2011-08-18, 15:05 | Link #15901 | |||||||
I disagree with you all.
Join Date: Dec 2005
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- who will make the efforts? - who will reap the benefits? - who will make the various judgment calls? (Like, maybe you don't need healthcare as much as astronauts need a new design for their toothbrushes...) Quote:
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But it is, still, a huge investment. Which may not pan out for a while. Or for the guys who go first and take all the risks, make all the effort. Quote:
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2011-08-18, 15:24 | Link #15902 |
Obey the Darkly Cute ...
Author
Join Date: Dec 2005
Location: On the whole, I'd rather be in Kyoto ...
Age: 66
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And.... the market death spirals some more....5% value lost worldwide today at the moment. Little guys get crushed since Large institutions can turn on a dime.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-14574125
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2011-08-18, 17:15 | Link #15903 | ||||
Le fou, c'est moi
Join Date: Dec 2007
Location: Las Vegas, NV, USA
Age: 34
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The problem with the United States is that it is ideologically disinclined to establish, or maintain, proper social safety nets, or to reduce income disparity. And it's still bleeding jobs. Ergo, people are increasingly pressured and unhappy. Much of the job growth of recent years are of the McJob variety and they are by nature paycheck-to-paycheck level of wages, if even that. Quote:
Not that I think a centralized planned economy is a good idea (we saw how that panned out), but surely you see that governments -- being, one would hope, public entities with the purpose of maintaining and improving society -- can if properly directed cushion much of the pain as society adjusts to new realities? Economists like to make much of the elegance of the law of supply and demand but they don't like to talk about what happens to people as the market adjusts. Quote:
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2011-08-18, 18:01 | Link #15904 | |
Knight Errant
Join Date: Dec 2007
Location: Dublin, Ireland
Age: 35
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Let's talk about something we're extremely familiar with: Anime. I recently went trawling for statistics in the anime ratings thread, and the estimate for the Anime viewing "market" was somewhere in the region of 2-8 million people in Japan, and substantially less then that actually regularly buying DVDs (top sales are 50,000, the profit point is around 5,000). That means that a group of consumers that likely don't number over 100,000 people are capable of supporting most of the Anime industry we know and love, and that's a pretty big industry. Now that 100,000 people isn't likely completely correct, but certainly 100,000 people who were completely devoted to Anime and spent all their spare cash on (overpriced) anime DVDs are capable of supporting an entire industry. So an entire industry, on the scale of Anime, could be theoretically supported by every 100,000 people. Certainly I bet you could scrounge up 100,000 hardcore nerds in the US who would buy the American Anime equivalent, if it exists (though there is stuff like Comic books). That means that there is immense growth potential in the production of cheap budgeted (and Anime is produced fairly cheaply) Niche products. The same logic can be applied to any number of things. So long as people continue to the trend of diversifying their tastes away from One size fits all overbudgeted hollywoodesque blockbusters their is room for growth in entertainment. People just need to have the imagination to find their niche, and pander to it shamelessly! Look at Visual novels... Not only that, but the market of actual physical entertainment (Eg the theater, musicals) isn't going to go away either. That is another growth area. To close, Entertainment can not really be industrialised, people will always want more variety and newer current stuff. And to answer the question, I could probably support 10(or more...) paradox interactives. Paradox only releases a game at 50$ a year, and I have a hell of a lot more time then that. |
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2011-08-18, 20:35 | Link #15905 | |
NYAAAAHAAANNNNN~
Join Date: Nov 2007
Age: 35
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2011-08-18, 22:21 | Link #15906 |
books-eater youkai
Join Date: Dec 2007
Location: Betweem wisdom and insanity
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In nod to IBM, HP overhaul minimizes consumers
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...08-18-22-58-55
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2011-08-19, 04:16 | Link #15908 | |
Le fou, c'est moi
Join Date: Dec 2007
Location: Las Vegas, NV, USA
Age: 34
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The hierarchy of needs, in other words. People need disposable income to start being patrons of niche entertainment. The needs satisfied by the products of agriculture and manufacture takes priority for most who live relatively close to minimum wage. The other point I had vaguely tried to note is that while the internet allows for the development of a niche beyond geographical barriers, it also allows for even more mass distribution and penetration. Everybody with an internet connection and not behind a Great Firewall somewhere can access the same variety of entertainment on a scale previously thought impossible. So once again, a single Paradox with a few dozen employees (if that) can service a species' worth of armchair Bonapartes with ease. A single anime industry based in Japan, surviving on the largesse of a relatively small and devoted fanbase, can delight a greater community with relatively little material returns to show for it. Even if one accepts that some countries like the United States and France (another world center of comics) can develop native animation industries of comparable scale, that's still a limited amount of employment provided and they *will* cut into the business of not only their direct Japanese competitors but also other forms of entertainment in their native countries and beyond...reducing employment in those industries. And if one industry proves far superior in appeal to another, whether by accident of talent or by the zeitgeist of the age, with the accessibility of the Internet do you think a sufficiently large audience could be made loyal and content enough with inferiority and pay for it? Therefore the assertion that the creative industries can provide mass employment on a scale needed to offset the dramatic decline of manufacturing jobs (and the hypothesis that the gradual loss of menial service jobs to technology will accelerate) -- our dispute in the first place -- is rendered even more difficult to accept. |
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2011-08-19, 04:31 | Link #15909 | |
NYAAAAHAAANNNNN~
Join Date: Nov 2007
Age: 35
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Meanwhile the conker-brained Congress is tripping over their shit, and with the 2012 elections are looming, the "big people" might pump more money into the former's hands to put down anti-trust law so they could run US like how Gazprom runs Russia today.
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2011-08-19, 07:08 | Link #15910 |
Shougi Génération
Graphic Designer
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Oh Jon Stewart, you are my last remaining news source. Mostly because you depict moronic behaviours in such a way that I don't necessarily want to stab myself repeatedly the way I do when watching the mainstream media.
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2011-08-19, 09:35 | Link #15911 |
books-eater youkai
Join Date: Dec 2007
Location: Betweem wisdom and insanity
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Evacuation of foreigners planned from Tripoli
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/...77A2Y920110819 Thoses ''foreigners'' should had enough brain to evacuate months ago.
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2011-08-19, 09:57 | Link #15912 | |
Knight Errant
Join Date: Dec 2007
Location: Dublin, Ireland
Age: 35
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The main thing if we want to see a more diverse economy is that we move away from buying from "big" corporations and buy from smaller more independent ones, that means less money gets wasted on people with the big salaries, the A list stars as it were. I think things are trending that way. But you have to understand that most goods that are bought and sold are luxuries anyway, and the premium a company gets for mass manufacturing something gradually becomes less and less, until it's basically nearly non-existant (if there's sufficient competition). The end consequence is that many more people own goods now that in previous times would have been considered luxuries. Even the poor have lifestyles that would have been considered kingly in olden times. People should have some perspective... (not counting unemployed here of course) |
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2011-08-19, 11:17 | Link #15913 |
廉頗
Join Date: Feb 2004
Location: Massachusetts
Age: 34
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Are we talking about the Western world, exclusively (Westernish Eastern countries like Japan included)? I'm just jumping in now and don't have the time to read everything, but if you're suggesting poor people worldwide are better off than at other junctions in history, I'd say you're way off. Perhaps the poor in our countries, who have gotten an indirect benefit from imperialist history, are better off.
But I could definitely make the argument in those less fortunate societies that the Europeans once exploited, the poor are worse off than at other points in history. And with population booming in said parts of the world, the squeeze for necessary resources becomes tighter and tighter. |
2011-08-19, 11:42 | Link #15914 | |
Knight Errant
Join Date: Dec 2007
Location: Dublin, Ireland
Age: 35
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But I think people are better off now then ever before because: * Outside of places like Somalia, people have access to suficient food, including relatively luxurious foods like Meat (previously only eaten outside special occasions by only the very wealthy). * We all have shelter (though this hasn't changed much, if anything our houses are smaller...) * We all have access to some form of education * We all have access to clean water * We all have the security of some form of police force * We all, usually, have some role in appointing our own government * We all have access to cheap miraculous technological items including: 1. Mobile Phones 2. Computers 3. Internet 4. Refrigerators 5. Modern Medecine (this is REALLY big, no more smallpox!) 6. And more Now of course the poor in non-western countries don't have it quite as good, not all the poor in non-western countries will have all of those, but they'll have most of them. Don't underestimate the internet there, it single handedly provides near universal access to information that was previously only the preserve of the very wealthy, and computers/mobile phones are cheap enough now that most poorer communities can now gain access. You'd be amazed at how mobile phones in particular have proliferated. A more difficult question is whether the poor are better off now then in 1960, in the western world probably not, but in the non-western world they are, particularly in South America, China and south east asia. |
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2011-08-19, 12:09 | Link #15915 | |
Asuki-tan Kairin ↓
Join Date: Feb 2004
Location: Fürth (GER)
Age: 43
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The relative wealth is what is more important for the psyche than the absolute wealth.. too much difference is equally harmful as too much equality - both extremes will decrease the personal freedom of the majority (to disregard this, results in an equaly dire situation that made the eastern socialist countries fail).
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2011-08-19, 12:40 | Link #15916 |
Senior Member
Join Date: Jan 2008
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Reindeer herder finds remains of baby mammoth in Russia's Arctic
"A reindeer herder in Russia's Arctic has stumbled on the prehistoric remains of a
baby woolly mammoth poking out of the permafrost, local officials said Friday. The herder said the carcass was as perfectly preserved as the 40,000-year-old mammoth calf Lyuba discovered in the same remote region four years ago, authorities said, adding that an expedition had set off hoping to confirm the "sensational" find. "If it is true what is said about how it is preserved, this will be another sensation of global significance," expedition leader Natalia Fyodorova said in a statement on the Arctic Yamalo-Nenetsk region's official website." See: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44200347...ience-science/ |
2011-08-19, 13:26 | Link #15918 | |
Senior Member
Join Date: Mar 2007
Location: Australia
Age: 41
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Israel and Gaza trade bombs and rockets
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2011-08-19, 13:41 | Link #15919 | |
Kurumada's lost child
Join Date: Nov 2003
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Now if you ask from a western perspective in which we are all concerned about individualism and showing off our uniqueness, such as our new custom built car, our designer clothes, our medals and other egocentric stuff like that, then yes, many people will hate having no material possessions that set apart from other individuals. Our society is trained by the market system to feel like each individual is "unique" in this way they can boost their sales. This tactic has a huge impact in society because it is not of the main reasons why we tend to be so materialistic and superficial. This is aberrant behavior because it has a negative effect in our collective well being. We are taught that we are separated from nature and from our fellow humans, and when one's ego gets big there is very little standing in the way to tyranny. Communism does not escape this paradigm either because while the vast majority of the people live with very limited freedoms the top lives in luxury. |
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2011-08-19, 13:49 | Link #15920 | |
Not Enough Sleep
Join Date: Nov 2003
Location: R'lyeh
Age: 48
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current affairs, discussion, international |
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