I think you're missing that those 1.4M people are needed, but they're no longer affordable at $15/hr. In theory.

What the GP is missing is that increasing the buying power of people in the area can boost local businesses.

Take the mom 'n' pop business down the road:
- 100 consumers in the local area that will visit the store.
- Sell widget for $5.
- Pay 5 employees $290/wk (probably reasonable coverage for a store)
- Consumers want the widget every other day, but have to save (for example) 1 week of pay to buy that widget and still cover other expenses.
- Business makes $5000 per week. Business spends $1450 in payroll.
- $3550 for the business after payroll and before cost.

- 100 consumers in the local area that will visit the store daily.
- Sell widget for $5.
- Pay 5 employees $600/wk (that's $15/hr, 40hr/wk)
- Consumers want the widget every other day, and can buy the widget every other day without worrying if they'll have to eat ramen noodles for the next week.
- Business makes $17500 per week. Business spends $3000 in payroll.
- $14500 for the business after payroll and before cost.
- Businesses makes more money, even though they're paying their workers more???
- Businesses can spend more with suppliers/distributors, passing that money further up the chain.

The whole thing is oversimplified, and assumes everyone in the area is paying that $15/hr of course. And keep in mind that $15/hr means $310 extra in the pocket per week - that's enough for each one of those 100 consumers to buy 62 widgets per week if they really wanted to, and they can maintain their other expenses (assuming they were able to in the first place.).

I've been sitting here thinking, and I don't see where - if anywhere - the whole thing breaks down either. Until someone gets greedy and says "I want me a bigger cut of this" and doubles their prices - which leaves everyone except for whoever doubled the prices in the same place they were in the first place.

Which is of course where it'll break down, because publicly traded companies are assholes that do everything in their power to make more money.

Absolutely. None of this "taking cover" bullshit - just keep firing until you or the literal thousands of enemies are gone, or run away to wherever that last health pack you saw was.

I'll suggest Serious Sam 2 though - 1 wasn't -bad-, I just didn't like the level design in a lot of places. YMMV, etc.

Oh, I'm way the hell removed from retail now. They started offering these services back in... 2008, I think? And I was out of there by 2009. Now I've got a small userbase that I keep nicely in line. Now, if only I could get some budget...

Me personally? No. Others though, especially when they're less-computer-literate business travelers (or tourists) and need a quick turnaround? I'm not saying it's smart, but it's understandable why they'd do it.

If they'd actually hired people on the ground who knew what they were doing (or let existing employees who knew what they were doing actually DO something,) it might have actually been a worthwhile service. As it was when I worked there though, if anything needed to be done, you connected it up to a remote session to India and let who-the-hell-knows-who-they-are do whatever work was "required." Having watched them do their thing, it's something that even 7 years ago I could have done in half the time it took them.

I sold the services when necessary, if only because I needed some minor piddly things like food and housing, but GTFO'd as soon as I could.

More like "I used to work at one of the stores shown in the video."

... yeah. Not surprised at all. The encouragement to flat-out lie to meet unrealistic sales goals (for the extended warranties and services) is about 90% of the reason I quit back when they started offering these services.

... that the dispute is about purrsonality rights?

This is truly news for nerds. Good job, editors.

Tumblr would -love- this idea.

Bonus points: It's supported pretty much all the addons I typically used with FF (Noscript is the big one,) and there are a few replacements for the ones it doesn't (AdBlock Plus -> AdBlock Latitude.)

I don't remember where I spotted it first, but PaleMoon is a FF fork that's dumped a lot of the stupid design decisions and supports 64-bit. I've been quite happy with it since I discovered it, and it can't be worse than the newest FF versions.

http://www.palemoon.org/

Oh, if only I had mod points.

In fact, I started smoking because of the military. I did a lot of bitching of my own about my mother's smoking when I was a kid, then turned around and started doing it once I was an "adult." Anything to take the edge off that stress.

I'm a bit late on this, but something he should keep in mind is that the Lucky Starr books are a bit dated in their science. I'm not sure if you're going for "fun read" or "get the kid into genuine science," but there are parts of some of them that are flat-out wrong.

"Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus" is the most obviously incorrect one, but I seem to recall that the original one ("Lucky Starr - Space Ranger") got some things wrong as well. Just something to keep in mind - a lot of Asimov's stuff has aged extremely well, but that particular series didn't.

Also, the pen name was Paul French - but the volume I have also has Asimov's name on it.