In the clothing world, we have few regulations (some tariffs on cotton and other materials). I can buy a nice, quality hoodie for US$10 at H&M. A few years back they were over US$50 at the mall.
It's the same hoodie. The price went down because they weren't selling.
of course, they weren't selling because they are ugly. Quality sweatshop stitching aside, of course.
Microsoft doesn't make traditional PCs because they don't have to - better profit margins in selling licenses, and they don't have to put their hardware ideas up against open competition.
However, Microsoft-friendly OEMs have lowered per-box costs compared to others, and Windows is on how many computers?
Just because they don't sell the hardware directly doesn't mean they don't own the platform.
It's an old concept, most easily explained by example:
Mining company sets up shop, moves miners in, and opens a store to provide the necessities for the miners. Unfortunately for the miners, the store charges just enough that a month's food and supplies cost more than a month's pay, leaving each miner accumulating greater and greater debt to the company store - which then comes out of their pay. The miners can't leave the company or they'd have to repay their debt, and they can't repay the debt because the company balances their pay and the store prices to keep them owing more and more.
It's a way of acuiring a captive labor force for the cost of food and housing. Effectively corporately-owned slaves.
Yeah, Fluffy got kind of mad when I tried it, and fitting the other four cats in was certainly no cakewalk.
And to top it off, I could have done it wirelessly!
Re:I will name my children...
on
Google Ant
·
· Score: 1
Yeah, but he'll be a real playa. He'll have hundreds of illegitimate code forks... er, bastards.
...Or is the point that a man may not have vaginal intercourse with another man, and should do it anally instead? (that would definitely be more practical...);)
Technically, he could "make things right", as you put it, because the Old Testament describes a polygamous, or, to be technical, polygynous, society - one in which men could have multiple wives.
Remember also that in 2 Samuel, the prophet Samuel relays a message from God basically saying "Didn't I give you all these hot wives? If you wanted more, you could've asked me and I'd have given you more, but nooooooo, you had to have somebody else's wife." (2 Samuel 12, if you're interested.)
If you ask me, it's a hallmark of an efficient society. You know how it's usually the guy who ends up having an affair and breaking up a marriage, because his wife's sex drive has declined? Well, if he could take a second wife, that wouldn't be a problem. Further, he wouldn't be put in either the situation of depriving his first wife of livelihood or of losing his own. It would seriously cut down on nasty divorces, and we could all celebrate the decrease in the number of lawyers about.
Islamic law, IIRC, allows men up to four wives, which seems a very practical number - enough to gain most of the benefits, but too few to allow one guy to drain the pool of availability. (also keeps the guy from getting spread too thin - even the most virile guy can only dispense so much manjuice before he has to recharge.)
Actually, the original was in the common vernacular - the part in Hebrew was written to those who spoke Hebrew, and the part in Greek was written in koine (common) Greek. Koine Greek was the common language of much of the "known world" at the time, being essentially a pidgin Greek derived from the Attic Greek that was spread by Alexander of Macedon. (It was the lingua franca of its time, not any sort of "Holy Ghost language" or anything weird like that. Just everyday Greek for everyday people.)
What we should find surprising about Jerome's translation of the Bible into common Latin is not that he thought to put the Bible into the common language, but that anyone (like Augustine) thought it a bad idea.
for instance, in a free market, there would be no monopolies-- because the only way monopolies can exist is when government creates them.
In a free market, if someone got monopoly power, they would quickly lose it because their prices would be above market rates.
---
You didn't do too well in Economics 1, did you? There is such a thing as a natural monopoly. In a free market, if I can, to use an outrageous example, produce TVs at a cost of $25 apiece, provided I do so in batches of a million, then having a monopoly would mean that nobody could compete unless they first gather $25 million in initial production capital, plus enough to store a million TVs (that warehousing won't be free) and somehow gain the ability to sell a million TVs with no momentum. And, of course, they have to compete with the monopoly's natural defense - a sale. (selling at low/no profit or at a loss to deny sales to a competitor)
No, the market only acts as you describe for small producers without price-setting power in near-perfect or perfect competition - i.e. commodities.
If the producer who raises their prices has enough market power, then the market price as a whole will simply follow suit. In the US, the high-fructose corn syrop you see in just about everything these days comes from only four companies: Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, Staley Manufacturing Co. and CPC International. (They control ~85% of the market.) This oligopoly was not created by any government, but by simple economics. Given a free market, these companies can charge whatever they want, because they pretty much own the market. If they raise their prices, their new price is the market price. Thus, because they own the market, they will not be corrected by it.
Or let's look at a retail chain like Wal-Mart. If Wal-Mart wants to clear out local retailers, all they have to do is sell stuff really cheap - below their competitors' costs. Of course, they'll lose money themselves, but they can subsidize that by raising prices in other areas - areas where competing retailers have already been wiped out. That kind of power pretty much ensures that any monopoly can, barring the most foolish of mismanagement, dominate and expand its market indefinitely.
And a free market most assuredly does not sell products "at cost" in a shortage situation. (the old "water more valuable than diamonds" bit)
The difference with the telecoms, actually, is that they have "common carrier" status - which means that they can't discriminate between customers of their common carrier function, save for the obvious matters of location and billing. (Rates must also be offered nonpreferentially, though it is typically accepted that rates need not be the same as long as each customer or potential customer had the option of a given rate.) This is akin to a bus being obliged to provide transport, subject to its capacity, to all people who both wish to make use of the route and are willing to pay a standard fare.
Television networks, on the other hand, are private carriers, meaning that they can pick and choose what they broadcast. Naturally, this is a system of necessity, as available time and bandwidth are both strictly limited. Because the television networks chose of their own volition to carry the Super Bowl and its accompanying controversial halftime show - even if they didn't know in advance that it would be controversial - they are considered responsible for that content.
Of course, that's a somewhat simplified explanation, but you can look up the relevant legislation if you're interested.
Of course, aside from this little piece of telecom trivia, I mostly agree with your point there.
They'd send it off to a lab and pass the costs on to the reporter. Flash memory does have a bit of "memory" so to speak, so while getting the information may be nontrivial, it's far from impossible.
Dumping isn't "free trade", it's the importation of large quantities of a product at below cost done for the sole and express purpose of destroying a local industry. Essentially, it is a form of a limit price designed to open a new market by damaging existing competitors.
For instance, if I make cars in wherever, and sell them in the US for next to nothing - decent cars, mind you - everyone would buy my cars, and eventually US automakers would be relegated to only the luxury market. By doing the same in the high end, I could basically destroy auto production in the US. Why would I do that? Simple - to drive my competition out of business. Of course, I can't sustain that kind of pricing, so once I'm the only game in town, cars now cost twice what they did before I started, and it all goes into my pocket. That's a classic dumping scenario.
Of course, what we are discussing here isn't dumping - at least not as defined by economists and international trade lawyers - rather, it is an artificial barrier to entry, and represents a de facto one-way exclusive dealing agreement with a pretense of openness. Or so some economists would characterise it.
Or even design cities properly - have decent-sized semi-wooded parks at intervals. Not only would they absorb the CO2 from the traffic, but they would also raise the quality of life for residents. Trees along the side of the roads add character. Green is good for a city, and I don't just mean money.
Re-read the post you're replying to - in an urban environment, large office buildings aren't going to suddenly say "whoops, two o'clock, turn off the lights." After two or three in the afternoon, the solar panels would be of little use - meaning that power would once again be drawn from the grid - i.e. from the power plants.
Saying "the plant will run anyway" in this situation is more akin to saying "it would be futile for me to boycott McDonald's because I would eat there anyway." Especially because peak energy use hours come when the sun is already at a bad angle for energy generation.
Peak total power consumption won't fall permanently from a solution that a: only works for part of the day, and b: doesn't work well at all during times of peak usage. The plant will run based on the highest draw of the year. (different seasons have their own power usage characteristics, so you're talking about a scale of at least five to ten years, minimum, for a very small plant. Twice that for anything of significance.
Trademark squatting, eh? That'll be life in a Federal pen for the lot of you IP thieves.
When will people realize that the law is designed specifically to enforce monetary justice?
Not to point out the obvious, but ASCII is 7-bit. In fact, there are a couple of different variations on the 80-FF range. Now, granted, we live in the era of Windows standardization, but we're not all Windows users, so we don't all use the same arrangements as Windows. (As an aside, that's why the so-called "extended ASCII" characters don't always make it through e-mail - a fair number of mailservers still use only the basic ASCII.)
If you want to talk expanded charsets, you should be talking about unicode, not ASCII.
Legislators are more obvious targets than you. Thus, they are more likely to be frightened of being picked out of a crowd. Especially when that crowd is filled with other likely targets.
So, while your post makes sense, you should recognise that gov't types were rather afraid for their own skins, too. Especially after realising that they could have been killed.
Hey, it's in the name of public safety! You could... um... you could burn yourself on that drum in a laser printer! They should be outlawed!
(well it does get pretty warm)
Re:i interviewed
on
Defining Google
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
"after about 30 minutse we were just shootign the shix and I could see they were eager to cut it short, not due to myself but becasue they were out of things to ask. end of hour 3."
They were probably just filling time because they'd already decided against you. When the interview turns to "shootign the shix," as you put it, you can figure that they've seen something that disqualifies you and are polite enough not to just get rid of you. Be especially wary of any mention of sports.
You say college doesn't teach communication skills? Well, let's see you try to pass a required English course without them. When you say "speak courteous," you show a decided lack of comprehension regarding the difference between adjectives and adverbs. Proper English would specify the form "courteously," rather than "courteous." Perhaps if you'd gone to college you would know this.
As for business knowledge, sure, you can study accounting, economics, marketing, and the like on your own, but, frankly speaking, it's typically faster and more efficient to just take a class. Or are would you wager your business on the inevitability of positive net income? Would you assume that you can puzzle out the details of corporate finance by "sitting down, thinking and jotting ideas"? There's a lot more to running a business than sheer cleverness - and intelligence only acts as a multiplier, not a substitute, for knowledge.
Slashdot Mirror
As passed, this article is false. Pull up the bill, go to the offending section 113, and actually read it. It doesn't even include the word annoy.
It's the same hoodie. The price went down because they weren't selling.
of course, they weren't selling because they are ugly. Quality sweatshop stitching aside, of course.
Xbox. Xbox 360.
Microsoft doesn't make traditional PCs because they don't have to - better profit margins in selling licenses, and they don't have to put their hardware ideas up against open competition.
However, Microsoft-friendly OEMs have lowered per-box costs compared to others, and Windows is on how many computers?
Just because they don't sell the hardware directly doesn't mean they don't own the platform.
It's an old concept, most easily explained by example:
Mining company sets up shop, moves miners in, and opens a store to provide the necessities for the miners. Unfortunately for the miners, the store charges just enough that a month's food and supplies cost more than a month's pay, leaving each miner accumulating greater and greater debt to the company store - which then comes out of their pay. The miners can't leave the company or they'd have to repay their debt, and they can't repay the debt because the company balances their pay and the store prices to keep them owing more and more.
It's a way of acuiring a captive labor force for the cost of food and housing. Effectively corporately-owned slaves.
No, now.
Right now, unless you work for Microsoft, you CANNOT run Vista as an administrator. Just try it.
You don't have Vista? Well, then you can't run it as admin, now can you?
Yeah, Fluffy got kind of mad when I tried it, and fitting the other four cats in was certainly no cakewalk. And to top it off, I could have done it wirelessly!
Yeah, but he'll be a real playa. He'll have hundreds of illegitimate code forks... er, bastards.
Anyone can boast - the question is whether or not it's true. After all, even IBM programmers have to eat.
e=mc^2 came from Einstein, you insensitive clod!
...Or is the point that a man may not have vaginal intercourse with another man, and should do it anally instead? (that would definitely be more practical...) ;)
Technically, he could "make things right", as you put it, because the Old Testament describes a polygamous, or, to be technical, polygynous, society - one in which men could have multiple wives.
Remember also that in 2 Samuel, the prophet Samuel relays a message from God basically saying "Didn't I give you all these hot wives? If you wanted more, you could've asked me and I'd have given you more, but nooooooo, you had to have somebody else's wife." (2 Samuel 12, if you're interested.)
If you ask me, it's a hallmark of an efficient society. You know how it's usually the guy who ends up having an affair and breaking up a marriage, because his wife's sex drive has declined? Well, if he could take a second wife, that wouldn't be a problem. Further, he wouldn't be put in either the situation of depriving his first wife of livelihood or of losing his own. It would seriously cut down on nasty divorces, and we could all celebrate the decrease in the number of lawyers about.
Islamic law, IIRC, allows men up to four wives, which seems a very practical number - enough to gain most of the benefits, but too few to allow one guy to drain the pool of availability. (also keeps the guy from getting spread too thin - even the most virile guy can only dispense so much manjuice before he has to recharge.)
Actually, the original was in the common vernacular - the part in Hebrew was written to those who spoke Hebrew, and the part in Greek was written in koine (common) Greek. Koine Greek was the common language of much of the "known world" at the time, being essentially a pidgin Greek derived from the Attic Greek that was spread by Alexander of Macedon. (It was the lingua franca of its time, not any sort of "Holy Ghost language" or anything weird like that. Just everyday Greek for everyday people.)
What we should find surprising about Jerome's translation of the Bible into common Latin is not that he thought to put the Bible into the common language, but that anyone (like Augustine) thought it a bad idea.
for instance, in a free market, there would be no monopolies-- because the only way monopolies can exist is when government creates them.
In a free market, if someone got monopoly power, they would quickly lose it because their prices would be above market rates.
---You didn't do too well in Economics 1, did you? There is such a thing as a natural monopoly. In a free market, if I can, to use an outrageous example, produce TVs at a cost of $25 apiece, provided I do so in batches of a million, then having a monopoly would mean that nobody could compete unless they first gather $25 million in initial production capital, plus enough to store a million TVs (that warehousing won't be free) and somehow gain the ability to sell a million TVs with no momentum. And, of course, they have to compete with the monopoly's natural defense - a sale. (selling at low/no profit or at a loss to deny sales to a competitor)
No, the market only acts as you describe for small producers without price-setting power in near-perfect or perfect competition - i.e. commodities.
If the producer who raises their prices has enough market power, then the market price as a whole will simply follow suit. In the US, the high-fructose corn syrop you see in just about everything these days comes from only four companies: Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, Staley Manufacturing Co. and CPC International. (They control ~85% of the market.) This oligopoly was not created by any government, but by simple economics. Given a free market, these companies can charge whatever they want, because they pretty much own the market. If they raise their prices, their new price is the market price. Thus, because they own the market, they will not be corrected by it.
Or let's look at a retail chain like Wal-Mart. If Wal-Mart wants to clear out local retailers, all they have to do is sell stuff really cheap - below their competitors' costs. Of course, they'll lose money themselves, but they can subsidize that by raising prices in other areas - areas where competing retailers have already been wiped out. That kind of power pretty much ensures that any monopoly can, barring the most foolish of mismanagement, dominate and expand its market indefinitely.
And a free market most assuredly does not sell products "at cost" in a shortage situation. (the old "water more valuable than diamonds" bit)
The difference with the telecoms, actually, is that they have "common carrier" status - which means that they can't discriminate between customers of their common carrier function, save for the obvious matters of location and billing. (Rates must also be offered nonpreferentially, though it is typically accepted that rates need not be the same as long as each customer or potential customer had the option of a given rate.) This is akin to a bus being obliged to provide transport, subject to its capacity, to all people who both wish to make use of the route and are willing to pay a standard fare.
Television networks, on the other hand, are private carriers, meaning that they can pick and choose what they broadcast. Naturally, this is a system of necessity, as available time and bandwidth are both strictly limited. Because the television networks chose of their own volition to carry the Super Bowl and its accompanying controversial halftime show - even if they didn't know in advance that it would be controversial - they are considered responsible for that content.
Of course, that's a somewhat simplified explanation, but you can look up the relevant legislation if you're interested.
Of course, aside from this little piece of telecom trivia, I mostly agree with your point there.
They'd send it off to a lab and pass the costs on to the reporter. Flash memory does have a bit of "memory" so to speak, so while getting the information may be nontrivial, it's far from impossible.
Dumping isn't "free trade", it's the importation of large quantities of a product at below cost done for the sole and express purpose of destroying a local industry. Essentially, it is a form of a limit price designed to open a new market by damaging existing competitors. For instance, if I make cars in wherever, and sell them in the US for next to nothing - decent cars, mind you - everyone would buy my cars, and eventually US automakers would be relegated to only the luxury market. By doing the same in the high end, I could basically destroy auto production in the US. Why would I do that? Simple - to drive my competition out of business. Of course, I can't sustain that kind of pricing, so once I'm the only game in town, cars now cost twice what they did before I started, and it all goes into my pocket. That's a classic dumping scenario. Of course, what we are discussing here isn't dumping - at least not as defined by economists and international trade lawyers - rather, it is an artificial barrier to entry, and represents a de facto one-way exclusive dealing agreement with a pretense of openness. Or so some economists would characterise it.
Or even design cities properly - have decent-sized semi-wooded parks at intervals. Not only would they absorb the CO2 from the traffic, but they would also raise the quality of life for residents. Trees along the side of the roads add character. Green is good for a city, and I don't just mean money.
Re-read the post you're replying to - in an urban environment, large office buildings aren't going to suddenly say "whoops, two o'clock, turn off the lights." After two or three in the afternoon, the solar panels would be of little use - meaning that power would once again be drawn from the grid - i.e. from the power plants. Saying "the plant will run anyway" in this situation is more akin to saying "it would be futile for me to boycott McDonald's because I would eat there anyway." Especially because peak energy use hours come when the sun is already at a bad angle for energy generation. Peak total power consumption won't fall permanently from a solution that a: only works for part of the day, and b: doesn't work well at all during times of peak usage. The plant will run based on the highest draw of the year. (different seasons have their own power usage characteristics, so you're talking about a scale of at least five to ten years, minimum, for a very small plant. Twice that for anything of significance.
Trademark squatting, eh? That'll be life in a Federal pen for the lot of you IP thieves. When will people realize that the law is designed specifically to enforce monetary justice?
Gee, and they get the pins for free? They're probably making 50c or less apiece after costs.
Not to point out the obvious, but ASCII is 7-bit. In fact, there are a couple of different variations on the 80-FF range. Now, granted, we live in the era of Windows standardization, but we're not all Windows users, so we don't all use the same arrangements as Windows. (As an aside, that's why the so-called "extended ASCII" characters don't always make it through e-mail - a fair number of mailservers still use only the basic ASCII.)
If you want to talk expanded charsets, you should be talking about unicode, not ASCII.
Legislators are more obvious targets than you. Thus, they are more likely to be frightened of being picked out of a crowd. Especially when that crowd is filled with other likely targets.
So, while your post makes sense, you should recognise that gov't types were rather afraid for their own skins, too. Especially after realising that they could have been killed.
Hey, it's in the name of public safety! You could... um... you could burn yourself on that drum in a laser printer! They should be outlawed!
(well it does get pretty warm)
"after about 30 minutse we were just shootign the shix and I could see they were eager to cut it short, not due to myself but becasue they were out of things to ask. end of hour 3."
They were probably just filling time because they'd already decided against you. When the interview turns to "shootign the shix," as you put it, you can figure that they've seen something that disqualifies you and are polite enough not to just get rid of you. Be especially wary of any mention of sports.
You say college doesn't teach communication skills? Well, let's see you try to pass a required English course without them. When you say "speak courteous," you show a decided lack of comprehension regarding the difference between adjectives and adverbs. Proper English would specify the form "courteously," rather than "courteous." Perhaps if you'd gone to college you would know this.
As for business knowledge, sure, you can study accounting, economics, marketing, and the like on your own, but, frankly speaking, it's typically faster and more efficient to just take a class. Or are would you wager your business on the inevitability of positive net income? Would you assume that you can puzzle out the details of corporate finance by "sitting down, thinking and jotting ideas"? There's a lot more to running a business than sheer cleverness - and intelligence only acts as a multiplier, not a substitute, for knowledge.