And they are highly profitable. You can buy back a brand new title that's selling for $59.99 for $20 a week after it's released and then sell it to the next consumer for $50. You just made $30 profit for a little bit of overhead and two consumers just got their fix a little bit cheaper. Everyone except the publishers win.
Legacy titles are a bonus, but the money is all in new releases.
These offers, and MMORPGs, are tied to an online persona like an XBox Live account. Your computer could crash, burn, and be rebuilt a hundred times over and it has absolutely nothing to do with your access to whatever content is tied to you account. If the game servers go down you're hosed anyway because you probably wouldn't be able to get any downloads, any updates, or in the case of MMORPGs, play the game.
That was the point, Democrats in Texas and Republicans in California wanted to destroy the value of the respective states because each state is a stronghold of the the other parties electoral base, and moving it to proportional value would severely damage a campaign strength they can more or less take for granted.
An interesting thing happened, and I don't know if it ever made it to/. A political group tried to get it enacted that Texas electoral votes would be distributed proportionately rather than all or nothing to take advantage of Texas' large urban areas (the ones that elected your 13 democrat congressmen) effectively turning Texas into a "purple state". I hear it ended right about the time someone threatened to do the same to California and destroy every Democrat presidential campaign for the next decade.(Or because it'd be hard to get something like that pushed through by Republicans in Texas.)
I work for a company that does exactly that, and competes with quite a few others who do the same, all of them, to the best of my knowledge, pretty profitable.
You take a number like $3 a pound for copper, consider that a CRT monitor has about 1-2lbs of copper in it. Precious boards (the kind you'd find in PC's, usually green) can market close to $4 a pound, something like ceramic processors can be in the $20-$40 per pound range. There's obviously money to be made, it's just a matter of whether your separation of these commodities is efficient enough to cover labor and logistics costs. Manual separation (read: guys with tools) is far more efficient at extracting well sorted and graded commodities at the cost of higher overhead cost. Mechanical separation (shredding) has been the growing trend in the industry that has much lower operating costs in the long run weighed against lower output and higher initial cost, as well as added problems with making sure no one throws something stupid in the machine.
Either way is profitable, but that's not the end of it, because that's assuming that you took all this equipment for free. If you charge the customer a fee associated with the collection and disposal of the equipment you can easily make back whatever commodity value didn't cover and more. There's also a large market for asset management, ie being able to provide the customer with a detailed inventory of their hardware because they were never able to do it themselves.
We take it one step further though, and it doesn't really fall under the topic of this article, but if you were curious. Many companies refresh their systems on a normal 2-4 year cycles, this mean that at this point we're being paid to take away equipment like 2-3ghz P4 computers, which with pretty minimal effort and an assurance of data security can be resold for pure profit. The market here is a little questionable for the future due to the ever dropping price of new PC hardware but it's still a pretty stable cash flow.
You might be a little late to the market though, besides smaller independently owned companies like the one I work for, IBM, Dell, and HP all have their own electronics recycling and refurbishing operations.
I just think about the uneducated Chinese peasant who was formerly dissolving solder in a dish over a flame, now dealing with barrels of highly corrosive acids.
You didn't read closely enough. The matter under discussion was that some of her contacts have.gov addresses and the GP posting that it's a clear violation because work should be done on work email and personal things on personal email.
My post states that I know for a fact people use business accounts for personal reasons. If she emailed X@alaska.gov about a bake sale no crime was committed, the presence of.gov accounts on a contact list, is not, in and of itself, obvious guilt.
Even with shredding operations, of which there are quite a few in North America, the metals eventually end up at a smelter. The best I've seen is using eddy current sorting, but even that still has impurities to be burnt off.
Not to mention retailers. Every time you take a monitor back to Best Buy they get to sell that to a recyclers who then sells the credit for recycling it to the state. Plenty of money for the seller, the disposer, and the state, you got robbed and the third world is still a dumping ground.
Or, since he was talking about the American industrial revolution, which was both a time of incredible innovation and exploitation, you could look at that. You could go one step further and compare it to the situation in China where exploitation and innovation (look at their progress in computing and aerospace) are once again going hand in hand.
I'm not saying that the correlation between exploitation and innovation is 1 to 1, or any grand argument of the kind you're trying to make, just that instead of trying to make a grand philosophical point, there are a lot of parallels between turn of the century America and modern China, and people aren't too broken up about how the former turned out.
I think you missed the point of the comment about the Chinese getting of scot-free.
The scale of these electronics dumps in China defies imagination if you haven't seen them for yourself. This isn't some back ally industry that the Chinese government couldn't stop overnight if they had any mindset to do so. I'd argue that the Chinese government is just as culpable for allowing their country being a dumping ground for hazardous waste as the countries that send it are.
Is it wrong to export the waste? You bet, I work for a recycling company that doesn't, that regularly has to compete with companies with much lower overhead because they do, I'd be a lot better off if it wasn't legal, but until countries stop accepting it (and many countries particularly in Africa are banning the importation of non-functional electronics) is the blame really one sided?
The problem, speaking as someone who works in the industry, is one of trust and profitability. If a company comes to you and says they'll dispose of your equipment you might as how, and for how much.
If they say "recycle it!" you feel good inside, but there's no guarantee that any of that work is done domestically, that it isn't merely loaded in a container and exported. Even better, if it stays in the US you have no guarantee that it isn't going to done by prison laborers in conditions that are every bit as bad as workers in third world countries. (Thankfully the largest facility in America using prison labor was just shut down this year)
You can bet that either of those options brings the bottom line quite a bit lower and still allows your crooked salesman to say that you're doing the environmentally responsible thing. Remember, there aren't that many states that outlaw simply throwing it in the trash, although the the number is growing.
Except that no one has read the emails. The "damning evidence" is a screenshot with a few potentially public matter subject lines. The email from Amy McCorkell mearly tells her not to let criticism get to her. Is that an email between two public officials? Yes. Is it an email of public business? Not even close.
It's often said you can't believe everything you read on the internet, you're banking on something you haven't even really read yet.
She's probably guiltier than sin, but I try to wait till something is verified before I bring out the tar and feathers, especially if your news source is Anonymous.
That's funny, every government employee I know (around 10) regularly sends personal mail from their work accounts, and I don't know a single person I work with who doesn't do the same.
I'm not saying the two shouldn't be kept separate, I'm just saying they aren't. With out knowing the content of the emails there is absolutely nothing but speculation.
Large sections of the Star Wars extended universe are far, far, far, better than the new trilogy, and in some cases probably even better than the originals that spawned them.
Of course you'll never read them. It's funny that someone who is decrying the name recognition factor of putting DA on the cover is absolutely refusing to read books, or buy lamps, or do God knows what else based on the exact same reasoning.
Slashdot Mirror
Or this?
Or this?
Sometimes things get lost to the ages.
How many live performances are out there that no one who wasn't there will ever hear?
Gamestop\EB\Babbages\Suncoast
And they are highly profitable. You can buy back a brand new title that's selling for $59.99 for $20 a week after it's released and then sell it to the next consumer for $50. You just made $30 profit for a little bit of overhead and two consumers just got their fix a little bit cheaper. Everyone except the publishers win.
Legacy titles are a bonus, but the money is all in new releases.
These offers, and MMORPGs, are tied to an online persona like an XBox Live account. Your computer could crash, burn, and be rebuilt a hundred times over and it has absolutely nothing to do with your access to whatever content is tied to you account. If the game servers go down you're hosed anyway because you probably wouldn't be able to get any downloads, any updates, or in the case of MMORPGs, play the game.
And if he claims tomorrow that he won the election you're more than welcome to have a few doubts.
I have to agree though, considering just how recently they announced their successful launch before they ever left the ground.
That's just cynical.
That was the point, Democrats in Texas and Republicans in California wanted to destroy the value of the respective states because each state is a stronghold of the the other parties electoral base, and moving it to proportional value would severely damage a campaign strength they can more or less take for granted.
An interesting thing happened, and I don't know if it ever made it to /. A political group tried to get it enacted that Texas electoral votes would be distributed proportionately rather than all or nothing to take advantage of Texas' large urban areas (the ones that elected your 13 democrat congressmen) effectively turning Texas into a "purple state". I hear it ended right about the time someone threatened to do the same to California and destroy every Democrat presidential campaign for the next decade.(Or because it'd be hard to get something like that pushed through by Republicans in Texas.)
Pretty much a side note.
Just because someone is an activist doesn't mean they're intelligent or well informed.
It just means they have strong opinions, and I have plenty of those about things I haven't even heard of yet.
I work for a company that does exactly that, and competes with quite a few others who do the same, all of them, to the best of my knowledge, pretty profitable.
You take a number like $3 a pound for copper, consider that a CRT monitor has about 1-2lbs of copper in it. Precious boards (the kind you'd find in PC's, usually green) can market close to $4 a pound, something like ceramic processors can be in the $20-$40 per pound range. There's obviously money to be made, it's just a matter of whether your separation of these commodities is efficient enough to cover labor and logistics costs. Manual separation (read: guys with tools) is far more efficient at extracting well sorted and graded commodities at the cost of higher overhead cost. Mechanical separation (shredding) has been the growing trend in the industry that has much lower operating costs in the long run weighed against lower output and higher initial cost, as well as added problems with making sure no one throws something stupid in the machine.
Either way is profitable, but that's not the end of it, because that's assuming that you took all this equipment for free. If you charge the customer a fee associated with the collection and disposal of the equipment you can easily make back whatever commodity value didn't cover and more. There's also a large market for asset management, ie being able to provide the customer with a detailed inventory of their hardware because they were never able to do it themselves.
We take it one step further though, and it doesn't really fall under the topic of this article, but if you were curious. Many companies refresh their systems on a normal 2-4 year cycles, this mean that at this point we're being paid to take away equipment like 2-3ghz P4 computers, which with pretty minimal effort and an assurance of data security can be resold for pure profit. The market here is a little questionable for the future due to the ever dropping price of new PC hardware but it's still a pretty stable cash flow.
You might be a little late to the market though, besides smaller independently owned companies like the one I work for, IBM, Dell, and HP all have their own electronics recycling and refurbishing operations.
I just think about the uneducated Chinese peasant who was formerly dissolving solder in a dish over a flame, now dealing with barrels of highly corrosive acids.
You didn't read closely enough. The matter under discussion was that some of her contacts have .gov addresses and the GP posting that it's a clear violation because work should be done on work email and personal things on personal email.
.gov accounts on a contact list, is not, in and of itself, obvious guilt.
My post states that I know for a fact people use business accounts for personal reasons. If she emailed X@alaska.gov about a bake sale no crime was committed, the presence of
That's wild, my friends out of state tuition to NYU was about that.
Even with shredding operations, of which there are quite a few in North America, the metals eventually end up at a smelter. The best I've seen is using eddy current sorting, but even that still has impurities to be burnt off.
I hope that was a joke anyway.
The poisoning from burning circuit boards isn't much worse than the poisoning from dissolving them with acid.
Not to mention retailers. Every time you take a monitor back to Best Buy they get to sell that to a recyclers who then sells the credit for recycling it to the state. Plenty of money for the seller, the disposer, and the state, you got robbed and the third world is still a dumping ground.
Or, since he was talking about the American industrial revolution, which was both a time of incredible innovation and exploitation, you could look at that. You could go one step further and compare it to the situation in China where exploitation and innovation (look at their progress in computing and aerospace) are once again going hand in hand.
I'm not saying that the correlation between exploitation and innovation is 1 to 1, or any grand argument of the kind you're trying to make, just that instead of trying to make a grand philosophical point, there are a lot of parallels between turn of the century America and modern China, and people aren't too broken up about how the former turned out.
I think you missed the point of the comment about the Chinese getting of scot-free.
The scale of these electronics dumps in China defies imagination if you haven't seen them for yourself. This isn't some back ally industry that the Chinese government couldn't stop overnight if they had any mindset to do so. I'd argue that the Chinese government is just as culpable for allowing their country being a dumping ground for hazardous waste as the countries that send it are.
Is it wrong to export the waste? You bet, I work for a recycling company that doesn't, that regularly has to compete with companies with much lower overhead because they do, I'd be a lot better off if it wasn't legal, but until countries stop accepting it (and many countries particularly in Africa are banning the importation of non-functional electronics) is the blame really one sided?
The problem, speaking as someone who works in the industry, is one of trust and profitability. If a company comes to you and says they'll dispose of your equipment you might as how, and for how much.
If they say "recycle it!" you feel good inside, but there's no guarantee that any of that work is done domestically, that it isn't merely loaded in a container and exported. Even better, if it stays in the US you have no guarantee that it isn't going to done by prison laborers in conditions that are every bit as bad as workers in third world countries. (Thankfully the largest facility in America using prison labor was just shut down this year)
You can bet that either of those options brings the bottom line quite a bit lower and still allows your crooked salesman to say that you're doing the environmentally responsible thing. Remember, there aren't that many states that outlaw simply throwing it in the trash, although the the number is growing.
Recycling of Ewaste is profitable, both in America and the third world.
So don't got to a private university? In state tuition shouldn't set you back more than $40,000 at least in my neck of the woods.
Except that no one has read the emails. The "damning evidence" is a screenshot with a few potentially public matter subject lines. The email from Amy McCorkell mearly tells her not to let criticism get to her. Is that an email between two public officials? Yes. Is it an email of public business? Not even close.
It's often said you can't believe everything you read on the internet, you're banking on something you haven't even really read yet.
She's probably guiltier than sin, but I try to wait till something is verified before I bring out the tar and feathers, especially if your news source is Anonymous.
That's funny, every government employee I know (around 10) regularly sends personal mail from their work accounts, and I don't know a single person I work with who doesn't do the same.
I'm not saying the two shouldn't be kept separate, I'm just saying they aren't. With out knowing the content of the emails there is absolutely nothing but speculation.
I have to agree with the GP.
Large sections of the Star Wars extended universe are far, far, far, better than the new trilogy, and in some cases probably even better than the originals that spawned them.
Of course you'll never read them. It's funny that someone who is decrying the name recognition factor of putting DA on the cover is absolutely refusing to read books, or buy lamps, or do God knows what else based on the exact same reasoning.