Y2HH

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Sep 9, 2011 -> 08:56 AM) I can throw things back at you with the same number of anecdotes. Reduced/vanished health care benefits, vanishing of Pension plan replaced by 401k (requiring everyone to become a stockbroker), longer hours, less overtime, spouse working longer hours also. Reduced/vanished health care benefits have what to do with making manual labor harder? Oh, that's right...nothing. Vanishing pensions have what to do with making a job harder? Oh, that's right...nothing. Longer hours? For who? Less overtime? Maybe starting now...government workers have been LIVING and abusing overtime for DECADES now. Spouse working longer hours? Who's?! None of those have DICK to do with a job becoming harder... My point remains, manual labor jobs have also become easier.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Sep 9, 2011 -> 08:50 AM) Aside from anecdotes though can you actually offer any legitimate evidence that "manual labor" has somehow become easier? I can offer some evidence in the reverse actually...life expectancy is at least a non-terrible proxy for the amount of punishment a body has taken over its lifetime (lots of other things go in...all of which play into the argument about how easy the poor have it). Amongst high income groups, life expectancy has been increasing at a solid rate pretty much forever. However, amongst low income groups, it's been stagnant, to the point where there is a growing gap in life expectancy between upper and lower income people. Oh god, here we go with your straw man defacto argument of 'anecdotes'. Ok, you're right, I'm wrong. Blue collar work got even harder, despite better tools existing, better automation, better everything. Sorry, but it's not a f***ing anecdote to say a garbage mans job is easier. It f***ing is.

I think this says it all to me when it comes to the modern standard of living and people thinking they're lives suck.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Sep 9, 2011 -> 08:38 AM) Ok, fine, you don't like the typewriter? Mass production, standardization, and electricity. All of those drove enormous productivity jumps. Productivity has been going up steadily for the whole century. The difference after 1980 is that the gains from that productivity stopped being shared. That probably depends on the job, but in fairness I agree in large part...the fact that corporations are more profitable now than ever before tells the tale. I was merely putting it out there that by and large, productivity is through he roof because of these assisted technologies, so I somewhat expect wages to not keep up with productivity anymore. I think a lot of it has to do with how easy jobs have become, to the point the companies in general don't need the people as much as they once did. Movies like the Matrix and Terminator depict evil robots taking over the world. Reality tells the same story, only differently. Those evil robots are just computers/the internet, and they already took over by and large, only they're not shooting guns at us or harvesting us for energy...they're just making us obsolete in the workforce.

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Sep 9, 2011 -> 08:35 AM) You've described a lot of benefits for white collar work. Cleaning up s*** hasn't gotten easier because of computers. That's reflected in the graphs floating around recently showing the divergence of life expectancy and how the upper-middle class and wealthy life expectancy continues to climb while lower-middle and lower class has basically flat-lined. And it's not like people are working any less or putting in less effort than they were 30 or 40 years ago, it's that the same amount of effort generates a lot more results because we've better tools. That doesn't justify the wealth benefits of all of that increased productivity going only to a small number of people. As for the explosion of credit, well, when your real wages are stagnant for decades, finding second sources of income or spending on credit are the only real way to maintain or marginally improve your standard of living. It gets to the fundamental problems we're currently facing, and advocating for significantly reduced amounts of consumption only gets us into a paradox of thrift and the current "complete collapse of aggregate demand" situation we face now. Even blue collar work got easier. Garbage trucks, for example, lift the cans for the garbage men now...the cans are also 100x lighter, and no longer need replacement due to rust, etc...but never mind that, innovation only exists in white collar offices...apparently. Also, your last paragraph is a load of entitlement bulls***. A truck load of it. Spending on credit is how you "marginally" improve your standard of living? This is such a load of garbage...people have NEVER lived better than they are now...NEVER. The POOR live better than the middle class once lived, and the middle class have no idea what it is to even be middle class. They have 3 computers, 3 tv's, 2-3 cars, a house that's worth 8x than annual combined incomes or an apartment that's as big as a house...they eat out 3-4 times a WEEK, they're leveraged to the hilt, and all because that's what they believe middle class is...because this is, according to you, marginally improving their standard of living? Growing up, I remember MAYBE going out to eat once every 3-4 months. Now, it's a daily occurrence. But yes, let's blame our wages...not our out of whack expectations of a 'standard of living' run amok.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Sep 9, 2011 -> 07:57 AM) But just think about how much the invention of the typewriter increased productivity at the point it was invented. There's no reason out there to think that innovation suddenly took a big jump at 1980. The typewriter did increase productivity when it was invented, but in comparison to a computer? Not even close. In the early 1980's, computers started to become mainstream in the office, and very shortly after they appeared in homes. A computer is a quantum leap in innovation over a typewriter, making the typists job much easier in that they can now save documents, quickly edit documents, print off multiple copies, etc...something that they couldn't do very easily up until then.

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Sep 8, 2011 -> 09:43 PM) While that image is fair in showing that pay stopped growing with productivity sometime in the early 80's, what it doesn't show is that while productivity continued to skyrocket shortly after, the jobs people perform are 1000x easier and thus more productive due to assisted computer automation, spreadsheets, advanced word processors and [shortly after] the Internet in general. Productivity is through the roof to a large degree BECAUSE of the computers the people are using to perform jobs they once had to manually perform, NOT because of their back breaking manpower. Even a secretary that once had to type one or two page memos on a typewriter, while manually correcting mistakes if any were made and/or having to retype the ENTIRE document if changes were necessary (sometimes multiple times), and then having to Xerox the memo, have them carried to individual desks/mailboxes (possibly having to fill out every envelope, stamp it, and have it carried to the post office), can now type the memo once, make easy and instantaneous corrections, and then email it out to every employee in 1/100th the time, at 1/10000th the cost... I'm just putting it out there...so don't think I'm trying to discredit the original point, but the original point doesn't take that into consideration, either. Also, to me the most glaring account of credit gone bad and spending out of control (people feeling entitled to things they cannot afford) is the final part of that image. Where household income is far exceeded by debt despite multiple incomes (this is what I find ridiculous about people becoming slaves to debt/credit card companies), I just don't get it... Maybe people need to spend less money on "stuff" instead of b****ing they don't make enough.

Awesome.

QUOTE (bigruss22 @ Sep 6, 2011 -> 10:35 AM) Split about another 2k on F, GE, DE, MMM today. Trying to diversify my portfolio a bit and I really see some growth possibilities in these companies, especially Ford where they performed pretty well lately and imo is undervalued at about $10.13 per share. Ford would be undervalued if they didn't have 98.5 BILLION in debt on the books. That said, they have been paying that down, but that's a LOT of debt. As it stands, it's valued properly...and I'm a shareholder and have been for close to 10 years -- first I bought in at 9.99. I later bought in at 2.17 or so. Wish I had bought more of the 2$ ones in hindsight. MMM is a great stock, but it's paying a rather low dividend at it's current price. If you want an investment opportunity, invest in one of the many tobacco companies, Reynolds American (RAI), for example, pays a near 6% dividend at a P/E of 16. These are what I call "moral" stocks, however...while I have no issues with investing in tobacco companies, I won't invest in any big oil companies...because I despise them, despite knowing that it's a bad business decision on my part. The reason I tell people tobacco companies are a solid investment with a long term outlook is because China is getting hooked like the US was in the 50's-70's...only there are over 1 billion customers there, compared to what we had here.

This is simply a case of the government (not blaming any in specific here), trying to look like it cares about 'fairness', when in reality, it's kind of shown us that it really doesn't care. For years Verizon and AT&T have basically price matched each others overly expensive services knowing they have the largest customer bases and most attractive coverage maps/phone exclusives, whether it be for super expensive text messaging packages, or dropping unlimited data plans for extremely low capped data services for the SAME exact prices. Meanwhile Sprint/Tmobile fight over the scraps and tend to cater to a lesser tech savvy crowd, as they don't lock in many huge exclusives that people care about (such as the iPhone, etc.)...and even they play the games. Look at Sprint, seeing as they got the iPhone coming to them, they suddenly decide to up their early termination to over 300$...yet the government says nothing about it? And here I thought they cared! At MOST, these early terminations should be based on the subsidized price of whatever phone you bought on a pro-rated scale. They're not. Bought a subsidized phone 1.9 years ago?! 300$. Oh, bought it yesterday...300$. Yea, that's fair. These are telco games, and always have been. Ever since they smashed up Ma-Bell into the baby bells...the government pretended to give a f*** about the people they've been price gouging for decades all the while allowing them to reconstruct the f***ing bell. A pictorial of the government breaking up MaBell only to allow it to slowly reconstruct. In the end, they broke it up into many competitors, only to allow them to reconstruct it into the big 2.

QUOTE (Athomeboy_2000 @ Sep 1, 2011 -> 08:04 PM) Need Advice I would like to rip my DVDs to MP4s or ISOs, or both. I would then like to store them on a NAS and have a box attached to my TV that has a GUI to access the files. I know iTunes/AppleTV does something like this, but I'd prefer not to be locked into the Apple ecosystem. Ideally, I want to keep the settop box under $150. ANy suggestions? Handbreak is a good DVD ripper, and it's free -- but there are plenty of these available. You may have to install VideoLAN/VLC Media player for decoding purposes, but I'm not sure that's even necessary anymore... One way or another you get locked into an Ecosystem, whether it be Apples, Microsofts, RoKu's, or some hardly supported you'd better know a lot to configure it Linux derivative. You can use a small set top box running Windows 7 Media Center and connect to your NAS via WiFi, but in either case, it can get complicated. The only reason I use the iTunes option is because, get this...it's easy. My "settop box" is an AppleTV2 which uses Wireless N, costs less than 100$, is tinyier than any media center box you will be able to build/find, and can be easily moved from one tv to another tv, since it weighs about 1 ounce and requires 2 plugs, 1 for power and 1 for HDMI. AppleTV supports NetFlix, Vimio, and Apple iTunes store services, including home LAN sharing/streaming services via any computer running iTunes. I'm not saying you can't build your own, but it's not always easy, and it will be bigger, louder and harder to support as most of these options are actually computers running Windows or some alternative. I believe Google may have an option out there, too, but from what I know about it it's not very well received. RoKu has some freeware options for LAN streaming, but RoKu doesn't work with home PC's natively and has no "home ecosystem" to speak of. It's more of an internet service for streaming, and in that regard, it's better than the Apple TV as it supports HuLu, too. The AppleTV's big advantage is it's seemless integration to your iTunes library for music/movies/pictures, it supports airplay (wireless stream off any modern apple device such as an iPad/iPhone), and is very very easy to get up and running. To this point, I've seen nothing that comes close in terms of how easy it is. As of IOS5 it supports HDMI and wireless mirroring of Apple devices, too...so for example, you can play a game on your iPad/iPhone and mirror it to your TV, so the iPad/iPhone screen becomes a game controller and your TV is where the game is displayed. As for the iTunes ecosystem, it's not something you really need to be concerned with, as like me, you want to rip your DVD's/BluRays and store them on a local drive -- while the Apple TV will use iTunes to catalog these movies/stream them, the files aren't really a part of "Apples" ecosystem...you're simply using Apples software to stream them. I've ripped quite a few movies and have them in my iTunes library, however, they are just simple movie files that can be ported from system to system since they reside on a shared drive. I've used iTunes for a few years now, but only for my own things, my music rip's and dvd rips are in my iTunes library since it's easy to stream them to my various apple devices...but I don't really use it to buy anything off iTunes. I think in my catalog of music, which is upwards of 100 gigs, I've got 2 songs that I purchased off of iTunes.

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Aug 25, 2011 -> 05:44 PM) our terrible patent system is why google bought motorola mobile No it's not...otherwise they would have made a serious run at the Nortel patents...OR, join Microsoft and Apple in their bid for them -- since Google was outright invited to join the Rockstar group and declined. This is an excuse used by Google and regurgitated by their people. Google could have had those Nortel patents if they choose too...in the end, they didn't want to share patents, they wanted them for themselves, and that's how they lost. While people are making a big deal out of the Motorola patents, Google bought them because they want tighter hardware/software integration like Apple has. If it was merely about patents, there were better ways to go about acquiring patents, without spending 12+ billion dollars outright, plus all the ongoing operating expenses (effectively doubling Google's number of employees/payroll), not to mention...they just bought a company so fat and old it STILL loses money despite selling millions upon millions of Android devices. It was about FAR more than patents. This is a company that couldn't find a way to turn a dime of profit, despite having these glorified patents... If it sounds too good to be true. It is.

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Aug 25, 2011 -> 04:32 PM) I know, I was poking fun at it. Their products are expensive because they don't produce bargain or mid-range products for the most part. You took that more seriously than it was meant, too. I understood what you meant when you said that...that you understood what I was talking about and knew that before I elaborated... I have to say, since becoming a Mac user, if/when you do need support, it's refreshing that you get an American on the phone, and/or in person at any Apple retail store. That kind of support is second to none.

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Aug 25, 2011 -> 04:27 PM) lol you took that joke way too seriously Repeating something I hear on a daily basis isn't a joke...it's repeating something many people actually believe.

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Aug 25, 2011 -> 03:26 PM) Nobody except the 60% of the market? There's a lot of mediocre Android phones out there, and that's the difference between them and Apple: Apple wants to control the entire product from start-to-finish to ensure that they only put out what they view as high-quality items in which they can control the consumer's experience, for better or worse. I'm not sure what that has to do with my "argument" that Android market share is exploding and that tech. innovation won't grind to a halt because Jobs stepped down. Tech innovation won't grind to a halt because Jobs stepped down. That's not the argument I was refuting. The argument you made was the typically repeated, "Apple products are way overpriced", bulls*** I hear over and over. The numbers simply don't fit. Does Apple charge a profit on their products? Sure...as does everyone...so long as they can. (HP could not, hence why they swallowed a loss on their 99$ tablets last week). Apples typical margins are 25%, well below Microsoft's 35%+...that aside, a 25% margin across all products sold does not constitute them taking 60%+ of the smartphone industries profits (which they currently do), as competitors like HTC often charge just as much for their newer model phones as Apple does. It has more to do with the fact that they sell them in greater numbers, and with less models to support they have far less overhead, which other companies don't seem to care about. Meanwhile, a Droid 1, 2, 3, X, and who knows what else all in the span of 1 single year all from Motorola, and hardly any of them still supported and/or lacking updates. Congratulations Moto Mobility, before Google bought you, you sold MILLIONS of Android devices...yet somehow LOST money (a lot of it)...despite many of their new models costing 199$+, just like Apples iPhone. People may not have noticed, but over time Apple has also lowered the subsidized price of their 3GS and iPhone 4 models...yet their margins somehow INCREASED. This is because they do business efficiently, and make changes when necessary to make them easier to produce. Dismissing Apples products as merely overpriced is just wrong. SOME of their products are overpriced...some are not. I'd bet most companies work this way, but just aren't selling in the record numbers that Apple is. The iPad 2 is as competitively priced in the industry as you can get...which is why nobody else can seem to make a dent yet. It's also why most Android pads with similar specs/ability (or more) cost the same (or more). Yes, innovation will continue. Yes, Android is becoming a solid OS...but their distribution methods and shaky support hinder it...regardless of how much it spreads. People get Androids because they a) hate apple, or b) cannot afford an iPhone, want a smartphone, and get very cheap model Android instead.

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Aug 25, 2011 -> 03:08 PM) This just supports the claim that Apple products are way over-priced! That also says operating profits from mobile phones, not just smartphones. But I don't know if smartphones have higher or lower margins. Apple does have significant market share with iOS, and since its concentrated on a single phone Apple is going to be profitable. Android, being spread out on dozens of different phones, isn't going to have a single dominant manufacturer. Most new androids are priced identically to the iphone...at least for a week or two until they have to give them away because nobody cares. So much for your argument.

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Aug 24, 2011 -> 10:04 PM) Jobs was not designing these products himself. People seem to think otherwise.

QUOTE (Iwritecode @ Aug 24, 2011 -> 04:32 PM) In just a few weeks my wife and I are actually going out to sign a contract for a permenant site at a campground about 30 minutes from our house. We camp there tons of times throughout the year so we figured it would be easier to just leave our trailer there rather than pack/unpacking it and towing it back and forth every time we go. Some people claim that we aren't really "camping" because we have a trailer with electricity, heat, air, etc. but we like it. It's still camping, just in a different sense of the word. Applying rules and regulations as to what is camping is silly. I do some of the most hardcore camping you could imagine, I.E. canoeing through the boundary waters, or backpacking up mountains in Colorado...although I always sleep in tents, on a lot of our trips, it's more of a glorified tail gating party/fishing trip...regardless of what you do or do not do...the point is this... You are outdoors.

I have some great camping stories, including one in which me and 5 friends were chased through the woods when we accidentally hiked ourselves upon what we believe must have been a backwoods meth operation. The fact that they chased us through the woods for 2 hours, and then used spotlights mounted to the backs of their pickup trucks in a weak attempt to find us at night in the woods showed their stupidity and their desperation. It was a heart pounding adventure to say the least...but we all survived unscathed. Oh, and for those that don't understand why what they did was stupid...shining a light into the woods at night doesn't help you see anything...all it does is help whatever is hiding from you and/or stalking you...see you that much better.

QUOTE (lostfan @ Aug 24, 2011 -> 07:10 PM) I'm not surprised, but that doesn't mean it's not a big deal. It was well within the realm of "s*** that could happen" but still, it's Steve f***ing Jobs. It's a big deal more in name than in reality. Fact is Steve Jobs hasn't been running day to day operations since January and the company hasn't skipped a beat. People seem to have a misconception that Jobs created things -- what he did better than any other CEO was demand things work for regular people. Tim Cook has been running that place in everything but name for a while now, and it's done well. The only thing they need to do is keep Jobs vision alive in that technology should be a blend of hardware sleekness/usability and software -- that, and it should be EASY to use for just about anybody. No company really does this quite as well as Apple did in recent years. So long as they continue that vision, I see no reason to believe the company will suddenly fail. That said, there is nothing to say the company will continue that vision, but seeing that is catapulted them to the #1 tech company in the world by market cap and by profits, they probably should. I'm not sure if it remains, but for a while last week, Apple was the #1 company in the world by market capitalization, surpassing even Exxon. Though that may have changed now.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Aug 24, 2011 -> 06:48 PM) Exactly. This is about as expected as you can get. It was expected enough that Apple had a complete transition plan already worked out for when he finally decided to do this. In other news, after the resignation of Steve Jobs, Apple's fourthcoming iPhone 6 leaked (apparently Apple is already going backwards): I guess without Jobs vision they just have no idea what they're doing anymore!

QUOTE (lostfan @ Aug 24, 2011 -> 05:53 PM) Steve Jobs resigned? Was a long time coming. After a second medical leave for recurrence of the same undisclosed illness, the writing was on the wall a long time ago.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Aug 19, 2011 -> 04:43 PM) Man, the crash you'd see in that commodity if any sovereign nation started selling its gold reserves... Well, now is the time to cash in. Gold is near an all time inflation adjusted high...and the only way to make money with gold is to sell it. Holding it costs money.

QUOTE (Cknolls @ Aug 19, 2011 -> 01:10 PM) I think we will see some central bank intervention coming shortly, maybe even this weekend. Be it the gold market or juse a version of QE on a global basis. What would they do with the gold market?

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Aug 18, 2011 -> 04:59 PM) Question for the group; does Rick Parry's attack on my livelihood here deserve to replace Bobby Jindal's? The Solar system itself started 4.56 U-Pb billion years ago. The Earth itself had coalesced as one of a hundred or so smaller-than-current-Mars sized bodies within 5 million years of that event. The Earth then grew by accretional processes as those bodies began slamming into each other. The final impact that created the Earth-Moon system happened about 50 million years later (largest error bounds are actually on that one). Every so often they figure out that the universe is older than previously thought. So that can probably apply to this...despite them currently thinking the solar system started 4.56 U-Pb billion years ago, in another decade they'll revise that to say 5.54 U-Pb... Or...are you claiming they've never -- ever -- changed these numbers before? Just wondering. Edit: And I realize that science generally accepts that the Earth is like 4.43-4.55 billion years old based on those isochron reads. Then again, I'm totally talking nonsense, because I took Geology courses like 14 years ago now.