I think you misread what the GP was trying to say. GP was saying that IF Americans had a decent job, time with family, and reasonable taxes and gas prices, then they would be happy. I'm pretty sure that the GP was not trying to say that Americans necessarily had all of that at the time.

The point is that most Americans want a few simple things, but instead the "freakshow on TV" ends up spinning the debate into a much more extreme showdown between viewpoints that don't really match what the "silent majority" actually feel.

You might want to see a doctor and get that checked out...

It's an estimate, first off, and it's only tracking users from the US.

Not only that, but it is theorized that in the Ethiopian Airlines crash in the Indian Ocean, that people inflating the life jackets while still in the cabin may have caused more people to drown because as the plane filled with water they were stuck to the ceiling of the cabin, unable to get out. Source

+1 Funny, just not sure if it was intentional or not...

You're definitely right - my error was that I was not looking at the difference between wholesale price and retail price (which is about 20%), but rather at the profit the retailer makes after factoring all the costs the retailer has to sell the game. As that same Forbes article you linked indicates, a retailer may only make about $1 in profit after considering those costs (compared to the $12 in markup on that $60 game).

I think the interesting comparison is then comparing the costs of a retailer versus that of the direct downloads that Blizzard uses. If retailers spend about 15% of retail price on their costs (or about $11 on a $60 game), you have to assume that the costs of a direct download are closer to 1% than 15%.

Given that Starcraft 2 retailed for $60, which is $10-20 more than the average AAA PC game, I think it's quite clear that they are going with #1.

I think you are overestimating the retail markups on games almost by an order of magnitude. Retailers don't make a lot of money on brand new games (which is why Gamestop as a company is doing well -- they have a huge head start on the used game market). I wouldn't be surprised if the markup is around 10% at most. However, the markup on used games is often 100-200% or more. Gamestop, for example, will buy a relatively new game from you for $10-20 and then sell the game right back at about $5 less than retail (e.g. $45 or $55). It's why many of the other big box stores are looking to get into this space (I believe that Best Buy is piloting such a program now).

Whether or not that is true, I think classifying a pension that covers people who happen to be government workers as "government" is a bit of a stretch. Pensions should have a fiduciary responsibility to the people who hold the pension, so any activity such as the lawsuit in the story should be driven by that responsibility, and should not be abused as a way for the government to interfere in private corporations. I haven't gone deep into the details of this particular case, but it seems like a legitimate gripe that has some similarities with the government initiatives by coincidence rather than indicating some subversive attempt by the government to control private interests.

The links I provided include in their figures these "other ways" that CEO's are compensated. While you could argue about the dollar amount of these forms of compensation, the companies that compile these sorts of data are fairly accurate in the present-day value of these alternative forms of compensation. Obviously, while his awards and salary may only have been $32k this year, I'm sure he is continuing to make money on compensation from prior years, whether it is through vesting or market appreciation of his options/grants/etc. Heck, even if he put $10 million of his compensation from last year into a savings account that paid 1% he'd still be making $100,000 a year off of it.

You're off by an order of magnitude...1/100 of $40 million is $400,000. Even someone making $5/hour working full time for 40 years will make $400,000.

Like the CEO of Citigroup, who earned $128,751 last year (source)? Or maybe you would prefer the outgoing CEO of Bank of America last year, who made $32,171 (source). Of course, the outgoing CEO of BofA also got a nice package worth tens of millions of dollars on his way out, so that's probably a bad example.

The bottom line is that neither company has done very well, and the amount of money a CEO is paid doesn't seem to be inversely related to the quality of the CEO as you seem to claim...

According to CNN, he could make $53 million in severance pay.

$9?!? Was that the 10AM showing on a Tuesday morning where they let you bring babies with you?

The "massive hole" is that the plantiff has not provided an original (or even well-reproduced) copy of the contract. What Zuckerberg is claiming is that the agreement that he and Ceglia had was only for StreetFax, and never had anything to do with facebook. The corollary to that is that the references to "the face book" on the contract that Ceglia provided is a fake and were added after the fact.

According to Zuckerberg:
1) Ceglia responded to Zuckerberg's ad on craigslist for a programmer in a work-for-hire contract.
2) The two signed a contract for StreetFax, Zuckerberg did the work, Ceglia paid him, and that was that, ending around late summer of 2003.
3) Zuckerberg came up (or stole from ConnectU, depending on who you ask) the idea for facebook in Fall 2003 and finished the implementation with thefacebook.com in Feb 2004.
4) 7 years later, Ceglia produces a modified version of their original contract that now includes references to "The Face Book" that were not there originally.

One of them is obviously not telling the truth. Whether Zuckerberg's claims and the fact that Ceglia has not provided the original for facebook's inspection put a "massive hole" in Ceglia's case is of course open for discussion.

Exactly. They haven't officially made that claim at this point, but I definitely believe that they don't think it's real. They are keeping all of their options open -- if they can get the suit thrown out without going into the authenticity of the contract (e.g. statute of limitations or an unenforceable contract), then that's probably the best bet for them, as proving that the contract is not authentic may be considerably tougher.