to do is tell Money, "Hey I got paid today", and it enters that paycheck with all of the totals pre-categorized. Every month, I simply click on that pre-defined transaction and it enters it into my register for me. Then, when I download transactions from my bank, it gueses that the $62 deposit that it sees is my paycheck and asks, "Should I match this $62 transaction to the one that you already have in there?" 99% of the time my answer is, "Yes, thank you."
Now, if my paycheck were different everytime I received it, this pattern wouldn't work. I'd have to manually enter all of the tax information everytime. And, of course, I wouldn't expect my bank to know all of that information. And there's no way the software can know all of that information. So I have to tell it.
I have a couple of accounts that don't support electronic transaction downloads. I hate those accounts. Keeping track of them is a TON more work. Fortunately, they only see activity once or twice a month. If this were my credit card (which sees LOTS of activity) then I'd switch banks until I found one that supported electronic transaction downloads.
Personally, I can't imagine going back to a spreadsheet to manage my finances. Already you spend 200% more time managing your transactions than I spend.
But both the banks and the software supports unique transaction id's. See? Says so here, too. (You gotta search for "FITID" word doc.) Gnucash supports them, too.
It's only if you use the old QIF format that you don't get unique transaction IDs. Which is, of course, why MS Money only imports OFX and doesn't export OFX. It only exports QIF. So that if you've got your data in MS Money and you try to import it into some other program (gnucash or quicken) you'll have to deal with duplicates.
Me too! But I have to admit that it's a really good product. I've used it since Money 2001, and I've used just about every feature available in the "Deluxe" version. I use it daily to track my finances, and run reports periodically to ensure that my spending doesn't eclipse my earning.
I'd love to try a competitive package. Gnucash is just too hard. I spend a week every so often with the latest version of gnucash to see if it's gotten better... and it has, but it's still way behind. I'd love to try Quicken, but Intuit doesn't seem to have a trial version. Moneydance is ok, but it's basic and doesn't do all that I need.
It's been about 8 months since I tried gnucash, maybe I should give it another try...
I hate to admit it (as a Linux user) that I use Microsoft Money. I've used MS Money since 2001, and the reason? Because I could try it before I bought it. As far as I can tell there's no way to try the latest version of Quicken without first plunking down some cash. And then if I don't like it, I'm stuck with something that I don't like.
I've tried gnucash and Moneydance. Frankly, they suck. I would love to see a usable personal finance software package from the F/OSS crowd that will run on my linux boxes. But I haven't found one yet. The only two options (IMHO) are Quicken and MS Money. And I'm not going to pay for Quicken until I'm sure that it will meet my needs. And personal financial management software is absolutely critical in my ability to maintain what I espouse in my signature. I use MS Money every day. I skip a day every week or so. But if I ever skipped a week, I'd feel very uncomfortable about my personal finances.
So, I'd much prefer to use a F/OSS package that accomplishes what I can do in MS Money. And, in lieu of that, I'd prefer one that was platform independant. But nothing that I've tried yet has come even close.
FYI: I run MS Money under linux using Win4Lin
That assumes that universal broadband is universally wanted. Right now, broadband isn't universally subscribed to in the areas where it's available. Why should anyone spend the time and money trying to do this really difficult thing which would only enjoy relatively low demand?
I know that this isn't a very satisfying answer, but there's much easier solutions for any individual who wants to get broadband and it's not available to them right now:
- Move to someplace it is available
- Live with the latancies associated with satellite
- Live with dialup
- Wait a little bit for the telcos to extend DSL's reach
All of these are much easier and cheaper alternatives to deploying broadband over powerlines. If you're a company that's going to take a risk on this thing, it better have really high demand. If it doesn't have really high demand, it better not be a very expensive gamble.I don't think that's true. The stock markets represent human decisions and analysis. The market is constantly moving towards the successful companies. The failures in the market fall out of the market. Thus the overall stock market can continue to succeed because the entire purpose of it is to weed out the failures. Which means, that if you pick a random sampling of stocks, you're going to get both future winners and future losers. You have to be mobile enough to cut your losses from the losers at the appropriate time, and move them to the winners.
I didn't mean to suggest that these things were simple. In fact, I meant to suggest that they take effort and are hard enough to be considered work. Such that if you don't do the work, you'll lose your investment.
Huh? Risk is measured by the potential to lose your investment. How can it not impact the average ROI? Or put another way, the only reason that I would invest in a risky stock (i.e. potentially lose lots of money) is because it has significantly higher ROI potential. Changing the risk changes the ROI potential.
Diversification is a hedging strategy. It ensures that I don't put all of my eggs into a stock. If that stock drops, I can go broke. But the thing with diversification is this, if that stock takes off, it only improves what I've put in to it. The rest of the money in my diversified portfolio stays pat. So diversification, lowers the risk profile of the portfolio at the cost of also lowering the potential ROI for that portfolio.
Risk and ROI are related. You can't change one without also changing the other.
Giving up on something that is hard is a good idea when there's an easier way to achieve the exact same thing. Delivery of high speed internet over powerlines is hard. But it's pointless in the face of cable, DSL and satellite internet.
My previous car was a '93 Ford Probe. It consistantly beat the EPA fuel mileage estimates by about 3-5 MPG My current car is an '02 Dodge Neon. It's consistantly worse than the EPA estimates by about 3-5 MPG.
Reading some of the other posts, it seems that older cars beat the EPA mileage and newer cars do not. Is it possible that the EPA changed their methods for estimating mileage?
Side note: I sure miss my '93 Probe. Sniff.
I should really address this, too.
The fact that there exists in our society voluntary unemployment is not evidence that our economic system is failing. It's evidence that it's succeeding. And it doesn't matter that I'm voluntarily unemployed as a result of working my entire life and then retiring, or that my children are voluntarily unemployed as a result of my work. What matters is that our economic system succeeds so well that some of us become unnecessary to sustain all of us. And that success is bred of one thing: continuous efficiency improvements.
And those continuous efficiency improvements do not just benefit the super rich. They benefit everyone. Anyone who went to school was voluntarily unemployed. The vast majority of us don't start employment until our teenage years. Our economic system is so successful that (very nearly) everyone experiences many years of voluntary unemployment. Compare and contrast this with life 100 years ago, when child labor was rapant. Or compare with current third world countries, in which children can't go to school because they have to stay home to work the land to produce food. Voluntary unemployment in a society is evidence of the wealth of that entire society.
The mistake is in thinking that because I'm voluntarily unemployed as a result of my work or my parents' work, that it's your work that continues to sustain me. That's true only if welfare or social security is the basis of my sustenance. In that case, those who are working are sustaining those who are not. But if I've retired off of my own saved income, then your work has nothing to do with me... unless, of course, I hire you. Then I would be paying you, and not the other way around.
Considering that 95% of new businesses fail, spreading your inheritance randomly is probably a losing strategy. Of course, probability being what it is, there is a possibility that this strategy could hit the right combination. But the odds aren't good.
In order to improve the odds, the investor must:
- Investigate the risks
- Make calculated risk decisions
- Diversify their portfolio
- Rebalance it on a regular basis
- Keep abreast of changes in the market that might make their asset allocation unfavorable.
On average, randomly investing will do much worse, and will likely lose all of the investor's money.This is the part that I disagree with. IMHO, running to stay in place is (for the most part) a function of the choices that a person makes in their spending. Which is to say that the vast majority of us don't "need" to run to stay where we are, we "choose" it by our spending patterns.
Exactly! And, with the exception of an extremely small number of people, anyone can earn a moderate sum more than they spend - simply by cutting their spending. (I don't know if you turn off signatures in your /. preferences but mine is meant to address this.) I've known a family of 5, who lived on a salary of $30k, who saved enough in 10 years to buy their own $150k house in CASH. They did this through a steadfast commitment not to spend money unless absolutely necessary. IMHO, they'd have been better off taking a loan on the house and investing the money (-5% on loan + 10% on investments = +5% overall). But that was their choice.
I remain unconvinced that anyone (but for an incredibly small number of people) is forced to live paycheck to paycheck with no oppurtunity for saving and investing. And MOREOVER, I'm unconvinced that even those that are in that situation (whether forced or not) are harmed in the long run by the introduction of an efficiency. Which, popping the discussion stack until it's empty, is the point that I was originally trying to make.
The main point that the OP was trying to make is this: an efficiency that is produced only benefits some in a society. In the short term, that may be true, but I don't think it's true for the long term. The short term benefits of an efficiency go to the company in terms of additional dollars saved. That benefit will be passed on to the rest of society in one of three ways:
No matter how I frame the question, I can't see how an efficiency doesn't benefit all of society in the long term. Of course, I've got this impacting my thoughts - so maybe I'm biased.
But if you're talking about stockholders and employees, I don't see those as necessarily seperate groups either. I'm an employee as well as a stock holder - I hold stock in the company I work for as well as other companies. Becoming a stockholder is a function of deciding to take the risk. Which is to say that anyone can become a stockholder, and can take advantage of a company producing an efficiency.
But even if you don't become a stockholder, I'm not yet convinced that a company producing an efficiency hurts anyone in the long term. In the short term, yes the people who lose their job are hurt. But the longer term benefits to the rest of society eventually offset that hurt.
And this is what we're talking about. Whether or not society as a whole benefits from the creation of an efficiency. I say it does. And I'm not alone.
I suspect I could come up with other examples, but I'm only trying to make one point: the creation of an efficiency, even one that results in loss of jobs, is always of long term benefit to society. Yes, in the short term, some people suffer, but even they benefit in the long term.
Again, I'm not sure that such a distinction really exists. No one can sit back and just watch the money coming in. In the tennants and landlords example, at first glance it looks like the landlords can just sit back and collect. But it ignores the fact that they are indebted to a mortgage. It ignores the fact that the landlord is responsible for maintenance and upkeep. Landlords must continue to produce or they'll lose the value of their property and their tennants will move somewhere else.
Is there a better example of someone who can sit back, without producing, and continuously earn money?
Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that we're all landlords and tennants within society?
I'm not sure that distinction really exists. 'Workers' only work for money. And they then use that money to purchase and own things. So, anyone who works, also owns. Consequently, if efficiencies benefit owners, then they benefit workers.