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Pastimes : All Clowns Must Be Destroyed -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: accountclosed who wrote (33138)	5/16/2000 9:15:00 AM
From: marginmike	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42523

I am really curious to see How strong this rally will be. The Volume in Pre-market is very strong, however the markups in the popular names is moderate at best. Its not the usiall mania, lets see today will tell us a good tale!

To: accountclosed who wrote (33138)	5/16/2000 9:23:00 AM
From: pater tenebrarum	Respond to of 42523

AM, hedonic pricing is device by which 'quality improvements' are factored into the calculations for GDP, inflation and productivity. it is most glaring in terms of computer hardware, eg. in '98, real growth of business investment in computers of 8,7 billion dollars was counted as 148 billion dollars worth of growth in the GDP data by multiplying the 'real' dollars with the processing power of the computers. similarly a computer with twice the processing speed is counted as twice as productive and if it costs 10% more than its predecessor it's price will have gone down by 40% for the purpose of CPI calculations. that's it in a nutshell (the exact formulas are slightly different...i can perhaps give you a link explaining the details later on). the US are the only major industrialized country to make use of this trick. the main effect of this is of course to distort all the important economic data. for instance the biggest jump in productivity is regularly occurring in the PC manufacturing sector itself. a simple example would be Dell assembling a PC and putting in 128mb of RAM instead of 64mb. since the memory of the PC is twice as large, and Dell takes the same time and only slightly higher input costs to assemble it, the process is deemed to have become almost twice as productive. obviously this doesn't make much sense. in a similar vein, if you're running a word processing program on a P3 instead of a P2 processor, how much more productive have you become? according to the government data your productivity has risen markedly.