The market has nothing to do with fair! It's supply and demand! Applying moral considerations to pricing would be communism!
More seriously, what makes 60 hours a week of labour from a nurse less valuable than 40 hours from a CEO? Nothing. To the people they care for, their labour is far more valuable. They'd rather have the nurse, than the CEO, who probably won't change a bedpan and has no sympathy for someone who can't get out of bed on their own. The only thing that differs is the CEO has the ability to control what he is paid.
We're all part of a vast enterprise that uses the resources of the Earth to sustain the human race. A fair rate would be for us all to get enough to live on comfortably.
Running things without support agreements brings managers out in hives, particularly an arena as risk-averse as a health service.
Something you paid for fucks up? It's the supplier's fault.
Something you didn't pay for fucks up? It's YOUR fault.
Therefore there's no real advantage, from the POV of licensing costs.
The real reason they've not migrated from WinXP has to be considered. The NHS is a mire of vast depth full of crufty software. They have so many pieces of old software it's not true. It's really diverse environment, with a high "institutional knowledge" factor where many systems just aren't adequately documented outside the heads of those who implement them.
Ironically, some of the oldest stuff is the easiest to migrate - because it's got a VT-100 terminal interface and runs on an AS/400 in a broom cupboard. You could even say that Linux would be it's natural environment, because any standard terminal will work.
But the next level...
You have:-
* 16-bit applications
I know of at least one hospital pharmacy management system still in use in the UK that's a 16-bit application. You can run it on 32-bit Windows, but not 64-bit, because it doesn't come with the 32-to-16-bit thunking layer.
* Old device drivers
There are plenty of devices with no drivers for Windows 7 and up.
* Badly written applications
Lots of programs on Windows got away with really bad habits like writing files in their own install folder for a long time. Windows 7 is somewhat stricter about this. Of course, on Linux, applications have mostly been grown up about this for some time.
And of course
* What if it breaks?
It's actually a very real risk. A lot of the software used in the NHS is of distinctly amateur quality and do things in eccentric and old-fashioned ways. I've seen software broken just because someone upgraded it's file server from NT to 2000 - it didn't play nice with some of the new optimizations on SMB (SMB optimizes single-user access to files by pre-emptively write-locking the file on the server. Which is not what you want when it's actually a multi-user data store.)
It's gone this way for as long as it has because like everything else in the NHS, the budget has been cut to the bone. There just isn't enough slack to institute change - but change is essential for improvement to occur.
It should be the poster-child for the advantages of FOSS though. Linux software tends to be more portable, and if you have the source, you've got more chance of porting it.
We don't have legislation capping drug prices AFAIK - our relatively cheap prices come from the power of having that single payer. If you have to choose between serving a market of 65 million people in one of the richest nations on Earth, and not serving that market, you're prepared to compromise a little on price.
It also helps that we have a blanket policy of using generic vs brand named drugs where possible, and we also have a body who's job it is to rate the effectiveness of treatments - we don't have the same pressure to use branded drugs just because they are newer and possibly-maybe marginally more effective (but 10x the price because they moved an atom to put it back on patent).
It's harder (7.7) than Gorilla Glass (6.5), and much more shatter resistant than sapphire crystal, as well as sounding much cheaper to manufacture (no finicky crystal growth, can be made in the shape you require, no need to cut AND polish, maybe just polish).
Gorilla Glass is pretty darn good. I've had a Nexus 4 for some years and it has one tiny, almost imperceptible scratch on the screen (as in : I know it's there, I have to tilt the screen to reflect light and actively look for it to see it). Something even harder, that's still shatter resistant? Sign me up.
It doesn't shatter easily because it's a sintered polycrystalline. Rather than being like the single grown sapphire crystals that Apple rejected for the iPhone which shatter easily along crystal fault lines, it's lots of crystals all jumbled together. Crack propagation doesn't happen so much. According to TFA, it chips, but it doesn't shatter.
even the vaunted European social democracies (the ones with the 'free' healthcare' are scratching their heads trying to figure out how to afford everything
As a citizen of the democracy with the "best healthcare system in the world", (the UK NHS) we already worked out how to afford everything - have a single-payer system that can negotiate a sensible price, and don't waste money on all that insurance bureaucracy.
We spend less than half what the USA does, and get better outcomes.
The problem is that the medical-industrial complex has worked out that obviously, people are willing to spend a lot more, and have contrived with our politicians to try and destroy the NHS so that they can profit.
Incidentally, if there are any Yanks reading : the British National Formulary is an excellent reference for just how hard you're being shafted by your medical industry ; the prices listed are what the NHS pays for these drugs.
A 200-dose inhaler of that stuff costs £1.50 ($2.30) - I hear it's more like $100 in the states.
These are the prices you can get if you have a single-payer healthcare system negotiating on your behalf. Socialized medicine, the great evil!
The main reason hearing aids are expensive is twofold
i) They need to be individually calibrated to the user's hearing loss spectrum
This means skilled audiometric testing. Skilled labour costs money in any economy.
ii) The miniaturization
In 2 generations hearing aids have gone from a cumbersome box you carry around on a strap, to something that sits behind your ear, to something that sits in your ear.
The box type could be built very cheaply now. You could probably write a smartphone app that did a reasonable job.
Should be "a symmetric key generated from details of the user's machine".
It's a design trade-off.
Their method means they don't have to maintain a repository of the keys that their infected machines have generated. They don't need a server receiving key transmissions, which means no server to attack, and also means their software is simpler, fewer moving parts, less to go wrong.
Unfortunately it suffers from the same problems as consumer media DRM - the user has both the encrypted data, and everything they need to generate the decryption key, it's just the algorithm that's "private". Security though obscurity.
What I do take issue with is his premise that money is happiness or, more specifically, that the amount of money he has versus the amount I have has some material impact on the happiness of either one of us.
Money is happiness, up to a certain point - that point is probably about $44k per year in the United States. The point at which you start to see diminishing returns is the point at which you no longer have to worry about money, where you have all the bottom tiers of Maslow's Hierarchy under control and can work on the top end.
Sure, it matters not to me that he has a yacht and a lease on a Lear jet. I work (indirectly) for a similar billionaire entrepreneur. I earn a good wage, my mortgage is paid, I live within my means, I live in a country with a good social healthcare system (for now..). I don't have to struggle to survive. In the status quo, the impact on my personal life is minimal.
But there are plenty of people who do have to struggle. The people working two or three jobs and still not keeping their head above water. The people who live in the richest nation on Earth but have a healthcare condition that makes them choose between food and medicine. They are the people who see that yacht and Lear jet and see red. The phrase always trotted out here is "the politics of envy". This is bullshit. They don't envy him his jet and his yacht - they wouldn't know what the fuck to do with them. They are angry, not envious, that he has so much, and they, the people who work for businesses that pass enormous wealth to the few are struggling to survive.
The marginal use of the plutocrat's income may diminish the more he has, but the flipside is also true - the marginal value of his labour is even smaller. Nick says it himself - he's not particularly clever or educated. The qualities that put him where he is today are a high tolerance for risk and a large dose of luck. His labour adds value to the businesses he is involved in, but it doesn't create most of the value. His workers do.
Or is it more that men are encouraged to think of the money as a parameter of success?
I became a doctor because of the vocational urge to do good. I totally utterly sucked at it because the work did not suit my personality at all - I have the typical ADHD traits of being very focussed but easy to distract, and that combined with a pager going off constantly and 10 different tasks pulling you every which way was hell for me.
Since then I've worked in healthcare computing for most of my career - I was always a computer nerd, I got to combine my medical degree and my hobby (I'm a better programmer now than I ever was a doctor though), and there was always the sense of still feeding my vocation. I do periodically consider a change of industry (especially when a recruiter waves a tasty wage packet under my nose), but you couldn't induce me to enter the financial industry with a cattle prod, I'd feel like I was earning money by shitting on people.
I square the fact that as an engineer, I increase productivity, with the fact that in the healthcare industry, this probably leads to better healthcare, rather than fewer jobs. I would have a hard time, personally speaking, being one of the engineers working on those automated supermarket tills.
The only reason I moved out of the public sector into the private sector was that I was having doubts about how much good my work in the public sector was actually doing. Although at the moment, I'm having doubts about how much good the healthcare IT sector does at all - it mostly seems to be oriented around meeting the needs of the Medical-Insurance-Industrial-Complex rather than the patient and bogged down by so much legislation that true innovation is virtually impossible. I have some very cool tech for the healthcare market in the back of my head, but I can't see it flying in the current environment.
Increasing automation isn't going to erode our quality of life so much as it is going to take all the fun out of his. He might as well be collecting leaves for all the good his extra money is going to do for him.
He makes this point himself - I recall he talks about buying maybe 2 or 3 pairs of "work pants" a year.
I don't get how a guy who stands up, and says "Hey, things are pretty unequal, and maybe we should do something about that or there will be some unpleasant civil unrest - seriously, how many more pairs of pants do I need?" is coming off as actually being all "Waaah, the proles are having a better life and that makes my life less enjoyable."
All that stuff you talked about? Nice groceries, tech goods, better healthcare? That's stuff for the middle classes. That's for people with good jobs that pay a lot more than minimum wage. But the more automation we have, the less middle class we'll have that can afford them. The reason there is a squeezed middle is because on one side, we have robots, and the other, we have foreign workers who'll work for less.
Well, here's the thing. The cheap foreign labour is now being replaced. Initially, by even more desperate poor brown people. But increasingly, by robots. Companies like Foxconn, not noted for their enlightened policy on worker welfare, are now replacing their workers with robots.
Productivity, on the upswing for over 5 decades, is now dropping. Not because the actual labour a single worker can do is less, but because the amount that's needed is less - because people can't afford the fruits of that labour. Like you said, how much can one rich guy consume?
The guy who took a pay cut from $1M to $70k, so he could pay his staff $70k minimum wage gets it. He's a surfer dude. $70k buys him all the knarly waves he can hang 10 on, and then some. Paying his workers a decent wage gets him 2 things - a workforce with great loyalty and no worries getting in the way of increasing the value of his business, and a feeling of doing the right thing that $930k dollars just can't buy you (in your own bank account).
The answer is to look at that million bucks and not to think "How much happiness can it buy me?", but "How much happiness can this buy?"
We do have the O2 reflex, it's just not the primary one and not active in most humans.
In individuals with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, the O2 reflex takes over - which makes it dangerous to give them high flow oxygen, because they will build up an excess of CO2 (because they don't breathe enough to expel it all). This reveals why CO2 is the usual trigger - normal air has enough oxygen in it, and our lungs are normally very efficient at absorbing it.
No, there is documentary evidence that the incumbent members of the justice administration consider it too humane.
How to kill a human being is a documentary where a prominent British politician investigates the commonly used methods of execution.
He concludes that the nitrogen method, used in abattoirs to kill pigs humanely, is ideal for human execution too. All the other methods have drawbacks. In particular, lethal injection is noted to be quite painful. In a country who's constitution forbids cruel and unusual punishment, this seems odd.
Several members of the incumbent correctional organizations express the opinion that nitrogen asphyxiation isn't cruel enough because asphyxia induces a brief, mild, state of euphoria before the victim loses consciousness. They also seem of the opinion that the execution should make the target suffer before death to provide a sense of justice to the family of their victim.
If the killers... go out with a euphoric high, that is not justice [1]
(and it's rumoured that Oklahoma is actually taking up nitrogen as an execution method after seeing this documentary).
It's more that boys take failure differently. We're presumed to be behind to start with (because by now everyone knows that boys are outperformed academically by girls).
Therefore we have more tolerance for failure.
Girls are always special and beautiful and awesome. So when they run into something hard they don't do well at right off the bat, they get turned off and move to something which is judged by less objective standards that you can fail "soft" at. It's a problem with prejudice alright, just the positive kind.
Mostly the asset production budget. Engine is either off the shelf or a relatively low cost for a few ubernerds. But you need a shitload of artists, musicians, voice actors, motion capture performers, and writers for a AAA game.
He isn't negatively affected at all - sure, his bank account might not be as full (and there's the increased equity from a more motivated business to consider).
His chosen lifestyle is paid for, in full, by the $70k salary. He's winning.
Now his staff are too. And he feels good about that. That's something that putting more money in his own pocket wouldn't have bought him.
Maybe the problem is CEOs who look at that pile of money in their account, and say "What the hell can I do with all this?!?" and their answer is what benefits one man.
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not a fair market rate
The market has nothing to do with fair! It's supply and demand! Applying moral considerations to pricing would be communism!
More seriously, what makes 60 hours a week of labour from a nurse less valuable than 40 hours from a CEO? Nothing. To the people they care for, their labour is far more valuable. They'd rather have the nurse, than the CEO, who probably won't change a bedpan and has no sympathy for someone who can't get out of bed on their own. The only thing that differs is the CEO has the ability to control what he is paid.
We're all part of a vast enterprise that uses the resources of the Earth to sustain the human race. A fair rate would be for us all to get enough to live on comfortably.
Hahahahaha.
£5.5M won't even scratch the surface.
We're talking an enterprise with around a million computers, running a vast swathe of different, obscure, an
Running things without support agreements brings managers out in hives, particularly an arena as risk-averse as a health service.
Something you paid for fucks up? It's the supplier's fault.
Something you didn't pay for fucks up? It's YOUR fault.
Therefore there's no real advantage, from the POV of licensing costs.
The real reason they've not migrated from WinXP has to be considered. The NHS is a mire of vast depth full of crufty software. They have so many pieces of old software it's not true. It's really diverse environment, with a high "institutional knowledge" factor where many systems just aren't adequately documented outside the heads of those who implement them.
Ironically, some of the oldest stuff is the easiest to migrate - because it's got a VT-100 terminal interface and runs on an AS/400 in a broom cupboard. You could even say that Linux would be it's natural environment, because any standard terminal will work.
But the next level...
You have :-
* 16-bit applications
I know of at least one hospital pharmacy management system still in use in the UK that's a 16-bit application. You can run it on 32-bit Windows, but not 64-bit, because it doesn't come with the 32-to-16-bit thunking layer.
* Old device drivers
There are plenty of devices with no drivers for Windows 7 and up.
* Badly written applications
Lots of programs on Windows got away with really bad habits like writing files in their own install folder for a long time. Windows 7 is somewhat stricter about this. Of course, on Linux, applications have mostly been grown up about this for some time.
And of course
* What if it breaks?
It's actually a very real risk. A lot of the software used in the NHS is of distinctly amateur quality and do things in eccentric and old-fashioned ways. I've seen software broken just because someone upgraded it's file server from NT to 2000 - it didn't play nice with some of the new optimizations on SMB (SMB optimizes single-user access to files by pre-emptively write-locking the file on the server. Which is not what you want when it's actually a multi-user data store.)
It's gone this way for as long as it has because like everything else in the NHS, the budget has been cut to the bone. There just isn't enough slack to institute change - but change is essential for improvement to occur.
It should be the poster-child for the advantages of FOSS though. Linux software tends to be more portable, and if you have the source, you've got more chance of porting it.
60 BUCKS?!?!?!
Would probably be overvaluing the company...
Too true.
We don't have legislation capping drug prices AFAIK - our relatively cheap prices come from the power of having that single payer. If you have to choose between serving a market of 65 million people in one of the richest nations on Earth, and not serving that market, you're prepared to compromise a little on price.
It also helps that we have a blanket policy of using generic vs brand named drugs where possible, and we also have a body who's job it is to rate the effectiveness of treatments - we don't have the same pressure to use branded drugs just because they are newer and possibly-maybe marginally more effective (but 10x the price because they moved an atom to put it back on patent).
It's harder (7.7) than Gorilla Glass (6.5), and much more shatter resistant than sapphire crystal, as well as sounding much cheaper to manufacture (no finicky crystal growth, can be made in the shape you require, no need to cut AND polish, maybe just polish).
Gorilla Glass is pretty darn good. I've had a Nexus 4 for some years and it has one tiny, almost imperceptible scratch on the screen (as in : I know it's there, I have to tilt the screen to reflect light and actively look for it to see it). Something even harder, that's still shatter resistant? Sign me up.
It doesn't shatter easily because it's a sintered polycrystalline. Rather than being like the single grown sapphire crystals that Apple rejected for the iPhone which shatter easily along crystal fault lines, it's lots of crystals all jumbled together. Crack propagation doesn't happen so much. According to TFA, it chips, but it doesn't shatter.
even the vaunted European social democracies (the ones with the 'free' healthcare' are scratching their heads trying to figure out how to afford everything
As a citizen of the democracy with the "best healthcare system in the world", (the UK NHS) we already worked out how to afford everything - have a single-payer system that can negotiate a sensible price, and don't waste money on all that insurance bureaucracy.
We spend less than half what the USA does, and get better outcomes.
The problem is that the medical-industrial complex has worked out that obviously, people are willing to spend a lot more, and have contrived with our politicians to try and destroy the NHS so that they can profit.
Incidentally, if there are any Yanks reading : the British National Formulary is an excellent reference for just how hard you're being shafted by your medical industry ; the prices listed are what the NHS pays for these drugs.
A 200-dose inhaler of that stuff costs £1.50 ($2.30) - I hear it's more like $100 in the states.
These are the prices you can get if you have a single-payer healthcare system negotiating on your behalf. Socialized medicine, the great evil!
The drug most often used, salbutamol, is a dirt cheap generic, you can get get 20 x 2.5 mg nebuliser vials for around £2 ($3)
The main reason hearing aids are expensive is twofold
i) They need to be individually calibrated to the user's hearing loss spectrum
This means skilled audiometric testing. Skilled labour costs money in any economy.
ii) The miniaturization
In 2 generations hearing aids have gone from a cumbersome box you carry around on a strap, to something that sits behind your ear, to something that sits in your ear.
The box type could be built very cheaply now. You could probably write a smartphone app that did a reasonable job.
It doesn't make the right emphasis
Should be "a symmetric key generated from details of the user's machine".
It's a design trade-off.
Their method means they don't have to maintain a repository of the keys that their infected machines have generated. They don't need a server receiving key transmissions, which means no server to attack, and also means their software is simpler, fewer moving parts, less to go wrong.
Unfortunately it suffers from the same problems as consumer media DRM - the user has both the encrypted data, and everything they need to generate the decryption key, it's just the algorithm that's "private". Security though obscurity.
What I do take issue with is his premise that money is happiness or, more specifically, that the amount of money he has versus the amount I have has some material impact on the happiness of either one of us.
Money is happiness, up to a certain point - that point is probably about $44k per year in the United States. The point at which you start to see diminishing returns is the point at which you no longer have to worry about money, where you have all the bottom tiers of Maslow's Hierarchy under control and can work on the top end.
Sure, it matters not to me that he has a yacht and a lease on a Lear jet. I work (indirectly) for a similar billionaire entrepreneur. I earn a good wage, my mortgage is paid, I live within my means, I live in a country with a good social healthcare system (for now..). I don't have to struggle to survive. In the status quo, the impact on my personal life is minimal.
But there are plenty of people who do have to struggle. The people working two or three jobs and still not keeping their head above water. The people who live in the richest nation on Earth but have a healthcare condition that makes them choose between food and medicine. They are the people who see that yacht and Lear jet and see red. The phrase always trotted out here is "the politics of envy". This is bullshit. They don't envy him his jet and his yacht - they wouldn't know what the fuck to do with them. They are angry, not envious, that he has so much, and they, the people who work for businesses that pass enormous wealth to the few are struggling to survive.
The marginal use of the plutocrat's income may diminish the more he has, but the flipside is also true - the marginal value of his labour is even smaller. Nick says it himself - he's not particularly clever or educated. The qualities that put him where he is today are a high tolerance for risk and a large dose of luck. His labour adds value to the businesses he is involved in, but it doesn't create most of the value. His workers do.
Or is it more that men are encouraged to think of the money as a parameter of success?
I became a doctor because of the vocational urge to do good. I totally utterly sucked at it because the work did not suit my personality at all - I have the typical ADHD traits of being very focussed but easy to distract, and that combined with a pager going off constantly and 10 different tasks pulling you every which way was hell for me.
Since then I've worked in healthcare computing for most of my career - I was always a computer nerd, I got to combine my medical degree and my hobby (I'm a better programmer now than I ever was a doctor though), and there was always the sense of still feeding my vocation. I do periodically consider a change of industry (especially when a recruiter waves a tasty wage packet under my nose), but you couldn't induce me to enter the financial industry with a cattle prod, I'd feel like I was earning money by shitting on people.
I square the fact that as an engineer, I increase productivity, with the fact that in the healthcare industry, this probably leads to better healthcare, rather than fewer jobs. I would have a hard time, personally speaking, being one of the engineers working on those automated supermarket tills.
The only reason I moved out of the public sector into the private sector was that I was having doubts about how much good my work in the public sector was actually doing. Although at the moment, I'm having doubts about how much good the healthcare IT sector does at all - it mostly seems to be oriented around meeting the needs of the Medical-Insurance-Industrial-Complex rather than the patient and bogged down by so much legislation that true innovation is virtually impossible. I have some very cool tech for the healthcare market in the back of my head, but I can't see it flying in the current environment.
Increasing automation isn't going to erode our quality of life so much as it is going to take all the fun out of his. He might as well be collecting leaves for all the good his extra money is going to do for him.
He makes this point himself - I recall he talks about buying maybe 2 or 3 pairs of "work pants" a year.
I don't get how a guy who stands up, and says "Hey, things are pretty unequal, and maybe we should do something about that or there will be some unpleasant civil unrest - seriously, how many more pairs of pants do I need?" is coming off as actually being all "Waaah, the proles are having a better life and that makes my life less enjoyable."
All that stuff you talked about? Nice groceries, tech goods, better healthcare? That's stuff for the middle classes. That's for people with good jobs that pay a lot more than minimum wage. But the more automation we have, the less middle class we'll have that can afford them. The reason there is a squeezed middle is because on one side, we have robots, and the other, we have foreign workers who'll work for less.
Well, here's the thing. The cheap foreign labour is now being replaced. Initially, by even more desperate poor brown people. But increasingly, by robots. Companies like Foxconn, not noted for their enlightened policy on worker welfare, are now replacing their workers with robots.
Productivity, on the upswing for over 5 decades, is now dropping. Not because the actual labour a single worker can do is less, but because the amount that's needed is less - because people can't afford the fruits of that labour. Like you said, how much can one rich guy consume?
The guy who took a pay cut from $1M to $70k, so he could pay his staff $70k minimum wage gets it. He's a surfer dude. $70k buys him all the knarly waves he can hang 10 on, and then some. Paying his workers a decent wage gets him 2 things - a workforce with great loyalty and no worries getting in the way of increasing the value of his business, and a feeling of doing the right thing that $930k dollars just can't buy you (in your own bank account).
The answer is to look at that million bucks and not to think "How much happiness can it buy me?", but "How much happiness can this buy?"
Those stupidly overbright headlamps that dazzle you could be replaced by ones that dim themselves when they see oncoming traffic.
Or, you know, just made illegal. I'm sure they don't actually improve road safety, at least, not for everyone.
It's short-sighted and stupid.
The end result will be torches and pitchforks. And even (some of) the rich know this.
Almonds will also become a scarce luxury foodstuff, with California accounting for 80% of the world crop.
All those hipsters who drink almond milk will have to find another kind of nut.
Well, someone will bring this up
Nestlé bottling water in California
But the first thing I thought when I saw the story (in a campaign email) was "I bet it's a small fraction of the total water usage".
I can't believe that it takes over a gallon of water to grow a single almond. Maybe they should look at ways of improving that.
And of legislating that people should be given a sound thwack around the head for buying bottled water. It's a wasteful, stupid, con.
UK news says yes
We do have the O2 reflex, it's just not the primary one and not active in most humans.
In individuals with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, the O2 reflex takes over - which makes it dangerous to give them high flow oxygen, because they will build up an excess of CO2 (because they don't breathe enough to expel it all). This reveals why CO2 is the usual trigger - normal air has enough oxygen in it, and our lungs are normally very efficient at absorbing it.
No, there is documentary evidence that the incumbent members of the justice administration consider it too humane.
How to kill a human being is a documentary where a prominent British politician investigates the commonly used methods of execution.
He concludes that the nitrogen method, used in abattoirs to kill pigs humanely, is ideal for human execution too. All the other methods have drawbacks. In particular, lethal injection is noted to be quite painful. In a country who's constitution forbids cruel and unusual punishment, this seems odd.
Several members of the incumbent correctional organizations express the opinion that nitrogen asphyxiation isn't cruel enough because asphyxia induces a brief, mild, state of euphoria before the victim loses consciousness. They also seem of the opinion that the execution should make the target suffer before death to provide a sense of justice to the family of their victim.
If the killers ... go out with a euphoric high, that is not justice [1]
(and it's rumoured that Oklahoma is actually taking up nitrogen as an execution method after seeing this documentary).
It's more that boys take failure differently. We're presumed to be behind to start with (because by now everyone knows that boys are outperformed academically by girls).
Therefore we have more tolerance for failure.
Girls are always special and beautiful and awesome. So when they run into something hard they don't do well at right off the bat, they get turned off and move to something which is judged by less objective standards that you can fail "soft" at. It's a problem with prejudice alright, just the positive kind.
Mostly the asset production budget. Engine is either off the shelf or a relatively low cost for a few ubernerds. But you need a shitload of artists, musicians, voice actors, motion capture performers, and writers for a AAA game.
He isn't negatively affected at all - sure, his bank account might not be as full (and there's the increased equity from a more motivated business to consider).
His chosen lifestyle is paid for, in full, by the $70k salary. He's winning.
Now his staff are too. And he feels good about that. That's something that putting more money in his own pocket wouldn't have bought him.
Maybe the problem is CEOs who look at that pile of money in their account, and say "What the hell can I do with all this?!?" and their answer is what benefits one man.