It's easier to make lots of money in a shorter time with the "inferior product/blitz marketing" combo rather than a long slower trudge up "earning customer trust" hill with well-made products. And this suits today's "profits now -- fuck the long term viability of this company, I'll be gone by then" corporate mindset just fine. It's not easier to make the products themselves. Making cheaper products means a balancing act between a product that seems to be "good enough" quality for consumers, yet low enough quality to break/wear down to facilitate requiring replacement. There's less room for variances in manufacturing tolerances, because you have a much smaller margin between "decent" and "too little".
The company that makes higher quality products will be able to command higher prices for it's goods, but have to invest more energy into research and development (product improvement). And the added "quality margin" will not be as much revenue as repeat purchases of the inferior product (that's mostly because consumers look too closely at price and don't know enough about many goods to judge the quality to see which is really the better buy). A well made product will last longer and that company will have to find new ways to get consumers to purchase new models of the product if they still have a perfectly functioning earlier model. Market saturation will reduce revenue until this innovative new feature can be found.
I should have specified I was talking about engineering and manufacturing when I said I agreed it's easier to make the higher quality product.
Even if the product is cheap enough that the consumer gets discouraged and avoids the same manufacturer for the replacement, it still works out -- if all the other manufacturers of the same product are practicing the same deliberately shoddy product design. Because while John may swear not to get another Brand X DVD player and instead get a Company Y model, someone else is similarly disgusted with Company Y's goods and will buy a Brand X one instead. Neither one is aware really that both companies suck, because the over-marketing is drowning out any serious product reviews, that and the recent trend of threatening to sue any publication that says anything bad about a product helps that, too.
So the companies are instead now competing using advertising firms to out-dazzle each others' share of consumers. The difficulty in marketing crappy products year after year isn't counted in the company's own difficulty in making said products -- that's the advertising firm's issue. But it's worth pointing out that is another facet to the "make it cheap and sell a bunch" approach.
No, I was about to say the same thing. The overall decline of product quality being the evidence. But he's right. It's easier to make a quality product, it's just not cheaper. There's greater profit to be made on making a lower quality product and then marketing it to hell to get the sales numbers, rather than making the product right to begin with and then letting the reputation your business gains from earning consumer trust increase sales. That's why the Brand Name itself is a worthless item for consumers looking for quality. They get bought and licensed too easily today to have them actually represent a company and the quality level of the products it produces.
I personally think the shift to easy-to-change anonymous three letter corporation initials is part of what made this possible. People took their company's reputation more seriously when it was literally their name on the product.
They may have differing opinions as individuals, but overall they share a general pattern of behavior, especially in the boardroom, that would yield a shared opinion which would support this type of double standard when it comes to regulation and government intervention in business. So it seems like "groups of people" but as part of indoctrination into corporate culture they've homogenized into what acts more like a single "evil" person.
The upper branches of corporations promote and build their ranks with individuals who share their own beliefs and ethics, the result being "meet the new guy, same as the one who just left".
For more info you might check out Who Rules America? by G. William Domhoff, it's a (small) college textbook about the interactions between the social classes, business leadership, and government.
I don't understand why this is modded Insightful. A corporation isn't really a life form in itself, it's just a legal entity. It does whatever running it (people) want. Meaning I could rewrite the parent as:
"Sounds like people really are just like individual [meat] persons."
Granted, some of them will do a great job, but many of them will be lazy, sloppy, and far less credible than the typical Wikipedia authors.
The fact they actually have college training in writing articles, and are having to document their sources, actually makes them more credible than the average Wikipedia author.
If these rare earths are so rare and valuable, and only going to become more so, why should the upfront cost matter? The plant should still make a huge profit, unless I am misunderstanding basic economics.
The economics seem sound, you're forgetting how corporate culture is, though. Everything runs on short-term profits and performance bonuses with today's CXXs. That's why most companies are laying off experienced people and selling off profitable ventures to the highest bidder, it's about differences that can be made on the balance sheet now, not about the health of the company down the road. Everyone will have safely jettisoned away on their Golden Parachutes by then, so who cares?
With an eight-year building time for a plant, it would be a decade before such a project really showed sizable profits for a company. The people who make the decision to go ahead with the project today would not likely be the ones to reap the financial benefits of such a venture, they would be "the next guy to sit in my chair", they would only be remembered as "that guy who sucked all our profits into building that expensive plant for all those years". So it's no wonder they aren't interested in this, it's does nothing for them personally!
More worrisome is people's eagerness to sell out real estate to foreign ventures. Here's a scenario:
Person owns large swath of land with these tech-useful elements in the ground.
U.S. companies slow to act because of corporate culture issue above.
Chinese investors come over and offer to buy said land.
Current owner accepts (Chinese money now > U.S. money later to them, after all).
Chinese now control both their own supplies and U.S. supplies now.
U.S. firms now price-squeezed for their country's own natural resources.
How about simply having a rule that the throttle run in "idle" position if the brake pedal is depressed regardless of he position of the gas pedal? That way even if the pedal was "stuck down" according to the engine it would ignore it from the driver having their foot planted on the brake trying to slow the car down.
Is there a real world situation were someone would be pushing the brake pedal down while simultaneously needing the throttle open legitimately?
I could fathom people who actually do create music are the ones with the problem. In a world where quality really isn't appreciated and "good enough" is all that's worth paying for, what's to happen to actual musical composers when the majority feel that these machine-made pieces are "good enough".
I was thinking about this a few months back while listening to some music featuring vocals by Vocaloid characters. Some of the songs they sing in are really quite enjoyable. They aren't at a level where they could actually replace professional musicians -- yet. But there is that chilling Gibson-esque sensation you get when you think about the day a singer becomes widely accepted that doesn't exist outside a machine.
This is similar to Walmart and Best Buy that have guarantees for the lowest price. If you bring an add from another store with a cheaper price, they'll honor that ad. But if you check, you'll see they never sell the exact same model computer (and probably most other high end products). They cut a deal with HP or Toshiba or whoever to make a slightly different model specifically for them. Maybe the RAM or HD size is slightly different. Walmart won't sell the models found at Best Buy and vice versa.
It got much more hair-splitting. Go back three or so years and look at the DVD player selection between major big-box retailers. They would each feature the exact same players with customized model numbers. Best Buy would have the RCA DVD-900, Wal-Mart the RCA DVD-901, Target the 902. The appearance and features of these players would be exactly the same, the difference was one model number could only be found at one retail chain, so each could claim the models were different if someone brought in an ad from another chain.
US astronomer Frank Drake has told scientists at a special SETI meeting in London that earthlings are making it less likely that we will be heard in space.
Curses! Yet another victim of the new AT&T's wireless service!
Say what? When I got the iPod Touch, my MacHead friends recommended it to convert video to a format suitable for playback on iPods
Uh, yeah. Exactly. Your MacHead friends recommended it... because they're Mac people. They don't have the same choice the Windows users do. The vast majority h264 MKVs are being made for playback on computers, not iPods. If you want to know what the majority people use, talk to the DVD pirates on the torrents, talk to the anime fansubbers; they aint using Handbrake.
So the statement I was originally replying to "HandBrake is the de-facto standard for creating h.264 files on Mac, Linux and Windows systems" is false, because it's really not used that much on Windows. I question how much it's used on Linux as well.
Handbrake is not^H^H^H the front end iPod owning folks are using on Windows. FTFY.
What do you mean you "fixed" that for me? We're not talking about iPods, we're talking about the prevalence of a software program to convert DVDs to h264 encoded video files.
Do all Mac addicts nowadays change the topic of the discussion to suit their argument?
Maybe the de-facto standard on OSX, but this is the first time I even heard there is a Windows version of Handbrake. People are using ffmpeg and other programs that use the X264 library. Yeah, Handbrake is one of those programs that uses it, but Handbrake is not the front end folks are using on Windows.
He wasn't talking to you, either. He was replying to the guy who said he merely wanted to read the book, not make a new work based on it. You can hardly blame him for not answering a question you didn't ask him, troll.
You could just make a statement about these copyright extensions and pirate an etext off the Net. How likely do you think it is someone would actually come looking for you?
Slashdot Mirror
No.
It's easier to make lots of money in a shorter time with the "inferior product/blitz marketing" combo rather than a long slower trudge up "earning customer trust" hill with well-made products. And this suits today's "profits now -- fuck the long term viability of this company, I'll be gone by then" corporate mindset just fine. It's not easier to make the products themselves. Making cheaper products means a balancing act between a product that seems to be "good enough" quality for consumers, yet low enough quality to break/wear down to facilitate requiring replacement. There's less room for variances in manufacturing tolerances, because you have a much smaller margin between "decent" and "too little".
The company that makes higher quality products will be able to command higher prices for it's goods, but have to invest more energy into research and development (product improvement). And the added "quality margin" will not be as much revenue as repeat purchases of the inferior product (that's mostly because consumers look too closely at price and don't know enough about many goods to judge the quality to see which is really the better buy). A well made product will last longer and that company will have to find new ways to get consumers to purchase new models of the product if they still have a perfectly functioning earlier model. Market saturation will reduce revenue until this innovative new feature can be found.
I should have specified I was talking about engineering and manufacturing when I said I agreed it's easier to make the higher quality product.
Even if the product is cheap enough that the consumer gets discouraged and avoids the same manufacturer for the replacement, it still works out -- if all the other manufacturers of the same product are practicing the same deliberately shoddy product design. Because while John may swear not to get another Brand X DVD player and instead get a Company Y model, someone else is similarly disgusted with Company Y's goods and will buy a Brand X one instead. Neither one is aware really that both companies suck, because the over-marketing is drowning out any serious product reviews, that and the recent trend of threatening to sue any publication that says anything bad about a product helps that, too.
So the companies are instead now competing using advertising firms to out-dazzle each others' share of consumers. The difficulty in marketing crappy products year after year isn't counted in the company's own difficulty in making said products -- that's the advertising firm's issue. But it's worth pointing out that is another facet to the "make it cheap and sell a bunch" approach.
No, I was about to say the same thing. The overall decline of product quality being the evidence. But he's right. It's easier to make a quality product, it's just not cheaper. There's greater profit to be made on making a lower quality product and then marketing it to hell to get the sales numbers, rather than making the product right to begin with and then letting the reputation your business gains from earning consumer trust increase sales. That's why the Brand Name itself is a worthless item for consumers looking for quality. They get bought and licensed too easily today to have them actually represent a company and the quality level of the products it produces.
I personally think the shift to easy-to-change anonymous three letter corporation initials is part of what made this possible. People took their company's reputation more seriously when it was literally their name on the product.
Heck we even had DOUBLE elections some of those years!
And our new overlords welcome EU! ... wait, I think I'm mixing too many memes now.
They may have differing opinions as individuals, but overall they share a general pattern of behavior, especially in the boardroom, that would yield a shared opinion which would support this type of double standard when it comes to regulation and government intervention in business. So it seems like "groups of people" but as part of indoctrination into corporate culture they've homogenized into what acts more like a single "evil" person.
The upper branches of corporations promote and build their ranks with individuals who share their own beliefs and ethics, the result being "meet the new guy, same as the one who just left".
For more info you might check out Who Rules America? by G. William Domhoff, it's a (small) college textbook about the interactions between the social classes, business leadership, and government.
I don't understand why this is modded Insightful. A corporation isn't really a life form in itself, it's just a legal entity. It does whatever running it (people) want. Meaning I could rewrite the parent as:
"Sounds like people really are just like individual [meat] persons."
Yes... insightful.
The fact they actually have college training in writing articles, and are having to document their sources, actually makes them more credible than the average Wikipedia author.
Am I the only one who read that as "There are 12" models?
The economics seem sound, you're forgetting how corporate culture is, though. Everything runs on short-term profits and performance bonuses with today's CXXs. That's why most companies are laying off experienced people and selling off profitable ventures to the highest bidder, it's about differences that can be made on the balance sheet now, not about the health of the company down the road. Everyone will have safely jettisoned away on their Golden Parachutes by then, so who cares?
With an eight-year building time for a plant, it would be a decade before such a project really showed sizable profits for a company. The people who make the decision to go ahead with the project today would not likely be the ones to reap the financial benefits of such a venture, they would be "the next guy to sit in my chair", they would only be remembered as "that guy who sucked all our profits into building that expensive plant for all those years". So it's no wonder they aren't interested in this, it's does nothing for them personally!
More worrisome is people's eagerness to sell out real estate to foreign ventures. Here's a scenario:
A burn out would require modifying the proportioning valve on the brakes wouldn't it? So the drive wheels aren't held.
The majority of people don't do burn outs. I'm talking about "normal" driving.
How about simply having a rule that the throttle run in "idle" position if the brake pedal is depressed regardless of he position of the gas pedal? That way even if the pedal was "stuck down" according to the engine it would ignore it from the driver having their foot planted on the brake trying to slow the car down.
Is there a real world situation were someone would be pushing the brake pedal down while simultaneously needing the throttle open legitimately?
I could fathom people who actually do create music are the ones with the problem. In a world where quality really isn't appreciated and "good enough" is all that's worth paying for, what's to happen to actual musical composers when the majority feel that these machine-made pieces are "good enough".
I was thinking about this a few months back while listening to some music featuring vocals by Vocaloid characters. Some of the songs they sing in are really quite enjoyable. They aren't at a level where they could actually replace professional musicians -- yet. But there is that chilling Gibson-esque sensation you get when you think about the day a singer becomes widely accepted that doesn't exist outside a machine.
Some people do apparently.
http://www.oberweis.com/web/default.asp
No, that's actually a stupid question. It's right in TFS:
"...The other company emerging from the split will include Motorola's wireless networking business and its enterprise radio systems operations."
I seem to recall reading the chance of being in a plane crash are 1 in 20,000.
The government better shut down the airlines and give us all our Lithium-ion batteries back for public safety.
It got much more hair-splitting. Go back three or so years and look at the DVD player selection between major big-box retailers. They would each feature the exact same players with customized model numbers. Best Buy would have the RCA DVD-900, Wal-Mart the RCA DVD-901, Target the 902. The appearance and features of these players would be exactly the same, the difference was one model number could only be found at one retail chain, so each could claim the models were different if someone brought in an ad from another chain.
Curses! Yet another victim of the new AT&T's wireless service!
Uh, yeah. Exactly. Your MacHead friends recommended it... because they're Mac people. They don't have the same choice the Windows users do. The vast majority h264 MKVs are being made for playback on computers, not iPods. If you want to know what the majority people use, talk to the DVD pirates on the torrents, talk to the anime fansubbers; they aint using Handbrake.
So the statement I was originally replying to "HandBrake is the de-facto standard for creating h.264 files on Mac, Linux and Windows systems" is false, because it's really not used that much on Windows. I question how much it's used on Linux as well.
What do you mean you "fixed" that for me? We're not talking about iPods, we're talking about the prevalence of a software program to convert DVDs to h264 encoded video files.
Do all Mac addicts nowadays change the topic of the discussion to suit their argument?
ROFL.
Maybe the de-facto standard on OSX, but this is the first time I even heard there is a Windows version of Handbrake. People are using ffmpeg and other programs that use the X264 library. Yeah, Handbrake is one of those programs that uses it, but Handbrake is not the front end folks are using on Windows.
It was on DealNews yesterday.
http://dealnews.com/32-off-Space-Shuttles-at-NASA-Deals-from-28-800-000-free-shipping-more/342463.html
The Blue Sea of Death?
The reboot time after that one was horrible!
not anyone who counted
He wasn't talking to you, either. He was replying to the guy who said he merely wanted to read the book, not make a new work based on it. You can hardly blame him for not answering a question you didn't ask him, troll.
You could just make a statement about these copyright extensions and pirate an etext off the Net.
How likely do you think it is someone would actually come looking for you?