foobarbazoo

If you think that btilly is not describing and then praising wealth destruction in that quote about Microsoft's Xbox business, please downvote this comment. Thanks.

HOW TO DESTROY WEALTH:

When I spend $100 on materials and labor, and I can -- at best -- sell the result to you for $80, $20 of wealth is destroyed. Why? Because the original $100 came from the creation of wealth equal to that, and I transformed that $100 into something that is now only worth $80. Literally, wealth was destroyed.

If you'd like a more concrete analogy, what Microsoft did is a lot like taking a a 1 carat diamond and smashing it into diamond dust. Only the arrangement of matter has changed, but in terms of wealth, the diamond dust is worth far less than the sparkling 1 carat diamond.

It's the same with the $100. As a $100 bill, it is worth exactly $100. Microsoft took that $100 and spend it on labor and materials. The matter in the world stayed the same. But the new arrangement of matter (an Xbox) was only worth $80 to the world. Microsoft destroyed $20 in wealth to the world.

This, in a nutshell, is what Microsoft did with the Xbox. Sony was doing something the world wanted with the Playstation. They were literally spending $100 and getting $120 in value out of it. That's what wealth creation looks like.

Microsoft did the opposite. Even worse, they did so in order to make it impossible for Sony to create wealth, too. In my book, reducing the wealth of the world for something so stupid, so small, as to "eliminate competition" is about the worst sin a business can do.

The literally billions of dollars of wealth destroyed at both Sony and Microsoft by the behavior of Microsoft has hurt the world in enumerable ways. For all we know, had the money been returned to shareholders, we may have made more progress on green energy. Or food production. Or water purification. Or cancer research. Or any of the other things we could have done instead of destroying wealth.

That is why the OP is so off base. And why the rest of you should upvote my comment like crazy. Wealth destruction is bad, full stop.

You're not helping him/her by upvoting their post, though if you are a cheater, it definitely pays to do so -- you want as many people as possible to be pissed off in the face of "rampant" cheating. Pissed off people do poorly in life, as a general rule.

In fact, given a choice between cheating and being pissed off, most people would be better off cheating.

Didn't your parents ever tell you that life is not fair?

JavaScript in not Ruby. Good code in Ruby != good code in JavaScript. The author would be far better off contributing to existing JavaScript frameworks than trying to make JavaScript work like Ruby.

I doubt everyone can do this, though.

There is no need to use the word "design" to refer to the complexity of the human body. "Design" implies a creator; "structure" simply describes those aspects of the human body (or life in general) that makes it "work" and does not imply a creator.

So given that, if life were on another project, well, we'd expect them to be trucking around the galaxy too by now. And they're not.

That leads to the reasonable conclusion that there are not aliens at the same level as us in this galaxy.

Note: For aliens to be at the same level as us and not trucking around, they would need to be hopelessly close to use in evolution. Given how much has happened in just the last 10K years, that seems extremely improbable.

Hmm, this was supposed to be a reply to another comment...

So this idea is actually not that far out for the US, at least.

I should also point out that the FairTax is primarily supported by conservatives at this point, though from my point of view, liberals should be even more supportive.

But you can get into a smaller, regional airport securely by flying in from an even smaller airport. So you need to secure those too.

We have a lot of airports in the US that need to be secured.

The better response is to tell Americans that airplanes are a terrorist target, just like busses (which are bombed all the time in Israel, thanks to their stellar airport security making airlines a harder target), and to remain vigilant.

That is all. Taking off our shoes, submitting to naked photographs and (just for fun) radiation is beyond laughable. It seems people would rather be demeaned than live in (an irrational) fear. Sad.

Even sadder: more Americans will die by choosing to drive rather than fly. Somehow, I doubt Big Sis sheds a tear.

There's a lesson here kids: when you can't prove something, "diagonilization" is the proof-tool of choice. Sure, if you include it, you won't have proven anything either, or useful, or correct, but you might just get a PhD.

(For those who are curious: diagonilization is a proof that takes the form: "Imagine you did this impossible thing. With the result of doing that impossible thing, now try and do this other, reasonable thing. You can't! So whatever properties I can derive from not being able to do this other, reasonable thing are true. (Please ignore that the first step is impossible, and focus on my brilliance in discussing the second, reasonable step.)"

That is, in a nutshell, the diagonilization "proof". The rest of the details are just there to make it look like it's actually logic or math. Best not to look too closely.

Also, you'll be shocked, SHOCKED to learn that not a single result in the real world relies on the diagonilization proof (though a lot of real-world PhDs would no doubt be affected by it's loss). sigh Mathematicians are idiots when they try and do logic. Stick with numbers, boys.