Domain: businessweek.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to businessweek.com.
Comments · 1,987
-
Tim Cook is a tax hypocrite
You should trying asking that to Tim Cook at a shareholders meeting and see what kind of response you get. Last time he was described as "visibly angry".
Whatever. This is the same guy that bluntly told congress they were wrong to try to collect more tax from Apple. He talks about social responsibility but he only means it if someone else has to pay for it.
-
Zynga's Whale Problem
"It costs money to develop and keep a game running, just like those fancy decorations and free drinks at a casino; whales, like gambling addicts, subsidize fun for everyone else.'"
Except video game players are more accurately described, than even casino players, as whales.
This is what Zynga reported years ago (before the bloom went off their rose) [1] - this entire economy seems
... ripe for abuse as a mechanism for laundering money in my opinion. In Zynga's case, I told one of my friends who worked there that if I was an investor, I'd love to be funneling money to Zynga, while my stock represented 100x the value of whatever I "donated". That's just one use case, it could be used simply to launder money from "users" to "developers" (what if they're both the same) - going through an app store runs the money through an reasonably effective one-way function at a basic cost of 30% overhead. -
Re: Hype? Case Study in Environmental Law
Businessweek - A third of all tin comes from Bangka. http://www.businessweek.com/ar... Bangka tin mines were opened to supply deleaded solder. The point is that the environmental cost of extraction is nearly always more significant than the environmental cost of exposure. Environmental laws that consider only the "end of pipe" without considering lifecycle costs are to environmentalism what mercury laxative was to medicine (very effective if all you care about is an excellent crapping experience)
80% of lead supply is recycled content, the alternative (tin) must be mined. I thought the hype was that we'd be significantly safer with solid tin solder in lined capped landfills than we would be with leaded solder in lined capped landfills. What ROHS did was take a very minor, negligible risk from rich nations and displace the environmental costs to a hugely impactful practice (tin dredging) in developing nations, and label it "green" and give environmental awards with no study of the consequences upstream.
Want an organic, non-toxic raw material? Baby seal pelts. If all you care about is the final disposal effect, mercury made a great laxative. Primum non nocere
-
Re:What's with this 'gigafactory' ?
They just announced a bond issue to pay for it.
It looks like a $1.6 Billion factory... not a Gigafactory.
http://www.businessweek.com/ne... -
Re:Stop the madness!
Hey, we still take in refugees and immigrants, not like you hate-filled Eurotards. Good luck in your upcoming EU Parliament elections. Maybe you can try that Master Race thing again soon.
-
Re:Title Bad Need More Better
In the Philippines, there are factories dedicated building parts of buildings and then shipping them worldwide.
Foxconn may not only be getting less expensive labor, but a marketing coup by making 'Indonesia's Smartphone'.
-
What's next, banning ...
... cigarettes?
-
Re:Different from the NSA
Why are states optimal? Is it because 50-200+ years ago, this patch of geography was chosen to be grouped together? How does this imply that all states have the resources necessary for their own road building? By directing those funds at the federal level, you can average out those differences, and ensure that if you drive across the country, you don't have to deal with roads of different quality. This should then allow equal benefits from interstate commerce. The same argument applies for a common social safety net, as you then can minimize the differences in poverty/health/nutrition in a way that doesn't require all states to have identical resources per citizen.
But there's this constant push to decentralize things, and "let the states handle this" so they offer different things, and solve things via competition. Why would you want competition between states? Who benefits from something like that? How many companies do you know that construct teams to work on identical problems in competition? What would happen if you did that? You'd get something like Sears ( http://www.businessweek.com/ar... ), where because of the competition, you have parts of the company actively opposing other parts to receive resources, causing the entire thing to lose out.
Not everything is a scheme to force Stalin-like five year plans on the nation. Not everything is a slippery slope to totalitarianism.
-
Re:ouch!
As should you, http://www.businessweek.com/ar... Google reason was patents and to build cell phones. They got the patents but failed miserably at the hardware end. $10 Billion plus for patents is an awful lot of money.
-
Why Photoship? Well...
Could it be because nobody is buying their stupid new subscription-only version of Photoshop, and this is a desperate attempt to make it tempting again?
-
Re:Math, do it.
80% of the bad loans were issued by financial institutions not even subject to the CRA.
http://www.businessweek.com/investing/insights/blog/archives/2008/09/community_reinv.html
-
Re:beacon of freedom
Lets see here, IRS was a lie?? If so why did they apologize for it?? I see your daily kos and raise you a wall street journal http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887323744604578474983310370360
Fast and Furious was a lie? Business week would disagree with you and huffpo http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-05-21/fast-and-furious-scandal-returns-to-haunt-obama
I could go on but its not worth my time -
Here we go againThis sounds like the opposite of a good strategy. I'd say that the purchase of conflict minerals is more likely to improve the situation than the ban will. It appears that such bans have decreased the Congo's legal export of tantalum for example by 90%.
Given the expected regulatory hassles, companies are looking for mineral supplies in more stable countries. Legal exports (as opposed to black market transactions) of the minerals from the Congo, which supplies 13 percent of the worldâ(TM)s supply of tantalum, dropped more than 90 percent in April from a month earlier, according to the latest data. âoeAlmost everything came to a standstill,â says Paul Yenga Mabolia, head of Promines, a World Bank program assisting the mining industry in Congo.
Note that a huge increase in the price of tantalum happened after supply was deliberately restricted.
Often, and this is no exception, fads come with a hefty priceâ¦literally. The price per kilogram of tantalum imports to the U.S. increased by 170% in just one year. The rise in price was mostly seen in imports by air, as shown in the graph below. The average import price of tantalum went from $110 in 2011 to nearly $300 in 2012. The craze is continuing into 2013 as well, with January numbers showing the average price at $360.
China also happens to be the primary source of imported tantalum for the US. Given that China is also alleged in my previous link to be the main destination for conflict tantalum, I wonder how much of that import is laundered tantalum from the Congo.
So here's my take on "conflict minerals". I think they don't help the people that they supposedly are intended to help and they reward those who break the law. That's an excellent combination for any policy to achieve. -
Re:victory against science
If you're going for precision, shouldn't it be
what we're changing is an organism's ability to produce proteins that it previously couldn't.
Depending on the food, those additional proteins could end up in your bloodstream, right? Now is that bad? Maybe, maybe not. Not all industry-funded studies have held up to scrutiny either but you're right insofar as the broad consensus is that GMOs are generally safe. The longer that consensus exists, the more convinced I'll be but until we have a couple generations experience, I guess I'll be the "paranoid" one.
I'm a little surprised you didn't hear about the multimillion dollar campaigns against Prop 37 (CA) and Initiative 522 (WA) last year. The Grocery Manufacturers Association was willing to "spend anything" and it resulted in a new record: the most money ever raised to defeat an initiative in Washington state. After a little scuffle, the top donors were revealed to be Grocery Manufacturers Association, Monsanto Company, DuPont Pioneer, Dow AgroSciences LLC, and Bayer CropScience.
-
Re:Stupid unnecessary consequences
It is up to private property owners ( or supposed to be ) whether to let oil pipeline through their property, not up to govt.
Go go gadget government! http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/texas-judge-rules-in-favor-of-transcanada-in-eminent-domain-case/2012/08/23/87744776-ecda-11e1-a80b-9f898562d010_story.html http://www.businessweek.com/news/2013-09-27/keystone-pipeline-eminent-domain-foes-seek-nebraska-court-order http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/26/oklahoma-keystone-pipeline-tar-sands_n_937748.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/keystone-xl-pipeline-is-issue-of-property-rights-for-some-ranchers/2012/07/27/gJQAqlQgDX_story.html http://leg.mt.gov/content/Committees/Interim/2011-2012/EQC/Meeting-Documents/January-2012/public-uses-eminent-domain.pdf
Kansas is excluded because Keystone XL uses the existing Keystone segment for that state, but I'm willing to assume that they had the government come and turn out people who didn't want their farms and ranches divided in half by a pipeline back when that was built too. God forbid they spend the extra few bucks to make the pipe go along property lines.
-
Cisco and Huawei
Given all the US lobbying against Huawei gear being used in critical infrastructure, it seems odd that the NSA is claiming they have managed to penetrate these routers.
Perhaps while NSA was powning Huawei routers they discovered they were already compromised.
Seems far more likely that in doing so, the NSA penetration was in turn detected and prevented by Huawei, or they haven't been able to penetrate to the extent they have with Cisco routers, and therefore they need to keep these out of critical infrastructure.
-
Re:Let me guess
peanuts my dear man...and so unfashionably retro btw. the 80's??? please...
haven't you heard?..like a month ago JC Morgan Chase admitted to the wholesale rape of its customers during the mortgage rip-off of the 00's.
total confession...felonious activities by perhaps thousands of its employees, ripping-off people of untold billions. knowingly and ADMITTEDLY!
the result of this coordinated criminal actively that makes what organized crime does look like a church bingo game?
a $13 billion settlement where all the felons involved get to stay in their jobs and continue their lifestyles, without nary a blemish on any of their "permanent" records.
it's disgusting to me that these people are allowed to simply pay-off the government, USING OTHER PEOPLE'S (the shareholders of JP Morgan Chase) MONEY, and get to continue their high-flying lifestyles while other "criminals", who perhaps get caught with user-quantity level of recreational drugs, get charged as felons and watch their lives become utterly ruined.
this guy is another example of our "justice" system that allows wealthy people to purchase there way out of legal problems...it's all corrupt as hell.
-
Black market Alchemist "Heady Topper"
Vermont black market microbrews are currently selling for about $28 per can, and the market has been infiltrated by modern day Elliot Ness's. So this is worth serious study. http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-12-06/vermont-tries-to-squelch-a-black-market-for-craft-beer
-
Re:lazy customers
How is a company suppose to handle a work load several orders of magnitude greater than their average daily work loads for just one time a year? What do you do? Hire a bunch of extra people and assets and infrastructure for just one week of the year?
Yes.
Maintaining profitability is especially difficult during peak season when UPS’s delivery expenses rise. This year, UPS is adding 55,000 part-time holiday workers, leasing 23 extra planes, and effectively building a second trucking fleet to handle the seasonal package flow. None of this is cheap. It’s up to Mr. Peak to plan accordingly.
-
Re:A lot more truth than the imagination of outsid
-
Re:corruption
You don't need to go farther than California to find an example of the government blackmailing people for "back taxes". Fortunately, this time, the tax-hungry government was stopped in its tracks. However who in India will oppose taxing of a faraway, rich company?
-
Re:Publish or perish must go
I don't think you can really blame academics. It seems to be, rather, that universities have succumbed to the same general trend that made MBAs and other business/management types infuse institutions beyond just the corporate world with a management style and optimization strategies that look only at narrowly defined metrics (usually revolving around financials, PR, etc.). Academic institutions seem to be run more like businesses these days than places of learning and research, and this is reflected in their employment distribution: in just one example, "employment of administrators jumped 60 percent from 1993 to 2009, 10 times the growth rate for tenured faculty" (source: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-11-21/the-troubling-dean-to-professor-ratio ). I remember reading about this trend of falling faculty-to-administrator ratio quite a few years ago, along with the claim that it's been going on since at least the 1970s; it really struck home, however, when I noticed it affecting very schools I had attended. With the falling powers of faculty associations (like unions in general), I doubt that researchers and instructors could have stemmed this.
-
I drive a Dodge Stratus
Stability control saves lives, know what Porsche's PSM stands for? Please Save Me. The non GT Carrera's i.e. the 911's all have stability control and even though there is a button to turn it off it is not completely disengaged.
A few years back another GT driver and his passenger were killed on a race track in So. California by a Ferrari entering the track the GT swerved, went in to the grass and hit a retaining wall. http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2006-06-07/carrera-gt-crashes-into-court
These cars need stability control, this is a huge mess for Porsche. Thank God they don't make these GT's anymore, half of them are gone anyway and when the wreck there's not much left.
-
Re:Voluntarily?
Ummm, google BOUGHT android
-
Re:"similar to"
Why can't we run around naked eating nuts and berries? The robots are taking over anyway. "unreasonable performance expectations combined with a fundamentally dehumanizing environment"? Who needs that? I vote for nuts and berries.
-
Re:Libertarian does not equal conservative...
Why do you believe that?
First of all, if you look worldwide you find that fossil fuels still receive enormously more subsidies than renewables: $409 billion vs. $60 billion in 2010. Second, even if you just look at the U.S. as your link does, the situation has only changed in the last few years, and before that, fossil fuels received far more money. Between 2002 and 2008, the U.S. spent $72 billion subsidizing fossil fuels but only $29 billion on renewable energy. Third, solar energy is now cheap enough that even if all energy subsidies were eliminated, it could still compete. And fourth, if we ever implement a carbon tax to make people pay for the greenhouse gases they generate, that will favor solar even more.
-
Re:Nuclear energy reduces greenhouse emissions
If we're going to get itchy about red billionaires making money from a pipeline, should we ignore blue billionaires who make money from the trains that carry the oil instead?
-
Re:And all these computer parts in cars...
This sounds like bullshit to me. The 2013 Ford C-Max is rated at 47MPG, and a test run by some experienced drivers got 60MPG out of it.
How about the Ford Fiesta ECOnetic at 65MPG?
-
Entitlement to a business model
The problem is that some businesses think that they are entitled to a given business model and way of getting money. These companies are the ones that will inevitably fail because they can't take the risk of killing their own cash cow. History is littered with examples from Kodak to Polaroid and so on.
What I don't see though is people willing to site companies that are willing to sacrifice their sacred cows and look for news ways of doing things. I'm going to cite IBM which was once so synonymous with making personal computers that they were the very standard (PC or Mac - PC was
/their/ thing) for the entire rest of the industry. Nowadays IBM is a software and services company that makes servers and mainframes primarily as a means by which to sell their services. Another company is Amazon which famously used to be a book company in it's earliest years before branching out into just about everything else. Amazon has also publicly committed to avoiding fat margins to force his business to be lean and competitive.Entitlement gets you a footnote in the history books, refusing to be entitled keeps you in the Wall Street Journal. There is nothing more dangerous to a business than entitlements for they engender complacency and complacency engenders competitors to take your place.
-
Re:British?
Why does Argentina continue to assert that the island is theirs at all?
Oil...
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-04-04/the-falkland-islands-brace-for-oil-wealth
-
Re:Propaganda for the Oil Companies
I agree with you that Iran's oil is more valuable. The reliability of the source is somewhat less, given the instability in the region.
I really don't believe that fracking has anything to do with Iran deciding to negotiate.
Remember, fracked sources have a very quick falloff. It's given rise to a term, "Red Queen effect" which means a fracked well has to do more and more fracking just to maintain the same level of output.
I can understand the US using fracking to try to boost the economy during a slowdown, but I really hope it's never seen as any sort of long-term solution, considering it creates a lot of environmental problems, which are created in a matter of days but take millenniums to go away. That's why I don't want to see the Keystone XL pipeline made. It will just accelerate the fracking and cause the US economy to rely on stripping itself of natural resources which is a recipe for becoming like a lot of failed African shitholes.
Natural resources are like treasure. And once you sell off the treasure, it's gone. The Keystone XL would take that precious shale oil and dump it on the world market where it will do absolutely nothing to ease fuel costs here in the US and will weaken us strategically.
-
Re:Gates was on the right track..
That $2bn/yr is coming from lots of different sources, or is at least being funded by many different players in the Android market in some form or fashion. Besides, Samsung is make 95% of the profits on Android, not Google: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-05-16/google-makes-android-but-samsung-makes-all-the-money
-
NSA denies everything
-
Re:Talent is 90% desire
Except 10,000 hours was disproven by doing a most basic analysis of the data: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-08-01/book-review-the-sports-gene-by-david-epstein
The thing is, you have to have both the drive and the ability. If you have no drive, you'll be bored. If you have no ability, you will be disillusioned. -
Re:Problem?
I don't think I know any US ambassadors that speak Danish, but as a very cushy position of an unimporant but close ally, the post of US ambassedar to Denmark fetches a quite high price.
You remember the case where a governor tried to sell a senate seat? His excuse afterwards was that, he thought it was acceptable because that is how diplomatic positions are traditionally "awarded".
Here are some guesses on the price:
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-12-13/the-economics-of-being-a-u-dot-s-dot-ambassador
http://taxpol.blogspot.de/2013/09/how-to-buy-us-ambassadorship-and-how.html -
Re:The fine wasn't all of the punishment
If Knight had put the $460 million in a pile and burned it, there would be no fine. The problem was that their algorithm was wildly buying and selling shares in the open market, and thus distorting that market. See the graph at http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-06-06/the-knightmare for an example of a stock that was affected. What if you were an investor in that stock who had set a stop-loss at $10? Knight's wild selling would have triggered the stop-loss, and you'd lose money because of Knight's actions. This gross market distortion is what the fine was meant to punish.
-
This works out to a 3% fine
This isn't a slap on the wrist. This is a pat on the back for inflicting harm with egregious negligence.
Therefore this was probably engineered as an assault.
-
Re:Open Source is not a Panacea
"broad statements like "open source will fix healthcare.gov" don't add anything to the conversation
I'm not sure if we're reading the same article. Just how difficult can it be to create a web site for flogging health insurance ?
a) Healthcare.gov is a platform for building health-care marketplaces.
b) The roll-out of healthcare.gov has been a mess.
c) Open Source methodology has a prove track record.
d) The transparency intrinsic to Open Source prevents such disasters as healthcare.gov, what ever the version.
The Obamacare Website Didn't Have to Fail -
Typical National, 1.0 launch in early few weeks
I understand the political grandstanders on both sides using this in their latest talking points but I really expected a bit more from Slashdot. Crashing Websites, Grumbling Users: Obamacare's Debut Is a Typical Tech Launch is the most balanced and informed article I've seen written on this topic.
Basically the webs has been out for little 2-3 weeks now. It's a National rollout. And it's all on 1.0 code. Of course there will be issues. Network design is done using estimates, but scaling is done using metrics. Load-testing with a 100K concurrent user target will not help you when 200K users show up at your door.
This is all business as usual at the start of the sign-up period. Where users can also call in their applications and also fill them out in person. I'd be surprised if they couldn't mail in their applications as well.
-
Re: "What useful purpose"
That's just not right. Arbitrage is a very useful function. In particular arbitrage equilibrium to exist for general economic equilibrium to exist. This implies existence of price stability.
HFT is just the inevitable end game when there are companies competing to arbitrage prices across markets. The more competitive it is the less profitable will be.
HFT is squeezing the nuts of arbs across the world. Because the price differences are always decreasing the ability to extract money from the trading system by arbs is decreasing all the time. The result is smaller buy/sell
This particular article is clear illustration of this. If power to run the HFT servers is a determining factor in the profitability of HFT, surely the margins are razor thin.
Further reading:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbitrage
-
Re:Starbucks figured it out early
Getting you in and out as quickly as possible is their goal.
Completely wrong. Lingering is the goal. Customers who linger buy more.
The main cost for these retailers isn't the food/coffee they serve it's the time and space you take up as you order it and then have to wait for all the inefficiencies with cash, cards, or checks.
Nope, it's health insurance. After that, it's definitely cost of goods sold. Operating expenses like "cash handling" aren't even a blip.
-
Re:Who needs the money more?
By attempting to block the technology altogether and punish anyone who participated.
No, you are misinformed there also.
It is only the "pop up motel landlords" whose information has been subpoenaed, not as you say "anyone who participated".
Here is link to an article that explains that:
which clearly states:
"Airbnb's legal troubles continue to mount in New York with an acknowledgment Monday that the state's attorney general has subpoenaed the startup for information about all 15,000 people who rent out spaces through the website.
Which is as it should be of course. For example, if I make a reservation to stay at a firetrap motel that subsequently burns down, it is the motel operator/owner, not I, who is held for the crime of negligence because of his responsibility in running a firetrap motel.
-
Domestic refineries
Isn't much of the foreign oil refined in the US anyway? Strategically that still gives some control over the commodity.
Anyway the article linked to in the summary is short on details. It looks like the oil+natural gas mentioned in the summary really consists mostly of natural gas.
-
Re:people would live in nice places? oh no!
They've reversed those policies as they weren't working. And you remember that power crisis California had a few years ago? It came about because it deregulated the power companies, and let them shut down operations for no reason, forcing California to buy power from out of state resources at premium rates.
Wrong..The rolling blackouts came because companies involved in supplying CA with energy were corruptly manipulating the markets. They decreased supply artificially in order to inflate prices causing a shortage that didn't exist. Enron was convicted of purposely flowing pipelines at half capacity claiming they were saving infrastructure costs. The deregulation allowed part of it to happen but it was only because of a partial deregulation that it could happen. Deregulation does not mean failure to enforce laws or carte blanche to defraud an entire state.
As for the leaving California for Texas, quite a few of the businesses are doing that and I'm sure quite a bit of the population is following. It might not be as much as the population replacements but it is happening.
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-07-03/why-are-californias-businesses-disappearing
There are also several counties trying to secede from California. I guess the ultimate plan is to form a new state called Jefferson.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/sep/26/california-counties-vote-secede-golden-state/
-
Re:Does this work elsewhere?
-
Re:That's why Europe is an entrepreneurial powerho
-
Re:Wow,
Where are you getting your stats? I would be interested to know.
Misc news articales on the subject.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/dark-pool-trading-reaches-record-levels-in-europe-2013-08-12
Saying it's hit 10% in Europe
This article... says its hit 14% in the US now.
"In February, dark pools matched an average of 908 million shares per day, accounting for roughly 14 percent of all U.S. stock trading volume, according to data from Tabb."
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-04-22/credit-suisse-making-dark-pools-even-darker
-
Re:wrong two words
Is someone trying to suggest that if the press release was given at 2:00:00 in a machine readable format, a computer parsed the information... and made a decision to trade without human interaction/vention, it would have been kosher?
Ummm, what? That's exactly how most trades originate.
Here: "Today, when Bloomberg releases a market-moving headline, on average it takes 4 seconds for the markets to move after the news story hits. Bloomberg machine-readable news can help you get ahead of that window.... Bloomberg's Event-Driven Trading feed offers clients instant, machine-readable delivery of Bloomberg's world-class news and data, including breaking headlines, exclusive worldwide market-moving coverage, structured financial data from company releases, news analytics, and global economic data."
Trying to compete with these guys by websurfing is really no different than reading the evening paper.
Well, here's a recent article that says the percentage of trades that are automated has been falling and may only be slight majority now.
-
Re:When is it going to happen to San Francisco?
If it can happen in Maine, I think it can surely happen in California
It can happen anywhere and it can happen for all the wrong reasons, especially in California because what people don't realize is that business will grow and prosper where it's welcome. Last year California lost 5.2% of its businesses and while the experts can't agree on a clear "why," I think that California has become more anti-business, anti-growth over the past few decades. I was born and raised in So. Cal and lived out there through the end of the 80s but even then it was still growing. Sure the recent recession has hit everybody but the decline in California is inevitable; Overpriced housing such as in Orange County means that even middle class wage earners have a very hard time of living there, which also helps to drive up the costs of labor. You can blame speculation on most of that but without mass transit and massive urban sprawl it creates huge amounts of gridlock. Add to it the anti-business legislation that's been passed and you have a perfect storm brewing over over-inflated housing prices, employees who can't get to work because of long commutes and an anti-business attitude and ranking highest in the nation on taxation in most categories, that makes California downright a sucky place to make a living and conduct business. As they say "it's a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there."
-
Re:Why is Apple the one being sued?
In my example, no. Hence the dealer is liable.
Er what? You asked for a Ford Escape. You got one. You didn't get the equivalent of a Humvee that you were expecting. That's the dealership's fault? How?
If they didn't specify the number of episodes, then they sold the entire season - whatever is reasonable and customary. Neither the seller or vendor gets to decide what is reasonable and customary - that is decided by what everybody else is doing. If they want to be different, the onus is on them to be different.
According to Microsoft and Amazon "Season 5" and "The Final Seaon" are 8 episodes each on digital download. According to Best Buy and Amazon "Season 5" DVD Box set is 3 discs (roughly 8 episodes) and was available before "The Final Season" was broadcast. Suffice to say, AMC has decided to sell them as two seasons despite what they have said it being one season.
It sounds like he can prove $22 in compensatory damages fairly trivially using the very argument you just presented (or at least $11 if you consider half the episodes made good on). Multiply that by however many Apple sold if it becomes a class action, and add in punitive damages if the behavior is deemed egregious.
He can prove he paid $22 for "Season 5". He can't prove that he lost value in something considering that downloads are 2.99 each and would have received a huge discount paying 1.375 each. For punitive damages, he must prove Apple did something different other than reselling AMC's product that Microsoft nor Amazon didn't do.
Not getting a discount means spending more money than was advertised. That is obviously damage - a monetary loss is the simplest form of damages to claim in court. As far as liability goes - that seems to be what we're arguing over.
The problem with that is that it was never advertised on Apple's site that Season 5 = 16 episodes. Apple probably didn't know as AMC controls that.
What Apple is doing in the worst light is selling something and delivering something else, blaming somebody else for it, and forcing people to sue them en masse to get their money back.
Resellers (especially those of copyrighted work) have limited liability and ability to change a product. AMC as the copyright holder gets to determine what "Season 5" is and they have decided it is 8 episodes. This is not blame. This is the way it is.
As for as suing, my contention is the guy is suing the wrong party. He should be suing AMC only. As a parallel, there is a class action lawsuit against VitaminWater over false claims of health and benefits. Not named in the suit as defendants are wholesalers, distributors, or retailers. The defendants named are the manufacturers (Coca-Cola). Going after Walmart for claims VitaminWater made would be a waste of time and expense.
As far as compensatory damages go - you say I missed the point and yet I only claimed $11 in damages for him, which to me seems to be the discount he thought he was getting. I'm not sure what exactly you're disagreeing on.
The issue is what he thought was getting could be reasonably determined by your average consumer. He thought he was getting 16 episodes yet at the same time, was it reasonable that the average consumer thought he should get a 40% discount on a brand new season of a popular show? If it looks to good to be true, it usually is. Caveat Emptor.
Sure, but the plaintiff's assumption was based on what everybody does. If I sell you Ford Focus for $15k and deliver a toy car, I'm going to get sued, because nobody would see that price and description and think of a toy car. Apple sold a season of a TV series, and they didn't deliver what they sold.
Everyone is selling "Season