I owned HP shares. I sold them (profitably) the moment I bought something from them that was grossly inferior, because I knew at that point they weren't the company they used to be.
The stock later plummeted to a fraction. Selling shoddy stuff hurt them badly.
They got the message. They fired their CEO. They changed. I think they're better now, but their ink-jet business practices just don't smell right (selling pennies of ink for tens of dollars, with dollars in cost to prevent you from refilling). I still don't trust them.
It only really "costs" if it's ineffective and it drives out otherwise productive activity. This being said, $1.75T is a whale of a lot. And a lot of it probably is ineffective.
We're in such a "null" economically that it's not out of the question that additional regulation have a multiplier greater than one! Obviously, that's not normally the case.
That's true. But something like 64% already offer health care.
I just want to keep the signalling separate from what really hits the bottom line.
No argument there. What I am seeing, however, is more like companies have embraced something like "survivor bias" as the central tenet of corporate culture. I've seen... lots of people walk away from business because of inadequate capacity. They fear adding capacity because business is then down...
I really don't see that *much*. It exists, but it's pretty rare.
Maybe he will, maybe he won't. I am just saying that people behave differently after being elected - and in a remarkably consistent manner. I would not have expected Obama to deploy drones; I would not have expected Bush to run up deficits.
Its not everyone else but the problem is that in many cases it is very difficult to tell whether someone is acting in your best interest or his/her own.
For instance, I'm finding it very difficult to find a reliable place to get my car fixed (the law says I must take it to the garage for an annual check). I thought I had found one but the last time he charged ?7 (thats about $10) for adding some wiper fluid and he wrecked the switch for the head-light adjustment.
Thats true. So far I always got good customer service from Ebay sellers based in the US.
--
Failure does not prove something is impossible, failure simply
indicates you are not using the right tools...
nico@nctdevpuntnl (punt=.)
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You keep going on like that. Some sales people are crooks, but some aren't. Assuming without evidence that other people are less virtuous than you is not a good strategy. Just saying.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics
160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510
845-480-2058
hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net
Historical reasons (they're 3.5x1.5, actually). Originally, that was the rough-cut dimension. You bought the shavings. Things have been resized a couple of times since.
3/4 x 11 1/4 (softwoods). A 1" hardwood plank, planed two sides, would be
9/16" thick.
Wrong. There are various ways to maximise profits. Most involve involve defrauding the customer to some extent by restricting the customer's access to genuinely competitive suppliers. As we know, companies have to be watched to prevent them setting up monopolistic cartels that agree to charge higher prices than the customer would end up paying in a genuinely free market. Even in the absence of formal cartels, companies can exploit advertising and brand management to generate customer loyalty which lets them charge more than their competitors for an effectively identical product.
The American military-industrial complex is a particularly flagrant case in point. The AK-47 is well-known to be the best assault rifle around - in Vietnam the US forces would use captured examples in preference to the guns that they had been trained to use - but the US army still uses the inferior substitute that US military-industrial complex manufactures.
Politicians have exactly equivalent incentives to behave honestly, and need to be watched just as closely as businesses. James Arthur displays the normal human weakness for doing what he's always done, and believes everything that the Republican party tells him, and nothing that any Democrat tells him. This isn't an optimal strategy - he's been suckered by brand loyalty.
My reason for not buying HP ink-jet printers is a trifle more rational. They work by - briefly - heating the ink to the boiling point in the printing head, which is rough on the printing head, so it has to be replaced frequently. Epson uses a piezo-electric print head, which lasts for years.
Generalising from a particular piece of kit to a whole product line is irrational, but that's what makes brand loyalty work.
Rational people don't. James Arthur was irrationality imputing dishonesty to the whole of HP on the basis of localised dishonesty in the part of teh company that makes low-end printers, and Nico Coesel was - perfectly rationally - pointing out that this was an over- generalisation.
The majority of human beings are straight shooters, and human society depends on this. It seems likely that the human brain and language evolved in large part to let us work together cooperatively and altruistically while keeping track of one another's behaviour sufficiently carefully to be able to catch cheats and stop them taking an unfair share of our collective efforts.
The psychopathic minority is small, but they have the potential to syphon off huge amounts of labour and resources if they aren't watched and sanctioned.
Evolutionary biologists are fascinated by altruism - it's rare in other species.
As might be expected in something you'd cite, this study doesn't make any attempt to evaluate the financial benefits of the regulations that are being complied with. Onerous "irrelevancies" like the safe disposal of poisonous waste obviously benefit the people who don't suffer from the consequences of tipping unsorted rubbish into an unused canal.
Employer-based health care is a bad idea. Universal health care works rather better, and pretty much every other country that has implemented it ends up with a price per head that is at least a third lower than the US pays. The best examples - France and Germany - offer everybody the same level of health care that only the fully insured enjoy in the US, at about 65% of the price per head.
How does it contribute if the coal comapnies don't pay and attention?
Who had gone bankrupt and were consequently worth nothing to their share-holders
Continuing a long-standing policy which Dubbya had tried to dismantle, in the interests of the oil-companies who had funded his election campaign
They shouldn't actually incite fear, because they are actually business as usual. James Arthur likes to present them as if they ought to inspire fear because he's a right-wing political propagandist with an axe to grind.
Providing that this doesn't involve opting for cheap - but dangerous - waste disposal in - say - Love Canal, rather than paying more to dispose of toxic waste safely.
So James Arthur's attempts to spread alarm and dispondency are actually treason?
Because he's a right-winger, and his brief is to work to maximise the advantages of the employers vis a vis their employees?
Historically speaking, the wood was sold "as sawn", and planed flat as an extra operation, if you wanted that. Since planing involves taking off wood, the dimensions after planing are smaler than those of the original sawn planks.
Typical Larkinism BS. 2" X 4" are the rough cut dimensions, right after being saw from logs. You can still buy them that way from a local sawmill, but very few people want to use them that way. They want milled lumber that's easier to handle, and less likely to cause injury during construction work. You might enjoy having hundreds of splinters in your body to become infected, but most people don't.
--
Subject: Spelling Lesson
The last four letters in American.........I Can
The last four letters in Republican.......I Can
The last four letters in Democrats.........Rats
End of lesson. Test to follow in November, 2012
Remember, November is to be set aside as rodent extermination month.
No, that's you opining without information. I bought a computer, not a printer, prior to the divestitures. The thermal design was outright negligent, causing separate failures of the power supply and hard drive. I corrected the flaws myself and am still using it. It hasn't failed since.
The old HP would never, EVER have shipped that computer. Ever.
It certainly was not an over-generalization, it was a completely accurate judgement that the company had lost its way, and no longer provided the absolutely impeccable products that people had been willing to pay more for.
In short, they'd ruined their good name and reputation, and were set to lose the enormous goodwill and financial value that goes with it.
Experienced in business and as investor, I was assessing their value as a business. I was 100% right. I sold my shares for many times what they traded for just a few years later.
We get better care, and we pay more for it. So what? We pay more for food than someone in Ethiopia too.
Most of the extra cost is directly the result of government intervention--they pay more than half the bills already, and they increased that at 7% a year before Obamacare, and 9% since.
Drivel. The President pre-announced that he was going to bankrupt coal-based enterprises--the source of most of America's electricity. He's doing it.
I heard an estimate that just one EPA regulation currently being drafted will retire 8% of the US' generating capacity.
Wrong.
Not a single item was misinformation--you're misinformed.
Name a President, other than a dictator, who dispossessed secured bondholders? Who's demanded $20 billion in ransom from a company without first a determination that they were even in the wrong? Whose administration has prevented companies from locating where they will?
It was the President who recently suggested publicly, several times, that Social Security checks might not be paid.
He said that deliberately to scare people. There was never any such possibility. He made it up--it wasn't true.
No they don't. The penalties are far smaller, and rarely enforced.
The President attempted to bribe at least two people running for office (Joe Sestak was one), a felony. Penalty? Nope.
The President deliberately misled seniors recently into thinking their SS checks might be in danger. An absolute lie. Penalty? None.
It has surfaced recently that the CBO was deliberately required to score Obamacare in a fashion that understated the true cost by hundreds of billions (omitting dependents of newly eligible), so that Obama could claim it cost less than it actually does. Penalty? None.
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The Attorney General has done more than enough to be put away, Tim Geithner has told a number of whoppers--voters' recourse? Nada. They're Obama's appointees, beyond the voters' reach.
They often plan never to even do that where some financial products are concerned. The banking collapse was amplified by hedge funds designinga products that would be practically guaranteed to fail, getting them sold by a third party and then betting on the failures. That is pretty much fraud in anybodies book but it has not (yet) been prosecuted.
What they were doing was the equivalent of buying home insurance on your neighbours house and then going a lobbying in a Molotov cocktail.
Same with private pensions and endowments a large proportion of what you pay in ends up as fees and bonuses for the sales force. The endowment sales bonus problem in the UK during the 1980's was so bad that they have been cleaning up the mis-selling scandal ever since (ie salesmen deliberately lying to customers to maximise their own income).
The purpose of a good salesmen is to get the customer to suspend disbelief for just long enough to sign the purchase order. They are complete bastards and in hitech companies selling large kit on long lead times they know damn well that they will have moved onwards and upwards before the shit hits the fan for the impossible product specification they have just sold. They will do anything to maximise their bonus package, absolutely anything.
I have seen some specs that would require the repeal of more than one law of physics. The company was used to not getting the last 10% of purchase price due to failed unrealistic final acceptance tests.
It is always worth asking a salesman how long have you been with the company. Beware of any that have less than four years track record. YMMV
There is an interesting test of salesmen vs technical guys I recall from an interview a long time ago. I later extracted the correct saleman answer out of the recruitment consultant.
The scenario is you are stuck with a broken leg on the far side of the moon in a hut with a fit colleague, a broken radio, limited oxygen supplies, spade, gun, wheelbarrow and a bunch of other bits and pieces.
The salesmans solution is: he grabs the gun, sits in the wheelbarrow and forces his colleague to push him to safety under duress.
The technical solution involves mending the radio whilst sending the fit guy off to get help.
There are very few *good* salespeople then. Most of the ones I have met were charming but would always do whatever it took to get their bonus and would lie through their teeth if they thought it would close a deal.
I did have the amusement once of telling an arrogant prat of a salesman that his discourteous handling of our customers business cards in Japan had just lost him an order worth $500k - and also that the $500 bar bill he picked up on his Amex the night before was actually for $5k.
And as for the salespeople in the average high street box shifters their product knowledge these days is strictly limited to whatever is printed on the ratings plate on the back of the unit.
That they are a salesman is evidence enough that they cannot be trusted. They may be charming and good company but their purpose is to separate you from as much money as possible for the smallest amount of goods. If you remember that then you will not go far wrong.
Assuming that the salesman facing you is more interested in maximising his own bonus than in selling you the right product to meet your needs is actually a very sound strategy. If you keep this in mind and watch out for the ones that have jumped ships every four years you will have a much better chance of ending up with the right solution.
Avoid agreeing to include lock-out specs that favour one manufacturer (unless you *really* want to pay more for less).
I have been on both sides of the fence on good and bad deals. The only time I got seriously burned as a buyer was precisely because I had formed a too good relationship with their sales guy and trusted what he said. In fact their 4 CPU mode was not supported or supportable at the time we bought the box and they were gambling we would never need it.
But we did and very suddenly after we took over another company. Then all hell broke loose when we discovered 4 CPU mode was unstable.
The main question is: is this a business or consumer product? In the mid 90s I repaired computers. I quickly learned that the big brands had business products which just work and consumer products which won't work.
--
Failure does not prove something is impossible, failure simply
indicates you are not using the right tools...
nico@nctdevpuntnl (punt=.)
--------------------------------------------------------------
I have been burned a couple of times over the past decades. The problem is seperating the good sales people from the bad. If you have to do that by experience, then you are always too late.
--
Failure does not prove something is impossible, failure simply
indicates you are not using the right tools...
nico@nctdevpuntnl (punt=.)
--------------------------------------------------------------
Pump and dump maximises returns for the senior executives if they can time it just right. If some fool can be persuaded to buy the company at the top of the market then they carry the can when things turn sour. The stock markets are so short term these days that no-one plans for the long term future of the company except in Japan.
HP kit isn't all that bad. Some of their consumer inkjets are a bit iffy, but their old Laserjets and scanners were phenomenal workhorses. I have only fallen out with them a bit over lack of XP/Win7 drivers. I would still consider their products in the right context.
Canon or Epson have the edge for inkjet and you have to carefully price in the costs of consumables or you can still be very easily stuffed.
Not everything HP make is junk, and Agilent still makes some fine gear.
You will quickly run out of suppliers if you do this to excess...
Only if the economy is in recession, and then only in terms of generating extra economic activity.
GDP has never been an entirely satisfactory metric. You have a better one?
Precisely 1.89? You appear to be summing geometric series run on to infinity, having chosen to assume that 53% of the cash handed over in each transaction become available for the next one.
It demonstrates a rather precise idea of the UK business environment, and is curiously similar to US estimates.
It's certainly generates a lot more action in the economy, but even the kind of Keynesian conjured up by James Arthur's right-wing imagaination would baulk at claiming that a house was worth twice as much after it had burnt down. James Arthur is fond of these verbal sleighs of hand, but they do betray his enthusiasm for peddling irrational, emotionally-loaded, propaganda.
An otiose proposition, and perfectly irrelevant to the discussion, since Keynesian pump-priming isn't spending your way out of debt, but spending your way out of a recession (by going into debt).
The tax income from an economy that is expanding at the nominal 4% per year is obviously larger than that from a stable or contracting economy, so you are better placed to pay of the debt once you have got the economy out of depression or recession, but this is does involve thinking about long term consequences, a task for which right-wingers don't seem to be well-equipped.
Another otiose and irrelevant proposition.
This is - of course - true but since every governement who has ever collected taxes has been doing this, for some thousands of years now, it seems a bit silly to go to trouble of wasting bandwidth reminding us of this well-known fact.
He's certainly not wasted his time advancing that particular proposition. He does argue that borrowing money from people who aren't spending it and giving it to people who will spend it boosts the economy, but this has been an economic orthodoxy since Keynes first advanced the idea in the aftermath of the Great Recession. It not an idea that James Arthur and his fellow believers in flat earth economics are prepared to endorse, but 5% of the population needs psychiatric care at some time in their lives and it is a bit sad that James Arthur hasn't benefited from that kind of attention.
The treatment is working - US GNP is rising, if not as fast as it has done, and unemployment is down to 9.1%. Paul Krugman's proposition is that the treatment wasn't as vigorous and as well targetted as it needed to be. Hoover's treatment of a similar situation after 1929 ended up with the GNP down by 25% and unemployment at 25%, and the Keynesian stimulus has done better than that.
This ignores the situation that made the stimulus payment necessary. James Arthur's beloved bankers engineered and burst the house price bubble by making ninja loans. When the bubble burst, it took a great deal of liquidity out of the economy. Most of the $1 trillion in stimulus was used up in replacing that liquidity.
Hoover's "stimulus package" allowed unemployment to rise to 25% after the 1929 crash.
Applied to the current US figures of about 140,000,000 in work, a rise in unemployment from the 7.5% before the GC to 25% now would have put
24.5 million people out of work, while today's actual unemployment rate of 9.1% represents just 2.24 million lost jobs. As Paul Krugman says, the stimulus wasn't as big as it should have been, but it was a great deal better than the nothing that James Arthur has been fervently campaigning for.
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