On 11/02/2011 9:20 AM, Invisible wrote:

>> that someone earning 7x what you do might buy one for a hobby?
>
> It's the "somebody earning 7x" that doesn't seem plausible.
>

It is the other way around. It does not seem plausible that someone with 
your job description and skills is earning as little as you do.

> Oh, surely somebody somewhere earns this much. But I don't think I've
> met them. (Unless you count the CEO of our company, who I happen to have
> met. But very few people are the CEO of a large company.)

I can say, quite categorically, that you have met and had a drink with 
at least three people in that bracket.

-- 
Regards
     Stephen

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>> It's the "somebody earning 7x" that doesn't seem plausible.
>
> It is the other way around. It does not seem plausible that someone with
> your job description and skills is earning as little as you do.

Well, yeah, I'm under-paid considering the job I do. But I'm sure 
there's lots of other people who also don't earn much money. What we're 
debating is how many people earn such an insane amount of money that 
thousands of pounds is nothing to them.

> I can say, quite categorically, that you have met and had a drink with
> at least three people in that bracket.

Really? How do you compute that?

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> I know a few people who have probably ended up spending something like
> that over the course of the ten or twenty years they've been doing a
> hobby, sure.

Didn't you used to hang out with some gamers, surely they'd all spent in 
excess of $1000 on their PCs?  Also nobody at your work who is 
interesting in cars and has spend more than $1000 on a car in one go?  I 
find it hard to believe nobody at your work owns a dSLR, which surely 
cost around $1000 to spend in one go.  Spending that sort of money on a 
hobby is more common than you think.

> Surely you don't actually need an expensive specially calibrated monitor
> just to ensure that IBM Blue comes out as IBM Blue. Presumably there are
> standardised ways of describing specific print colours, and the
> advertisers will just tell you what colour they want according to some
> such standard.

Sure, but then how to mix that with the rest of your page layout?  They 
certainly don't just guess what the final outcome will be and hope it 
comes out looking ok.

> I can believe that the likes of the billion-selling top magazines would
> go to these lengths. But Linux Format? I rather doubt it. Generally if
> an image looks reasonable on a regular screen, it looks reasonable in
> print too. Unless it's crucial for your images to look "perfect",

Did you ever try actually comparing printed colours to your monitor 
using cheap consumer equipment?  I don't think anyone would call that a 
"reasonable" match.  Besides, the artists and designers who choose 
colours get very annoyed when the final product looks a totally 
different shade to what they designed.

> Now there's something I hadn't thought of... For most magazines, exact
> colour probably isn't critical.

I think you'd be surprised what level of work goes into making even a 
low circulation full-colour magazine.  If you've designed a nice bright 
orange and green colour scheme to give a certain impact, you're going to 
be pretty annoyed when the orange comes out brown and doesn't match any 
more, which could have been avoided by buying a $1000 calibrated 
monitor.  Of course for one-offs there are ways around it (eg the 
printer sending you a sample, you tweaking it, repeat a few times) but 
for anyone regularly making such a magazine you *will* have calibrated 
monitors.

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On 11/02/2011 10:19 AM, scott wrote:
>> I know a few people who have probably ended up spending something like
>> that over the course of the ten or twenty years they've been doing a
>> hobby, sure.
>
> Didn't you used to hang out with some gamers, surely they'd all spent in
> excess of $1000 on their PCs?

Hmm, plausibly yes. (Especially Wev. Then again, he somehow drives a 
BWM, and he makes it his mission in life to have a better PC than anyone 
else in the group...)

> Also nobody at your work who is
> interesting in cars and has spend more than $1000 on a car in one go?

Cars and houses are probably the only things I can think of that most 
people have and cost significantly more than that, yes.

> I
> find it hard to believe nobody at your work owns a dSLR, which surely
> cost around $1000 to spend in one go. Spending that sort of money on a
> hobby is more common than you think.

No, I'm fairly sure none of the 26 people who work here own a DSLR. 
(Obviously I haven't gone and *asked* them all individually, but nobody 
seems that interested in photography.)

>> Generally if
>> an image looks reasonable on a regular screen, it looks reasonable in
>> print too. Unless it's crucial for your images to look "perfect",
>
> Did you ever try actually comparing printed colours to your monitor
> using cheap consumer equipment? I don't think anyone would call that a
> "reasonable" match.

When I print photos out, it usually looks approximately as poor as it 
did on screen, yes.

> I think you'd be surprised what level of work goes into making even a
> low circulation full-colour magazine.

OK. As I say, I don't work in the print business personally. It just 
surprises me that anyone would shell out such a huge amount of money for 
something unless it was absolutely critical to have it.

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On 11/02/2011 10:06 AM, Stephen wrote:

> It is your job. Your employers sound as if they are running the UK side
> of your company like an outsourced third world project.

No no, they run the *entire* company like this.

According to Wolfram, my employer lost almost 1 million USD last 
financial year. Consequently, there is a spending freeze on *everything*.

Then again, even back when we were making a profit, the company attitude 
has always been to avoid investment wherever possible. I guess it's just 
a very short-sighted company.

> It looks like
> your world view is hampered by this. No criticism to you intended.

Perhaps. But I've met plenty of people who *don't* work for this screwy 
company, and most of them aren't exactly loaded either. (With a few 
notable exceptions.)

> The management of the company (Burroughs
> Corporation) knew that using inferior equipment would hamper the
> workforce in producing quality goods.

Hah. Would that more companies thought this way...

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> OK. As I say, I don't work in the print business personally. It just
> surprises me that anyone would shell out such a huge amount of money for
> something unless it was absolutely critical to have it.

It surprises me how anyone could think $1000 is a "huge amount of money" 
for a company to spend.

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> According to Wolfram, my employer lost almost 1 million USD last
> financial year. Consequently, there is a spending freeze on *everything*.

Don't worry, my employer lost 53 million USD last year :-)

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scott <sco### [at] scottcom> wrote:
> No they are listed on consumer sites, because nowadays they're cheap


> plausible that someone earning 7x what you do might buy one for a hobby?

And you don't even need to go that far. Double your salary, and you've probably
got at least 4x as much disposable income.

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On 11/02/2011 10:40 AM, scott wrote:
>> OK. As I say, I don't work in the print business personally. It just
>> surprises me that anyone would shell out such a huge amount of money for
>> something unless it was absolutely critical to have it.
>
> It surprises me how anyone could think $1000 is a "huge amount of money"
> for a company to spend.

Perhaps for Time-Warner it isn't. For my local newspaper that employs 
maybe 20 people, it probably is.

Then again, what do I know?

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On 11/02/2011 10:41 AM, Bill Pragnell wrote:

> And you don't even need to go that far. Double your salary, and you've probably
> got at least 4x as much disposable income.

That's an interesting statistic. I like that.

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