If your sale cost is less than (fixed cost)/(#of units sold)+marginal cost, you're making a loss. Fixed costs are pretty damn relevant for the price the product is sold at; look at the drug companies.

You're not paying for the price of production alone. You're paying for:

-the designers that made them look like something other than misshapen blobs
-the designers and developers who make rules that allow you to play a balanced game with them
-the writers who have lovingly crafted a vast, detailed, and epic galaxy of war, darkness, and SPACE MARINES
-lawyers to defend IP, since pirated codices and miniatures actually reduces Game Workshop's ability and willingness to create more army lists/figure lines
-marketers to make little kids want to play as SPACE MARINES, so people actually have others to play with
-support staff, so when developers like THQ want to make a WH40k game, we get amazing games like Dawn of War instead of terrible spinoffs

and last but not least:
-the Inquisition, who nobody in WH40k sees coming, because they're everywhere!

More seriously, I know we all like to rip on price tags that put a product out of our budget range, but can we please remember that if we don't want to buy a product because of price, we can choose not to?

Almost everything we see on shelves uses the product price to cross subsidize administrative, legal, and marketing costs. Seeing the price tag and holding it up to the cost of production is silly.

There seems to be a very wide range in the abilities of the winner and runner up bots that might not be noticed by someone unfamiliar with Starcraft. In order of appearance:

1) In the flying units versus flying units match, mutalisks (guys with wings) should have focused the scourges (little 'c' shaped guys) because scourges have about 1/5th the health of a mutalisk, but can suicide to take out 5/6ths of a mutalisk's health. Red ai focused scourges, the other ai didn't, with disastrous results for the other ai.

2) In the match with infantry, the players had medics, which heal other units but can't attack, and marines/ghosts, which can do damage but can't heal each other. One ai moved medics with ghosts such that the medics could actually heal. The other ai just left the medics a mile away from the combat, and got slaughtered. Furthermore, the AIs didn't bother with formations, which meant that half their units spent the entire fight trying to get into range. A precombat formation lets almost all the combat units start firing as soon as the fight begins.

3) The red zealots retreated in the face of numerically superior opponents, while the teal zealots just attack moved no matter how many they had. Teal zealots didn't focus fire, which meant that they lose units sooner, and thus had less damage output compared to red. In addition, red failed to kill the pylons (600hp) powering the buildings (a lot more than 600hp). Neither player built their bases to maximize the number of pylons powering their vital gateways; each pylon usually powered only one building.

4) In the fight with dragoons (orange spider things) versus tanks, the protoss (orange) could have frozen half the enemy tanks with a single stasis spell by sneaking the arbiter (flying spider thing) to the back of the tank formation. Furthermore, the protoss could have focused the science vessel (floating teal circle) that was preventing them from being invisible. It would have been a slaughter if the vessel had been focused, as teal would have had no real way to hit the orange units.

5) In the match between Overmind and Krasi0, the article talks about mutalisk clumping preventing some of the mutalisks from attacking. However, the point of the stack is that when one guy is in range, everyone else is. Also, the attack animation is so fast that for all practical purposes, the flyers can shoot while moving. They use their mobility to get out of range of infantry units, then zoom in to pick off outliers when their attack cooldown is finisihed. In actual competition, the terran player would usually rely on a strategic placement of static defenses and a highly mobile cluster. However, the terran (defending force) built tanks, vultures, and goliaths (mech guys that shot missiles) with the flaw that tanks and vultures can't shoot air, and are thus almost useless versus the mutalisks. The mutalisks spent the second half of the clip shooting tanks rather than focusing down the goliaths volleying missiles into them. The terran AI prioritized repairing tanks as much as goliaths, and didn't place tanks next to goliaths to soak up bounce damage from a mutalisk.

In general, the AI had problem with understanding the priority in a fight. That is to say, they often had no sense of what units are critical to a position or what units pose the most threat. They didn't arrange their units to maximize their effectiveness, and often failed to alter their behavior based on the other party. It's a fun contest, but I'm not sure the AIs could beat a moderately skilled player who understands tactics AND strategy.

According to TFA US citizens spend 407 million hours a MONTH on online games, not 407 million hours a year. Slight difference.

Gaming is 10% of the time spend online now, and it's pretty obvious that the average American spends more than 4 hours a year online.

Sociologists will wonder in vain why final exam grades in 2010 were so abnormally abysmal.

From the article:

"It’s too early to determine conclusively why U.S. creativity scores are declining. One likely culprit is the number of hours kids now spend in front of the TV and playing videogames rather than engaging in creative activities. Another is the lack of creativity development in our schools. In effect, it’s left to the luck of the draw who becomes creative: there’s no concerted effort to nurture the creativity of all children."

One of the test questions was “How could you improve this toy to make it better and more fun to play with?”

If you went to the average TV viewer and asked them what could make their T.V. shows better, I sincerely doubt that they could give a succinct and "creative" set of ideas that would improve various shows. If you asked a video gamer for say an MMO like WoW or even a browser game like Farmville what suggestions they have to improve the games, you would probably have to gag them to get them to shut up. For video game fans, new ideas (some of them quite creative workarounds) are a dime a dozen, and the challenge is filtering them to find the best ideas for how to gear/play a character or how to run a farm.

Video games are almost perpetually linked with television by virtue of being activities in which one sits down in front of a glowing screen, but video games tend to be highly interactive with constant feedback/user response while television is nearly 100% passive. (American Idol voting doesn't count) I would agree that the increase of mindshare and time devoted to passive pursuits could decrease creativity, but I really wish that the media would, as a group, get a better idea of how different video games and television shows are. The difference between games and t.v. is the difference between using a kitchen knife to chop vegetables and using a kitchen knife to stab people, yet again, video games are taking more blame for making our kids less creative than the school systems' standardized tests and performance obsessed culture.

Americans aren't spoiled compared to most other Westerners? If you actually read the article, he said "The American public ... just like your teenage kids, aren't acting in a way that they should act" with respect to climate change. He seems correct, and I would say that it's a welcome change from PR spinning and political doublespeak.

... of the 21st century.

The foundation of economics is the same as the foundation of statistics. No economist can accurately predict how an individual game can turn out, just like no economist can accurately predict how an individual actor will choose. However, the law of large numbers means that given a sufficiently large population, mass scale behavior can be predicted. A simple example of this in action is that if I flip a coin and call it heads or tails, I'll be wrong roughly 50% of the time. However, if I say that 50% give or take 5% of a thousand coin flips will end up heads or tails, I'd probably be right.

Economics does not rely on perfect knowledge and perfect actors. It relies on modeling the real world as best as possible, and you know what? Models usually include abstract representations, and abstract representations include idealized actions.

With regard to the story, it's laughable to think that financial market predictions are anything like sports predictions. These teams are made up of players who don't play together during regular seasons; they're generally on different teams in Europe. How is it news that analyzing various productivity and growth forecasting statistics will fail to predict who wins a 1-0 soccer game?

There are very few markets where the products are near identical. Consumers are heavily influenced by brand name, societal perception of item status, and so forth.

The type of jobs introduced by manufacturing in this day and age don't pay very well. Even if a megacorp moved all of their production into the US, they might add 20,000 jobs. In a nation with 130+million employees, the increase in domestic demand is negligible. An increase in cost per product of 5%, however, is noticeable by almost every consumer.

To h4rr4r who posted below this comment who says that if "you have a cost and pass it on, your prices go up," that's sort of the definition of passing a cost on. Everyone and anyone can raise prices, it just wouldn't make economical sense to do so when they're at an optimal level. The tax alters the economics, which alters the optimal point, which alters the resulting steady state price. Every one of their competitors likely use offshored labor if those competitors are american, and thus they would also be sharing in the higher cost. According to game theory, they'll see that all their costs will rise, and they'll be comfortable letting their prices rise.

The trouble with these type of taxes is that the corporations simply pass it onto the customers. Unless a huge tax is placed on the products, it will still be cheaper overall to offshore labor and charge consumers more. There are three scenarios:

1) Low tax, say taxing the corporations for 20% of the difference between US cost of labor and offshored cost of labor. Consumers will pay more in the US, but get no new jobs, and are worse off. The government earns taxes and is better off. The corporations sell slightly fewer products due to slightly higher cost, and are slightly worse off.

2) Medium tax rate, say taxing the corporations for 80% of the difference between US cost of labor and offshored cost of labor. Consumers will pay more in the US, but get no new jobs, and are worse off. The government earns lots of taxes and is better off. The corporations sell fewer products due to higher cost, and are noticeably worse off.

3) High tax rate, say taxing the corporations for 120% of the difference between US cost of labor and offshored cost of labor. Consumers will pay more in the US, but get some new jobs, and are worse off unless they would be unemployed otherwise. The government earns very little in taxes and is barely better off. The corporations sell fewer products due to higher cost, and are much worse off.

Of course, the corporations lose less money if the goods in question are price inelastic (demand doesn't drop that much if price increases) and there's a social benefit from more employment and technical expertise, but the government gets the most money in case 2, where everyone except for the government is made worse off by the taxes. In real life, there's a huge time in cost and effort needed to move manufacturing back to the US, what with hiring new managers, building or reopening factories, establishing entirely new supply lines, canceling contracts, etc. Because of this, companies are unlikely to move manufacturing back to the US even if the tax makes hiring offshore workers the same as hiring American workers; the slight gain in quality and public respect is canceled out by the upfront cost of moving.

I for one sincerely doubt that the US government will tax corporations with a high enough rate to make most of them move back to the US, as the tax income is the lowest in that situation. Sadly, even if this knee jerk reaction goes through, social benefit to consumers and citizens will likely take a back seat to corporate interests and government revenue collection.

The probe obviously got rick-rolled during the approach vector.

The speed of light is about 300,000,000 m/s, or 300,000 km/s. 17km/s is such a minuscule fraction of that speed that relativity doesn't come into play.