Is it fair that a stockholder who does *nothing* except wait gets much more money than someone who toils for the company 40 hours a week?
Well, that depends on the value of the holdings, of course:)
Remember, though, that there's opportunity costs involved in investing in a company, as well as risks. For an example of the risks, if the company goes bankrupt, the employee just loses his job, while the stockholder can lose everything he invested in the venture, which might be hundreds of thousands, or even millions of dollars.
On the opportunity costs side of things, people in aggregate invest where they think they will get the greatest return. People invest in a company here and not elsewhere because they think it will make them more money. If you try to cap profits here, investors will decide the investments here are less attractive than elsewhere, and go elsewhere. And elsewhere these days often means to other countries. Guess what happens, then? Businesses find it harder and more costly to expand as they have to turn to more expensive sources of funding, like bank loans, so job growth slows, and people may even lose their jobs.
You're asking the right questions, though. Keep thinking, and ask some more, of me or someone you might trust more. You're making me get some use out of my economics degree, finally.:)
people should "blame" consumers. We demand cheaper prices for our goods, and labor is overall the most flexible cost area in the world market. Right now, many western nations have above-average wages for manufacturing positions, so it is only natural for those jobs to go elsewhere, assuming the transportation of imported goods is not cost-prohibitive, and these are not industries that are crucial to national survival.
Forget all the claims about productivity of workers in the US or Western Europe, too: stark reality is, if you produce twice as many goods as a worker in another country, but he works for less than half as much money, he's the better deal in the market, period, because the company can get two of him for less than it costs to keep you. Not only is he cheaper at the outset, but if he gets sick, the productivity that is lost while he recovers or a replacement is sought is half yours - and again, he costs less than half what you do.
And for those who think "it's not fair": it wouldn't be fair to demand that stockholders continue to lose profits or even capital by forcing a business to keep paying an artificially inflated price for any other resource, why should it be fair to force them to prop up the local labor market?
Impressive. Wish I could say the same about Wasteland, which is my favorite game, but after a few games, when I've maxed out the characters (you can restart from the beginning with your saved characters after you win), the game starts crashing because the variables go out of bounds:) Yes, it's fun to try to see how far I can get with no armor or weapons:)
I've started over from scratch, by necessity, maybe 3 or 4 times, but that's not as much fun. I guess that's only 20+ times in all.
The problem that I had with BB wasn't that they were slow to process returns, (they seemed to be 24-48 hours, about the same as NF, and both companies have distribution centers within 30 miles of me, and BB also has its national headquarters here) but that sometimes 2-4 days would go by with empty slots while I had literally a couple hundred titles enqueued and all "available now." I'd email and ask why repeatedly, and 4-6 days later they'd email back saying things to the effect that they were having problems because of the volume of new members. So, basically, the discs weren't really available. I decided to drop them because they seemed to be deliberately misleading, and slow in customer service, besides.
How'd you decide which cell card to get? Or was it the only one available when you first got service? Do you think the different cards're noticeably different, performance wise, with 1xRTT, and do you think it will be more obvious with EVDO?
I wanna rush out and start buying parts, but I'd like to know your reasoning for that choice in particular:) Also, I guess, why you went with Verizon, and not Cingular or Sprint. I do see Verizon claims to have the full broadband access here in Dallas, which I guess means EVDO.
Now I'll be able to find the nearest starbucks no matter where I am. Beats the method of calling my friends every half an hour when i'm on a trip and trying to describe the surrounding cities/streets/lamp posts in hope for some guidance to a hot cup of coffee.
You should be going here. The guy's visited 4535 so far, or about 90% of the corporate Starbucks in the country. And others, abroad. If you haven't got a wireless setup for your travel, yet, you can visit the states beforehand and print/save pictures of the stores.
We're no longer allowed to record our classes with cameras or audio gear. They claim it's because the material they're teaching in the classrooms is actually licensed from someone else.
These are Cisco cert classes, but still... it's not like they do more than recite the slides that are printed in our books, anyway.
First of all, if one of these hit your house at 60 MPH it *MIGHT* break a window or scratch off some paint.
What? 3000 pounds of payload, not to mention what the device itself weighs. If a 3000 pound car hit your house at 60 MPH, do you think that's all it will do? Now imagine 3000 pounds landing on your roof, which is much more likely than running into it from the side. Now imagine the device is approaching terminal velocity, instead.
Secondly, who says it has to land?
You must not have read the article, where they talked about landing them.
I'm leery about the system they're showing, if they aren't ready to discuss bandwidth per customer and total numbers of simultaneous connections, etc.
Also, how heavy is it going to be, and how dangerous will it be for something like that, with its 3,000 pound payload capacity, to land for refueling? What if strong winds hit it, and it drifts off course? Have they built their refueling stations far away from population centers, so that if these start to get carried off by the wind, they can drop them more quickly, without running the danger of landing on buildings, etc.? What if they somehow lose radio contact?
In response to your misunderstanding, the sample was distributed in a kit intended for testing sample-identification equipment. Not for testing on people, or even for making vaccines.
I did read it... did you miss the following quote?
The risk is relatively low that a lab worker will get sick, but a large number of labs got it and if someone does get infected, the risk of severe illness is high and this virus has shown to be fully transmissible," WHO's influenza chief, Klaus Stohr, told The Associated Press. (emphasis mine)
He's not talking about the strain in general. He's talking about what was sent out in all those kits to all those labs. And about real people now, not back in the 50s. That indicates people could actually catch this from the test kits if mishandled, etc., does it not? It wasn't a dead virus sample. Now, remember that a lot of these kits were sent overseas. Some people overseas may have an interest in not destroying their kits, but attempting to culture from the live sample they have.
It would really help to RTFA this time, because, while this is a serious screwup, it's not what a lot of people are thinking after reading the poorly worded summary.
Please do. I don't know what you think I'm thinking, but I'll bet it wasn't what I really was thinking: they wouldn't be so hastily incinerating something if it was dead, would they?
Next year, they should build a larger version for the outside of their dorm and act as a light&sound organ, like the control building at the top of Devil's Tower in Close Encounters.
seriously, I'm so used to seeing some regularly that if a few hours pass, and I don't get any, (and this is AFTER all my filtering, that's how bad it is) I test mail my server to make sure it's all good.
What do you do when someone isn't flamebait or trolling, they simply don't know what they're talking about? Mod them "overrated?" But what if they're only a 1 or 2?
This is where following the advice to concentrate on modding up, not down, helps. If you see stupidity/trollishness given +5, then by all means, push it back down. But in the meantime, other, valuable comments are lurking at +1 and +2, and probably deserve at least as much to be raised and seen.
Of course, I often skim at +3, when I'm not modding, so I'm biased:)
Ogg is free, (supported by xmms), patentless and offers better compression (or what ever you call it) than mp3.
Oh, yes, and hundreds of portable devices support it, also. Not to mention the huge existing filebase, right?
BTW, I think you mean Ogg Vorbis. Ogg is a file format, and within it, just for audio, there's Vorbis, Speex, and FLAC support, etc. Ogg also does video, using Theora, among others. Vorbis is likely the most popular audio codec using Ogg. However, Vorbis is lossy, so it makes no sense to convert MP3s over through yet another stage of lossy compression just because it's spiffy. And for people with gigabytes of recorded music, some of it live, re-ripping or re-recording with Vorbis as the only codec not only may not be practical, it may not even be possible, sometimes.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, that depends on the value of the holdings, of course
Remember, though, that there's opportunity costs involved in investing in a company, as well as risks. For an example of the risks, if the company goes bankrupt, the employee just loses his job, while the stockholder can lose everything he invested in the venture, which might be hundreds of thousands, or even millions of dollars.
On the opportunity costs side of things, people in aggregate invest where they think they will get the greatest return. People invest in a company here and not elsewhere because they think it will make them more money. If you try to cap profits here, investors will decide the investments here are less attractive than elsewhere, and go elsewhere. And elsewhere these days often means to other countries. Guess what happens, then? Businesses find it harder and more costly to expand as they have to turn to more expensive sources of funding, like bank loans, so job growth slows, and people may even lose their jobs.
You're asking the right questions, though. Keep thinking, and ask some more, of me or someone you might trust more. You're making me get some use out of my economics degree, finally.
people should "blame" consumers. We demand cheaper prices for our goods, and labor is overall the most flexible cost area in the world market. Right now, many western nations have above-average wages for manufacturing positions, so it is only natural for those jobs to go elsewhere, assuming the transportation of imported goods is not cost-prohibitive, and these are not industries that are crucial to national survival.
Forget all the claims about productivity of workers in the US or Western Europe, too: stark reality is, if you produce twice as many goods as a worker in another country, but he works for less than half as much money, he's the better deal in the market, period, because the company can get two of him for less than it costs to keep you. Not only is he cheaper at the outset, but if he gets sick, the productivity that is lost while he recovers or a replacement is sought is half yours - and again, he costs less than half what you do.
And for those who think "it's not fair": it wouldn't be fair to demand that stockholders continue to lose profits or even capital by forcing a business to keep paying an artificially inflated price for any other resource, why should it be fair to force them to prop up the local labor market?
Impressive. Wish I could say the same about Wasteland, which is my favorite game, but after a few games, when I've maxed out the characters (you can restart from the beginning with your saved characters after you win), the game starts crashing because the variables go out of bounds :) Yes, it's fun to try to see how far I can get with no armor or weapons :)
I've started over from scratch, by necessity, maybe 3 or 4 times, but that's not as much fun. I guess that's only 20+ times in all.
Sorry, but it really seems discordant to mix these.
What's next, 3D shutter glasses that look like Geordi La Forge's visor from Star Trek: TNG?
(actually, those might be cool)
...make sure you get them to install Hitachi Deathstars.
The problem that I had with BB wasn't that they were slow to process returns, (they seemed to be 24-48 hours, about the same as NF, and both companies have distribution centers within 30 miles of me, and BB also has its national headquarters here) but that sometimes 2-4 days would go by with empty slots while I had literally a couple hundred titles enqueued and all "available now." I'd email and ask why repeatedly, and 4-6 days later they'd email back saying things to the effect that they were having problems because of the volume of new members. So, basically, the discs weren't really available. I decided to drop them because they seemed to be deliberately misleading, and slow in customer service, besides.
When everyone learns how to read upside-down!
I downloaded it, and AVG detected it's got the trojan called downloader.lstbar, or something like that??
Okay, so tell us honestly: when you delete old searches, they stay recorded on the server, don't they?
Actually,
"GlobalSpec is a rapidly growing B-to-B, Internet-based, 'media-model' business linking buyers and sellers in the $500 billion electrical, mechanical and optical products markets."
You must have mistaken their front page search links to mean they actually had something to do with those things?
They do seem to be good at generating hot air and pageviews with press releases, anyway.
How'd you decide which cell card to get? Or was it the only one available when you first got service? Do you think the different cards're noticeably different, performance wise, with 1xRTT, and do you think it will be more obvious with EVDO?
:) Also, I guess, why you went with Verizon, and not Cingular or Sprint. I do see Verizon claims to have the full broadband access here in Dallas, which I guess means EVDO.
I wanna rush out and start buying parts, but I'd like to know your reasoning for that choice in particular
You should be going here. The guy's visited 4535 so far, or about 90% of the corporate Starbucks in the country. And others, abroad. If you haven't got a wireless setup for your travel, yet, you can visit the states beforehand and print/save pictures of the stores.
We're no longer allowed to record our classes with cameras or audio gear. They claim it's because the material they're teaching in the classrooms is actually licensed from someone else.
These are Cisco cert classes, but still... it's not like they do more than recite the slides that are printed in our books, anyway.
What? 3000 pounds of payload, not to mention what the device itself weighs. If a 3000 pound car hit your house at 60 MPH, do you think that's all it will do? Now imagine 3000 pounds landing on your roof, which is much more likely than running into it from the side. Now imagine the device is approaching terminal velocity, instead.
You must not have read the article, where they talked about landing them.
I'm leery about the system they're showing, if they aren't ready to discuss bandwidth per customer and total numbers of simultaneous connections, etc.
Also, how heavy is it going to be, and how dangerous will it be for something like that, with its 3,000 pound payload capacity, to land for refueling? What if strong winds hit it, and it drifts off course? Have they built their refueling stations far away from population centers, so that if these start to get carried off by the wind, they can drop them more quickly, without running the danger of landing on buildings, etc.? What if they somehow lose radio contact?
That's why you should be sleeping in a Faraday Cage, of course. Problem solved.
I did read it... did you miss the following quote?
He's not talking about the strain in general. He's talking about what was sent out in all those kits to all those labs. And about real people now, not back in the 50s. That indicates people could actually catch this from the test kits if mishandled, etc., does it not? It wasn't a dead virus sample. Now, remember that a lot of these kits were sent overseas. Some people overseas may have an interest in not destroying their kits, but attempting to culture from the live sample they have.
Please do. I don't know what you think I'm thinking, but I'll bet it wasn't what I really was thinking: they wouldn't be so hastily incinerating something if it was dead, would they?
when they were asked to pick a strain themselves to test people with, and it took the WHO to tell them they screwed up and shouldn't have done it?
How many private firms have stockpiles of old virus strains we no longer have immunity to? And are they really that stupid?
Next year, they should build a larger version for the outside of their dorm and act as a light&sound organ, like the control building at the top of Devil's Tower in Close Encounters.
Then they can use it to tell mom & dad they're homesick, and will they come pick them up for a short visit?
seriously, I'm so used to seeing some regularly that if a few hours pass, and I don't get any, (and this is AFTER all my filtering, that's how bad it is) I test mail my server to make sure it's all good.
Why don't cashiers just stick them under the tray, like coupons, $50s, or other unusual things they have to keep track of?
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon" ...with wireless access?
This is where following the advice to concentrate on modding up, not down, helps. If you see stupidity/trollishness given +5, then by all means, push it back down. But in the meantime, other, valuable comments are lurking at +1 and +2, and probably deserve at least as much to be raised and seen.
Of course, I often skim at +3, when I'm not modding, so I'm biased
Oh, yes, and hundreds of portable devices support it, also. Not to mention the huge existing filebase, right?
BTW, I think you mean Ogg Vorbis. Ogg is a file format, and within it, just for audio, there's Vorbis, Speex, and FLAC support, etc. Ogg also does video, using Theora, among others. Vorbis is likely the most popular audio codec using Ogg. However, Vorbis is lossy, so it makes no sense to convert MP3s over through yet another stage of lossy compression just because it's spiffy. And for people with gigabytes of recorded music, some of it live, re-ripping or re-recording with Vorbis as the only codec not only may not be practical, it may not even be possible, sometimes.
How dare Hitachi leak information about the new "deathstars?"
Well, at least the exsplosions will be even cooler in 3-D.