Domain: fool.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to fool.com.
Comments · 549
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Re:Gluttony is a sin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
1. Eating before the time of meals in order to satisfy the palate.
Biblical example: Jonathan eating a little honey, when his father Saul commanded no food to be taken before the evening.[1Sa 14:29] (Note that this text is only approximately illustrative, as in this account, Jonathan did not know he was eating too.)
2. Seeking delicacies and better quality of food to gratify the "vile sense of taste."
Biblical example: When Israelites escaping from Egypt complained, "Who shall give us flesh to eat? We remember the fish which we did eat in Egypt freely; the cucumbers and the melons, and the leeks and the onions and the garlic," God rained fowls for them to eat but punished them 500 years later.[Num 11:4]
3. Seeking to stimulate the palate with overly or elaborately prepared food (e.g. with luxurious sauces and seasonings).
Biblical example: Two sons of Eli the high priest made the sacrificial meat to be cooked in one manner rather than another. They were met with death.[1Sa 4:11]
4. Exceeding the necessary quantity of food.
Biblical example: One of the sins of Sodom was "fullness of bread."[Eze 16:49]
5. Taking food with too much eagerness, even when eating the proper amount, and even if the food is not luxurious.
Biblical example: Esau selling his birthright for ordinary food of bread and pottage of lentils. His punishment was that of the "profane person . . . who, for a morsel of meat sold his birthright," : we learn that "he found no place for repentance, though he sought it carefully, with tears." [Gen 25:30]
I would argue that peopling buying an iPhone X could violate all of these, especially if they upgrade early. As Apple users do, the fucking sinners.
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Re:The scam continues
Bullshitters might be attracted to bullshitters - they might be betting on Elizabeth Holmes. She was able to fleece so many people once before, making a lot of people a lot of money, they might be betting on her abilities again. I mean look back at the year 2000 stock bubble and the 2008 housing bubble. There were many pundits screaming buy! buy! buy! (Jim Cramer, Abby Joseph Cohen, and others) and they suffered no significant negative consequence.
Of course, it's not hard to create an updraft in a stock ("Surely these big money types know something we don't! Get in before it's too late!") that is awash in liquidity injected by central banks around the world operating from the same playbook. There may even be a formula for it (in the context of a high liquidity market, $takeoff_velocity = $amount_injected/$market_cap).
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Re:Phone problem, not really malware's fault
Yeah, pretty much. I found an interesting article on Motley Fool about cell phone replacement cycles
https://www.fool.com/investing...
Apple and Samsung are pushing to shorten them to sell more phones and non replaceable batteries, slowing the phone with each upgrade and moving to people where they replace each year is a way to do that. Meanwhile Americans tend to keep their phones longer and longer, probably because they're pissed off that phones are being increasingly defeatured.
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Re:I'd rather have a slower iPhone
Three phones (that certainly all cost more than 1/3 of an iPhone if they weren't budget phones) versus what would probably be a single iPhone. Yeah, the TCO must be on your side, snort.
I bought an S2 and waited three years to get an S5. And the S5 lasted three years and now I've got a V20. Which will hopefully last three years until I have to replace it.
I.e. I buy a phone every three years. Interestingly I'm not alone in this - Motley Fool say people upgrade every 29 months on average
https://www.fool.com/investing...
"Americans now take an average of 29 months to upgrade their cell phone, up from 28 months at the end of last year, and an increase of 24 to 26 months that was typical just a couple of years ago, as noted in a recent Wall Street Journal article. And just four years ago, the upgrade cycle was just 22 months. "A phone with no removable battery from a manufacturer who degrades performance with each software update isn't going to last you three years. It will be 1-2 tops. And the Motley Fool article points out Apple and Samsung are both pushing for 12 month upgrade cycles.
"But if users are taking longer to upgrade their phones, it's clear that this could be a problem for two of the biggest smartphone makers, Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) and Samsung (NASDAQOTH: SSNLF).
Both companies now have their own yearly smartphone upgrade plans, which allow customers to pay the companies directly for their device each month, choose any of the four U.S. wireless providers, and then trade in their smartphone every 12 months for the latest model."Actually without a firmware reset and new battery, which is tricky on the new phones, I'd have upgraded sooner, probably in 1-2 years. Like Apple, Samsung phones seem to slow down alarmingly with time, and batteries wear out.
So yeah, TCO is on my side over people who buy a new iPhone or a Samsung Galaxy every 1-2 years. And Motley Fool point out that Apple users buy a phone every 22 months with Apple trying to push this to 15.
" Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster said back in February that he believed Apple has already sold about 250,000 iPhones through its upgrade program, which could definitely be considered a success given that it debuted not too long ago. But Munster made a prediction that the iPhone upgrade program would also lower the device's upgrade cycle, which appears unlikely now.
Originally, Munster thought the program would reduce the average iPhone user's upgrade time frame from 22 months to only 15 months. But that 15 month time frame would mean iPhone users would be upgrading their phones 14 months earlier than the average American, based on Citigroup's new data. And with Apple's iPhone sales currently slowing, that quick upgrade time seems even more unlikely. "You go ahead and build your business in your perceived wonderful marketplace. Give it a real good shot & invest everything you have into it.
Do come back in a few years to let us know how you did...
Apple fans show their people skills once again. If I find a viable manufacturer I'd be tempted to Kickstart it, but to be honest I've got other things that I need to work on.
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Re:Check the couch for change.
Rather than make up numbers, why not look them up? Here are some real numbers - have fun with them.
Cost of Medicare per person per year is roughly $12000. Medicare isn't free, either - it's significantly subsidized, but the average subscriber is paying about $7600 a year. So that means that taxpayers are paying about $5400 per year per Medicare subscriber. Medicare payments currently make up roughly 15% of the total US budget, with enrollee premiums and deductibles returning a little over 60% of that.
Cost of social security per person per year is roughly $16320. It makes up about 20% of the total budget. Social Security is (ostensibly) paid for by current-worker taxes, but is certainly going to need retooling one way or another.
Military spending in 2015 was less than 16% of the US budget, although that is currently going up.
Also interest on the debt takes up 6% of the budget.
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Re: Why is this so cheap?
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Re:If it can't stand up to scrutiny, it ain't scie
There you HERETICS go again.
FTFY.
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Re:If it can't stand up to scrutiny, it ain't scie
There you AGW deniers go again.
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Re:sure they do
Makes for less unemployment?
What's cheaper: public housing and food stamps or chemo treatments? How about chemo treatments plus treatment medication that costs as much as a month's worth of public housing plus food stamps per dose - or even much more?
Not to mention the loss of revenue in the manufacturing, sales and marketing of tobacco... They spent $8.2 billion in 2015 in marketing alone according to the CDC, up from 8.0 in 2014.
And I'm sure you cried a big tear in history class for all the slave drivers put out of work after the Civl War, too.
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Will Google end Intel support?
Replace Your Exploit-Ridden Firmware with Linux
Google has already been thinking about switching to POWER chips. Maybe this UEFI thing will be the final push they need?
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Re:Going up in the world
You are mistaking the ULA Cost+ system (milk the system for everything you can making as much profit as possible and hire retiring generals/Astronauts as lobbyists to keep the gravy train running) for the Space-X system (plough profits back into developing the technologies needed in order to be able to send rockets to mars and colonise it). It's true that Space-X now has lobbyists in D.C., but no ex-generals there either to my knowledge.
No ex-generals, yet. Musk is a modern-day Howard Hughes. And that includes building strong ties to government agencies and taking their money. The only difference between SpaceX and ULA is that SpaceX has to hustle harder because they were the underdog. They don't seem to be making money, at least as of 2015. Once they have a solid business, we'll see if they too sit on their laurels like ULA, or if that the cash still goes into R&D. The investors will expect some decent returns at some point, and R&D is usually one of the first items to get cut.
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Re:So is the situation dire enough to
So far, you haven't provided any evidence whatsoever, only made a bunch of unfounded claims, so there's nothing to refute.
You mean like you made unfounded claims? How you provided no evidence? Is it that hard to click on the link I gave and then click on the results?
https://www.iaea.org/sites/def...
https://www.fool.com/investing...Let me guess, because the data comes from the International Atomic Energy Agency and World Nuclear Association it cannot be trusted? I tried to find similar data from someone that might be more neutral on the topic. Why could that be? Perhaps because wind and solar aren't that safe.
Also, you didn't answer my question before. It should be easy enough to find. What is the price of solar power at midnight in Michigan? In January? I found the price for nuclear, about 16 cents per kilowatt hour.
https://www.eia.gov/state/rank... -
Re:This is great news for solar in the USA
Uh no. Most countries do not build their own pickup trucks. They might have pickup trucks built there, but the most popular brands in the world (in order) are Ford, Chevrolet, and Toyota. Essentially all the pickup trucks on the planet are made by one of those three companies.
International popularity of the F-150, Ranger, and Silverado is massive. I don't know where this myth about American trucks not selling worldwide came from, but it is bullshit. Our pickup trucks are the most popular in the world, because they are the best. People talk a lot of shit about Toyotas but they don't build anything made to do work at the level of an F-Series or even a Silverado. The next step up from a full-size, full-fat American pickup truck like a 3/4 ton or 1 ton diesel is a much heavier vehicle, like a Unimog.
As for the chicken tax harming American auto buyers, it really hasn't. In fact, arguably, it's done the opposite. In the recent lull in American mid-size truck production, people bought plenty of Japanese mid-size trucks which were actually produced here in the USA. The Chicken Tax actually has helped preserve or even create American jobs! The only vehicles to which it applies are light trucks, and even then only ones for cargo and not for passengers. We've got a 2006 Sprinter T1N and Mercedes has to drop the front subframe and ship the vehicle and the engine+front suspension separately to dodge the tax. But passenger vans just get sent over fully completed, even though they're the same vehicle with holes cut out and windows slapped into 'em. The truth about the chicken tax is that it is not arduous to dodge around its requirements, and also that its requirements only affect a minority of buyers.
There is one group of people who were harmed slightly by the chicken tax: people who bought Toyota pickups before about 2015 or 2016. I'm not sure which year it was, but in one of those years they finally started sharing drivetrain parts between the HiLux (the international model of pickup) and the American pickups. Parts sharing is important to parts availability, and the HiLux parts in question were also stronger.
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Re:Well this is odd
16 billion is one big whack of cash. I doubt that a single bank would be willing or able to take on that kind of risk out of their own capital.
So, Amazon goes to the bond market, which is much larger than any bank, or even the entire US stock market (in fact it is twice the size of the stock market in capitalization.)
As for not issuing Amazon stock to the current Whole Foods stock-holders, perhaps they fear a dilution, or don't want to influence governance as a result of all those new voting shares. There is an interesting viewpoint on the Motley Fool website. TL/DR: If Amazon is confident about the success of the deal, it makes more sense to use cash. If it is not, then it makes sense to use stock, so that they share the risk with the erstwhile Whole Foods shareholders. Also, Amazon may think that Whole Foods is undervalued, so it makes more sense to use cash.
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Most hated company in the World?
Not the first, second or third time Monsanto have been implicated in major scandals.
Products banned in Europe?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...Hated by customers?
https://www.euractiv.com/secti...A bad investment?
https://www.fool.com/investing... -
Sigh.
Any idiot with money to burn can throw billions at something.
Problem is that they aren't really profitable:
https://www.fool.com/investing...
And they now owe investors a ton of money/results. Though that may have worked for places like Amazon (whose initial investors were incredibly irate about such things), and though it might even make Musk richer (same as Jeff Bezos), it doesn't mean that it will translate into anything people can continue to use in the future when that investment doesn't pay off or provides only tiny margins at HUGE risk.
This is one of those times where you profit by knowing when to leave someone holding the hot potato.
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Re:This is unfortunate
Intel's problem is that they have already cut their losses and ran from the invasion of phone/tablet products. It's the 11th straight quarter of declining PC shipments. Meanwhile smartphone sales are up again now outselling PCs at a rate well over 5:1. Tablet sales are also down (Q1 numbers) so you might say Microsoft has managed to shore up the convertible/laptop market with the Surface line, but WinTel is completely on the sidelines in the global smartphone revolution. According to the platform statistics 53% of all Internet access is now mobile, 42% PC, 5% tablets.
Intel is not in trouble, they have the server market and so far AMD's offering is basically a return to competition, it's a long way to go until Intel is on the ropes fighting for survival. But they and Microsoft completely failed to bring out a good x86 smartphone leveraging the tons of existing win32 code, I don't know why. I mean all the alarm bells should have gone off when the iPhone became a success in 2007, even with 3-4 years development time they should be ready to kick ass around 2011 but instead we got the Nokia flop. Considering the power of phones relative to typical office applications I'm kinda waiting for the phone with a cheap dock that gives you charging, display, keyboard, mouse, a chromebook-like UI and a bluetooth headset in case you need to answer the phone while docked. Like if you already have a phone and a TV, add these accessories and you won't need a laptop.
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Re:The storage problem is working itself outWow you are a lying piece of shit. The number of dead in the Ukraine according to the World Heath Organization is less then 60. The deaths outside of the Ukraine from radiation are 0. That is why nuclear is the safest energy source. Fact.
You are obviously an idiot
...Germany is burning coal. That is what happens when you do not have.a clean source of baseload energy. Fact.
Or do you realy think the nation of minds and thinkers and engineers consists only out of idiots?
Well if they are anything like you yes I do. I think the antinuclear movement is made up of feckless weak-minded idiots who believe lies told to them by the fossil fuel industry.
Which pollution does a nuckear power plant prevent?
Air pollution you stupid fucking twit. And learn to spell.
You can google about both power sources btw
... what is preventing you from getting a clue instead of insulting fellow /. readers!I provided sources for everything, you provided 0 sources. You insulted me several times. You insulted me first. If you can't take the heat stay out of the kitchen you stupid feckless shitwad.
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Re:Sell! Sell! Sell!
It's nicer than saying, "We're reinvesting our earnings into the long term growth of netflix rather than pushing net cashflow that can be paid out as investor dividends because I care more about the longevity of Netflix more than your capital gains" to your shareholders.
Most investors will accept that statement eagerly. If investors only cared about dividends, the startups in Silicon Valley would have no funding.
A company flush with cash has two options to make investors happy:
1. Invest the cash into a new area that promises to have a large return on investment (this case).
2. Pay a dividend, or buy back stock.
The worst thing a company can do is sit on loads of cash, like Apple. -
Re: Unique concept!
SpaceX has had unprofitable periods and profitable periods. General consensus is that it's probably running around the break even point on average, but it's doing that while plumbing a large amount of R&D money into reusable rocket technologies, developing them and currently trying to drive the refurb window down to days. That may not meet your definition of "profitable", but if nothing else, it's employing a lot of people, helping local economies, advancing the state of the art in aerospace, and has directly driven launch costs down while causing competitors to find ways to make access to space cheaper too. That's already a win, even if they go bust tomorrow, which is unlikely.
There's a similar situation for Tesla, plumbing a huge amount of money into a battery factory and generally investing for the long haul, not for immediate profit.
Unlike many businessmen, Musk is not in it for the money. He's in it to change the world in ways he believe are for the better. Will it all work out? Probably some will, some won't (I'm not sold on the viability of the Boring idea), and there are problems with his approaches (e.g, running employees to the bone) but it's still a damn sight more impressive than "schlub at Starbucks". He's done more for the world than you will do if you had a hundred lifetimes to do it in.
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Re:Not exactly a neural lace
Musk is smart to focus on medical applications, where even an implant that functions poorly is much better than the alternative. It's a lot easier to make a pacemaker than to perform a heart transplant, and the same holds true for the brain.
Musk is very good at taking seemingly impossible goals and breaking them down into more achievable ones. Medical implants for the disabled are likely a stepping stone for brain enhancement on healthy individuals.
Another example of this method:
1. Invest in a high performance, low volume, electric vehicle. Profit.
2. Invest in a high end, luxury, electric vehicle. Profit
3. Invest in a high volume electric vehicle. End goal. -
Re:As opposed to Amazon Prime?
A rose by any other name is still a rose. Last year Amazon changed the job title of Andy Jassy and Jeff Wilke to CEO along with Jeff Bezos.
As far as I can tell, in reality Andy Jassy is still VP of AWS and Jeff Wilke is VP of everything else ("Worldwide Consumer") and Jeff Bezos is still CEO. Calling a VP a CEO is stupid IMO.
http://www.geekwire.com/2016/a...
http://fortune.com/2016/04/07/...Google basically did the same thing when it re-organized under Alphabet where Larry Page still oversees all the "CEOs" that are actually VPs of Calico, CapitalG, DeepMind, Google, Google Fiber, GV, Jigsaw, Nest, Sidewalk Labs, Verily, Waymo, and X.
There are companies with more than one CEO who actually share the job. Whole Foods and Chipotle tried it, but it didn't work out for them and they switched back to a single CEO. Oracle has two CEOs in name atm, but from what I've heard Larry Ellison is still running the show and its another case of bad titles. I don't think there are any major American businesses that still have multiple CEOs, but it apparently is more common in other countries like Germany. I don't really know anything about German business though.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/m...
https://www.fool.com/investing... -
Medical tricorder
The competition appears to be for a medical tricorder.
(There are legitimate science tricorder projects as well.)
Fifty-ish medical conditions is a very good start, and I can only imagine that adding more and different sensors will allow such a system to discriminate between more conditions in the future (do these devices ask for human input of symptoms or history?).
Of course, we could never get these approved for use in the USA - the 3.8 million noted in the article would only be a drop in the bucket compared to the costs of certification. If a single drug costs $2.5 billion for certification (and hearing aids cost $5000 and up), imagine how much it would cost to certify an autodoc for 50 diseases!
But this should work quite well in developing countries.
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Re:EV pickup economics
Yeah, an EV pickup would be awesome... but still too expensive, I think.
I think you're being a little too pessimistic. Prices for battery packs are falling and in a few years when someone (Tesla?) bothers to do this sort of truck I think the economics of it will be fairly reasonable. Pricey at first to be sure like any new technology but I think there is cause for optimism looking forward.
I agree that in a few years it will be feasible.
You'd need a 200+ kWh battery to have reasonable range while towing.
Not if you made it a hybrid. I think a hybrid actually makes more sense for a pickup anyway, especially for a work truck. Problem is that nobody has bothered to do an electrified pickup properly yet, hybrid or pure EV. But if we go pure EV, GM has stated that their costs for battery packs are already around $145/kWh which would put your 200kWh battery pack at around $29,000. Expensive sure, but not prohibitively so. If they can build the rest of the truck for under $30,000 (and we know they can) then they are competitive with current high end pickups right out of the gate. Make it a hybrid and you could cut the cost of the battery pack by more than half.
I'd like a hybrid with a detachable ICE which is placed in the bed, up front like a large truck box so it wouldn't interfere with fifth-wheel or gooseneck towing, and with extendable legs so you can jack it up and drive the truck out from underneath it. This would allow you to eliminate most of the front hood; you'd still need to keep a bit for a crumple zone, but wouldn't need much. That would be a huge improvement for off-road driving, where the big projecting hood often obscures the driver's vision of the road. The ICE wouldn't need to be big enough to fully power the vehicle while towing a tall load at highway speeds, it would just need to provide enough range extension to give you, say, 300 miles loaded range. Then you could recharge the battery at a charging station, or let the ICE recharge it, while you eat, etc.
Of course, most of the time I'd keep the ICE parked and use the truck as a pure EV. Give me a couple hundred miles of unloaded range and my everyday driving is covered, and then some.
For camping, I'd drop the ICE in and hook up the camp trailer and take everything up to the mountains, then drop both trailer and ICE at the camp site. The ICE could act as a generator, if needed (though my camp trailer has solar panels), and I could roam the hills on electric power, with the very low center of gravity provided by that big battery along the very bottom of the vehicle (and the big steel plate underneath it). When the battery gets low, back to camp to recharge from the ICE.
What would make it even better is if you could power the vehicle with hub motors, and put the wheels on four independently-suspended extensible jacks. That would dramatically increase the net clearance, with no axles or down-hanging differentials, and would allow the truck to be lowered close to the road for better efficiency on the highway or raised for greater clearance off-road. You could even lift one side for traversing a hillside. And you would no longer have to raise or lower trailer tongue jacks. Lower the truck, back the ball under the tongue or gooseneck and raise the truck. No need for pneumatic levelers, obviously. Granted that there are a lot of challenges with hub motors, since they're unsprung weight, but I think it could be done and there would be huge advantages.
For boating, most of the time I don't go far so I'm sure I could leave the ICE home. But this raises the possibility of getting an electric boat... which the truck's ICE could also be used to recharge on extended trips. I'm a little skeptical of the practicality of an electric ski boat, though. Given how they burn
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EV pickup economics
Yeah, an EV pickup would be awesome... but still too expensive, I think.
I think you're being a little too pessimistic. Prices for battery packs are falling and in a few years when someone (Tesla?) bothers to do this sort of truck I think the economics of it will be fairly reasonable. Pricey at first to be sure like any new technology but I think there is cause for optimism looking forward.
You'd need a 200+ kWh battery to have reasonable range while towing.
Not if you made it a hybrid. I think a hybrid actually makes more sense for a pickup anyway, especially for a work truck. Problem is that nobody has bothered to do an electrified pickup properly yet, hybrid or pure EV. But if we go pure EV, GM has stated that their costs for battery packs are already around $145/kWh which would put your 200kWh battery pack at around $29,000. Expensive sure, but not prohibitively so. If they can build the rest of the truck for under $30,000 (and we know they can) then they are competitive with current high end pickups right out of the gate. Make it a hybrid and you could cut the cost of the battery pack by more than half.
I mean, ICEV trucks are $60K and people do buy those -- lots of them -- but at more than double the price?
Like I said, I don't think you'd have to double the price to get something pretty reasonable on the road.
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Re:Taxes are for dummies
"I would support the Buffet rule of making over 5M in income you pay 30% tax no matter what. Most of the super rich are getting income from dividends which is taxed at 17% and then they take deductions."
Not that I'd argue against raising it...but I believe it's 20%...
https://www.fool.com/retiremen...And how do your deductions affect...? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
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Re:Taxes are for dummies
But as a percent of income the rich buy less, thus paying less taxes. That's why sales taxes are considered regressive, hitting the poor and middle class more.
For the most part, this is simply due to the tax on investment income (capital gains) being taxed at a lower rate than income you make from say your actual job. The more you have, the more you're likely investing it, the more it becomes the largest part of your income. And please note, I'm discussing "long term capital gains", not short term. For anyone interested, there's a good article explaining the rates here...
https://www.fool.com/retiremen...NYT does a good historical story on it here http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01...
So, the question becomes, does it make sense to have a lower rate on investment income? There are arguments against it, primarily focused on "fairness", and how the govt. could increase it's tax base. The opposing side argues that it's better for the economy as a whole to keep the lower rates...
http://www.nola.com/business/i...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/h... -
Re:Is Google slowly Dieing?
That package includes its mobile application development platform Fabric, the Crashlytics crash-reporting platform, mobile app analytics tool Answers, SMS login system Digits, and development automation system Fastlane.
https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/01/23/google-buys-parts-of-twitter-but-doesnt-want-the-w.aspx
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This is actually dangerous
I know everyone wants to back the little guy, but Netflix is actually recreating the very monopolies we are trying to break-up:
The common complaint about cable was that they bundled everything together. You had to pay a monthly fee, you couldn't pick your channels a la carte, and if you wanted to watch "Game Of Thrones" you had to subscribe to HBO and pay monthly, even for just one show. In addition, nobody liked having to pay for cable TV & internet both, since it felt like the same service from the same company. Then to make matters worse, you had to buy HBO on cable just to stream the show on HBO's web site, which made no sense. (HBO might have fixed this, but the same goes for other channels, and sporting events.) This drove piracy mainstream.
But the bigger issue is that telecommunications companies are buying out content providers. This merging is dangerous, because a telecom company controlling say, a media news outlet, can't be unbiased. And there is nothing to stop them from offering certain content on their networks only.
Netflix threatened to break that all up. I could buy my internet from anyone, subscribe to Netflix, and have so much content we didn't need cable TV. We no longer paid for TV "channels" we didn't need. But then Amazon Prime came along, and then we needed to buy Netflix + Amazon. Oh, and buy Hulu for your TV watching. So now, we need to again buy all these services in order to have access to a full catalog of content. We are back to premium TV channels again. But at least we gained our a la carte stations!
But if Amazon and Netflix start to offer exclusive content, we get back to the media companies (Amazon, Netflix) being content providers too. I want to watch just one show, and I have to subscribe to Netflix. I's the HBO Game-of-thrones scenario all over again.
The solution is, and has been for 40+ years, to break apart the monopolies. We must separate content delivery companies from content creating companies. That no longer just means the telecom monopolies shouldn't be content providers, but it also means the streaming companies can't be content creators, and transitively, the telecom can't be either one. This gets us back to the ideal world where we choose our telecom company, choose our streaming service, and choose our content - all separately. Every streaming service should be able to provide all content, or nearly all of it. Competition comes back, we no longer have the zero-rating problem..
So cheer Netflix's success, but be careful what you wish for. At the present rate, we will all be paying $50/month for all these streaming services just to get the content we need.
P.S. We also need to stop each streaming service provider from using their own protocol. You bought a Roku box last year huh? Well, you can't access the newest coolest streaming service because they didn't make a firmware update for that service. If 20 years ago, you told people that their TV or cable-box needed a firmware update every time a new channel came-out, they would be attacking the telecom companies with pitchforks. Yet that is happening today and people accept it.
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Try Again...
Don't know about the new Slamdung SoC; but the A10 in the iPhone 7 still outperforms the Qualcomm 835.
And the A11 is just around the corner.
Just sayin'... -
Re:Way more than that
Might want to update that conservative estimate there squirt. Its more like 100 Billion in debt. No wonder they are worried about 14B
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Re:Pro Shareholder Agenda
Corporations should focus on their employees and their customers, not shareholders.
This can be read as "businesses should focus on their employees and their customers, not their owners".
Now, explain why, exactly, someone should buy part of a business if they're not going to get some benefit from doing so....
Shareholders shouldn't get anything more than a share of profits relative to their share of shares. Just because you've put a bit of money in a company (alongside thousands to millions of other people) doesn't mean you should get a say in anything. If you don't like what the company is doing take your shares out. Fair enough shareholder meetings where they put their views to the company are a good thing but the company shouldn't be beholden to anything.
For companies that don't issue dividends (like Facebook), they don't distribute a share of their profits to their shareholders, so the only way an "investor" can profit from money invested in shares is to trade their shares to someone else to generate a return. Also in most states (including Delaware where most US corporations are domiciled), have the requirement that controlling shareholders and boards of directors have a specific fiduciary duty to minority shareholders (e.g., has to act for the benefit of the minority shareholders). Clearly Mr Zuckerberg hold a position that would be considered a conflict of interest in this matter so if he does anything to make the share price go down, but somehow he "profits", it might be considered breaching the fiduciary duty.
As a theoretical example, say if Facebook were to issue a special stock dividend of non-voting shares (in lieu of money) to all registered shareholders, they might dilute they *say* they have in shareholder governance and make the stock potentially worth less to other people, but allow Zuckerberg to donate non-voting shares to various charities w/o losing the majority of votes. You might say by this action, Zuckerberg profits and the other share holders might suffer a bit relatively to Mr Zuckerberg... Wait, didn't that just actually happen?
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No honor among thieves
"The FTC claims that to prevent Apple from launching a WiMax iPhone after Sprint deployed its first WiMax network in 2008, Qualcomm 'agreed to rebate to Apple royalties' received from the iPhone maker's contract manufacturers 'in excess of a specified per-handset cap.' In other words, Qualcomm allegedly let Apple pay lower royalties to secure a long-term spot in the iPhone, lock rivals out of the baseband market, and deal a fatal blow to the WiMax standard."
http://www.fool.com/investing/... -
Re:Looking Back
3 years ago they predicted 100,000 in 2016
http://insideevs.com/tesla-pro...
In January of 2016 they were projecting over 3,200
http://www.fool.com/investing/...
The 100k prediction for 2016 was by a Forbes contributor, not Musk or Tesla.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ch... -
Looking Back
3 years ago they predicted 100,000 in 2016
http://insideevs.com/tesla-pro...
In January of 2016 they were projecting over 3,200
http://www.fool.com/investing/... -
Re:Why not Windows 10 Mobile on x86?
I think MIPS has a fair chance in the market as well, but you are right that x86 won't cut it
Imagination Technologies purchased MIPS for only $60M and attempted to entice SoC manufacturers to use their cores for mobile. But mobile never played out for them and the company started losing money with that strategy so now Imagination is also retreating to the embedded space from mobile like Intel. So we are back to ARM being the only realistic choice.
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4425*850=4 million pounds of satellite
That is an enormous amount of weight to send up. Space-x is aiming for (has not achieved) $1,000 per pound. Their current cost is more realistically $4,000.
4425*850*4000=$150,450,000,000. Then add the cost to send up another 4427/7=630 satellites per year (630*850*2000(because they'll get costs way down if they can send up that much material)=$1 billion dollars per year. They need to spend 150 billion dollars initially and an ongoing 1 billion dollars per year.
In 2014 SpaceX had a "market cap" of (optimistically) 12 billion dollars. Let's assumt that 12 billion dollars have already been justified. Now rumors of an IPO have been heard, so let's assume a massive over-the-top IPO: 13 billion dollars. Then add in a billion dollars. (assuming every penny they can scrape together goes to this plan) 12+13+1=26 billion. Using realistic numbers for launch costs and hyper-optimistic numbers for funding, they're about 125 billion dollars short. And I don't see Trump signing a 125 billion dollar Space-X pork bill. If we're very optimistic about launch costs that hypothetical bill could go as low as a still-highly-unlikely 75 billion dollars. -
Re:Bad Reason
Well it's actually Intel's fault for only supporting LPDDR3 instead of LPDDR4 in Skylake. They choose to do this because LPDDR4 memory is more expensive, and from this article, http://www.fool.com/investing/...
The Skylake processors Apple used, the 2.9GHz i5 6267U and 2.6GHz Core i7 6600U, support DDR3LP and DDR4.
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Re:Bad Reason
Well it's actually Intel's fault for only supporting LPDDR3 instead of LPDDR4 in Skylake. They choose to do this because LPDDR4 memory is more expensive, and from this article, http://www.fool.com/investing/... it says that an increased cost of RAM would result in one of the following:
1. PC vendors will cut corners elsewhere to accommodate the more expensive memory within a fixed price point, potentially hurting the user experience.
2. PC vendors will raise prices, which could lead to lower sales and thus reduced processor sales for Intel.
3. PC vendors' margins will contract.Which Intel didn't want to do. That combined with the delays for the release of Skylake and its successor Cannonlake (which does support LPDDR4) leave us with the current situation.
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Re:So many problems...
Meanwhile, the average American spends $775 dollars a year for Cable TV.
http://www.fool.com/investing/...If you gave them a choice between an $600 EpiPen that they may not need (but may save their life) and missing out on Keeping up with the Kardashians or Monday Night football, I'm sure the later would win out.
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Re: green fantasies
And you're an anonymous coward, so what's the point? Nuclear is VERY cost-efficient, and compact in terms of footprint. The reasons that it doesn't appear so at the moment have nothing to do with the technology, but the efforts of environmental groups to stop them. Years of red tape, study after study, injunction after injunction raise the costs and time for construction considerably. Do you honestly think it takes decades to build a reactor because of the technology? Seriously? They aren't "piddling around", they're being interfered with, obstructed, and delayed. http://www.fool.com/investing/... I am a realist. Mini-nukes - the kind on aircraft carriers and submarine are very cost-effective, incredibly safe, and the military literally has decades of data on their output and function. I had a brother who was in the navy, and they used to sleep on top of them. And it will scale fine...you're still thinking about large-scale plants like three mile island. I'm talking about reactors the size of refrigerators that arrive fully-fueled and automated. You never have to do maintenance, you never have to adjust them...and when they're out of fuel, the entire unit becomes a disposal container. They don't have to be large enough to power entire states, just small towns and cities. And before you whip out your Bush Derangement Syndrome, it's Obama (and GE) that are building and deploying them NOW. http://news.nationalgeographic...
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Corporate welfare
It amazes me how a company, sitting on as much cash as Apple has tucked away (i.e., appx $200Billion), still needs to be the beneficiary of corporate welfare.
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Re:Finally...
Apple may not care about DRM one way or the other but they do care about people bypassing their cash generating MFi program and their proprietary lightning connector and using the "audio" jack as a data connection interface. I'm sure they're still trying to figure out how to make Square pay the fee.
Bullshit. Apple looks the other way on NON-MFI devices ALL the time. Or do you really think all those $2.99 Lightning cables on Amazon are MFI-registered? Wait, you're probably stupid enough to actually think they are.
You can buy a spindle of the chips required to make a Lightning cable at less than $0.50 a chip at a quantity as low as 1000 units. The price obviously decreases with volume. Then it's another $10,000 to join the MFI program. So, yes, I bet you could ship a $2.99 lightning cable from China to the US if you have the right volume.
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Re:Finally...
Apple may not care about DRM one way or the other but they do care about people bypassing their cash generating MFi program and their proprietary lightning connector and using the "audio" jack as a data connection interface. I'm sure they're still trying to figure out how to make Square pay the fee.
Bullshit.
Apple looks the other way on NON-MFI devices ALL the time.
Or do you really think all those $2.99 Lightning cables on Amazon are MFI-registered? Wait, you're probably stupid enough to actually think they are. -
Re:Finally...
Apple may not care about DRM one way or the other but they do care about people bypassing their cash generating MFi program and their proprietary lightning connector and using the "audio" jack as a data connection interface. I'm sure they're still trying to figure out how to make Square pay the fee.
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Re:Untouchable criminal
By that line of reasoning its perfectly understandable why we have money to build tunnels under highways for the mating routes of turtles, but we cant provide funding for sufficient mental health care for the TWENTY TWO US VETERANS who commit suicide every day. (https://www.22kill.com/)
They come from different budgets.
Here's a list of stupid shit the government has spent money on : http://www.fool.com/investing/...
Would you argue that any of these are more important than some other project you think is vital? Do you think they are more important than, say, wellfare support for the elderly? How about for funding food for underprivileged kids? How about wellness checks for people with disabilities?
Would you look any of the people directly impacted by the lack of funding in those programs in the eye and tell them that they really have no argument at all for their concern about the waste in the list above because "they come from a completely different pool of money".
You're a fucking hypocrite and/or a complete moron. -
Re:Wow
Tesla ditched Mobileye, and not the other way around. Mobileye's stock went down by 10% after this. Tesla's didn't.
Welcome to slashdot, where the moderators are dumbfucks and the points don't matter. Guess what? Mobileeye ditched Tesla, to spend more time working with other manufacturers. They probably saw the writing on the wall: Tesla wants to control every part of their car internally, and working with Mobileye was just a way to get their foot in the door sooner with a product. Sooner or later, Tesla would have dropped them. While their stock has taken a big hit since the announcement, it's probably best for them in the long run. It's also great for Tesla, since they can deflect some of the blame onto their now-departed partner.
Whose stock dips after an announcement doesn't inherently tell you anything, mostly because the market is not rational.
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Too bad Apple shutdown Ammosexual
Sure bicycles are an okay hobby and have an emoji, sure taking a dump has a turd emoji dedicated to it, but going to the range is a hobby that gets Tim Cook's panties in a twist.
Microsoft is just as bad, but everyone considers them evil anyways.
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Re:I know lots of people
http://www.gamespot.com/articl...
Clickbait from 2014.
http://www.fool.com/investing/...
Clickbait that claims that the Fire TV/mobile is a competitor to the PS4/Xbox.
http://www.cnet.com/news/xbox-...
This one is about Windows apps on Xbox, and has nothing to do with your premise.
http://news.softpedia.com/news...
Clickbait from 2009, which means the "last generation" they were referring to was the 360 and PS3!
Sony is talking about no future playstations.
I've seen nothing of the sort, citation needed from SCEfoo themselves.
And as to ease of use... learn to use a computer or render yourself too incompetent to participate in the modern world.
I run Linux so by my standards, you windows using gamer dudebros are the incompetents who shouldn't even be trusted to admin their own computer.
The level of competence required to manage a gaming PC is within the easy reach of a ten year old child. If that's too much for you... then that can only be pitied.
The masses simply can't be trusted to admin their own machines well. They don't have the time, knowledge or inclination. Said people should not be gaming on PC's....at all. They probably shouldn't even be using PC's for web browsing or media consumption.
Again, I run Linux, so NEVER pull that "console gamers are dumb" shit with me.
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Re:I know lots of people
http://www.gamespot.com/articl...
http://www.fool.com/investing/...
http://www.cnet.com/news/xbox-...!
http://news.softpedia.com/news...
The writing is on the wall. MS is talking about making the Xbox effectively a gaming PC with a console formfactor. Sony is talking about no future playstations. The industry is moved on.
The entire console system doesn't make sense. Its more expensive... period. In every way. The quality that you get is generally a lot less. Compatibility is less. And as to ease of use... learn to use a computer or render yourself too incompetent to participate in the modern world. The level of competence required to manage a gaming PC is within the easy reach of a ten year old child. If that's too much for you... then that can only be pitied.