They also say in the contracts that they do not guarantee the speed or that your service will be uninterrupted. In effect, they have free reign to just cut you off or slow down your connection via whatever QoS system they feel like. Sign a business-grade contract with a service level agreement and all of this petty bullshit goes away.
Look, the figures they're talking about are >300Kb/s permanently sustained. That's a TON of bandwidth. This homebody portrayal of the wife, kids and golden retriever is a ruse. I have two workstations, two servers and a WAP on my home line and have never run that much of a sustained suck. I was geting 50,000 hits a day on my webserver in one month and my bandwidth averaged about 50Kb/s--that's 500MB per day. This guy is talking about transfers on the order of 3.7GB per day. 113 gigabytes per month? My wife and kids my ass. OC-48 will transfer about 14TB/month at a cost of a little more than $10,000. That would allow 124 customers like this guy. AT COST that's $81 per month and people bitch about $45.
The advertisments are FULL of disclaimers and the contracts explicitly state that you are not guaranteed any speed at all, only that you will have the potential for certain bursted rates.
Fraud my ass. Read your contract. If you don't like it, pay for a SLA. It costs twice to three times as much, but you are guaranteed uninterrupted service and full use of the stated bandwidth. Even at $120/month, at full usage the profit margin is razor thin--a single support call wipes it out.
Do the math. You're getting what you're paying for... by a long shot.
Sigh. The United States is hardly a welfare state--and it wasn't FDR, it was Johnson. The USSR failed because Russia withdrew through legal process. Have you ever seen the evidence of the USSR first hand? I have. It reminded me of Queens. Communism an central planning are alive and well. Some people call it "China." Social welfare is also alive and well. Most people call that "Western and Northern Europe."
Have you ever been outside your own country, FatSean? If not, that is what you have forgotten because without doing so you have no basis for comparison.
How you manage determine that those legal structures exist to "encourage development" yet think I'm wrong for saying they "further a healthy market" is truly amazing. It does appear that copyright and patent hinder the market, but that is because they are being abused--on both sides of the argument.
The reason those structures were established, however, was to encourage the market. When the pharmaceutical companies complain about patent infringement, there are HUGE issues they should be taken to task for, but fundamentally, they are correct when they argue that patents exist to encourage research and development. If it costs a billion dollars to create something that can then be copied by people who haven't spent a dime, no one will spend the billion dollars and that invention will never be created.
Trademark is very similar. It takes a huge amount of money to create a widely recognized brand--completely divorced from the investment to create the products or services behind the mark. In the case of Booble, it is being touted as a parody. It isn't really. Just because it's funny doesn't make it satire. They've taken the investment of Google to create recognition that "[G|Fr]oogle" means "good search engine" -- and made a functioning search engine for profit. They're not making fun of Google. They're just profiting from Google's investment. That it is prurient and makes Japanese school girls giggle is irrelevant.
Everyone is getting all fussy because trademark, copyright and patent law are pushing across dangerous lines. All of the above are in place to further a healthy, free competitive market. When those rules are abused in ways that might harm the market, people rightly should get "fussy."
There does seem to be a dogmatic bandwagon in the OSS community that cannot distinguish between enforcement of those protections that help ensure competition and those that hinder it. When a company enforces its copyright, everyone screams about how ridiculous the whole system is. As soon as someone violates the GPL, everyone goes running back to extolling the virtues of copyright.
It's amusing that the arguments against copyright and patents are often made against the largest contributors to OSS whose payrolls compensate some of the most influential individual contributors for their work on "free" software. It seems people mistake "free" defined as "unfettered" for "free" defined as "without cost." The latter definition quite certainly does not apply.
$58,000 over 400 employees is only $145 each. Considering a middle-management position costs about $75-100 per hour (that's real estate, salary, benefits, etc.), these numbers quickly add up. At that rate, $58,000 is about 750-800 hours. Say you have a meeting for fifteen minutes with your entire staff to discuss virus protection best practices--you've just spent $30,000. If ten people on your IT staff need to run around for a day cleaning up computers, which is a safe bet, you're down another $6-10k. Without even getting into lost revenue, you've just spent $40,000 for one day of IT work and a staff meeting.
There are about 140 million people in the American workforce, each of whom cost on average about $0.36 per minute--in total about three billion dollars per hour. Spread that out over a year and all you need to do to charge off a billion dollars in labor is disrupt business for three seconds per day. Anyone spend three seconds or more per day dealing with viruses, spam and DDoS attacks? Anyone who says "no" is either full of crap or getting their email on paper.
A few weeks later, another email. I was to come in for a two-day 'interview'. I'd be doing what I'd be doing if I got the job - writing scripts. When I got there, it was a case of "Here's the script language documentation, do something cool". And I tried. An army of skeletons rising from the dead to attack your town. I was surprised at how quickly I picked it up but I did, and I got a script vaguely near completion in my two days. That was in July.
Note: TWO DAYS to go from "here, kid, this is the API doc" to "look, skeletons rising from the dead." Everyone else either told him to take a flying leap or didn't even acknowledge his existence.
Then again, for my last test the company in question wouldn't provide the docs for their custom API. I had to divine everything out of their source. Rather unreasonable, but a damned good test.
Rather appropriate for this thread, Black and White was a very elegant game. The character graphics were a little primitive, but technically the game was brilliant. The weather of your game universe would sync with your weather, you could have game characters alert you to real world events (say, email), the atmospheric effects were beautiful, the environmental sounds were very well layered and the zoom from one extreme to the other was flawless. The interface was a very good showing for gestures rather than a cluttered screen of buttons and menus. Metrics were well integrated into gameplay so you could judge your universe purely on behavior and physical evidence, rather than little gauges. The character AI was brilliantly inspired and well executed. You had control, sort of, and the sort of was the key. Your avatar (or whatever you want to call it) would learn your behavior and follow your orders, but would also run about and do things as you would. If you were evil, your character would learn to be evil. If you were abusive to your character (beating it up, basically) it would become erratic and destructive...and eventually, evil.
It was an absolutely brilliant concept with excellent design. The only problem was GAMEPLAY SUCKED. There weren't enough puzzles and battles were few and far between. The pace was mind-numbingly slow and they forced you through a half-hour training everytime you performed a clean install. It was a nightmare and absolute proof positive that extraordinary minds with astounding inspiration and phenomenal skills can produce what amounts to a glorious proof of concept and a piece of shit product.
If you can find it for fifteen bucks, buy it. It truly is a unique piece of work. It is a prime example of everything being perfect, except for that elusive "it."
See: Motion Picture Industry See Also: Music Industry Finally, see: other posts about how talented people turn out complete crap for purely bureaucratic reasons.
That the levels on some games suck is no indication that someone whose skills suck is going to get a job in game design anymore than a bad play on the field in professional sports indicates that the screaming couch-potato has a chance of replacing the offending player. Great skills often turn out crappy products. Ever play Black and White?
Fortunately, most countries of the world have higher ethical standards than you and enumerate quite a number of economic rights, including the right to work, the right to adequate housing, the right to food. The normalization that has been progressing for the last century, the current administration in Washington aside, has been quite in the opposite direction of the one you seem to favor.
The vast majority of IT workers in the 90s worked for a very realistic wage. If you bother to look at the labor statistics and not just sit around being self-righteous, you would see that most professions requiring similar training and experience pay about what most IT workers have been making all along. Sure there were excesses, but most of that was the MBA's, not the BSCS's.
Why don't you publish your current salary so we can judge you as harshly as you categorically judge everyone else in your field?
The dollar fell because the national debt suddenly increased at three times the rate of the previous eight years at the same time the trade deficit --- you know, all the globalization you're talking about -- racked up almost a half trillion per year.
You have the equation quite backwards, Mr. Anonymous Coward.
You have to realize one thing: game development companies are TINY, with a comparatively large portion made up by very tight pre-existing relationships. The distributors may be faceless Borgs, but the development houses are the garage bands of software. ID and Valve barely have fifty people combined. Bioware has less than one hundred--and they write a boatload of games. Ubisoft has 1280 employees -- in nine countries. That's an average of 142 each, which is pretty damned small. Even Electronic Arts only has 2300 employees in "creative" positions. You start adding all this up and you quickly realize there are more Major League Baseball players than there are people working on the creative side of game design.
Translation: you had better be fscking INCREDIBLE and even then, be prepared to be an intern and move across the country or to a different country (say, Canada) to do so...and you'd better be able to do more than just edit levels. You'd better be a god.
I'd take the Vanagon, find the best programmers you can and start your own studio. The odds are worse than PowerBall, but they're more in your favor than competing with a million people for one of ten jobs.
...especially because AdWords hardly affect the general searches and Overture only places the top few spots. Sounds like someone just wasted a crapload of money for no reason.
It is a race to the bottom and the reason is that India has an atrocious human rights record and is surrounded by countries that have even worse human rights records. It's a "democracy" so there is hope, but currently you have an educated elite and a massive underclass that supports it. Indian salaries don't have to increase markedly anytime soon even if every single engineer works at full capacity because the service and manufacturing classes there are paid far less than even the $3/hour programmers. There is no sign that this is going to change and if it does, there will be China. Until the labor standards are equalized and enforced, this is the definition of a race to the bottom.
Now, in fairness, the United States is relatively guilty on this as well. When you have places like Southern California where a "living wage" is twice the minimum wage and the legislature refuses to raise the bar, the perceived wealth comes by sacrificing the lives of the largest portion of society who have little to no hope of advancing.
This is what causes cities to burn. Mine (L.A. until I went east) was torched twice and I had to drive through (or around) military lock downs to get to work. It's a wake up call. Unfortunately, people hit "snooze."
No, $11k in the United States is 1/3 the per capita GNP. The "Poverty Line" is a complex thing. There is the oft-cited "Federal Poverty Line," which is variable depending on the number of people in the household, but for a single person is actually close to $11K.
The formula most often used by economists is a statistic based on the mean income. A common yardstick is 20% below the mean, but sometimes even more conservative figures are used. The definition above uses the 40th percentile. The 50th percentile begins at $28k (half of Americans make less than that), the 25th percentile (meaning 75% of Americans make less) begins at $56k. However, this means that the statistical poverty line is different in Los Angeles, California than in Mobile, Alabama or even nationwide. A person in Mobile probably won't hit "the poverty line" until they're somewhere around $11k. A person in Orange County, California, where the mean (and, roughly, the 50th percentile) is nearly $50k, will hit poverty at about $35k. This is what all these myopic people yammering about "you are not entitled to a 'high paying' job" don't factor into their arguments. There is no IT industry in Mobile , Alabama and a $60k/year job in Silicon Valley or Orange County is NOT that great. In fact, if "relative poverty" was the bar for federal need-based assistance instead of "absolute poverty" (translation: Mobile, AL), a great number of less-than-senior programmers in Orange County and Silicon Valley would qualify for food stamps.
So, I'm not entirely disagreeing with the statement "11K is 1/3 of poverty," but as you will no doubt be skewered for implying that $33k is 'poor,' which obviously it IS in many places, the clarification bears attention.
The problem with The Wealth of Nations is that it boils everything down to arbitrage. Unfortunately, the technology that really only came into being over the last decade have made nearly everything a potential for international arbitrage. This is not just a problem for the United States, although the United States seems to be the last to blush at it from a governmental point of view. This is something that every single one of the so-called "global North" are worried about because if everything is distilled to "capital" and "labor," well, labor is cheaper almost anywhere else. Labor is cheaper in Canada and Mexico. You don't even need to go to India. You think we've got problems with that? Go to Germany or Scandanavia where labor is even more expensive.
OF COURSE it is a "good thing" to the recipients of the work in underdeveloped countries. However, CEO salaries are on average thirty times what even the President of the United States makes. The CEO of Abercrombie & Fitch makes about half of the compensation for the entire House of Representatives and Senate combined. The AVERAGE CEO compensation is $11,000,000 per year--thats 39,285% more than the average American. A Dilbert cartoon recently opined on this where Alice is speaking to the CEO and asks, "I work 70 hour weeks and I don't make $40 million per year. Do you work twenty-eight thousand hours per week?" Note, this is a characterization of someone making $100,000 per year -- in the top eight percent in the United States.
This "they need the jobs more than we do" is ridiculous. That's a race to the bottom. Almost EVERYONE needs the jobs more than we do. By comparison, the unemployed computer programmer needs the $60k that used to be his salary about two hundred times more than the CEO who outsourced his job. Put your scorn for the overpaid where it belongs.
$60k in 2004 is $27k in 1980 dollars. Anyone who remembers 1980 remembers that was a painfully modest salary then. We're getting lost in a collective memory lapse where the numbers we see today are impressive compared to what we experienced a decade or two ago. In 1980, the pay gap between worker and CEO was only about 42:1. In 1990, it was 84:1. In 2000, it was 531:1. That's a jump of 44,700% in ten years. That's a compounded 192% raise every year. If a $60k computer programmer performed that well, they'd be making $40 million per year after ten years. In the meantime, we can all sit back and party like it's 1981. YAY.
As for this argument from possessions, the cost of possessions is relative to the location. Anyone who has travelled abroad at all realizes that the standard of living that $50k affords in the United States costs $100k in Sweden, costs $25k in Poland and about $15k in India. A $7.50/hour engineer in India is SIGNIFICANTLY better off than an unemployed computer programmer in the United States by virtue of the fact that it costs many times as much just to stay alive in the United States as it does to live in luxury in India.
That is the nature of arbitrage. You'd think by blathering Adam Smith you'd realize that.
I had enough cash to get through a year without working and still have an exit strategy (read: enough to get through two years AND move 3000 miles away), so I took the time to do local market research, draw up a business plan and set up the basic structures for simply doing business (i.e. corporation, bank accounts, insurance lines etc.) and started doing some heavy networking. There are other social costs. Businesses do _not_ like doing business with anyone who does not look like a business. Translation: you need an office and they're not free. If you don't trust me on that, you just walk into a chamber of commerce and wait for someone to utter the words "home-based-business" and watch the reaction. Besides, it's illegal in most cities to have clients come to your home for ANY business and some businesses cannot be licensed as home-based at all. Accountants, for instance, often are forbidden for some inexplicable reason. If you go to enough booze-and-schmoozes, Mayoral breakfasts, Chamber brunches, networking dinners and golf tournaments... you get the picture, it all adds up quickly to thousands of dollars and you _need_ to do it. The drycleaning alone will break the bank. When you start doing real marketing (read:advertising, trade shows etc.), it gets really expensive. Keep in mind you need to have at least six month's reserves to keep yourself alive, plus at least as much for business expenses. That's a tall order for someone with no revenue stream. Investors? It costs as much money to woo investors as it does to find customers...and it's harder. A customer is risking a single purchase order on you. An investor is betting the farm.
There are success stories, but most often failure is simply due to lack of resources and it takes a TON of resources to start a company. Remember, if the business flops, you've still got to have six month's reserves to find a job else you'll be working at McDonald's. If you have a mortgage to pay for (and god help you if you have kids), that means at least $100k free and clear in order to risk it. That ain't chump change.
In any case, just doing your homework is expensive and often after doing it you'll find it is not worth the risk and wasting $10k to figure that out is a hell of a lot better than burning $100k and ending up serving Big Macs because you can't even afford to look for a job anymore.
There are some cautionary notes about the figures. Watch out for current dollar and chained figures. If you are comparing the debt to the GDP, do not do so using the chained figures as they may not have used the same [in|de]flation or base year. As a basic yardstick, if they both use the same base year, you're probably OK, but it's still shaky. Using unadjusted figures for comparison over time will yield more accurate results.
That said, it's worth noting that we've added $20B to the national debt--this month--and since taking office George II has added roughly a $1.5T to the debt, for a total of over $7T. There's this Republican mantra that deficit spending and ballooning the debt don't matter, but the smoke and mirrors of it is that the economic gains they claim can be almost dollar for dollar attributed to their irresponsible borrowing habits like the Yuppie who leverages everything for a new BMW. They claim the Democrats are worse, but the numbers are all there...then of course, they come out saying, "oh, we're all just as bad. That's partisan talk." Oh, piss off guys, no, Republicans ARE worse about this. MUCH worse. When the numbers start getting into 200-300% difference, it's not exactly a point of subtlety.
This should fail readily on challenge as it is obviously obvious technology, as easily evident by the ubiquitous use of the same methods.
Then again, there's always Patent number 5,786,818 to stand as a grim (or humorous) reminder of how asinine this can be. Apparently, by 1998, no one had figured out a system that "...essentially follows the pointer and the equivalent of a single click is sent to objects such as icons or system menus for the desktop environment."
The preexistence of the same features in X didn't stop the patent from being awarded.
The Microsoft tax appears to be $109. The cheapest stripped down Dimension 2400 I could build was $428. The Windows version upgrade license is $99. Personally, if I WANTED Windows pre-installed, I'd prefer to be charged $200 for a full copy non-vendor-locked copy, thankyouverymuch.
I have to admit it was pretty stomach churning to see a bright yellow Dodge "Duallie" with a giant chrome deflector on the roof... driving down the Vaclavske Namesti blasting hip hop... almost as disturbing as running into a glitter gold 1979 Pontiac Firebird in Poland.
Wow... and people wonder why we have a trade deficit. Geezuz.
Slashdot Mirror
They also say in the contracts that they do not guarantee the speed or that your service will be uninterrupted. In effect, they have free reign to just cut you off or slow down your connection via whatever QoS system they feel like. Sign a business-grade contract with a service level agreement and all of this petty bullshit goes away.
Look, the figures they're talking about are >300Kb/s permanently sustained. That's a TON of bandwidth. This homebody portrayal of the wife, kids and golden retriever is a ruse. I have two workstations, two servers and a WAP on my home line and have never run that much of a sustained suck. I was geting 50,000 hits a day on my webserver in one month and my bandwidth averaged about 50Kb/s--that's 500MB per day. This guy is talking about transfers on the order of 3.7GB per day. 113 gigabytes per month? My wife and kids my ass. OC-48 will transfer about 14TB/month at a cost of a little more than $10,000. That would allow 124 customers like this guy. AT COST that's $81 per month and people bitch about $45.
The advertisments are FULL of disclaimers and the contracts explicitly state that you are not guaranteed any speed at all, only that you will have the potential for certain bursted rates.
Fraud my ass. Read your contract. If you don't like it, pay for a SLA. It costs twice to three times as much, but you are guaranteed uninterrupted service and full use of the stated bandwidth. Even at $120/month, at full usage the profit margin is razor thin--a single support call wipes it out.
Do the math. You're getting what you're paying for... by a long shot.
Sigh. The United States is hardly a welfare state--and it wasn't FDR, it was Johnson. The USSR failed because Russia withdrew through legal process. Have you ever seen the evidence of the USSR first hand? I have. It reminded me of Queens. Communism an central planning are alive and well. Some people call it "China." Social welfare is also alive and well. Most people call that "Western and Northern Europe."
Have you ever been outside your own country, FatSean? If not, that is what you have forgotten because without doing so you have no basis for comparison.
How you manage determine that those legal structures exist to "encourage development" yet think I'm wrong for saying they "further a healthy market" is truly amazing. It does appear that copyright and patent hinder the market, but that is because they are being abused--on both sides of the argument.
The reason those structures were established, however, was to encourage the market. When the pharmaceutical companies complain about patent infringement, there are HUGE issues they should be taken to task for, but fundamentally, they are correct when they argue that patents exist to encourage research and development. If it costs a billion dollars to create something that can then be copied by people who haven't spent a dime, no one will spend the billion dollars and that invention will never be created.
Trademark is very similar. It takes a huge amount of money to create a widely recognized brand--completely divorced from the investment to create the products or services behind the mark. In the case of Booble, it is being touted as a parody. It isn't really. Just because it's funny doesn't make it satire. They've taken the investment of Google to create recognition that "[G|Fr]oogle" means "good search engine" -- and made a functioning search engine for profit. They're not making fun of Google. They're just profiting from Google's investment. That it is prurient and makes Japanese school girls giggle is irrelevant.
The term "snowball's chance in hell" comes to mind.
Everyone is getting all fussy because trademark, copyright and patent law are pushing across dangerous lines. All of the above are in place to further a healthy, free competitive market. When those rules are abused in ways that might harm the market, people rightly should get "fussy."
There does seem to be a dogmatic bandwagon in the OSS community that cannot distinguish between enforcement of those protections that help ensure competition and those that hinder it. When a company enforces its copyright, everyone screams about how ridiculous the whole system is. As soon as someone violates the GPL, everyone goes running back to extolling the virtues of copyright.
It's amusing that the arguments against copyright and patents are often made against the largest contributors to OSS whose payrolls compensate some of the most influential individual contributors for their work on "free" software. It seems people mistake "free" defined as "unfettered" for "free" defined as "without cost." The latter definition quite certainly does not apply.
...actually, it's not entirely useless.
$58,000 over 400 employees is only $145 each. Considering a middle-management position costs about $75-100 per hour (that's real estate, salary, benefits, etc.), these numbers quickly add up. At that rate, $58,000 is about 750-800 hours. Say you have a meeting for fifteen minutes with your entire staff to discuss virus protection best practices--you've just spent $30,000. If ten people on your IT staff need to run around for a day cleaning up computers, which is a safe bet, you're down another $6-10k. Without even getting into lost revenue, you've just spent $40,000 for one day of IT work and a staff meeting.
There are about 140 million people in the American workforce, each of whom cost on average about $0.36 per minute--in total about three billion dollars per hour. Spread that out over a year and all you need to do to charge off a billion dollars in labor is disrupt business for three seconds per day. Anyone spend three seconds or more per day dealing with viruses, spam and DDoS attacks? Anyone who says "no" is either full of crap or getting their email on paper.
In short, this shit adds up. Quickly.
http://www2.bwgame.com/?url=/studios/FEATURES
A few weeks later, another email. I was to come in for a two-day 'interview'. I'd be doing what I'd be doing if I got the job - writing scripts. When I got there, it was a case of "Here's the script language documentation, do something cool". And I tried. An army of skeletons rising from the dead to attack your town. I was surprised at how quickly I picked it up but I did, and I got a script vaguely near completion in my two days. That was in July.
Note: TWO DAYS to go from "here, kid, this is the API doc" to "look, skeletons rising from the dead." Everyone else either told him to take a flying leap or didn't even acknowledge his existence.
Then again, for my last test the company in question wouldn't provide the docs for their custom API. I had to divine everything out of their source. Rather unreasonable, but a damned good test.
Rather appropriate for this thread, Black and White was a very elegant game. The character graphics were a little primitive, but technically the game was brilliant. The weather of your game universe would sync with your weather, you could have game characters alert you to real world events (say, email), the atmospheric effects were beautiful, the environmental sounds were very well layered and the zoom from one extreme to the other was flawless. The interface was a very good showing for gestures rather than a cluttered screen of buttons and menus. Metrics were well integrated into gameplay so you could judge your universe purely on behavior and physical evidence, rather than little gauges. The character AI was brilliantly inspired and well executed. You had control, sort of, and the sort of was the key. Your avatar (or whatever you want to call it) would learn your behavior and follow your orders, but would also run about and do things as you would. If you were evil, your character would learn to be evil. If you were abusive to your character (beating it up, basically) it would become erratic and destructive...and eventually, evil.
It was an absolutely brilliant concept with excellent design. The only problem was GAMEPLAY SUCKED. There weren't enough puzzles and battles were few and far between. The pace was mind-numbingly slow and they forced you through a half-hour training everytime you performed a clean install. It was a nightmare and absolute proof positive that extraordinary minds with astounding inspiration and phenomenal skills can produce what amounts to a glorious proof of concept and a piece of shit product.
If you can find it for fifteen bucks, buy it. It truly is a unique piece of work. It is a prime example of everything being perfect, except for that elusive "it."
See: Motion Picture Industry
See Also: Music Industry
Finally, see: other posts about how talented people turn out complete crap for purely bureaucratic reasons.
That the levels on some games suck is no indication that someone whose skills suck is going to get a job in game design anymore than a bad play on the field in professional sports indicates that the screaming couch-potato has a chance of replacing the offending player. Great skills often turn out crappy products. Ever play Black and White?
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
--George Santayana
Clearly, you have forgotton a great deal of the last two hundred years...perhaps two thousand.
Fortunately, most countries of the world have higher ethical standards than you and enumerate quite a number of economic rights, including the right to work, the right to adequate housing, the right to food. The normalization that has been progressing for the last century, the current administration in Washington aside, has been quite in the opposite direction of the one you seem to favor.
Get out of the dark ages.
How self-congratulatory.
The vast majority of IT workers in the 90s worked for a very realistic wage. If you bother to look at the labor statistics and not just sit around being self-righteous, you would see that most professions requiring similar training and experience pay about what most IT workers have been making all along. Sure there were excesses, but most of that was the MBA's, not the BSCS's.
Why don't you publish your current salary so we can judge you as harshly as you categorically judge everyone else in your field?
The dollar fell because the national debt suddenly increased at three times the rate of the previous eight years at the same time the trade deficit --- you know, all the globalization you're talking about -- racked up almost a half trillion per year.
You have the equation quite backwards, Mr. Anonymous Coward.
You have to realize one thing: game development companies are TINY, with a comparatively large portion made up by very tight pre-existing relationships. The distributors may be faceless Borgs, but the development houses are the garage bands of software. ID and Valve barely have fifty people combined. Bioware has less than one hundred--and they write a boatload of games. Ubisoft has 1280 employees -- in nine countries. That's an average of 142 each, which is pretty damned small. Even Electronic Arts only has 2300 employees in "creative" positions. You start adding all this up and you quickly realize there are more Major League Baseball players than there are people working on the creative side of game design.
Translation: you had better be fscking INCREDIBLE and even then, be prepared to be an intern and move across the country or to a different country (say, Canada) to do so...and you'd better be able to do more than just edit levels. You'd better be a god.
I'd take the Vanagon, find the best programmers you can and start your own studio. The odds are worse than PowerBall, but they're more in your favor than competing with a million people for one of ten jobs.
Funny, I didn't think "the coasts" had a monopoly on incorporated cities.
...especially because AdWords hardly affect the general searches and Overture only places the top few spots. Sounds like someone just wasted a crapload of money for no reason.
It is a race to the bottom and the reason is that India has an atrocious human rights record and is surrounded by countries that have even worse human rights records. It's a "democracy" so there is hope, but currently you have an educated elite and a massive underclass that supports it. Indian salaries don't have to increase markedly anytime soon even if every single engineer works at full capacity because the service and manufacturing classes there are paid far less than even the $3/hour programmers. There is no sign that this is going to change and if it does, there will be China. Until the labor standards are equalized and enforced, this is the definition of a race to the bottom.
Now, in fairness, the United States is relatively guilty on this as well. When you have places like Southern California where a "living wage" is twice the minimum wage and the legislature refuses to raise the bar, the perceived wealth comes by sacrificing the lives of the largest portion of society who have little to no hope of advancing.
This is what causes cities to burn. Mine (L.A. until I went east) was torched twice and I had to drive through (or around) military lock downs to get to work. It's a wake up call. Unfortunately, people hit "snooze."
The broader definition can be found here:
http://www.labor.gov/ilab/media/reports/oiea/wage
The formula most often used by economists is a statistic based on the mean income. A common yardstick is 20% below the mean, but sometimes even more conservative figures are used. The definition above uses the 40th percentile. The 50th percentile begins at $28k (half of Americans make less than that), the 25th percentile (meaning 75% of Americans make less) begins at $56k. However, this means that the statistical poverty line is different in Los Angeles, California than in Mobile, Alabama or even nationwide. A person in Mobile probably won't hit "the poverty line" until they're somewhere around $11k. A person in Orange County, California, where the mean (and, roughly, the 50th percentile) is nearly $50k, will hit poverty at about $35k. This is what all these myopic people yammering about "you are not entitled to a 'high paying' job" don't factor into their arguments. There is no IT industry in Mobile , Alabama and a $60k/year job in Silicon Valley or Orange County is NOT that great. In fact, if "relative poverty" was the bar for federal need-based assistance instead of "absolute poverty" (translation: Mobile, AL), a great number of less-than-senior programmers in Orange County and Silicon Valley would qualify for food stamps.
So, I'm not entirely disagreeing with the statement "11K is 1/3 of poverty," but as you will no doubt be skewered for implying that $33k is 'poor,' which obviously it IS in many places, the clarification bears attention.
The problem with The Wealth of Nations is that it boils everything down to arbitrage. Unfortunately, the technology that really only came into being over the last decade have made nearly everything a potential for international arbitrage. This is not just a problem for the United States, although the United States seems to be the last to blush at it from a governmental point of view. This is something that every single one of the so-called "global North" are worried about because if everything is distilled to "capital" and "labor," well, labor is cheaper almost anywhere else. Labor is cheaper in Canada and Mexico. You don't even need to go to India. You think we've got problems with that? Go to Germany or Scandanavia where labor is even more expensive.
OF COURSE it is a "good thing" to the recipients of the work in underdeveloped countries. However, CEO salaries are on average thirty times what even the President of the United States makes. The CEO of Abercrombie & Fitch makes about half of the compensation for the entire House of Representatives and Senate combined. The AVERAGE CEO compensation is $11,000,000 per year--thats 39,285% more than the average American. A Dilbert cartoon recently opined on this where Alice is speaking to the CEO and asks, "I work 70 hour weeks and I don't make $40 million per year. Do you work twenty-eight thousand hours per week?" Note, this is a characterization of someone making $100,000 per year -- in the top eight percent in the United States.
This "they need the jobs more than we do" is ridiculous. That's a race to the bottom. Almost EVERYONE needs the jobs more than we do. By comparison, the unemployed computer programmer needs the $60k that used to be his salary about two hundred times more than the CEO who outsourced his job. Put your scorn for the overpaid where it belongs.
$60k in 2004 is $27k in 1980 dollars. Anyone who remembers 1980 remembers that was a painfully modest salary then. We're getting lost in a collective memory lapse where the numbers we see today are impressive compared to what we experienced a decade or two ago. In 1980, the pay gap between worker and CEO was only about 42:1. In 1990, it was 84:1. In 2000, it was 531:1. That's a jump of 44,700% in ten years. That's a compounded 192% raise every year. If a $60k computer programmer performed that well, they'd be making $40 million per year after ten years. In the meantime, we can all sit back and party like it's 1981. YAY.
As for this argument from possessions, the cost of possessions is relative to the location. Anyone who has travelled abroad at all realizes that the standard of living that $50k affords in the United States costs $100k in Sweden, costs $25k in Poland and about $15k in India. A $7.50/hour engineer in India is SIGNIFICANTLY better off than an unemployed computer programmer in the United States by virtue of the fact that it costs many times as much just to stay alive in the United States as it does to live in luxury in India.
That is the nature of arbitrage. You'd think by blathering Adam Smith you'd realize that.
I had enough cash to get through a year without working and still have an exit strategy (read: enough to get through two years AND move 3000 miles away), so I took the time to do local market research, draw up a business plan and set up the basic structures for simply doing business (i.e. corporation, bank accounts, insurance lines etc.) and started doing some heavy networking. There are other social costs. Businesses do _not_ like doing business with anyone who does not look like a business. Translation: you need an office and they're not free. If you don't trust me on that, you just walk into a chamber of commerce and wait for someone to utter the words "home-based-business" and watch the reaction. Besides, it's illegal in most cities to have clients come to your home for ANY business and some businesses cannot be licensed as home-based at all. Accountants, for instance, often are forbidden for some inexplicable reason. If you go to enough booze-and-schmoozes, Mayoral breakfasts, Chamber brunches, networking dinners and golf tournaments... you get the picture, it all adds up quickly to thousands of dollars and you _need_ to do it. The drycleaning alone will break the bank. When you start doing real marketing (read:advertising, trade shows etc.), it gets really expensive. Keep in mind you need to have at least six month's reserves to keep yourself alive, plus at least as much for business expenses. That's a tall order for someone with no revenue stream. Investors? It costs as much money to woo investors as it does to find customers...and it's harder. A customer is risking a single purchase order on you. An investor is betting the farm.
There are success stories, but most often failure is simply due to lack of resources and it takes a TON of resources to start a company. Remember, if the business flops, you've still got to have six month's reserves to find a job else you'll be working at McDonald's. If you have a mortgage to pay for (and god help you if you have kids), that means at least $100k free and clear in order to risk it. That ain't chump change.
In any case, just doing your homework is expensive and often after doing it you'll find it is not worth the risk and wasting $10k to figure that out is a hell of a lot better than burning $100k and ending up serving Big Macs because you can't even afford to look for a job anymore.
The Bureau of Economic Analysis has the GDP history at:
http://www.bea.gov/bea/dn/nipaweb/TableView.asp?S
The national debt figures are kept by the Treasury and can be found here:
http://www.publicdebt.treas.gov/opd/opd.htm
There are some cautionary notes about the figures. Watch out for current dollar and chained figures. If you are comparing the debt to the GDP, do not do so using the chained figures as they may not have used the same [in|de]flation or base year. As a basic yardstick, if they both use the same base year, you're probably OK, but it's still shaky. Using unadjusted figures for comparison over time will yield more accurate results.
That said, it's worth noting that we've added $20B to the national debt--this month--and since taking office George II has added roughly a $1.5T to the debt, for a total of over $7T. There's this Republican mantra that deficit spending and ballooning the debt don't matter, but the smoke and mirrors of it is that the economic gains they claim can be almost dollar for dollar attributed to their irresponsible borrowing habits like the Yuppie who leverages everything for a new BMW. They claim the Democrats are worse, but the numbers are all there...then of course, they come out saying, "oh, we're all just as bad. That's partisan talk." Oh, piss off guys, no, Republicans ARE worse about this. MUCH worse. When the numbers start getting into 200-300% difference, it's not exactly a point of subtlety.
This should fail readily on challenge as it is obviously obvious technology, as easily evident by the ubiquitous use of the same methods.
Then again, there's always Patent number 5,786,818 to stand as a grim (or humorous) reminder of how asinine this can be. Apparently, by 1998, no one had figured out a system that "...essentially follows the pointer and the equivalent of a single click is sent to objects such as icons or system menus for the desktop environment."
The preexistence of the same features in X didn't stop the patent from being awarded.
The Microsoft tax appears to be $109. The cheapest stripped down Dimension 2400 I could build was $428. The Windows version upgrade license is $99. Personally, if I WANTED Windows pre-installed, I'd prefer to be charged $200 for a full copy non-vendor-locked copy, thankyouverymuch.
Hmmm, "jobless recovery," anyone?
I have to admit it was pretty stomach churning to see a bright yellow Dodge "Duallie" with a giant chrome deflector on the roof... driving down the Vaclavske Namesti blasting hip hop... almost as disturbing as running into a glitter gold 1979 Pontiac Firebird in Poland.
Wow... and people wonder why we have a trade deficit. Geezuz.