1) Design it so it has a bezel to protect the screen. 2) put some silicone bumpers on the corners to protect it from falls.
An aftermarket case for my $600 phone cost me $6. If features of the case were designed in to the phone, they would add pennies to the cost. Without the case, my phone could be broken in one very short fall. With the case, my phone has taken at least a dozen 3 to 4 foot falls with no damage.
Swapping 10 fixtures to LED can save you $20 per month in direct costs. Which means you pay for more than one bulb per month with the savings. On top of that you are not pumping all that heat into your house and then paying to cool it back down.
My electric bill dropped significantly from going to LED. In terms of alternative energy- they are a hell of a better deal than solar panels or even extra insulation.
I've lost some CFL's but so far I haven't lost any LED's and I turn them on and off a lot.
I have one "40 watt" (which is really 20 watt imho) which has been going for 75000 hours on my porch (so far). 24 hours a day for 9 years except during hurricane Ike. I paid $35 for it back in 2003. It was pitiful for home use. But it's an awesome porch light. Doesn't attract bugs and provides enough light to see my keys.
It looks NORMAL like a regular LED bulb. I'm sorry but LED bulbs set at 2900k look either Pink or Orange to me and most the people i know. I'm sure that real incandescent bulbs are 2900 kelvin and the rest of the LED companies are trying to mimic them but it doesn't look right in LED.
2: This bulb is 900 lumens.
I know 850 lumens is supposed to replace a 60 watt bulb. But it doesn't for me. It seems dim. At 900 lumens, it seems a little brighter than a 60 watt bulb and I actually like that. I suspect 870 or 880 lumens would be the correct value for a perfect swap.
Downsides: I've never had it happen to me, but I've read that some G7's buzz.
I have approximately 12 brands of LED bulbs going in my house, including phillips. I use the phillips 75 watt in a fixture with a lamp shade. I have a 9 year old "40 watt" bulb which is really more like 20 watt on the porch-- it's always on.
I also find pretty good light (and they fit in cieling fans better) from the lights with the squashed disks. They do give light over a large area. The top is about 1/2" think and about 2" around. They also give a little more lumens than similarly rated bulbs. I have three of those.
I have some multiple fixture floor lamps that all the other random bulbs go into.
At this point, other than the "globe" fixtures in the bathroom, new bulbs going foward will all be G7's until I hear of something better.
I do also have some of the new 3500 kelvin CFL bulbs from Home Depot. I really like the light. It's "superwhite" but not "blue". But like all CFL's they seem to take 60 seconds to achieve full brightness.
I have an old random 75w CFL in my utility room.
I only have three incandescent bulbs left in the house at this point. Two globes in the bathroom and one standard 60w in the attic.
There are some lovely videos of all the anchors on Fox News stating both sides of a particular issue. For example... "Can the president affect oil prices?"
In each case, they say, "No the president can't affect oil prices" and "The president can affect oil prices- why isn't it he?"
They are quite humorous, you should give them a look.
For project budgeting purposes, ours went for $60 per hour while the united states workers went for $90. No idea what the difference was but at a budgeting level, the company treated them differently.
Indian wages are now inflating about 20% per year. Chinese wages are inflating between 100% on the low end to 12%+ on the high end.
Another 4-6 years and it won't make sense to use them any more.
And the boomers and chinese boomers have started retiring. Things will get better but it will probably be 2016 before it really starts to gain steam.
On the boomer front, 5 million went on social security in 2010 and 2011. That compares to 5 million pre-boomers who went on social security from 2000 to 2009.
an extra 800k retire each of the next 4 years. Then an extra 1.6million extra per year every year after that for 15 years.
I just hope it's in time for the gen-x and other kids behind the boomers.
What you are saying was much more valid back in 2000.
Today, I know engineering students, genetics students, chemistry students, medical students.
They are not taking stupid jobs.
They have to pay full dollar for an education here, for cars here, for cloths here, hell even for movies and music CD's here.
Meanwhile they are put into competition with people who get everything for about 1/5th the price paid here except automobiles and air conditioners.
You can't even legally buy the $2.49 DVD's that sell for $16 here and 10 cent pills which sell for $5.00 here and resell them back in the U.S. It's illegal to buy them there for the grossly lower price and reimport them back into the U.S.
Well, I lived on half of what I made and was planning on retiring in January.
Instead I got laid off on december 31st.
So no months vacation pay but 3 months severence, a half bonus, and unemployment.
I had enough to make it to 91. With the returns over the last three months (i.e. shareholder value), I have enough to make it to 96 as long as we don't get hyperinflation.
Of course, if I had a job, I'd be screwed by hyperinflation too.
From experience, I can say there has been a big change from 2004 to 2012.
In 2004, my company got masters degree candidates for bachelors degree salaries.
In 2008, my company got bachelor degree candidates for bachelors degree salaries.
In 2011, we were getting disengaged bachelor degree candidates. They basically counted on working for us for 6 months and then being rotated elsewhere. This had the expected and predictable effects.
In 2012, they laid 90% of us off and replaced us with infosys people. They unexpectedly lost another 5%. Infosys was unable staff so we had the weird situation of not even training our replacements but recording training sessions. I went to lunch with a few of the survivors last week and it's a complete mess.
Funny thing is- apparently these workers count as still being indian employees of infosys. They are working some fantastic hours, don't have the skill set and are trying hard to acquire it, but they are not getting paid U.S. salaries even they they are located in the U.S. - just good pay by Indian standards. Apparently they'll be rotated back to india and another similar crew will be brought in. I don't know- perhaps it's that 6 month thing overseas like we do with Aramco. I hear they are living 6+ to an apartment.
So we are competing in our own country for jobs with people being paid in the $35000 to $50000 range when those jobs cost $100k locally and require degrees that are a lot more expensive to obtain here than in india.
An H1b is paid a "reasonable" salary which is princely by their native countries standards.
And the company gets to treat them as slaves and work them long hours because if they quit, they must find another job who can sponsor them for an h1b quickly or return home.
Jobs report today said no jobs being created. Yet we are hiring many h1b's. Meanwhile, many of our 30 year olds are suicidal over a combination of unforgivable debt and no jobs.
Quite a disconnect.
I think it's time to put a tariff on offshored/outsourced jobs- including h1b's.
The top 1% has 23.94% of the income (same as just before the great depression).
The top 10% earns 42% of the nations income. (this is the group I was apparently thinking of when I slapped off my post).
Okay... here is part of the issue:
Payroll taxes. 15% of most of our incomes... less than 1% of the wealthy income. State and Local taxes (10% to 12% of moderate income vs.03% for the wealthy).
So this is really about "Federal Income Tax" vs the total tax load.
I agree - the wealthy pay the amounts you are saying of the Federal Income Tax.
However, they are paying a total tax load under half of what most of the rest of the citizens pay. As I alluded to above- raising the federal tax due by most of the country would throw them into poverty because they are paying 25% to 27% of their income in taxes and fixed fees which the wealthy pay a total of less than 1%.
So I'd trade you.... Percentage based state income tax instead of sales tax. And start applying the payroll tax all the way up, not just the first $106k.
It's going to get trickier as automation and robotics destroy jobs faster than they can be created. Hopefully retiring boomers will hide that until after 2020.
It seems pretty clear that legalizing pot would take billions from the cartels.
I personally think cocaine and pot should both be legal.
Cocaine is only slightly more addictive that alcohol (17% to booze's 15%). I've known lots of people who did cocaine regularly back in the 70's and 80's who still had normal lives.
I wouldn't risk it myself. I don't like the small but non-zero risk of instant death by heart attack. My drug of preference would be pot butter in food and sugarfree candies. No lung damage, great sex, cheaper than booze, no problems with diabetes.
Okay, let's set the foundation that I agree that any creator can price their product any way they want. If they want to price it at $10,000 that's their right.
My reasoning on the pricing of songs has several sources.
First, I think the current pricing level is disproportionately high. Consider J.K. Rowling earning a billion dollars for her books. If the price were a 10th, she still would have earned 100 million dollars. And some people would have bought books by other authors. High prices crowd out other artists.
Second, In a working capitalist system, when there was such a huge glut of content, the price should be dropping (and in some areas it is-- I've recently seen the start of DVD's with 4 good movies on them for five dollars). If our copyright worked the way it did before it was captured by the industry and ran out after 14 or 28 years, most of the content created by people who are dead would be much less than 10 cents.
Third, at $1, I think many people pirate content and get comfortable pirating content that they would buy at a lower price level. Admittedly 10 cents is an arbitrary figure and 15 cents or even 25 cents, more (and I think most) people would choose to buy over pirating. Even at 10 cents, it would take over $1000 to fill an ipod with songs.
Fourth, I think $1 per song is so high that many people who won't pirate don't purchase at all. It's also really a "first world" price. There is no way it is going to sell in a country where someone earns $400 a month.
Fifthly (and finally) And for some content, the companies legally sell their product for about 1/6th the price ($2.50 for a dvd that sells in the u.s. for $16). And that puts me at a basic disadvantage. Companies are increasingly hiring labor at 3rd world rates and selling their products to me at 1st world rates and to the labor at 3rd world rates. For example, my blood pressure medicine costs $5 per pill here without insurance and it costs 10 cents per pill in india. It's not a sustainable situation. At some point, the prices for goods must equal out- and if a good is sold in india or china for 1/5th the price, I should have access to the product for a similar price. It's a very artificial and unfair situation.
Sure, I can say that I deleted the Mp3, but how can I prove it?
I might have copies of it elsewhere, on memory sticks.
Personally, I think a fair price for mp3's is under 10 cents these days. And I think when you actually go to the trouble of "buying" one, then you should be able to redownload it in the future.
If the current IP laws had existed at the beginning, we would only have a few stories, and an even smaller group of people would own everything.
The current laws are broken-- were intentionally broken by people who got the first big pile of money.
It's reasonable that people should be able to get a decent living and a reasonable return on their investments for a limited amount of time for each creation.
If IP is real in the sense that property is real, then we need to start applying property tax to it.
I got some smiles and laughter out of the various sites today. The world is such a horrible place, I'm glad they took.33% of the year out to bring some joy into the world.
Dude, headphones are insufficient (so you don't really go to sleep until you collapse) and they wake you up from the pain after a few hours.
You can't control your reactions to deep bass. It manipulates your body directly. That's why people use it in concerts. It also passes easily through fairly thick walls.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems more like a choice to me.
1) Design it so it has a bezel to protect the screen.
2) put some silicone bumpers on the corners to protect it from falls.
An aftermarket case for my $600 phone cost me $6. If features of the case were designed in to the phone, they would add pennies to the cost. Without the case, my phone could be broken in one very short fall. With the case, my phone has taken at least a dozen 3 to 4 foot falls with no damage.
They are actually quite expensive.
Swapping 10 fixtures to LED can save you $20 per month in direct costs. Which means you pay for more than one bulb per month with the savings. On top of that you are not pumping all that heat into your house and then paying to cool it back down.
My electric bill dropped significantly from going to LED. In terms of alternative energy- they are a hell of a better deal than solar panels or even extra insulation.
I've lost some CFL's but so far I haven't lost any LED's and I turn them on and off a lot.
I have one "40 watt" (which is really 20 watt imho) which has been going for 75000 hours on my porch (so far). 24 hours a day for 9 years except during hurricane Ike. I paid $35 for it back in 2003. It was pitiful for home use. But it's an awesome porch light. Doesn't attract bugs and provides enough light to see my keys.
http://www.amazon.com/Light-Lumen-Replacement-G7-Power/dp/B0064AE2K4/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1365796844&sr=8-1&keywords=g7+led+bulb
The G7.
There are two reasons.
1: This bulb is set at 3000 kelvin.
It looks NORMAL like a regular LED bulb. I'm sorry but LED bulbs set at 2900k look either Pink or Orange to me and most the people i know. I'm sure that real incandescent bulbs are 2900 kelvin and the rest of the LED companies are trying to mimic them but it doesn't look right in LED.
2: This bulb is 900 lumens.
I know 850 lumens is supposed to replace a 60 watt bulb. But it doesn't for me. It seems dim. At 900 lumens, it seems a little brighter than a 60 watt bulb and I actually like that. I suspect 870 or 880 lumens would be the correct value for a perfect swap.
Downsides: I've never had it happen to me, but I've read that some G7's buzz.
I have approximately 12 brands of LED bulbs going in my house, including phillips. I use the phillips 75 watt in a fixture with a lamp shade. I have a 9 year old "40 watt" bulb which is really more like 20 watt on the porch-- it's always on.
I also find pretty good light (and they fit in cieling fans better) from the lights with the squashed disks. They do give light over a large area. The top is about 1/2" think and about 2" around. They also give a little more lumens than similarly rated bulbs. I have three of those.
I have some multiple fixture floor lamps that all the other random bulbs go into.
At this point, other than the "globe" fixtures in the bathroom, new bulbs going foward will all be G7's until I hear of something better.
I do also have some of the new 3500 kelvin CFL bulbs from Home Depot. I really like the light. It's "superwhite" but not "blue". But like all CFL's they seem to take 60 seconds to achieve full brightness.
I have an old random 75w CFL in my utility room.
I only have three incandescent bulbs left in the house at this point. Two globes in the bathroom and one standard 60w in the attic.
Iraq was more about Bush Jr's relationship with Bush Sr than it was about Iraq.
Bush Jr was not as wise as his father.
But only in states with income tax does any of your tax on income go to run your local state (and city) governments.
Compared to Fox News...
There are some lovely videos of all the anchors on Fox News stating both sides of a particular issue. For example... "Can the president affect oil prices?"
In each case, they say, "No the president can't affect oil prices" and "The president can affect oil prices- why isn't it he?"
They are quite humorous, you should give them a look.
You don't generally pay taxes on the raw food used to prepare meals.
Mod parent up... informative.
It says "The Infosys and Tata workers are on L1 visas making 60% or so of the average."
We did hear they were on L1 visas so that part of the statement is confirmed.
And we budgeted them on projects at $60 vs $90 for locals so that parts confirmed too.
For project budgeting purposes, ours went for $60 per hour while the united states workers went for $90. No idea what the difference was but at a budgeting level, the company treated them differently.
That is the one thing that is changing.
Indian wages are now inflating about 20% per year.
Chinese wages are inflating between 100% on the low end to 12%+ on the high end.
Another 4-6 years and it won't make sense to use them any more.
And the boomers and chinese boomers have started retiring. Things will get better but it will probably be 2016 before it really starts to gain steam.
On the boomer front, 5 million went on social security in 2010 and 2011. That compares to 5 million pre-boomers who went on social security from 2000 to 2009.
an extra 800k retire each of the next 4 years. Then an extra 1.6million extra per year every year after that for 15 years.
I just hope it's in time for the gen-x and other kids behind the boomers.
What you are saying was much more valid back in 2000.
Today, I know engineering students, genetics students, chemistry students, medical students.
They are not taking stupid jobs.
They have to pay full dollar for an education here, for cars here, for cloths here, hell even for movies and music CD's here.
Meanwhile they are put into competition with people who get everything for about 1/5th the price paid here except automobiles and air conditioners.
You can't even legally buy the $2.49 DVD's that sell for $16 here and 10 cent pills which sell for $5.00 here and resell them back in the U.S. It's illegal to buy them there for the grossly lower price and reimport them back into the U.S.
Well, I lived on half of what I made and was planning on retiring in January.
Instead I got laid off on december 31st.
So no months vacation pay but 3 months severence, a half bonus, and unemployment.
I had enough to make it to 91. With the returns over the last three months (i.e. shareholder value), I have enough to make it to 96 as long as we don't get hyperinflation.
Of course, if I had a job, I'd be screwed by hyperinflation too.
From experience, I can say there has been a big change from 2004 to 2012.
In 2004, my company got masters degree candidates for bachelors degree salaries.
In 2008, my company got bachelor degree candidates for bachelors degree salaries.
In 2011, we were getting disengaged bachelor degree candidates. They basically counted on working for us for 6 months and then being rotated elsewhere. This had the expected and predictable effects.
In 2012, they laid 90% of us off and replaced us with infosys people. They unexpectedly lost another 5%. Infosys was unable staff so we had the weird situation of not even training our replacements but recording training sessions. I went to lunch with a few of the survivors last week and it's a complete mess.
Funny thing is- apparently these workers count as still being indian employees of infosys. They are working some fantastic hours, don't have the skill set and are trying hard to acquire it, but they are not getting paid U.S. salaries even they they are located in the U.S. - just good pay by Indian standards. Apparently they'll be rotated back to india and another similar crew will be brought in. I don't know- perhaps it's that 6 month thing overseas like we do with Aramco. I hear they are living 6+ to an apartment.
So we are competing in our own country for jobs with people being paid in the $35000 to $50000 range when those jobs cost $100k locally and require degrees that are a lot more expensive to obtain here than in india.
It's not quite that simple.
An H1b is paid a "reasonable" salary which is princely by their native countries standards.
And the company gets to treat them as slaves and work them long hours because if they quit, they must find another job who can sponsor them for an h1b quickly or return home.
Jobs report today said no jobs being created.
Yet we are hiring many h1b's.
Meanwhile, many of our 30 year olds are suicidal over a combination of unforgivable debt and no jobs.
Quite a disconnect.
I think it's time to put a tariff on offshored/outsourced jobs- including h1b's.
Interesting since I know many of the wealthy pay under under 20% taxes (Romney appears to have paid 13% and Buffett pays under 17%).
I'm wondering how so many people earn so much, pay such low tax rates, and yet pay 71% of the income taxes.
At a six figure income, my taxes paid was about 14% of my income.
So let me do some digging.
The NY Times supports your statement:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/10/26/nyregion/the-new-gilded-age.html?_r=0
The top 1% has 23.94% of the income (same as just before the great depression).
The top 10% earns 42% of the nations income. (this is the group I was apparently thinking of when I slapped off my post).
Okay... here is part of the issue:
Payroll taxes. 15% of most of our incomes... less than 1% of the wealthy income. .03% for the wealthy).
State and Local taxes (10% to 12% of moderate income vs
So this is really about "Federal Income Tax" vs the total tax load.
I agree - the wealthy pay the amounts you are saying of the Federal Income Tax.
However, they are paying a total tax load under half of what most of the rest of the citizens pay. As I alluded to above- raising the federal tax due by most of the country would throw them into poverty because they are paying 25% to 27% of their income in taxes and fixed fees which the wealthy pay a total of less than 1%.
So I'd trade you.... Percentage based state income tax instead of sales tax. And start applying the payroll tax all the way up, not just the first $106k.
It's going to get trickier as automation and robotics destroy jobs faster than they can be created. Hopefully retiring boomers will hide that until after 2020.
If you are taking in 40% of the income of the entire nation, you should expect to pay 40% of the tax of that entire nation.
And since the very poor already can't eat much less pay taxes, you should probably expect to pay 41% of the taxes.
When the law was passed, the default rate for students was 1%. Actually better than for many other forms of debt.
It's not right that we let 18 year olds sign contracts like this.
If you could default on these loans, the banks would not loan so much money and tuition would not be as high.
My entire degree cost me under $20,000 from 1985 to 1993 and lead to six figure salaries. Great investment. Today-- not so much.
It seems pretty clear that legalizing pot would take billions from the cartels.
I personally think cocaine and pot should both be legal.
Cocaine is only slightly more addictive that alcohol (17% to booze's 15%). I've known lots of people who did cocaine regularly back in the 70's and 80's who still had normal lives.
I wouldn't risk it myself. I don't like the small but non-zero risk of instant death by heart attack. My drug of preference would be pot butter in food and sugarfree candies. No lung damage, great sex, cheaper than booze, no problems with diabetes.
Okay, let's set the foundation that I agree that any creator can price their product any way they want. If they want to price it at $10,000 that's their right.
My reasoning on the pricing of songs has several sources.
First, I think the current pricing level is disproportionately high. Consider J.K. Rowling earning a billion dollars for her books. If the price were a 10th, she still would have earned 100 million dollars. And some people would have bought books by other authors. High prices crowd out other artists.
Second, In a working capitalist system, when there was such a huge glut of content, the price should be dropping (and in some areas it is-- I've recently seen the start of DVD's with 4 good movies on them for five dollars). If our copyright worked the way it did before it was captured by the industry and ran out after 14 or 28 years, most of the content created by people who are dead would be much less than 10 cents.
Third, at $1, I think many people pirate content and get comfortable pirating content that they would buy at a lower price level. Admittedly 10 cents is an arbitrary figure and 15 cents or even 25 cents, more (and I think most) people would choose to buy over pirating. Even at 10 cents, it would take over $1000 to fill an ipod with songs.
Fourth, I think $1 per song is so high that many people who won't pirate don't purchase at all. It's also really a "first world" price. There is no way it is going to sell in a country where someone earns $400 a month.
Fifthly (and finally) And for some content, the companies legally sell their product for about 1/6th the price ($2.50 for a dvd that sells in the u.s. for $16). And that puts me at a basic disadvantage. Companies are increasingly hiring labor at 3rd world rates and selling their products to me at 1st world rates and to the labor at 3rd world rates. For example, my blood pressure medicine costs $5 per pill here without insurance and it costs 10 cents per pill in india. It's not a sustainable situation. At some point, the prices for goods must equal out- and if a good is sold in india or china for 1/5th the price, I should have access to the product for a similar price. It's a very artificial and unfair situation.
Sure, I can say that I deleted the Mp3, but how can I prove it?
I might have copies of it elsewhere, on memory sticks.
Personally, I think a fair price for mp3's is under 10 cents these days.
And I think when you actually go to the trouble of "buying" one, then you should be able to redownload it in the future.
If the current IP laws had existed at the beginning, we would only have a few stories, and an even smaller group of people would own everything.
The current laws are broken-- were intentionally broken by people who got the first big pile of money.
It's reasonable that people should be able to get a decent living and a reasonable return on their investments for a limited amount of time for each creation.
If IP is real in the sense that property is real, then we need to start applying property tax to it.
I'm not sure if it's more giggle or guffaw.
I got some smiles and laughter out of the various sites today. .33% of the year out to bring some joy into the world.
The world is such a horrible place, I'm glad they took
Dude, headphones are insufficient (so you don't really go to sleep until you collapse) and they wake you up from the pain after a few hours.
You can't control your reactions to deep bass. It manipulates your body directly. That's why people use it in concerts. It also passes easily through fairly thick walls.