chuckkir

Old smooth-bore dueling pistols aren't terribly accurate, and a kill shot was unlikely. However, wounds and infection were more likely to kill you than they would be today. More accurate pistols may be one of the reasons the duel died out.

Actually, I think it is. It sounds like they're clawing back the investment profit, but it is likely those profits were invested in something else which also earned a profit. That additional profit is yours to keep as far as I can tell.

Actually, according to the original plan, the House of Representatives should have grown so that each member represents a roughly equal number of constituents (excepting very small population states which still get one). At some point it was capped at 435 (I presume for space reasons) and the disparity of representation has increased since. So it seems that more power has been transferred to rural states than the founders had originally envisioned.

In general a professor is an entrepreneur. They are running a small business where they sell their product ("knowledge") to customers (business and industry) by means of sales and marketing (conferences and papers). Grad students are employees of this business, and of course the prof's incentive is to keep the good ones and fire (graduate) the bad ones, thus the reward for the student working hard is more hard work.

The flip side of this is that they charge $50 more than Apple for an iPhone. Why make all your customers demand a price match for something so widely known? It seems like it would irk most people in the hopes of extracting a few bucks from a handful of folks.

There are people storing up closets full of the old full-copper pennies waiting for the day that the penny is discontinued and they can get scrap value that is higher than the face value. For now they aren't allowed to deface money so they're just storing them. I don't even know if it's worth the time spent sorting, but everyone needs a hobby.

It's so easy to become jaded when so many things are "too good to be true" and in fact aren't true. Theranos, Madoff, etc.

The phrase is still valid, but it is unclear that it applies to the current company. Companies do not have minds and are not people. They do have inertia, but if you change enough of the people then it's fundamentally a different company. MS is certainly different than it was 20 or 10 years ago.

While I think the parent was referring to how much a company would need to spend to buy off enough reps for their legislation, it is a valid point that increasing the current $100M or so we currently spend on these guys by 2 orders of magnitude would eat a lot of the national budget. Then again, it would also lower unemployment.

So it's sort of like the vinyl record thing then? I suspect the difference in photographs that you see is more in the difference between using an enlarger and photo paper vs. a color printer, and in this case I assume he's printing from the processed digital image. Assuming I'm right then he's not getting that advantage but I can see how someone with an enlarger could do things differently.

As for the technique, I agree that it was more exacting back in the film days. I also had much less money then. The net result was that I didn't take a lot of photos I now wished that I had. Although these days that's what we use our phones for so I guess it's not really an issue.

There is a lot of very nice gear available quite cheaply though. Maybe this will be a trend an it's time to buy Kodak stock?

I was talking to a friend who recently got into 35mm film cameras. He develops the color film himself, but then immediately scans it in and uses digital tools to work on the images. I left a bit confused; what is he gaining by using film as the medium?

In the WP case there was essentially a monopoly (Luxotica). As a monopoly they had built in additional profit and limitations that gave WP more room to work. It was definitely a broken market. Traditional competitors like Oakley were killed by Luxotica stores simply refusing to carry their brands and then buying the company when the stock sank. The "disruptive" delivery was needed to be a viable competitor.

A distinction without a difference.

You can't argue the genius that came up with "chocolate diamonds." You have a diamond that looks brown and ugly and can somehow make it desirable and even rare. While I swore off natural diamonds a long time ago, somehow I feel like DeBeers will be able to spin this and come out ok.