Offtopic: I use quotes because that is the proper way to quote text which does not take significant space. Not only this, but because I don't want to type out the HTML tags to do it.
On Topic: By admitting that the the AG (and thus, the poster) was "...reinterpreting your Constitution to mean whatever you want it to mean." you admit treason by the AG. He has no constitutional power to interpret the constitution. He also is aiding the enemy (in this case, the terrorists) with his illegal re-interpreting of the constitution by inducing fear into the population for the purpose of changing the current political climate.
If this is not treason, what is?
However, you cannot classify the poster's comments as treason. There is a difference. The AG took an oath to office to protect the constitution. This is not just another case of not upholding your oath of office. It is a case of directly going AGAINST your oath of office for political gain. This is by definition the enemy of the United States. Actively breaking his oath rather than passively not doing his job, he is the enemy.
In another post you claim that the poster is also committing treason by reinterpreting the constitution, but this cannot be so because he is not in the position to commit treason by abusing his power to uphold the constitution. However, your admission that the poster's actions are treasonous only reinforces the point that the AG is because he is in a position of power which would make it treasonous, and is actively pursuing the treasonous actions against the constitution and the people of the United States.
Finally, your claim that the poster is reinterpreting the constitution is really not all that true anyway. The only test would be to go back in time and ask the dead people who wrote it. The next best thing, a test in the SCOTUS, will never happen because nobody in power has the balls to indict the AG for his actions.
It is fundamentally flawed in certain circumstances... like the one we are in right now. Now it wasn't setup to be like this but over the many years it has slowly grown this way. The idea that one vote used wisely only works for third parties when you have caps on spending low enough for (reasonable) 3rd parties to compete with it. However, any time a three party system could be applied to this method, you are in a state of instability, ie, it will always tend towards a 2 party system in the long run and stay there (at least with current election rules).
In a ranking system(instant runoff), or approval system, every person can vote their conscience and still have a backup who is of the party they lean towards. This type of voting tends to make the end results to prefer the most popular party when better alternatives are not there, but still gives the alternative candidates a chance when they are more popular than any given party. This method, even with unrestricted spending, could tend towards a multi-party system in a stable state.
Now, there may be things which could cause instability in the multi-party system that we are missing about a ranking system that would not reveal itself until many years down the road once the different parties figured all the little tricks and dynamics involved in that type of voting system. But you must address those problems as they come up, something that isn't being addressed with the current system.
People have been researching polling methods for hundreds of years, and the scholars mostly agree against a 1 vote used wisely system for the very reasons mentioned above. It works good for simple elections involving 2 people. But only run-off style elections allow a 3rd or 4th party to be involved while still accounting for the will of the people. That is why most local/non-partisan elections are run this way (but not instantly, but a second election)
Get over yourself. The world society, the one you live in, is based around compromise. Maybe you have heard of it before. There is nothing so special about you that makes your opinions so important that a candidate should be chosen just for your individual personal beliefs. Opinions are like assholes. Everyone has one, and everyone's is different. The rules apply to you too. If you can't find a candidate that you can support based on your personal principles, go back to step 1 and read my original post. Quit bitching that the only candidates that have a chance to win don't agree with you on 100% of the issues you care about. It is as simple as this. Even IF you truely believe both candidates are exactly weighted for and against to the same degree in your opinion, you STILL have your personal voting strategy to apply to any given race(based on your cause), which should make it even easier to decide on a candidate. If you believe one party is corrupt more than another, and you believe in each candidate 50% exactly, then your choice is obvious to support the candidate of which party you want in power at that given time. If you think that both candidates are evil, then you need to go back and re-read what I wrote above. You aren't special because of your beliefs. Everyone votes based on their principles, and if you haven't yet determined principles you believe in which are compatible with candidates for office, then you have more problems than who to vote for.
I'll let you in on a little secret. There isn't a single person out there who agrees with any single candidate on every issue, or even most issues. Pretending that you are special because this little rule applies to you doesn't change the reality of the situation.. Every voter disagrees with those they vote for. That is the nature of society in general context, and in the context of the US Government. Even with ideal candidates, you will disagree with them. This is because everyone has different beliefs and so there is no group of candidates that could line up with every single person. Yes, I'm touching on that compromise word I mentioned earlier.
I am not trying to put you down, I just think people need to wake up and smell the coffee before they start spouting off ridiculous statements like your post.
"If you don't like either candidate, simply vote out the incumbent."
This is one of many excellent solutions for those who "can't decide who to vote for" or are afraid of "voting for the lesser of two evils".
You people need to get a hold of yourself. If you are talking about the lesser of two evils, or you are thinking of it, then your doing more damage than good. There is RARELY the lesser of two evils. Go back with your 20/20 heindsight and tell me of all the elections you can think of, where you voted the lesser of two evils, or didn't vote, and someone came into power and ruined everything you stand for?
I'm sorry folks, but this is serious. If you can't be an adult, sit down, and figure out that one of the candidates is more in line with your principles, then you have a serious problem and maybe you SHOULDN'T be voting.
It is extremely RARE if the only two options are so evil that you cannot come to a common ground with either of them. If this is the case, you have serious mental problems, either that your just ignorant. This is not to offend anyone, because I know a lot of people who say they voted for the lesser of the evils. But seriously people. This isn't rocket science, and if you are talking like that then you need to shut up and quit filling people's heads. If you don't trust either candidate then you had better figure something out because you have trust problems.
In summary: If you are talking about voting for the lesser of two evils, you really do have some serious issues you need to address on a personal level.
(maybe now and then there really are two evil people as the only option, but seriously, in these national elections, are you serious?)
We did a new pumpkin PC this year just in time for Halloween...
This time it can see via webcam eyes (thanks logitech), breath through its nose via case fan, and talk out its mouth via speaker system. The insides are made of a custom power supply and mac-mini Core Duo system. The lighting is made of neon wiring thanks to Startech.com mutant mods.
There is a link there to last year's 2005 pumpkin, and this year's 2006 mac-o-lantern. Check out the last page with a video of the pumpkin in action with the webcam and singing the Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven video.
Would somebody please explain to me what this means? Are GUIs "dumb" by definition?
Lets see...
To eject a disk/drive/floppy: Drag it to the trash can. Dumbed down. To context click (a critical feature): Two handed CTRL+Click. Dumbed down. To context click on a mighty mouse: lift up left finger, click with right finger: Dumbed down. To install a driver for 3rd party hardware devices: Dumbed down and no central system area to do it. To enter a wireless network key: No, its not in the network control panel. Not even a link to it. Dumbed down. Go -> Applications: Dumbed down. And half the crap in the desktop menus don't even belong there.
Previous Mac OS's: To control your printer: go to the "chooser", no, not the "printer chooser", but the "chooser": Get real.
Linux requires me to think too much (recompiling the kernel to install a driver? -- why would a home user ever want to do that??)
That is because on the Mac there are no drivers to install. Fat chance getting 3rd party hardware installed the majority of the time (more than 50% of peripherals out there has no supported driver for mac)
Dell has had the Core 2 Duo for a bit, but I'm sick of using Windows and dealing with MS security issues, MS DRM policies, MS licensing changes... and on and on...
Oh yea, I forgot... Apple doesn't do DRM... When is the last time you used a mac? 1984?
Mac OS gives me the best of both worlds: a unix environment that is incredibly user friendly because it drops the nauseating hypocracy of GNU and the EFF... I don't have to recompile anything to install a driver.
Lets see... EFF/GNU makes linux hard to USE? I always thought it was because linux requires the command line a lot and apps aren't very consistent across the board... Oh wait I must have been thinking about another linux kernel... You forgot to mention that you don't have to recompile anything to install a driver because you won't catch anybody installing a driver into mac OS.
Is the Apple solution the best solution in any particular category? Yes: user friendliness. It still has DRM, the hardware is expensive and isn't always the best. It's not fully OSS...
Lets see.. EFF/GNU is full of hypocrisy but have you ever used a dictionary?
But as an all around package? No one does it better. Yes, Jobs is my god and I will submit to his never-ending p0wnij.
I work for a campus maintaining over 3,000 systems, mostly in warranty from the majors. We probably replace a few drives a week on average. Half the drives we get back from RMA are refurbished, but typically don't cause a problem. The majority of failures we must replace are Maxtor (now defunct) and IBM/Hitachi. It is rare that a segate or WD drive goes out within the first year, but after 2 or 3 anything is possible and you are guaranteed failures in a significant percentage.
WD and Segate are the only brands of drives that are reliable. Some will tell you that WD is crap, but those people haven't installed a hard drive since 1998. In today's world, if WD and Segate were making shit, they would be out of business by now, as their RMA costs would be through the roof. WD and Segate outsell the competition several times each and if yield were that bad the price of drives would be double.
When it comes to actually getting warranty replacements, WD is the best in the industry as far as service, on the other hand, Segate has the longest warranty on their OEM drives (5 years). Over the last 6 years I have worked here, the trends have been about the same, with IBM/Hitachi getting worse, maxtor always having been average/unreliable, and Segate getting better, from my perspective. I have found that the old Maxtor drives are having their labels covered up by segate labels. I know these models still have the same problems maxtor always had. I am unsure of the future of segate drives coming out of Maxtor designs, but I have read insider reports that they are cleaning up their act. Will not know if this is true probably for a few years when we have had time to see the standard 3 year cycle complete.
For the extra cost it takes you to manage, deal with bugs, fix with wrappers, and pay for licensing for cPanel, pass that cost on to customers via monthly fee.
For the customers who choose the more robust packages which have cheaper, or no licensing fees, which cost your admin staff less money to operate and keep patched, charge those customers a cheaper rate. It's not that you would lose revenue by discounting the service, you would keep the alternate controller at your current base rate. Then all new customers will have to pay... say $1/month extra for the cPanel solution. You could still market cPanel solutions at whatever price you want via banners on affiliate sites and only those customers who clicked on that banner would receive cheaper pricing. This is also where sales team training is KEY. You need to educate them on which pannels are better, why, why does it benefit the customer, and why security matters, etc..
I guarantee you that all the nooby web guys paying the 5$ per month for hosting won't spend the extra $2/month to 'upgrade' to cPanel. 99% of them use it for fantastico and webmail anyway. And the people who are running REAL websites would switch to your alternate solution the first time they are hacked. It doesn't sound like such a horrible way to run your business. Have a percentage of your shared hosts to be the alternate solution, and push that in your marketing and sales pitches, when users web-chat with you shopping for a host, email your sales team looking for a host, or order online, if the alternate system is promoted as THE system, with the cPanel as a premium package, then it won't be hard to switch the bulk of new users to it.
It isn't like you can't call it a Control Panel. The word isn't trademarked. If people see the word "control panel" they will think cPanel (if they have ever heard of it). You guys are forgetting that 99% of the people out there shopping for a low cost shared web host have absolutely NO IDEA what a cPanel is.
I don't know if you agree with me, but I have delt with the end users a lot being in the business of helping people swtup small business websites. And I haven't found a single person, ever, who cares what version of a control pannel you use, as long as it works and does most of what they want to do, and the stuff it can't do could be done with technical support.
Free market cant fix a monopoly who is actively using its monopoly to charge others for whatever service.
The only reason the telco's and cable co's have this option is because they have a government granted monopoly, in exchange for restrictions. This fact is what you are forgetting. it is also the fact that means we must regulate them.
If the telco's want to turn into content providers rather than content movers, then they will need to get the government out of the business and release their monopoly on the cable lines, selling their last mile lines to the neighborhoods that they connect to, and become content providers. Short of this, they have no right to double charge for service. The telco's granted monopoly is for one purpose: to provide a data pipe to the consumer's home, for the cost of the service plus a reasonable markup. anything outside this scope is a problem.
the price of bandwidh has come down significantly over the past 10 years. It used to be 29.99 for dialup service on a 14.4kbps modem, plus long distance fees because ISP's didn't exist locally in too many places. In Arkansas, you had to call the state capital city and pay long distance from anywhere in the state if you wanted internet, plus the fee to the ISP. now it is 12.99/year for 256/1MB DSL service with a 1yr contract through SBC in almost all areas of the state. It is 24.99 for 256/256 cable internet with no service contract. The content providers (google, etc) are already paying their service providers for the bandwidth they are uploading. Their service providers are already paying the telco's for the peering fees they must pay any time they upload more than they download to their peers. This is how the free market decides peering prices.
So google pays per megabyte to upload. Google's ISP pays per megabyte to upload. and the telco/cableco's charge per megabyte (rolled into a flat rate bandwidth cap per month) to the consumers. EVERY company involved is getting paid for their services. If they want to change the peering price because the costs have increased, fine. This is the market deciding on a price.
But these monopolies, which are restricted by the government to charge fair prices, have no right to charge imagionary fees. If the telco's pipes are bottlenecked, then they should upgrade them and increase their peering fees and increase their subscriber fees. If they don't like it, then they can give up their monopoly and compete in the market without one. Something I doube very seriously they could ever do successfully. Last mile providers should not grow to a scope any larger than last mile providers. Their monopoly means they cannot compete in the free market, and so if they try to do it then all bets are off and the free market fails. We need to keep EVERY last mile provider with government granted monopolies OUT of the free market as much as possible. The best way to do this is to keep them down as service providers to their subscribers.
Your points are good about how the government should get out of it, but there is just one problem:
The government is already involved in this government granted monopoly. This is in the form of a monopoly given to these companies to lay their line, allowing nobody else to do it. They also gave these companies free money from each consumer in the form of the universal service fee. In exchange the telco's are supposed to provide these lines at a wholesale price, at the cost of doing business for them (the same cost that they themselves would have to pay if they were to buy it from themselves) and that they would roll new wires out to rural areas using the extra money from the universal service fund.
Now that the telco's are trying to upsell their service, using a product that they were given for free by the government (the universal service fund pays for the lines, the telco's just manage and own them). They are trying to say that over time, somehow they are losing money because more and more people are using these lines, paying the universal service fee, and paying the telco's fees. So now that they have more customers using them, with no additional cost to use it, and the lines were granted to them for free by the government, in a monopolistic form, and now they want to charge more arbitrarilly?
That is the issue here. The government is ALREADY INVOLVED. unless the government gets out of the universal service fund, unless the government gets out of the telco regulation business completely, they will need to play arbitrator between the telco's, the businesses, and the consumers.
Bingo. You just made the point your parent was. You just described an unviable business model.
Now that you have made this discovery, you have to ask yourself:
Do I plan on seeing this job through and improving the business, making it a career? Or... Do I just like the job and plan on milking it until they go bankrupt, and then find a new one at that point?
You must pick one of these. If you select question #1, then you will need to take charge and earn your way up the ladder. You will have to take the initiative and build a better connection -- no matter the risk or cost -- until your goal is achieved. You will need to pull all the weight you can afford to pull to make this happen. You will need to pull all the strings with the different people in your office you are capable of pulling, to slip this transitional phase into the business plan. You said yourself your boss would never do it, so you are going to have to do the work on your own or you will have to quit and find a new career. You will have to identify this problem before you can fix it. The problem is that your leaders have not setup a viable business model. Your job, should you choose to accept it, is to strive twards this viability. Time will not fix it. Hope will not fix it. If you think for one second that one of these days, if your buyers and sellers can just make one big score because some idiot bought an overpriced object on ebay to bankroll your business needs then you have another thing coming. You will have to take immediate initiative and make things happen properly. If you are on dialup and you have a bottleneck for listing items, then the fix of a new connection would either mean laying off one of your employees, or the ability to buy and sell more products. Both cases could bring your business into profitability. This is obvious to me but I have seen it not so obvious to people I have worked with in the past.
Ebay is a complex business to be in, 99% of the power sellers out there have absolutely no clue what a business is, how to run one, or what a prsentable product should look like on the web. 99% of them have crappy pictures (because of crappy equipment, crappy listers, and crappy internet connections), crappy descriptions, crappy layout templates, and crappy customer service when there are problems (probably because there is no streamlined process to buy and sell and so too many customers slip through the cracks, causing your business to play customer service catchup, rather than actively preventing problems). You say you only make 2000 to 5000 in sales per week, well, what if you had the capacity to list 15% more items per week with a new connection? What if your listing process included clean, easilly editable templates. What if your bosses trained your listers properly in marketing techniques that would make the product be more wanted on ebay? What if your bosses knew the ebay market better and learned how to monopolize categories from other sellers who don't have a clue? The fact that your ebay business is not viable makes all of the above immediately under scrutiny simply because the business owner doesn't understand the dynamics of buying and selling on ebay.
If you selecte #2, then you should just sit tight, chill out, and let the lamers drive themselves into the ground. Collect your paycheck (you claim around $20K/yr) and be happy. Don't involve yourself any more in the business process and just do what you are told. Make sure you set about 10% of your paycheck each week aside into a bank account so you can have reserves leftover for when your job unexpectedly is over. If you can't afford this 10% savings (really, it ought to be more) then you need to cut back on nice things in life such as beer, long drives, name brand food, and name brand clothes.
This is just my personal advice from me to you. I don't know for a fact that my criticisms of your boss's business are true, but I can guarantee that at least some of it is. I have gone through similar situations with businesses, and more speci
Your initial responce is what I had, but then I did some digging...
According to winamp.com:
AOL Music Now... is now integrated with Winamp. Offering both subscription and a la carte options, AOL Music Now provides access to over 2,000,000 songs from thousands of artists in every genre available.
Winamp has a really hardcore following. Pretty much the "iTunes" of the PC, but with dwindling marketshare. Even many iPod users use winamp for their music catalog over iTunes when you are not a iTunes music store shopper. So you have about 25% of the current MP3 player market compatible with this. You have an even larger percent of the installed base of mp3 players being compatible with this (At one point Apple had close to 90% marketshare, but that was for a very short time and previous to that they had 50% and less leading up to the iPod Mini launch). You have a large population of winamp users out there who have been using winamp since way before AOL bought them. You have a cool program with a built in store and widely compatible with a large enough percentage of the portable music installed base and market.
Obviously, the Real player isn't going to overtake iTunes the program. Obviously windows media player is holding the cards in the non apple market right now. And obviously, winamp is currently the only real player with any sort of chance to slip its foot into the door. Windows media player is irrelevant. It is like the IE of music players. Nobody cares for it. Nobody likes it. It is just there and comes with windows. iTunes is only popular because of iPod and iTMS. without the exclusive pairing of those 2 things, iTunes the player is a worthless pile of scrap brush metal.
I have always said it and I will say it again. Pair an iTMS like music service with winamp. Make it compatible with the players out there. Out pops a winner. I don't expect this to happen overnight without support of apple's music format (and therefore, iPod DRM support), but it can do it with or without. Mark my words... This is the begining of the end for apple's reign of terror on the digital music market.
One of these days the practice of moving manufacturing to China and other countries will not depend on being big enough to do it efficiently. That is when all these artificial margins these companies (like Apple) are getting will instantly shrink and and guess what? Time to go bankrupt.
Current business models which depend on Chinese (or other offshore) manufacturing to cut costs have no lasting ability. I give them another 3-5 years.
To throw more flames on the coles, Foxconn is also Dell's largest supplier of components. So this isn't just an Apple article, it explains why the Foxconn president is the richest man in the (eastern) world.
Foxconn is also Dell's largest supplier of system components. The only thing foxconn doesn't make that is in a Dell business system is the plastics and chassis (and even then, most are Foxconn)
Does this mean that corporate america is funding political terrorists?
"I'd like to learn more about your likes and dislikes"
Likes: 1) Built in software for encryption and data sync (no more 3rd party utilities that all work differently) 2)ability to install programs onto the drive (though this is already possible on regular UFD's)
Dislikes: 1) Requirement to fake a CDROM drive and break other OS's and break locked down windows. 2) Skinned and bloated launchpad. This thing should be the bare minimum. The same functionality could be done in negligable amount of ram and CPU time with off the shelf toolkits. This thing is just plain bloated and takes forever to come up. And the splash screens are idiotic. 3) The extra partition which cannot be erased and software must be removed with a special program 4) once the software is erased, you cannot go back to the factory state 5) every feature on the U3 platform could be accomplished using standard USB drives, except the faking of the CDROM device. So why not just preload software on standard drives? 6) The U3 drives are not standard UFD's and thus have compatibiity problems in other operating systems (such as MacOS X which tries to mount an empty CDROM drive).
"especially objections to the technology as it exists today for Windows."
Objections: 1) launchpad skinning and splash screens and bloatedness 2) partitioned drive. Should be a 100% standard UFD, not a complicated fake CDROM
"For example, many people object to the factory's two-partition format, so if there were a way to repartition the drive into a single volume, would that address the concern?"
I don't think so: because the drive should come from the factory as a standard UFD with just some software on it.
"Is it the lack of control over the format of the device that's the core issue, or is it something more specific?"
It is the lack of UFD compliance out of the box that is the issue.
"Is regaining 4 Megabytes out of a Gig or two from a $50 device really making people lose sleep at night?"
Nobody cares about 4 megabytes, even on a 256MB drive. But the fact that the drive is not a standard UFD out of the box, and has a ton of tricks built into it just to get it to function, and that you have to wait for the launchpad to load up. This is what the problem is.
"So, jack up all you want, as long as you don't go past the point of diminishing returns."
Uhh, I think we all understand this principle. My above comment was based on it. The point is that in this case it doesn't apply because it is a new business. You cannot find the point of diminishing returns without first taking data at lower price points. Without this data, all your assumptions are just that: assumptions.
Having experience with this type of candy store, I can tell you right now that the "point of diminishing returns" is pretty low, usually just under the local market.
Excuse me? It's called captialism to jack prices up?
Jacking prices up does not a maximized profit make. In fact, in most cases (ESPECIALLY WITH AN ITEM LIKE CANDY) jacking the prices up will reduce profits.
In most cases, unless your shit is packed out and you are near full capacity, jacking prices up is going to make you go out of business faster, not slower.
The rules of maximizing profits by jacking up prices only work once the business is established (2-3 years from now) and you are at a high enough volume that the price increase will make up for the reduced volume. But when you are starting a candy store at your counter for teenagers to play WoW on then it isn't going to work. Especially on opening year.
"ow is this the case? How is it the wealthiest man on earth is not the one who owns the most natural resources? Bill Gates built a company of ideas, not gas or oil or anything else. Wealth is built by the efforts of human minds, not by the existence of gold or dirt."
You are forgetting that the most abundant (ROI wise) natural resource on this planet, the human resource, is what Bill Gates is mining in his company.
Do you think Gates himself is writing those programs? Marketing those products? Managing those employees? No. he is farming out labor to a large group of highly trained humans. The same humans that depend directly on other natural resrouces.
You import (or buy) natural resources (Food, water, building materials, shelter, and humans) insert them into your business model, and out pops a product created with those natural resrouces. You can say that the idea of that business model is what creates wealth. But all it does is turn the already expensive resouces you put into it combine. The product is not inherantly worth MORE than the value of the resrouces you put into it. Every single cost must be factored in, including the human cost and profit cost, and then it is a break even. The human cost is obvious, but the profit cost is a direct transfer of wealth (by transforming resources into money) into a seperate account set aside for the investors. This is not a wealth creation but a wealth transfer.
The reason Billy G is so rich is because his resource cost is so large, and his sales output is so large, that shaving off fractions of his margin into profit(a cost of the business) by transforming resources into money, and then placing a fraction of that money into a savings account. There is no wealth creation in this process, only a transfer. The only wealth creation is by mining the raw materials. Everything else is wealth transfer, not creation. In the case of Microsoft, most of the wealth is in transfers.
The Employees of Microsoft are trading (transfering) wealth to their employer in the form of ideas and mental capacity. In exchange, Microsoft transfers a smaller amount of wealth (the difference defined as the gross margin of the resource) to the employee in the form of cold hard cash. The employee then spends that cash on natural resources for consumption, much of which goes to waste in the landfill. The cycle continues.
You can argue a lot of things about economics by shuffling money around into different places, assigning a dollar price on every single activity that a human can do, with investments "creating" wealth magically through interest rates and human ingenuity and what not, but at the end of the day, when actual costs of resources are itemized out, individually, properly, 100% of all GENERATED wealth is in the "production" (or mining or collection) of natural resources. EVERYTHING else is a wealth transfer via manipulation of margins. There is no other correct way of looking at economics. This is the FOUNDATION of all economic principles. It is the foundation of Wal-Mart, Microsoft, and any other rich company. This realization is the difference between wealthy people, and the rest.
"If natural resources take such a huge stance, why are most of the oil producing nations still 'poor'?"
Hint: They are not.
What news channel have you been watching? Let yourself peek into reality for just a second:
The largest exporter of oil to the largest consumer(USA): Canada. Not Poor. The largest exporter of oil period: Saudi Arabia. Not Poor. The largest oil exporting newish government: Venezuela. Not Poor. The third largest oil producer in the world: USA. Not Poor. The UK is ranked 13th.
In fact, of the top 10 oil producers in the world, not a single one of them is "poor". You might consider Russia poor, if you count their temperary economic problems as being poor. Plus, they are so big that oil alone cannot prop up their economy and they have (rightfully so) throttled their output in reflection. You might count Iraq poor, but come on, Bush bombed their capitol, killed their president's sons, and captured their leader, throwing them into civil war. To make matters worse, he invited international terrorists and Al Queda, a group previously not operating in Iraq, into the most powerful opposition group in Iraq. And they still have fucking curbside trash services and cellphones for christs sake. Does sticking your thumb in blue ink to be able to vote make you a poor country? Does dust in the wind because you live in a desert make you poor?
Please look at this list and tell me, which of these countries are "poor"???? And you were modded Insightful? Learn reality. Don't spout off bullshit.
Natural resources are the KEY to thriving economies. Wealth is CREATED solely (SOLELY!) by natural resources. Nothing more. Natural resources are the starting point of ALL created wealth. Stock markets don't create wealth. Business don't create wealth except through natural resources. Banks don't create wealth except through financing business. You have inflation, and it is caused by the mining of natural resources. You have raw materials, and they cost money to dig up. But most natural resources cost less to dig up than they bring back in sales. This is why natural resources are the begining of the economy. The entire world economy is rooted in this principle. Economies were STARTED with the trading of natural resources. Where did you learn economics? Wal-Mart?
I have to agree, a government playing games with the economy can be the difference between successfull and failing in extreme cases of government abuse (of which there are many examples in history). But governments have negligable meaning in the long run(and usually even in the short term) when looking at the big picture. Without self sustaining natural resources, a local economy CANNOT SURVIVE without external and continuing investment. End of story.
Next time, before posting utter bullshit, think about the ignorance you spread to the rest of the world in your posts. It can only serve to hinder progress.
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Offtopic: I use quotes because that is the proper way to quote text which does not take significant space. Not only this, but because I don't want to type out the HTML tags to do it.
On Topic: By admitting that the the AG (and thus, the poster) was "...reinterpreting your Constitution to mean whatever you want it to mean." you admit treason by the AG. He has no constitutional power to interpret the constitution. He also is aiding the enemy (in this case, the terrorists) with his illegal re-interpreting of the constitution by inducing fear into the population for the purpose of changing the current political climate.
If this is not treason, what is?
However, you cannot classify the poster's comments as treason. There is a difference. The AG took an oath to office to protect the constitution. This is not just another case of not upholding your oath of office. It is a case of directly going AGAINST your oath of office for political gain. This is by definition the enemy of the United States. Actively breaking his oath rather than passively not doing his job, he is the enemy.
In another post you claim that the poster is also committing treason by reinterpreting the constitution, but this cannot be so because he is not in the position to commit treason by abusing his power to uphold the constitution. However, your admission that the poster's actions are treasonous only reinforces the point that the AG is because he is in a position of power which would make it treasonous, and is actively pursuing the treasonous actions against the constitution and the people of the United States.
Finally, your claim that the poster is reinterpreting the constitution is really not all that true anyway. The only test would be to go back in time and ask the dead people who wrote it. The next best thing, a test in the SCOTUS, will never happen because nobody in power has the balls to indict the AG for his actions.
"And by trying to broaden the definition of treason with semantic tricks like this, you are doing the exact same thing"
And with this comment, you have admitted the argument and lost all credibility in your argument.
It is fundamentally flawed in certain circumstances... like the one we are in right now. Now it wasn't setup to be like this but over the many years it has slowly grown this way. The idea that one vote used wisely only works for third parties when you have caps on spending low enough for (reasonable) 3rd parties to compete with it. However, any time a three party system could be applied to this method, you are in a state of instability, ie, it will always tend towards a 2 party system in the long run and stay there (at least with current election rules).
In a ranking system(instant runoff), or approval system, every person can vote their conscience and still have a backup who is of the party they lean towards. This type of voting tends to make the end results to prefer the most popular party when better alternatives are not there, but still gives the alternative candidates a chance when they are more popular than any given party. This method, even with unrestricted spending, could tend towards a multi-party system in a stable state.
Now, there may be things which could cause instability in the multi-party system that we are missing about a ranking system that would not reveal itself until many years down the road once the different parties figured all the little tricks and dynamics involved in that type of voting system. But you must address those problems as they come up, something that isn't being addressed with the current system.
People have been researching polling methods for hundreds of years, and the scholars mostly agree against a 1 vote used wisely system for the very reasons mentioned above. It works good for simple elections involving 2 people. But only run-off style elections allow a 3rd or 4th party to be involved while still accounting for the will of the people. That is why most local/non-partisan elections are run this way (but not instantly, but a second election)
Get over yourself. The world society, the one you live in, is based around compromise. Maybe you have heard of it before. There is nothing so special about you that makes your opinions so important that a candidate should be chosen just for your individual personal beliefs. Opinions are like assholes. Everyone has one, and everyone's is different. The rules apply to you too. If you can't find a candidate that you can support based on your personal principles, go back to step 1 and read my original post. Quit bitching that the only candidates that have a chance to win don't agree with you on 100% of the issues you care about. It is as simple as this. Even IF you truely believe both candidates are exactly weighted for and against to the same degree in your opinion, you STILL have your personal voting strategy to apply to any given race(based on your cause), which should make it even easier to decide on a candidate. If you believe one party is corrupt more than another, and you believe in each candidate 50% exactly, then your choice is obvious to support the candidate of which party you want in power at that given time. If you think that both candidates are evil, then you need to go back and re-read what I wrote above. You aren't special because of your beliefs. Everyone votes based on their principles, and if you haven't yet determined principles you believe in which are compatible with candidates for office, then you have more problems than who to vote for.
I'll let you in on a little secret. There isn't a single person out there who agrees with any single candidate on every issue, or even most issues. Pretending that you are special because this little rule applies to you doesn't change the reality of the situation.. Every voter disagrees with those they vote for. That is the nature of society in general context, and in the context of the US Government. Even with ideal candidates, you will disagree with them. This is because everyone has different beliefs and so there is no group of candidates that could line up with every single person. Yes, I'm touching on that compromise word I mentioned earlier.
I am not trying to put you down, I just think people need to wake up and smell the coffee before they start spouting off ridiculous statements like your post.
"If you don't like either candidate, simply vote out the incumbent."
This is one of many excellent solutions for those who "can't decide who to vote for" or are afraid of "voting for the lesser of two evils".
You people need to get a hold of yourself. If you are talking about the lesser of two evils, or you are thinking of it, then your doing more damage than good. There is RARELY the lesser of two evils. Go back with your 20/20 heindsight and tell me of all the elections you can think of, where you voted the lesser of two evils, or didn't vote, and someone came into power and ruined everything you stand for?
I'm sorry folks, but this is serious. If you can't be an adult, sit down, and figure out that one of the candidates is more in line with your principles, then you have a serious problem and maybe you SHOULDN'T be voting.
It is extremely RARE if the only two options are so evil that you cannot come to a common ground with either of them. If this is the case, you have serious mental problems, either that your just ignorant. This is not to offend anyone, because I know a lot of people who say they voted for the lesser of the evils. But seriously people. This isn't rocket science, and if you are talking like that then you need to shut up and quit filling people's heads. If you don't trust either candidate then you had better figure something out because you have trust problems.
In summary: If you are talking about voting for the lesser of two evils, you really do have some serious issues you need to address on a personal level.
(maybe now and then there really are two evil people as the only option, but seriously, in these national elections, are you serious?)
We did a new pumpkin PC this year just in time for Halloween...
This time it can see via webcam eyes (thanks logitech), breath through its nose via case fan, and talk out its mouth via speaker system. The insides are made of a custom power supply and mac-mini Core Duo system. The lighting is made of neon wiring thanks to Startech.com mutant mods.
Take a look: http://www3.uark.edu/bkst/pumpkin/
There is a link there to last year's 2005 pumpkin, and this year's 2006 mac-o-lantern. Check out the last page with a video of the pumpkin in action with the webcam and singing the Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven video.
Would somebody please explain to me what this means? Are GUIs "dumb" by definition?
Lets see...
To eject a disk/drive/floppy: Drag it to the trash can. Dumbed down.
To context click (a critical feature): Two handed CTRL+Click. Dumbed down.
To context click on a mighty mouse: lift up left finger, click with right finger: Dumbed down.
To install a driver for 3rd party hardware devices: Dumbed down and no central system area to do it.
To enter a wireless network key: No, its not in the network control panel. Not even a link to it. Dumbed down.
Go -> Applications: Dumbed down. And half the crap in the desktop menus don't even belong there.
Previous Mac OS's:
To control your printer: go to the "chooser", no, not the "printer chooser", but the "chooser": Get real.
Linux requires me to think too much (recompiling the kernel to install a driver? -- why would a home user ever want to do that??)
That is because on the Mac there are no drivers to install. Fat chance getting 3rd party hardware installed the majority of the time (more than 50% of peripherals out there has no supported driver for mac)
Dell has had the Core 2 Duo for a bit, but I'm sick of using Windows and dealing with MS security issues, MS DRM policies, MS licensing changes... and on and on...
Oh yea, I forgot... Apple doesn't do DRM... When is the last time you used a mac? 1984?
Mac OS gives me the best of both worlds: a unix environment that is incredibly user friendly because it drops the nauseating hypocracy of GNU and the EFF... I don't have to recompile anything to install a driver.
Lets see... EFF/GNU makes linux hard to USE? I always thought it was because linux requires the command line a lot and apps aren't very consistent across the board... Oh wait I must have been thinking about another linux kernel... You forgot to mention that you don't have to recompile anything to install a driver because you won't catch anybody installing a driver into mac OS.
Is the Apple solution the best solution in any particular category? Yes: user friendliness. It still has DRM, the hardware is expensive and isn't always the best. It's not fully OSS...
Lets see.. EFF/GNU is full of hypocrisy but have you ever used a dictionary?
But as an all around package? No one does it better.
Yes, Jobs is my god and I will submit to his never-ending p0wnij.
Hi,
I work for a campus maintaining over 3,000 systems, mostly in warranty from the majors. We probably replace a few drives a week on average. Half the drives we get back from RMA are refurbished, but typically don't cause a problem. The majority of failures we must replace are Maxtor (now defunct) and IBM/Hitachi. It is rare that a segate or WD drive goes out within the first year, but after 2 or 3 anything is possible and you are guaranteed failures in a significant percentage.
WD and Segate are the only brands of drives that are reliable. Some will tell you that WD is crap, but those people haven't installed a hard drive since 1998. In today's world, if WD and Segate were making shit, they would be out of business by now, as their RMA costs would be through the roof. WD and Segate outsell the competition several times each and if yield were that bad the price of drives would be double.
When it comes to actually getting warranty replacements, WD is the best in the industry as far as service, on the other hand, Segate has the longest warranty on their OEM drives (5 years). Over the last 6 years I have worked here, the trends have been about the same, with IBM/Hitachi getting worse, maxtor always having been average/unreliable, and Segate getting better, from my perspective. I have found that the old Maxtor drives are having their labels covered up by segate labels. I know these models still have the same problems maxtor always had. I am unsure of the future of segate drives coming out of Maxtor designs, but I have read insider reports that they are cleaning up their act. Will not know if this is true probably for a few years when we have had time to see the standard 3 year cycle complete.
Business solution to a business problem:
For the extra cost it takes you to manage, deal with bugs, fix with wrappers, and pay for licensing for cPanel, pass that cost on to customers via monthly fee.
For the customers who choose the more robust packages which have cheaper, or no licensing fees, which cost your admin staff less money to operate and keep patched, charge those customers a cheaper rate. It's not that you would lose revenue by discounting the service, you would keep the alternate controller at your current base rate. Then all new customers will have to pay... say $1/month extra for the cPanel solution. You could still market cPanel solutions at whatever price you want via banners on affiliate sites and only those customers who clicked on that banner would receive cheaper pricing. This is also where sales team training is KEY. You need to educate them on which pannels are better, why, why does it benefit the customer, and why security matters, etc..
I guarantee you that all the nooby web guys paying the 5$ per month for hosting won't spend the extra $2/month to 'upgrade' to cPanel. 99% of them use it for fantastico and webmail anyway. And the people who are running REAL websites would switch to your alternate solution the first time they are hacked. It doesn't sound like such a horrible way to run your business. Have a percentage of your shared hosts to be the alternate solution, and push that in your marketing and sales pitches, when users web-chat with you shopping for a host, email your sales team looking for a host, or order online, if the alternate system is promoted as THE system, with the cPanel as a premium package, then it won't be hard to switch the bulk of new users to it.
It isn't like you can't call it a Control Panel. The word isn't trademarked. If people see the word "control panel" they will think cPanel (if they have ever heard of it). You guys are forgetting that 99% of the people out there shopping for a low cost shared web host have absolutely NO IDEA what a cPanel is.
I don't know if you agree with me, but I have delt with the end users a lot being in the business of helping people swtup small business websites. And I haven't found a single person, ever, who cares what version of a control pannel you use, as long as it works and does most of what they want to do, and the stuff it can't do could be done with technical support.
Thanks for listening.
Free market cant fix a monopoly who is actively using its monopoly to charge others for whatever service.
The only reason the telco's and cable co's have this option is because they have a government granted monopoly, in exchange for restrictions. This fact is what you are forgetting. it is also the fact that means we must regulate them.
If the telco's want to turn into content providers rather than content movers, then they will need to get the government out of the business and release their monopoly on the cable lines, selling their last mile lines to the neighborhoods that they connect to, and become content providers. Short of this, they have no right to double charge for service. The telco's granted monopoly is for one purpose: to provide a data pipe to the consumer's home, for the cost of the service plus a reasonable markup. anything outside this scope is a problem.
the price of bandwidh has come down significantly over the past 10 years. It used to be 29.99 for dialup service on a 14.4kbps modem, plus long distance fees because ISP's didn't exist locally in too many places. In Arkansas, you had to call the state capital city and pay long distance from anywhere in the state if you wanted internet, plus the fee to the ISP. now it is 12.99/year for 256/1MB DSL service with a 1yr contract through SBC in almost all areas of the state. It is 24.99 for 256/256 cable internet with no service contract. The content providers (google, etc) are already paying their service providers for the bandwidth they are uploading. Their service providers are already paying the telco's for the peering fees they must pay any time they upload more than they download to their peers. This is how the free market decides peering prices.
So google pays per megabyte to upload. Google's ISP pays per megabyte to upload. and the telco/cableco's charge per megabyte (rolled into a flat rate bandwidth cap per month) to the consumers. EVERY company involved is getting paid for their services. If they want to change the peering price because the costs have increased, fine. This is the market deciding on a price.
But these monopolies, which are restricted by the government to charge fair prices, have no right to charge imagionary fees. If the telco's pipes are bottlenecked, then they should upgrade them and increase their peering fees and increase their subscriber fees. If they don't like it, then they can give up their monopoly and compete in the market without one. Something I doube very seriously they could ever do successfully. Last mile providers should not grow to a scope any larger than last mile providers. Their monopoly means they cannot compete in the free market, and so if they try to do it then all bets are off and the free market fails. We need to keep EVERY last mile provider with government granted monopolies OUT of the free market as much as possible. The best way to do this is to keep them down as service providers to their subscribers.
Your points are good about how the government should get out of it, but there is just one problem:
The government is already involved in this government granted monopoly. This is in the form of a monopoly given to these companies to lay their line, allowing nobody else to do it. They also gave these companies free money from each consumer in the form of the universal service fee. In exchange the telco's are supposed to provide these lines at a wholesale price, at the cost of doing business for them (the same cost that they themselves would have to pay if they were to buy it from themselves) and that they would roll new wires out to rural areas using the extra money from the universal service fund.
Now that the telco's are trying to upsell their service, using a product that they were given for free by the government (the universal service fund pays for the lines, the telco's just manage and own them). They are trying to say that over time, somehow they are losing money because more and more people are using these lines, paying the universal service fee, and paying the telco's fees. So now that they have more customers using them, with no additional cost to use it, and the lines were granted to them for free by the government, in a monopolistic form, and now they want to charge more arbitrarilly?
That is the issue here. The government is ALREADY INVOLVED. unless the government gets out of the universal service fund, unless the government gets out of the telco regulation business completely, they will need to play arbitrator between the telco's, the businesses, and the consumers.
There really is no other way of looking at it.
Bingo. You just made the point your parent was. You just described an unviable business model.
Now that you have made this discovery, you have to ask yourself:
Do I plan on seeing this job through and improving the business, making it a career?
Or... Do I just like the job and plan on milking it until they go bankrupt, and then find a new one at that point?
You must pick one of these. If you select question #1, then you will need to take charge and earn your way up the ladder. You will have to take the initiative and build a better connection -- no matter the risk or cost -- until your goal is achieved. You will need to pull all the weight you can afford to pull to make this happen. You will need to pull all the strings with the different people in your office you are capable of pulling, to slip this transitional phase into the business plan. You said yourself your boss would never do it, so you are going to have to do the work on your own or you will have to quit and find a new career. You will have to identify this problem before you can fix it. The problem is that your leaders have not setup a viable business model. Your job, should you choose to accept it, is to strive twards this viability. Time will not fix it. Hope will not fix it. If you think for one second that one of these days, if your buyers and sellers can just make one big score because some idiot bought an overpriced object on ebay to bankroll your business needs then you have another thing coming. You will have to take immediate initiative and make things happen properly. If you are on dialup and you have a bottleneck for listing items, then the fix of a new connection would either mean laying off one of your employees, or the ability to buy and sell more products. Both cases could bring your business into profitability. This is obvious to me but I have seen it not so obvious to people I have worked with in the past.
Ebay is a complex business to be in, 99% of the power sellers out there have absolutely no clue what a business is, how to run one, or what a prsentable product should look like on the web. 99% of them have crappy pictures (because of crappy equipment, crappy listers, and crappy internet connections), crappy descriptions, crappy layout templates, and crappy customer service when there are problems (probably because there is no streamlined process to buy and sell and so too many customers slip through the cracks, causing your business to play customer service catchup, rather than actively preventing problems). You say you only make 2000 to 5000 in sales per week, well, what if you had the capacity to list 15% more items per week with a new connection? What if your listing process included clean, easilly editable templates. What if your bosses trained your listers properly in marketing techniques that would make the product be more wanted on ebay? What if your bosses knew the ebay market better and learned how to monopolize categories from other sellers who don't have a clue? The fact that your ebay business is not viable makes all of the above immediately under scrutiny simply because the business owner doesn't understand the dynamics of buying and selling on ebay.
If you selecte #2, then you should just sit tight, chill out, and let the lamers drive themselves into the ground. Collect your paycheck (you claim around $20K/yr) and be happy. Don't involve yourself any more in the business process and just do what you are told. Make sure you set about 10% of your paycheck each week aside into a bank account so you can have reserves leftover for when your job unexpectedly is over. If you can't afford this 10% savings (really, it ought to be more) then you need to cut back on nice things in life such as beer, long drives, name brand food, and name brand clothes.
This is just my personal advice from me to you. I don't know for a fact that my criticisms of your boss's business are true, but I can guarantee that at least some of it is. I have gone through similar situations with businesses, and more speci
Your initial responce is what I had, but then I did some digging...
... is now integrated with Winamp. Offering both subscription and a la carte options, AOL Music Now provides access to over 2,000,000 songs from thousands of artists in every genre available.
According to winamp.com:
AOL Music Now
Winamp has a really hardcore following. Pretty much the "iTunes" of the PC, but with dwindling marketshare. Even many iPod users use winamp for their music catalog over iTunes when you are not a iTunes music store shopper. So you have about 25% of the current MP3 player market compatible with this. You have an even larger percent of the installed base of mp3 players being compatible with this (At one point Apple had close to 90% marketshare, but that was for a very short time and previous to that they had 50% and less leading up to the iPod Mini launch). You have a large population of winamp users out there who have been using winamp since way before AOL bought them. You have a cool program with a built in store and widely compatible with a large enough percentage of the portable music installed base and market.
Obviously, the Real player isn't going to overtake iTunes the program. Obviously windows media player is holding the cards in the non apple market right now. And obviously, winamp is currently the only real player with any sort of chance to slip its foot into the door. Windows media player is irrelevant. It is like the IE of music players. Nobody cares for it. Nobody likes it. It is just there and comes with windows. iTunes is only popular because of iPod and iTMS. without the exclusive pairing of those 2 things, iTunes the player is a worthless pile of scrap brush metal.
I have always said it and I will say it again. Pair an iTMS like music service with winamp. Make it compatible with the players out there. Out pops a winner. I don't expect this to happen overnight without support of apple's music format (and therefore, iPod DRM support), but it can do it with or without. Mark my words... This is the begining of the end for apple's reign of terror on the digital music market.
Exactly.
One of these days the practice of moving manufacturing to China and other countries will not depend on being big enough to do it efficiently. That is when all these artificial margins these companies (like Apple) are getting will instantly shrink and and guess what? Time to go bankrupt.
Current business models which depend on Chinese (or other offshore) manufacturing to cut costs have no lasting ability. I give them another 3-5 years.
Macs cost 300$?
Hey, can you show me the deal for that on fatwallet? I searched all day and couldn't find the coupon code.. Maybe I missed the hot deal?
To throw more flames on the coles, Foxconn is also Dell's largest supplier of components. So this isn't just an Apple article, it explains why the Foxconn president is the richest man in the (eastern) world.
Foxconn is also Dell's largest supplier of system components. The only thing foxconn doesn't make that is in a Dell business system is the plastics and chassis (and even then, most are Foxconn)
Does this mean that corporate america is funding political terrorists?
"I'd like to learn more about your likes and dislikes"
Likes:
1) Built in software for encryption and data sync (no more 3rd party utilities that all work differently)
2)ability to install programs onto the drive (though this is already possible on regular UFD's)
Dislikes:
1) Requirement to fake a CDROM drive and break other OS's and break locked down windows.
2) Skinned and bloated launchpad. This thing should be the bare minimum. The same functionality could be done in negligable amount of ram and CPU time with off the shelf toolkits. This thing is just plain bloated and takes forever to come up. And the splash screens are idiotic.
3) The extra partition which cannot be erased and software must be removed with a special program
4) once the software is erased, you cannot go back to the factory state
5) every feature on the U3 platform could be accomplished using standard USB drives, except the faking of the CDROM device. So why not just preload software on standard drives?
6) The U3 drives are not standard UFD's and thus have compatibiity problems in other operating systems (such as MacOS X which tries to mount an empty CDROM drive).
"especially objections to the technology as it exists today for Windows."
Objections:
1) launchpad skinning and splash screens and bloatedness
2) partitioned drive. Should be a 100% standard UFD, not a complicated fake CDROM
"For example, many people object to the factory's two-partition format, so if there were a way to repartition the drive into a single volume, would that address the concern?"
I don't think so: because the drive should come from the factory as a standard UFD with just some software on it.
"Is it the lack of control over the format of the device that's the core issue, or is it something more specific?"
It is the lack of UFD compliance out of the box that is the issue.
"Is regaining 4 Megabytes out of a Gig or two from a $50 device really making people lose sleep at night?"
Nobody cares about 4 megabytes, even on a 256MB drive. But the fact that the drive is not a standard UFD out of the box, and has a ton of tricks built into it just to get it to function, and that you have to wait for the launchpad to load up. This is what the problem is.
"So, jack up all you want, as long as you don't go past the point of diminishing returns."
Uhh, I think we all understand this principle. My above comment was based on it. The point is that in this case it doesn't apply because it is a new business. You cannot find the point of diminishing returns without first taking data at lower price points. Without this data, all your assumptions are just that: assumptions.
Having experience with this type of candy store, I can tell you right now that the "point of diminishing returns" is pretty low, usually just under the local market.
Excuse me? It's called captialism to jack prices up?
Jacking prices up does not a maximized profit make. In fact, in most cases (ESPECIALLY WITH AN ITEM LIKE CANDY) jacking the prices up will reduce profits.
In most cases, unless your shit is packed out and you are near full capacity, jacking prices up is going to make you go out of business faster, not slower.
The rules of maximizing profits by jacking up prices only work once the business is established (2-3 years from now) and you are at a high enough volume that the price increase will make up for the reduced volume. But when you are starting a candy store at your counter for teenagers to play WoW on then it isn't going to work. Especially on opening year.
position: relative;
Use it in every element, it is the silver bullet to fix every CSS bug that IE contains.
"ow is this the case? How is it the wealthiest man on earth is not the one who owns the most natural resources? Bill Gates built a company of ideas, not gas or oil or anything else. Wealth is built by the efforts of human minds, not by the existence of gold or dirt."
You are forgetting that the most abundant (ROI wise) natural resource on this planet, the human resource, is what Bill Gates is mining in his company.
Do you think Gates himself is writing those programs? Marketing those products? Managing those employees? No. he is farming out labor to a large group of highly trained humans. The same humans that depend directly on other natural resrouces.
You import (or buy) natural resources (Food, water, building materials, shelter, and humans) insert them into your business model, and out pops a product created with those natural resrouces. You can say that the idea of that business model is what creates wealth. But all it does is turn the already expensive resouces you put into it combine. The product is not inherantly worth MORE than the value of the resrouces you put into it. Every single cost must be factored in, including the human cost and profit cost, and then it is a break even. The human cost is obvious, but the profit cost is a direct transfer of wealth (by transforming resources into money) into a seperate account set aside for the investors. This is not a wealth creation but a wealth transfer.
The reason Billy G is so rich is because his resource cost is so large, and his sales output is so large, that shaving off fractions of his margin into profit(a cost of the business) by transforming resources into money, and then placing a fraction of that money into a savings account. There is no wealth creation in this process, only a transfer. The only wealth creation is by mining the raw materials. Everything else is wealth transfer, not creation. In the case of Microsoft, most of the wealth is in transfers.
The Employees of Microsoft are trading (transfering) wealth to their employer in the form of ideas and mental capacity. In exchange, Microsoft transfers a smaller amount of wealth (the difference defined as the gross margin of the resource) to the employee in the form of cold hard cash. The employee then spends that cash on natural resources for consumption, much of which goes to waste in the landfill. The cycle continues.
You can argue a lot of things about economics by shuffling money around into different places, assigning a dollar price on every single activity that a human can do, with investments "creating" wealth magically through interest rates and human ingenuity and what not, but at the end of the day, when actual costs of resources are itemized out, individually, properly, 100% of all GENERATED wealth is in the "production" (or mining or collection) of natural resources. EVERYTHING else is a wealth transfer via manipulation of margins. There is no other correct way of looking at economics. This is the FOUNDATION of all economic principles. It is the foundation of Wal-Mart, Microsoft, and any other rich company. This realization is the difference between wealthy people, and the rest.
"If natural resources take such a huge stance, why are most of the oil producing nations still 'poor'?"
Hint: They are not.
What news channel have you been watching? Let yourself peek into reality for just a second:
The largest exporter of oil to the largest consumer(USA): Canada. Not Poor.
The largest exporter of oil period: Saudi Arabia. Not Poor.
The largest oil exporting newish government: Venezuela. Not Poor.
The third largest oil producer in the world: USA. Not Poor.
The UK is ranked 13th.
In fact, of the top 10 oil producers in the world, not a single one of them is "poor". You might consider Russia poor, if you count their temperary economic problems as being poor. Plus, they are so big that oil alone cannot prop up their economy and they have (rightfully so) throttled their output in reflection. You might count Iraq poor, but come on, Bush bombed their capitol, killed their president's sons, and captured their leader, throwing them into civil war. To make matters worse, he invited international terrorists and Al Queda, a group previously not operating in Iraq, into the most powerful opposition group in Iraq. And they still have fucking curbside trash services and cellphones for christs sake. Does sticking your thumb in blue ink to be able to vote make you a poor country? Does dust in the wind because you live in a desert make you poor?
Please look at this list and tell me, which of these countries are "poor"???? And you were modded Insightful? Learn reality. Don't spout off bullshit.
Natural resources are the KEY to thriving economies. Wealth is CREATED solely (SOLELY!) by natural resources. Nothing more. Natural resources are the starting point of ALL created wealth. Stock markets don't create wealth. Business don't create wealth except through natural resources. Banks don't create wealth except through financing business. You have inflation, and it is caused by the mining of natural resources. You have raw materials, and they cost money to dig up. But most natural resources cost less to dig up than they bring back in sales. This is why natural resources are the begining of the economy. The entire world economy is rooted in this principle. Economies were STARTED with the trading of natural resources. Where did you learn economics? Wal-Mart?
I have to agree, a government playing games with the economy can be the difference between successfull and failing in extreme cases of government abuse (of which there are many examples in history). But governments have negligable meaning in the long run(and usually even in the short term) when looking at the big picture. Without self sustaining natural resources, a local economy CANNOT SURVIVE without external and continuing investment. End of story.
Next time, before posting utter bullshit, think about the ignorance you spread to the rest of the world in your posts. It can only serve to hinder progress.
I didn't want to have to post an argument this time because there are too many idiots on here today defending the undefendable.
Thank you for posting something worthwhile. Lets hope you don't get modded down.