And all the power to you, but assuming the only diff is where they are from, I would rather pay less. That way, I can use what's left over for something else.
Your point on buying value is completely valid. However, you seem to be dismissing "Made in China" to be of the lowest value before analysis. If you find more value in American/Canadian/UK/German wares, more power to you. Personally, I don't want to pay for service due to contact wear and have thus bought a $10 "Made in China" toaster. I know enough about toasters to service it, if need be, but never had to in the 7 years I owned it.
I have found all types of items in WalMart & Amazon that I find to be of better value than the alternatives. I actually find so many, that it is only on rare occasion that I expend the costs of physically going and looking at the alternatives. WHY? Most of the time, I have found it to be a wasted effort.
I rarely look at what the label says of its origin, there is absolutely no point. Made in China could just mean the customs agent in China stuck a sticker on it. Same goes for the alternatives, nearly anything that you buy is dependent on foreign trade links. So, I base my purchasing decisions on value and past experience. I am also extremely fickle about sticking to a brand. I will switch the second one displeases me, but the counter is the same.
I actually find this method of consumption to be the most American of America. I am proud of it! And I think no less of your purchasing decisions. BUT, I would prefer if the government(s) didn't limit our choices (ex: tariffs on sugar). If there is a preference, I would much rather be provided factual information about my options and be allowed to choose afterward (ex: tainted Chinese milkpowder).
[quote]... Therefore, it's in their best interests to just pocket the money, and that's exactly what they do.[/quote]
That is not true. Not when someone else will charge just a little less to provide equal service. In such a situation, the options are either to not make any revenue or lower your price to be competitive. Yes there are migration costs, but they are almost always primarily government mandated regulations that get in the way. In which case, there are usually counter regulations to help out the consumer (ex: price regulation of energy companies...)
"Basic economics" (BE) didn't get us into this mess. Old school thinking got us into this mess (everyone should be able to afford a house). BE would have never let us get more into debt trying to hold up debt ridden businesses. Or let us pay more for houses and company assets than they are worth.
Interdependency between entities, whether they be countries, states, cities, businesses, or even families has shown over and over again to be the best we have. It isn't ideal, but better than the alternatives that humans have come up with so far.
If being completely self reliant and self sustaining is so great, why isn't it adopted to the very core of our societies? Why do I have to depend on a baker, farmer, car maker, or even family? If we are so interdependent on all these things in our personal lives, the majority of which are anonymous and hidden (alluding to the invisible hand), what makes countries so different?
That "Yank and Rank" philosophy of his is highly criticized by many economists. The counter I would give is Edwards Deming, who is partially accredited with the success of Japan's automobile industry and Ford.
There are many problems with Welch's system, outside of accepted morality by society issues. For one, you don't get a workforce of dedicated, hardworking individuals, but rather hardworking, stressed out, politically inclined, cut throat, risk takers. Not to mention, you lose group think, orientation, and moral. In a company, one would much rather have a well working group than a bunch of extremely smart individuals who are looking to back stab each other.
Having this process every once is a while (I say 5 years) is fine, but all the time like Welch did... well just look at Enron who took his idea to almost its ideal. A representative of the average employee to paraphrase said: "If you saw an exhausted employee on the floor on the way to the boss's office, you didn't step on the guy, you stomped on his throat and hoped he never got up!" People love to blame Skillings, Lay, and the SEC, but they don't realize how much blame falls on the lenders (major banks), employees, and the stock analysts.
The most recent value (not current value) of a company is dependent on "actual production and sales" among other things. The stock price is the net present value of the company as per the consensus of all the buyers and sellers of the stakes in the company. The later is reality, and it actually makes more sense than the former.
The shareholders, etc. of Apple have no right to Jobs' health records. HIPAA or otherwise. BUT, take this scenario: Jobs puts out that he is sick for 10 days. Rumors fly around and the price drops. He buys up a ton of stock, and then puts out a press release that states that he is in perfect health. The stock shoots up, and he makes a ton. Now, he better be sick those 10 days else, the shareholders have a valid lawsuit for the profits that Jobs made. The fact that his health shouldn't have dropped the stock is a different issue. Same if the scenario was reversed and he (or other parties) shorted.
The SEC doesn't care about Jobs actual health. They care that the image being presented to the public is factual. He maybe in the hospital a 3rd time for heart surgery, no one needs to know that, but their business continuity plan better have a section about who takes over if he kicks the bucket.
The day after next, I found my tires slashed and no way to get home. Mgt had already fired all my coworkers and building AC was turned off to save energy (my idea). So I just slept in the server room. Damn servers crashed at midnight thou, but I was too cold to reboot them.
Should have done more research and found out the young engineer's girlfriend worked CSI. Would have figured to wear some gloves then.
Anyone else feel guilt for tilting their cards back and forth in the light. I can barely grasp the universal consequences of my seemingly innocent action.
Pumped storage is cost effective. We currently do it with excess load on the power grid where turning off a coal plant would be too inefficient. We take extra power on the grid during non-peak times and run the hydro plants backward to store up potential energy behind the dams.
The problem seems to be routing that excess power from the source to the plants. Since HVDC lines are far more efficient, I was proposing building dedicated lines from fluctuating power sources (wind/solar/tidal) and storage (dams). Plus, with HVDC, you don't need to worry about varying voltage and frequencies like you would with AC.
By local setup, one option I can think of, if you have 2 lakes, you can pump water from a lower lake to a higher one. Another much smaller scale would be water towers. It just seems batteries are not the way to go for large scale storage.
Exactly, battery tech isn't economical yet. And it isn't improving anytime soon as batteries are pretty much at the end of their innovation (barring any major breakthrough). Similar to "how do you make a better wheel?" Batteries are the only solution in small setups, but I don't think they scale very well to really large systems.
Our current solution is to send it to the grid and pump water back up in hydroelectric plants. Wouldn't dedicated HVDC lines from solar/wind plants to hydro be a more economical alternative? Or build a local setup where you pump lots of liquid/weight up a height. It basically ends up being an ultra capacitor.
I don't disagree with you on the terrorist point. I think the whole airport security (to take one, small example) and such are total BS. The loss in privacy, personal rights, lack of actual protection from an ill defined, unknown attack vector, and the monetary costs aren't worth the pointless jobs (one good thing) it has created. I think we did more to harm ourselves in the last 8 years than anything labeled as terrorist could have hoped to achieve in the last century.
I was just using it as a way to say how ridiculous the RIAA's claims were.
Anyway, as before, "realistically" speaking, cell phones could be used to continue criminal business operations. Lets say that actual harmful criminals make up only 5% of the prisoner population. To take it to a realistic extreme, do you really want an "income tax evader" such as Al Capone to continue operations from an x by y cell?
Except in one case you are talking about copyright infringement which could potentially cost millions. The other: potentially cost thousands of lives through a terrorist attack.
More realistically, very little lost revenue as most of those copyright infringers don't buy anyway. Verses continued drug operations and possibly a hit on a key eye witness.
Come on! Really? I like the idea that you have wall phones that allow you to dial specific prefiltered phone numbers. And the conversations are recorded. But cell phones?
MS didn't _need_ to make IE free upon inception either. MS didn't _need_ to bundle IE to Windows either. MS didn't _need_ to make a Mac version of IE either. MS didn't _need_ to make an "open office specification" either. MS didn't _need_ to make their own JVM either.
Or did they?
I am going to treat MS for what they really are... a cut throat business that looks after itself, and a damn good one at that. Nice, charity, evil, and backstabber don't really come into the picture.
Loved that analogy... till you said "car". What the heck, you were doing great, but then HAD to pay homage to all the OS&car analogies that came before!!!
So in other words, lets raise taxes another 10% under the banner of fighting terrorism. I can see the lawyers and USB makers already foaming at the potential revenue.
I think the fact is that data can be lost by corporate or government entities, and where there is an opportunity or better yet a will, it will almost always happen. Even the most perfect system will always have the most imperfect cog, the user. The how may help us better protect future information, but the issue is that the information is out there and almost always never be retrieved back.
I love it when people say that so far "nothing bad has happened" or "the lost info isn't clear text" or something similar. They are, at best, doing a probability and risk analysis or worst no clue what they are talking about. Unfortunately, I think it makes people feel better when they hear that, and forget that... your data is still out there forever!
But I think now a days data breaches are far worse when it has something to do with the government as they usually hold more very private and static data than any single corporation. It worries me that countries like the US and UK want to aggregate and collect so much information in one place. Its just a gold mine that waiting to be picked that no amount of local or international laws are going to stop someone from trying. And the problem is, it only takes one, ONE person to breach the security and that data snapshot in time is forever out in the wild.
This is exactly what I was thinking. Compared to CC and CompUSA, BB has "knowledgeable staff" on the floor... from the average customer's point of view. Now I can easily see the average customer going to the "guru" thinking he is the expert of experts instead of the actually product experts.
Their experience is pretty much going to be what I recently had at a CC store. The bloody expert (normally called a car salesman) tried to explain what a "Thin DLP" was compared to a regular DLP, and the benefits of that additional foot of space, in trying to convince us to buy the DLP. No, I kid you not!! And that wasn't anything remotely close to our question!!
I think this is going to make BestBuy look like crap in terms of customer assistance and bring it down to CC and take CC a few notches down.
It might help sales, but it certainly won't help image. People are going to take this stuff home, and still hate it (those who didn't in the 1st place don't need salesman). But this time, they will blame Bestbuy and CC along with Vista.
The odds are in your favor. He isn't the only one carrying a gun. A lot of people are. How many? Who knows, but neither does that bad guy. The chances are, not all the guys who are carrying guns are bad. Even one good guy carrying a gun greatly increases your chances against a bad guy.
On the other hand, banning guns from both will only stop the good guy from being dangerous.
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And all the power to you, but assuming the only diff is where they are from, I would rather pay less. That way, I can use what's left over for something else.
Your point on buying value is completely valid. However, you seem to be dismissing "Made in China" to be of the lowest value before analysis. If you find more value in American/Canadian/UK/German wares, more power to you. Personally, I don't want to pay for service due to contact wear and have thus bought a $10 "Made in China" toaster. I know enough about toasters to service it, if need be, but never had to in the 7 years I owned it.
I have found all types of items in WalMart & Amazon that I find to be of better value than the alternatives. I actually find so many, that it is only on rare occasion that I expend the costs of physically going and looking at the alternatives. WHY? Most of the time, I have found it to be a wasted effort.
I rarely look at what the label says of its origin, there is absolutely no point. Made in China could just mean the customs agent in China stuck a sticker on it. Same goes for the alternatives, nearly anything that you buy is dependent on foreign trade links. So, I base my purchasing decisions on value and past experience. I am also extremely fickle about sticking to a brand. I will switch the second one displeases me, but the counter is the same.
I actually find this method of consumption to be the most American of America. I am proud of it! And I think no less of your purchasing decisions. BUT, I would prefer if the government(s) didn't limit our choices (ex: tariffs on sugar). If there is a preference, I would much rather be provided factual information about my options and be allowed to choose afterward (ex: tainted Chinese milkpowder).
[quote]... Therefore, it's in their best interests to just pocket the money, and that's exactly what they do.[/quote]
That is not true. Not when someone else will charge just a little less to provide equal service. In such a situation, the options are either to not make any revenue or lower your price to be competitive. Yes there are migration costs, but they are almost always primarily government mandated regulations that get in the way. In which case, there are usually counter regulations to help out the consumer (ex: price regulation of energy companies...)
"Basic economics" (BE) didn't get us into this mess. Old school thinking got us into this mess (everyone should be able to afford a house). BE would have never let us get more into debt trying to hold up debt ridden businesses. Or let us pay more for houses and company assets than they are worth.
Interdependency between entities, whether they be countries, states, cities, businesses, or even families has shown over and over again to be the best we have. It isn't ideal, but better than the alternatives that humans have come up with so far.
If being completely self reliant and self sustaining is so great, why isn't it adopted to the very core of our societies? Why do I have to depend on a baker, farmer, car maker, or even family? If we are so interdependent on all these things in our personal lives, the majority of which are anonymous and hidden (alluding to the invisible hand), what makes countries so different?
That "Yank and Rank" philosophy of his is highly criticized by many economists. The counter I would give is Edwards Deming, who is partially accredited with the success of Japan's automobile industry and Ford.
There are many problems with Welch's system, outside of accepted morality by society issues. For one, you don't get a workforce of dedicated, hardworking individuals, but rather hardworking, stressed out, politically inclined, cut throat, risk takers. Not to mention, you lose group think, orientation, and moral. In a company, one would much rather have a well working group than a bunch of extremely smart individuals who are looking to back stab each other.
Having this process every once is a while (I say 5 years) is fine, but all the time like Welch did... well just look at Enron who took his idea to almost its ideal. A representative of the average employee to paraphrase said: "If you saw an exhausted employee on the floor on the way to the boss's office, you didn't step on the guy, you stomped on his throat and hoped he never got up!" People love to blame Skillings, Lay, and the SEC, but they don't realize how much blame falls on the lenders (major banks), employees, and the stock analysts.
That is incorrect.
The most recent value (not current value) of a company is dependent on "actual production and sales" among other things. The stock price is the net present value of the company as per the consensus of all the buyers and sellers of the stakes in the company. The later is reality, and it actually makes more sense than the former.
The shareholders, etc. of Apple have no right to Jobs' health records. HIPAA or otherwise. BUT, take this scenario: Jobs puts out that he is sick for 10 days. Rumors fly around and the price drops. He buys up a ton of stock, and then puts out a press release that states that he is in perfect health. The stock shoots up, and he makes a ton. Now, he better be sick those 10 days else, the shareholders have a valid lawsuit for the profits that Jobs made. The fact that his health shouldn't have dropped the stock is a different issue. Same if the scenario was reversed and he (or other parties) shorted.
The SEC doesn't care about Jobs actual health. They care that the image being presented to the public is factual. He maybe in the hospital a 3rd time for heart surgery, no one needs to know that, but their business continuity plan better have a section about who takes over if he kicks the bucket.
The day after next, I found my tires slashed and no way to get home. Mgt had already fired all my coworkers and building AC was turned off to save energy (my idea). So I just slept in the server room. Damn servers crashed at midnight thou, but I was too cold to reboot them.
Should have done more research and found out the young engineer's girlfriend worked CSI. Would have figured to wear some gloves then.
Anyone else feel guilt for tilting their cards back and forth in the light. I can barely grasp the universal consequences of my seemingly innocent action.
Pumped storage is cost effective. We currently do it with excess load on the power grid where turning off a coal plant would be too inefficient. We take extra power on the grid during non-peak times and run the hydro plants backward to store up potential energy behind the dams.
The problem seems to be routing that excess power from the source to the plants. Since HVDC lines are far more efficient, I was proposing building dedicated lines from fluctuating power sources (wind/solar/tidal) and storage (dams). Plus, with HVDC, you don't need to worry about varying voltage and frequencies like you would with AC.
By local setup, one option I can think of, if you have 2 lakes, you can pump water from a lower lake to a higher one. Another much smaller scale would be water towers. It just seems batteries are not the way to go for large scale storage.
Exactly, battery tech isn't economical yet. And it isn't improving anytime soon as batteries are pretty much at the end of their innovation (barring any major breakthrough). Similar to "how do you make a better wheel?" Batteries are the only solution in small setups, but I don't think they scale very well to really large systems.
Our current solution is to send it to the grid and pump water back up in hydroelectric plants. Wouldn't dedicated HVDC lines from solar/wind plants to hydro be a more economical alternative? Or build a local setup where you pump lots of liquid/weight up a height. It basically ends up being an ultra capacitor.
Judge: "The court finds the term patent troll to be quite accurate, please do continue"
I don't disagree with you on the terrorist point. I think the whole airport security (to take one, small example) and such are total BS. The loss in privacy, personal rights, lack of actual protection from an ill defined, unknown attack vector, and the monetary costs aren't worth the pointless jobs (one good thing) it has created. I think we did more to harm ourselves in the last 8 years than anything labeled as terrorist could have hoped to achieve in the last century.
I was just using it as a way to say how ridiculous the RIAA's claims were.
Anyway, as before, "realistically" speaking, cell phones could be used to continue criminal business operations. Lets say that actual harmful criminals make up only 5% of the prisoner population. To take it to a realistic extreme, do you really want an "income tax evader" such as Al Capone to continue operations from an x by y cell?
Except in one case you are talking about copyright infringement which could potentially cost millions. The other: potentially cost thousands of lives through a terrorist attack.
More realistically, very little lost revenue as most of those copyright infringers don't buy anyway. Verses continued drug operations and possibly a hit on a key eye witness.
Come on! Really? I like the idea that you have wall phones that allow you to dial specific prefiltered phone numbers. And the conversations are recorded. But cell phones?
But it certainly makes me "feel" better that suicide is illegal, and we all know that people don't do illegal things.
MS didn't _need_ to make IE free upon inception either.
MS didn't _need_ to bundle IE to Windows either.
MS didn't _need_ to make a Mac version of IE either.
MS didn't _need_ to make an "open office specification" either.
MS didn't _need_ to make their own JVM either.
Or did they?
I am going to treat MS for what they really are... a cut throat business that looks after itself, and a damn good one at that. Nice, charity, evil, and backstabber don't really come into the picture.
Not to defend the pro-OSS but...
*company* has screwed over every *partner* it has come across with bent-nailed baseball bat and an office chair.
Loved that analogy... till you said "car". What the heck, you were doing great, but then HAD to pay homage to all the OS&car analogies that came before!!!
So in other words, lets raise taxes another 10% under the banner of fighting terrorism. I can see the lawyers and USB makers already foaming at the potential revenue.
I think the fact is that data can be lost by corporate or government entities, and where there is an opportunity or better yet a will, it will almost always happen. Even the most perfect system will always have the most imperfect cog, the user. The how may help us better protect future information, but the issue is that the information is out there and almost always never be retrieved back.
I love it when people say that so far "nothing bad has happened" or "the lost info isn't clear text" or something similar. They are, at best, doing a probability and risk analysis or worst no clue what they are talking about. Unfortunately, I think it makes people feel better when they hear that, and forget that... your data is still out there forever!
But I think now a days data breaches are far worse when it has something to do with the government as they usually hold more very private and static data than any single corporation. It worries me that countries like the US and UK want to aggregate and collect so much information in one place. Its just a gold mine that waiting to be picked that no amount of local or international laws are going to stop someone from trying. And the problem is, it only takes one, ONE person to breach the security and that data snapshot in time is forever out in the wild.
I think this is what a LOT of people don't seem to get. Unfortunately, far too many decisions are made based on not thinking beyond what you see.
This is exactly what I was thinking. Compared to CC and CompUSA, BB has "knowledgeable staff" on the floor... from the average customer's point of view. Now I can easily see the average customer going to the "guru" thinking he is the expert of experts instead of the actually product experts.
Their experience is pretty much going to be what I recently had at a CC store. The bloody expert (normally called a car salesman) tried to explain what a "Thin DLP" was compared to a regular DLP, and the benefits of that additional foot of space, in trying to convince us to buy the DLP. No, I kid you not!! And that wasn't anything remotely close to our question!!
I think this is going to make BestBuy look like crap in terms of customer assistance and bring it down to CC and take CC a few notches down.
It might help sales, but it certainly won't help image. People are going to take this stuff home, and still hate it (those who didn't in the 1st place don't need salesman). But this time, they will blame Bestbuy and CC along with Vista.
The odds are in your favor. He isn't the only one carrying a gun. A lot of people are. How many? Who knows, but neither does that bad guy. The chances are, not all the guys who are carrying guns are bad. Even one good guy carrying a gun greatly increases your chances against a bad guy.
On the other hand, banning guns from both will only stop the good guy from being dangerous.
It is morally wrong to let suckers keep their money. Nuff said.
...zzrp*** Tell me of this thing you fleshlings call love.
Well you,.. oh you already have a vibrator... yes, you start with that and...