In general I think Sony tends to rate the price of their consoles by the price of what they could get for the blu ray components by selling regular blu-ray players. Some people (like believe it or not, my parents) will pay 2x as much for a relatively low end dedicated blu-ray player than they would buy a PS-3 because despite being gamers the PS-3 is a "toy" and they feel is less capable of playig blu-ray movies or whatever.
I think there is enough of this sentiment where they market accordingly, and they (more or less rightfully) believe they can make more money for the same components by using them in another device.
Speaking soley for myself I have an original issue 60 GB PS-3 sitting next to my 360 Elite right now (I wasn't alwayd disabled). Truthfully my biggest fear is that if my PS-3 dies I won't be able to play my PS-2 games anymore because the new PS-3 systems are not backwards compadible with PS-2. Thus I'd need to wind up buying TWO consoles to do what my current one will (and right now affording one will be a chore, next gen I will have to be a lot more picky if I can find some way to manage it).
As it is, I feel they are being cheap by omitting the PS-2 components to begin with. Truthfully all of these price drops mean little to me given that they have already reduced the quality of the unit accordingly.
What's more, the only ones who can really say what Sony is actually making (or "losing") for money on console sales or whatever is Sony. However my experience is that one of the reasons why the global economy is such a mess today isn't so much because of any given politician, but because companies have started to view "profit" in terms of growth, and expected growth. Simply making more money than you started with is not enough, you have to meet the planned growth or you "lost" money. Granted some of this is caused by the fact that companies borrowed money and such based on projected growth, but in most cases it's just BS. Companies going out of business for "losing money" are oftentimes just not making as much money as quickly as the investors would like.
I get tired of hearing how they are losing X amount of $ on each unit sold or whatever, when as far as I can tell that amount of lost money is simply the differance in price between a PS-3 unit and the more expensive, yet less sophisticated Blu Ray player they could have made from the same components.
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As far as British cooking goes, truthfully people eat what they like. There is nothing wrong with the cooking of most nations, especially prosperous ones that wind up with a choice (ie not eating purely domestic products that might in some cases amount to grubs and such). I don't see how anyone can really "knock" someone for eating fish and chips if they like that better than say portugese cooking or whatever.
Food snobs are some of the most ridiculous fellows out there, basically saying you shouldn't eat something because THEY Think there is something better.
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As far as the Euro goes, I actually think Britan did the right thing by sticking with the pound.
Truthfully I see The Euro as being a disaster waiting to happen despite the conveinence. What's more it came with the pretensions of Europe trying to turn itself again into a pre-eminant economic power by trying to get most of global finance to go through the ECM (European Common Market) as opposed to Wall Street. In general a pretty antagonistic move on a lot of levels because it's threatening the economic dominance of America which is totally based on trade and finance nowadays (and if that global focus shifts more it could be very bad).
I think to some extent Britan, or at least elements of the goverment, realizes that despite all arrogant pretensions, you need America and as far as nations go we've actually been a good friend (this is comparitively speaking, no need to America Bash. Britan in comparison wasn't half as nice as we were when they basically occupied the same position). Especially with some of the short sighted views people are having of the far East (namely China). Creating more of a resource/trade war than is absolutly nessicary is a bad thing.
I know many will disagree, but those are my basic thoughts on the subject. Yes, it's annoying, and involves getting slammed on some things like console prices, but in the
overall scheme of things that's pretty minor.
To put things in somewhat off the wall terms, you have Europeans looking at things like the ancient "Cyberpunk 2020" with world finance shifting to the Euro. You have the asians looking at other visions with "Nuyen" or the equivilent of "Hong Kong Dollars". Then you've got others looking at all of that and going "you know they call all of that a 'dark future' for a reason" and instead want to keep things relatively stable.
