BTW- this is also the ultimate answer to Wal*Mart- has it occured to anybody that if there are no spoiled rich brat kids of Sam Walton left alive, the stock is likely to pass into the hands of-ahem-more socially responsible people? Best way to fight Wal*Mart- kill a Walton today!
Some of us Bluetopians as you call us are already starting gun clubs- or have been in them for years. You see, out here in the west, the Californicators may have their own ideas about environmentalism; but there's a proud LIBERAL tradition going back over a century and a half, and part of that liberal tradition is being able to feed, clothe, and shelter your family without help. For that, hunting is required. Now that the Californicators have been moving north, hunting has become more required- stupid environmentalists in Portland have passed laws taking the human-imposed checks and balances out of the cougar, coyote, and grizzly populations, and these species have started to show up in public parks well within city limits, so a gun is even MORE required.
That, and of course, thanks to red state idiocy, we may just need to upgrade those weapons a bit when Washington finds out that we don't have any respect for anybody east of the Continental Divide and sends those tanks after us.
Only an idiot would swap with a radically different product. More likely- $400 DVD Player swaped with $29.95 DVD Player on special. Wal*Mart is perfect for this- the Rollback price is always a loss leader, and it's sitting right next to the same product with a 40% markup.
Maybe the point isn't to make money. Maybe the point is to rip off a big faceless corporation that is seen as having WAY too much profit for what they do.
Theft isn't always about profit- especially for a system like capitalism full of have-nots.
If you were working for $8.50/hr as the sole breadwinner and limited to 20 hours a week work, and wondering how your sick child was going to see the doctor without medical insurance, would YOU notice the lower priced items being rung up?
WalMart is the perfect target for this, they don't pay their people enough to notice.
Obviously, you don't like Wal-Mart. I don't either.
Regardless of whether I like them or not does not change the facts of how they do business.
But a lot of people do. The reason they shop there is that they want to shop there.
The reason they shop there is because they're stupid idiots who don't realize that they're shopping themselves into a third world bananna republic.
The reason that other stores go out of business is that their customers would perfer to go to Wal-Mart.
And the reason that their customers would prefer to go to Wal Mart is because of those loss leaders- known as Rollbacks in Wal*Mart Marketing Jargon.
You are apparently so egoecentric that you assume everyone shares your preferences and thus the only reason that people shop at Wal-Mart is that they are somehow forced to.
No, I believe they are forced to shop there because they are FORCED TO SHOP THERE- 6 months after a Wal*Mart opens in any given town all other stores go out of business, and suddenly the rollbacks don't look as cheap as they once were.
But that is not the case. If you really believe this, then you should buy some land near your local Wal-Mart and open your own store that sells the same sorts of goods, but of higher quality, and pay your employees well.
Costco tried that and went out of business.
Then see how many people leave Wal-Mart to come shop at your store. Put your money where your mouth is.
Personally, I think local stores who want to compete with Wal*Mart should put their shotguns where their mouths are- because there's no way they can compete with a corrupt business willing to pay their people next to nothing and willing to lose $1 billion on a new store just to put everybody else out of business. Better yet- perhaps we should start REALLY competeing with Wal*Mart and simply shoot anybody who gets near the store- then see how long it lasts.
The goods will become cheaper because it will be possible to make them more cheaply. This is the way the market operates. If one company chooses to keep their prices higher than necessary, they will be driven out of business by a competing company that lowers their prices.
Not if that company destroys their competition FIRST, and then still keeps prices high.
Customers will choose to get something cheaper if they can. Look at how successful Wal-Mart is and how effectively they have destroyed their competition, mainly because they charge low prices. If it's possible to lower prices, someone will and they will win as a result. This means that the profit magins of investors of companies that inflate prices will not be good, so the incentive is to price things cheaply. Thus, your paycheck buys more as production becomes more efficient.
Wal*Mart's a great example- they use loss leaders to destroy their competition, then charge a 40% markup on EVERYTHING ELSE IN THE STORE. Since the loss leader low price stuff is total crap, their stockhoders are multi-bilionaires, their customers get ripped off, and their workers are all supported by YOUR tax money through welfare because they have no other jobs available and can't earn enough to actualy live. Thank you for a great example of a company which uses incredibly cheap manufacutring to keep costs to customers high and very nice profits rolling in to stockholders while "pretending" to be the low-cost leader.
As if Linux or XP or Unix never overflows a 16 bit signed integer.....this is a QA problem with the outsourcing vendor, nothing more. Pretty damned common problem with CMM shops, near as I can tell.
"It was my concept along with my colleague, Diane Lopez," says Wray, a former network engineer with Networks Associates. "We knew of people inundated with interference on their wireless systems. In fact, Diane, in her apartment, could find eight wireless networks around her. She needed to shield herself."
No, she needed to stop wasting money on broadband and mooch off her neighbors.
I'm sorry, that is not the definition of a kit. A kit is a self contained package which contains all parts in one package, and upon assembly, the parts contained within one singular package becomes one unit. The point is, that the parts come from disparate sources - not one single source.
OK, it's not a kit. But it ain't manufacturing either- NOTHING in an American Car is American made, not a single bolt.
Perhaps this will be true in the long run, but it is not true yet.
It's going there quickly.
There are still quite a bit of maquiladoras in Tijuana and Nuevo Laredo making car parts - you cannot simply deny their existance.
Yes, but they don't sell to America- they're too expensive. Those parts are going to Canada and Europe, which have a higher standard of living than the United States.
Maybe they exist only because of earlier investments and are only on borrowed time, and perhaps in time they too will be shut down and sent off to China, Indonesia and other countries, but thats not the point. The point is that they are here in the present.
And the real point is, they're no longer selling to America, and haven't since 2002.
Of course
But it shouldn't be that way- a country should protect it's vital economic interests better than that. What if China decided to suddenly shut down their plants, and what if Mexico died from global warming? We don't have the manufacturing capacity left in the United States to maintain assembly- It's a stupid idea to depend on other countries for everything.
You mean that the car parts are manufactured in Beijing among other places, not that the car is manufactured.
MANUFACTURED is separate from ASSEMBLED- the parts are largely manufactured in China now (Mexico's $1/hr minimum wage is too high).
To say that it is manufactured here and assembled here would imply that cars are packaged into kits;
I think you mean manufactured there and assembled here- and yes, they are packaged into kits. True, a given shipment of a given part might contain enough parts for 1000 cars- but they are still a kit to be assembled as much as a computer is when built by a homebrew shop.
in reality an exhaust pipe might be made in Beijing, the steering wheel in Mexico etc.
Not bloody likely with the cost of labor in Mexico vs the cost of labor in China. Getting all of the parts from China will save you money.
If you really want to go back further; you might bring up where the rubber and glass are produced.
Which is also likely China- but the original silica probably came from California and the natural non-vulcanized rubber probably came from Vietnam. The point is- there ain't no such thing as a car made 100% in Japan OR the United States any more.
why do we hold email to a higher standard than the post office
You do know, right, that the modern post office is so accurate that bankruptcy courts count putting the bill into a blue box as being equivalent to the debt holder having recieved a payment, right?
The problem comes in on any server-side implementation I'd have to say- because the spam folder, if it exists at all, is on the server rather than in the client program, it's MUCH harder to use a web interface to search through. In addition to that- SpamBayes and apparently Firefox (both are open source, I'll bet they're using the same code for this) err on the side of caution by double-weighting ham and only single-weighting spam (which means, basically, that every time you recover a message from the spam filter, it gets the original spam score removed from any given word, AND it gets 2 points added on the ham side. Where deleting as spam merely gives one point to the spam side score for the same word). Thus the scoring errs towards marking messages as e-mail rather than spam, by default.
Next big invention is a bit of a misnomer in this instance. Actually, one of three things could hit VERY SOON that will make the whole outsourcing argument moot- and if we can mitigate it and slow it down until one of those three things hits, we will have successfully won the economic war:
1. New technology that only American Inventiveness and Individualism can come up with creates a boom of new jobs for a short time. 2. Baby boomers retiring/dying off create the last labor shortage ever, starting in 2008. 3. Robots create such a human labor surplus that the economy crashes to the point that all that is left is substinence farming of organic gardening to sell to the elites who have laid off all the rest of us. Another option is for the government to tax robotics to the point that we're all on welfare.
Any one of these three will make the 3.7 million jobs we'll eventually lose to outsourcing look like a drop in the bucket- but we've got between 4-12 years before any of them hit, so what we do in the mean time counts.
Absolutely agreed- I use two different spam filtering solutions- one on my aracnet account and one on seeberfamily.org. The one on my aracnet account was set up by the ISP and is a combination of procmail filtering and a more traditional blacklist/whitelist filter, by Symantec. It gets FALSE POSITIVES so often that I can no longer use that account for business (but at least spam never reaches my inbox on it either). I use Spambayes on my seeberfamily.org and informationrus accounts on client side, not server side (server delivers everything, client sorts) and I've yet to see a false positive. False negatives, however, happen quite regularly, especially on badly misspelled 419 scams.
SpamBayes seems to have accomplished this- but by erring on the other side. I've had NO false positives in the 4 months I've been using it. I get about 5-10 false negatives and 20-30 false "maybes" a day though- but the point is that I haven't seen a bounce message that didn't come from my own mailserver in 2 months now- it ALL gets positively marked as spam.
The problem with err-on-the-side-of-caution bayesian filters is that they take time to tune correctly- but once you get them tuned, they're very effective.
The events of the past 5 years have proven to me that diplomacy is largely bullshit when dealing with people dead set on ruining you economically or destroying you with your own technology. We've tried diplomacy- now it's time to try something a bit more advanced.
You don't really need nukes. Guerilla tactics work wonderfully with even low-tech devices. And let's face it - weapons, most explosives, etc are fairly trivial to make and use.
True enough- but my point was that if we were truly smart we'd realize that there's not a lot of difference between economic and physical warfare- and that physical warfare can be used to gain competitive advantage in economic warfare.
Not bad. However, I like the recent change that requires some H1-B's to be graduates of US schools. It provides an incentive for foreign students to come here and subsidise our schools, giving domestic students lowered tuition. If we keep H1-B's around, I say make this a requirement for all of them.
Only if you ALSO include giving them a green card and NEVER allowing them to return home- so that we can compete on cost of retirement as well. That's one of the things that burns me up about the use of NIVs- they work here for six years, go home, and live like kings off of their savings. I work here for 30 years, give or take a decade, and have to retire in poverty because nobody gives a decent retirement package anymore and all of the stock based ones are just frauds to support stock brokers.
And this surprised you why? Did you think your contracts could compete with Wipro, Infosys, and Tata, who are all paying wages 1/10th what you can find help for?
I'll go further and restate my case: U.S. citizens can't get that sort of training in sufficient numbers: they aren't prepared, even though some of them are bright enough.
If we were- we'd be a hell of a lot more dangerous to deal with than we are already. Most high school honors physics graduates I know can assemble a nuclear weapon with no problem if given the proper materials.
Slashdot Mirror
BTW- this is also the ultimate answer to Wal*Mart- has it occured to anybody that if there are no spoiled rich brat kids of Sam Walton left alive, the stock is likely to pass into the hands of-ahem-more socially responsible people? Best way to fight Wal*Mart- kill a Walton today!
Some of us Bluetopians as you call us are already starting gun clubs- or have been in them for years. You see, out here in the west, the Californicators may have their own ideas about environmentalism; but there's a proud LIBERAL tradition going back over a century and a half, and part of that liberal tradition is being able to feed, clothe, and shelter your family without help. For that, hunting is required. Now that the Californicators have been moving north, hunting has become more required- stupid environmentalists in Portland have passed laws taking the human-imposed checks and balances out of the cougar, coyote, and grizzly populations, and these species have started to show up in public parks well within city limits, so a gun is even MORE required.
That, and of course, thanks to red state idiocy, we may just need to upgrade those weapons a bit when Washington finds out that we don't have any respect for anybody east of the Continental Divide and sends those tanks after us.
Only an idiot would swap with a radically different product. More likely- $400 DVD Player swaped with $29.95 DVD Player on special. Wal*Mart is perfect for this- the Rollback price is always a loss leader, and it's sitting right next to the same product with a 40% markup.
Maybe the point isn't to make money. Maybe the point is to rip off a big faceless corporation that is seen as having WAY too much profit for what they do.
Theft isn't always about profit- especially for a system like capitalism full of have-nots.
If you were working for $8.50/hr as the sole breadwinner and limited to 20 hours a week work, and wondering how your sick child was going to see the doctor without medical insurance, would YOU notice the lower priced items being rung up?
WalMart is the perfect target for this, they don't pay their people enough to notice.
Obviously, you don't like Wal-Mart. I don't either.
Regardless of whether I like them or not does not change the facts of how they do business.
But a lot of people do. The reason they shop there is that they want to shop there.
The reason they shop there is because they're stupid idiots who don't realize that they're shopping themselves into a third world bananna republic.
The reason that other stores go out of business is that their customers would perfer to go to Wal-Mart.
And the reason that their customers would prefer to go to Wal Mart is because of those loss leaders- known as Rollbacks in Wal*Mart Marketing Jargon.
You are apparently so egoecentric that you assume everyone shares your preferences and thus the only reason that people shop at Wal-Mart is that they are somehow forced to.
No, I believe they are forced to shop there because they are FORCED TO SHOP THERE- 6 months after a Wal*Mart opens in any given town all other stores go out of business, and suddenly the rollbacks don't look as cheap as they once were.
But that is not the case. If you really believe this, then you should buy some land near your local Wal-Mart and open your own store that sells the same sorts of goods, but of higher quality, and pay your employees well.
Costco tried that and went out of business.
Then see how many people leave Wal-Mart to come shop at your store. Put your money where your mouth is.
Personally, I think local stores who want to compete with Wal*Mart should put their shotguns where their mouths are- because there's no way they can compete with a corrupt business willing to pay their people next to nothing and willing to lose $1 billion on a new store just to put everybody else out of business. Better yet- perhaps we should start REALLY competeing with Wal*Mart and simply shoot anybody who gets near the store- then see how long it lasts.
The goods will become cheaper because it will be possible to make them more cheaply. This is the way the market operates. If one company chooses to keep their prices higher than necessary, they will be driven out of business by a competing company that lowers their prices.
Not if that company destroys their competition FIRST, and then still keeps prices high.
Customers will choose to get something cheaper if they can. Look at how successful Wal-Mart is and how effectively they have destroyed their competition, mainly because they charge low prices. If it's possible to lower prices, someone will and they will win as a result. This means that the profit magins of investors of companies that inflate prices will not be good, so the incentive is to price things cheaply. Thus, your paycheck buys more as production becomes more efficient.
Wal*Mart's a great example- they use loss leaders to destroy their competition, then charge a 40% markup on EVERYTHING ELSE IN THE STORE. Since the loss leader low price stuff is total crap, their stockhoders are multi-bilionaires, their customers get ripped off, and their workers are all supported by YOUR tax money through welfare because they have no other jobs available and can't earn enough to actualy live. Thank you for a great example of a company which uses incredibly cheap manufacutring to keep costs to customers high and very nice profits rolling in to stockholders while "pretending" to be the low-cost leader.
As if Linux or XP or Unix never overflows a 16 bit signed integer.....this is a QA problem with the outsourcing vendor, nothing more. Pretty damned common problem with CMM shops, near as I can tell.
Are you ever going to answer the 2 Americas Objection? Or is this just a troll account that never gets checked?
What's to stop you from painting the shingles? Aesthetics don't matter- this stuff is probably gunmetal grey anyway.
Lowe's should consider carrying that product.
Lowe's should consider USING that product. Or for that matter, any better security than WEP.
FTFA:
"It was my concept along with my colleague, Diane Lopez," says Wray, a former network engineer with Networks Associates. "We knew of people inundated with interference on their wireless systems. In fact, Diane, in her apartment, could find eight wireless networks around her. She needed to shield herself."
No, she needed to stop wasting money on broadband and mooch off her neighbors.
I'm sorry, that is not the definition of a kit. A kit is a self contained package which contains all parts in one package, and upon assembly, the parts contained within one singular package becomes one unit. The point is, that the parts come from disparate sources - not one single source.
OK, it's not a kit. But it ain't manufacturing either- NOTHING in an American Car is American made, not a single bolt.
Perhaps this will be true in the long run, but it is not true yet.
It's going there quickly.
There are still quite a bit of maquiladoras in Tijuana and Nuevo Laredo making car parts - you cannot simply deny their existance.
Yes, but they don't sell to America- they're too expensive. Those parts are going to Canada and Europe, which have a higher standard of living than the United States.
Maybe they exist only because of earlier investments and are only on borrowed time, and perhaps in time they too will be shut down and sent off to China, Indonesia and other countries, but thats not the point. The point is that they are here in the present.
And the real point is, they're no longer selling to America, and haven't since 2002.
Of course
But it shouldn't be that way- a country should protect it's vital economic interests better than that. What if China decided to suddenly shut down their plants, and what if Mexico died from global warming? We don't have the manufacturing capacity left in the United States to maintain assembly- It's a stupid idea to depend on other countries for everything.
You mean that the car parts are manufactured in Beijing among other places, not that the car is manufactured.
MANUFACTURED is separate from ASSEMBLED- the parts are largely manufactured in China now (Mexico's $1/hr minimum wage is too high).
To say that it is manufactured here and assembled here would imply that cars are packaged into kits;
I think you mean manufactured there and assembled here- and yes, they are packaged into kits. True, a given shipment of a given part might contain enough parts for 1000 cars- but they are still a kit to be assembled as much as a computer is when built by a homebrew shop.
in reality an exhaust pipe might be made in Beijing, the steering wheel in Mexico etc.
Not bloody likely with the cost of labor in Mexico vs the cost of labor in China. Getting all of the parts from China will save you money.
If you really want to go back further; you might bring up where the rubber and glass are produced.
Which is also likely China- but the original silica probably came from California and the natural non-vulcanized rubber probably came from Vietnam. The point is- there ain't no such thing as a car made 100% in Japan OR the United States any more.
why do we hold email to a higher standard than the post office
You do know, right, that the modern post office is so accurate that bankruptcy courts count putting the bill into a blue box as being equivalent to the debt holder having recieved a payment, right?
The problem comes in on any server-side implementation I'd have to say- because the spam folder, if it exists at all, is on the server rather than in the client program, it's MUCH harder to use a web interface to search through. In addition to that- SpamBayes and apparently Firefox (both are open source, I'll bet they're using the same code for this) err on the side of caution by double-weighting ham and only single-weighting spam (which means, basically, that every time you recover a message from the spam filter, it gets the original spam score removed from any given word, AND it gets 2 points added on the ham side. Where deleting as spam merely gives one point to the spam side score for the same word). Thus the scoring errs towards marking messages as e-mail rather than spam, by default.
Next big invention is a bit of a misnomer in this instance. Actually, one of three things could hit VERY SOON that will make the whole outsourcing argument moot- and if we can mitigate it and slow it down until one of those three things hits, we will have successfully won the economic war:
1. New technology that only American Inventiveness and Individualism can come up with creates a boom of new jobs for a short time.
2. Baby boomers retiring/dying off create the last labor shortage ever, starting in 2008.
3. Robots create such a human labor surplus that the economy crashes to the point that all that is left is substinence farming of organic gardening to sell to the elites who have laid off all the rest of us. Another option is for the government to tax robotics to the point that we're all on welfare.
Any one of these three will make the 3.7 million jobs we'll eventually lose to outsourcing look like a drop in the bucket- but we've got between 4-12 years before any of them hit, so what we do in the mean time counts.
Absolutely agreed- I use two different spam filtering solutions- one on my aracnet account and one on seeberfamily.org. The one on my aracnet account was set up by the ISP and is a combination of procmail filtering and a more traditional blacklist/whitelist filter, by Symantec. It gets FALSE POSITIVES so often that I can no longer use that account for business (but at least spam never reaches my inbox on it either). I use Spambayes on my seeberfamily.org and informationrus accounts on client side, not server side (server delivers everything, client sorts) and I've yet to see a false positive. False negatives, however, happen quite regularly, especially on badly misspelled 419 scams.
SpamBayes seems to have accomplished this- but by erring on the other side. I've had NO false positives in the 4 months I've been using it. I get about 5-10 false negatives and 20-30 false "maybes" a day though- but the point is that I haven't seen a bounce message that didn't come from my own mailserver in 2 months now- it ALL gets positively marked as spam.
The problem with err-on-the-side-of-caution bayesian filters is that they take time to tune correctly- but once you get them tuned, they're very effective.
The events of the past 5 years have proven to me that diplomacy is largely bullshit when dealing with people dead set on ruining you economically or destroying you with your own technology. We've tried diplomacy- now it's time to try something a bit more advanced.
You don't really need nukes. Guerilla tactics work wonderfully with even low-tech devices. And let's face it - weapons, most explosives, etc are fairly trivial to make and use.
True enough- but my point was that if we were truly smart we'd realize that there's not a lot of difference between economic and physical warfare- and that physical warfare can be used to gain competitive advantage in economic warfare.
Not bad. However, I like the recent change that requires some H1-B's to be graduates of US schools. It provides an incentive for foreign students to come here and subsidise our schools, giving domestic students lowered tuition. If we keep H1-B's around, I say make this a requirement for all of them.
Only if you ALSO include giving them a green card and NEVER allowing them to return home- so that we can compete on cost of retirement as well. That's one of the things that burns me up about the use of NIVs- they work here for six years, go home, and live like kings off of their savings. I work here for 30 years, give or take a decade, and have to retire in poverty because nobody gives a decent retirement package anymore and all of the stock based ones are just frauds to support stock brokers.
And this surprised you why? Did you think your contracts could compete with Wipro, Infosys, and Tata, who are all paying wages 1/10th what you can find help for?
I'll go further and restate my case: U.S. citizens can't get that sort of training in sufficient numbers: they aren't prepared, even though some of them are bright enough.
If we were- we'd be a hell of a lot more dangerous to deal with than we are already. Most high school honors physics graduates I know can assemble a nuclear weapon with no problem if given the proper materials.
A Cook? I thought the book was about outsourcing, not how to prepare American Programmer for the dinner table in a gourmet way....