Re: SB 900 better?

Neil Harrington wrote:
"ASAAR" <caught@xxxxxx> wrote in message news:c5m4n4h6v7vsd4bh0to8l5cuif8mdbovm9@xxxxxxxxxx
On Sat, 17 Jan 2009 11:52:20 -0500, Neil Harrington wrote:

And the SB-800 shuts down at the best of times. Nikon's next
super speedlight, the SB-1000 is so revolutionary that it will be
produced and assembled in Nikon's new factory in France, and if
Nikon can make it through this winter of despair, should start
shipping them this spring, just in time for the season of Light.
That's interesting. Have you heard of any new Speedlights coming out a
little further down the food chain? Some of the SB-900 features are really
appealing, but it's a bit pricey for my purposes. I'm wondering if any
similar features might show up in, say, an SB-700. (At present I have an
SB-400, two SB-600s and an SB-800.)
(Shhh. That was just a bit of plagia . . . uh, I mean, just
paraphrasing Dickens.

Not Shakespeare (". . . the winter of my discontent")?


Yeah, that's the ticket!) As for other
speedlights, nope, I've only seen one or two (including an SB-700)
mentioned in thread titles, but I've skipped those, since messages
such as those are almost invariably useless "wish lists". Pricey,
yes, but there's a general feeling that Nikon will raise prices
about Feb. 1, so those considering getting an SB-900 but are
wavering, now might be a good time to buy. With the plummeting
price of the dollar, I'm surprised that prices have remained stable
this long.

I have been too, but the dollar and other currencies as well seem to go up and down like yo-yos, relative to each other. I've seen projections for the Australian dollar, for example, showing that while it has been falling dramatically against the dollar the last several months, it is expected to rise sharply over the coming months. I have no idea why the people making the projections expect that, though.

It would be nice if there were some unchanging standard for a medium of exchange such that all other currencies could be gauged by their relationship to it. For example, "A loaf of whole wheat bread like this one is worth exactly 1 zorkmid, and will ALWAYS be worth exactly 1 zorkmid, until the end of time." Then we'd know what the other currencies were really doing, at least in connection with bread.

Bread is made of flour, fat, heat and labour, not to mention packaging, storage and transportation.

Flour is made of capital (land), wheat, labour, natural humidity, more labour (harvest), capital (machinery) and processing (capital, labour...).

Fat comes from variable sources and needs capital, labour and processing at many stages.

If you believe that the values of the various inputs (and I just scratched the surface) above will remain steady, that humidity and crop yields will be even, then you're well deluded. That's why the price of bread (and most commodities) varies. There is no 'gold' standard. Not even gold.

Add to that the vagaries of consumption (wage variance means people buy bread at differing consumption rates which change over time) and it begins to look more and more, day to day, market driven.

Inflation is due to various things including money supply (stimulus) and industrial/service efficiencies (or lack thereof).

The recent economic blowup is a perfect storm of neglect to regulate properly; stimulus (artificially low overnight esp. in the US); absurd lending practices; disregard of risk evaluations; FreMac/FanMae racing to low quality mortgage paper; ratings agencies competing to get rating business rather than providing high quality objective ratings of commercial paper; over dependence and poor interpretation of "quant" data; poor energy efficiency v. a growing world appetite for oil; .... and so on.

This race to the beginning began in the Clinton years and was accelerated by the Bush admin. (less regulation and lax oversight/application of what was left).

The bubble state was called in 2002/2003. And it was ignored.

Greed is good.
Unfettered greed is not.


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