Slashdot Mirror

Why is this downrated? The GP made a completely false claim, and also alluded to the use of tariffs to "protect its manufacturers", like that's some sort of bad thing.

That's completely absurd. China is well known for dumping. You might want to look at what dumping is (horrendous link, but whatever). The reason why Chinese dumping is so significant is that their dumping practices are backed by their government. In the US, if a company is dumping, they are also gambling with their own future that the future market gains they will obtain by dumping will be able to overcome their immediate losses. That risk generally prevents the practice, although it still may happen from time to time, however it is more often practical in such cases that the results are much better for consumers say in a more long term low price stability. There are also regulations protecting markets from monopolization by companies using influence from other markets to corner them - you might recall Microsoft's problems with Internet Explorer, for example.

For many instances of dumping from China, that is not the case - their immediate losses by dumping their products are backed by their government, so they are taking on much less risk by doing so. Their government is simply buying the market - buying global monopolies, and getting around local anti-monopoly provisions while doing so by making it appear as though the businesses are playing fairly in those local markets. China's government is effectively picking the winners and losers in these cases, and gains significant influence over these sectors of the global economy through these actions. There isn't much of a way to combat this except through tariffs, unless you want the US to begin the same anti-competitive practices.

But the US is not Brazil, and stating 220%+ tariffs on solar panels is just garbage. Even Brazil wouldn't go that far. Heck, Iran wouldn't go that far. At that point you'd just simply ban them - like China has banned importing US corn.

> Front running is placing an order BEFORE the other order hits the queue because you know the order ahead of time.

And many, if not all HFT practicioners, do exactly this. See:

http://www.investopedia.com/ar...

Quoting the article:

“Electronic front running,” which involves a HFT firm racing ahead of a large client order on an exchange, scooping up all the shares on offer at various other exchanges (if it is a buy order) or hitting all the bids (if it is a sell order), and then turning around and selling them to (or buying them from) the client and pocketing the difference.

> ARBITRAGE IS GOOD FOR EVERYONE!

I'm afraid that you keep saying that as if it were true. It's not. Arbitrage has limited benefits, and for modern stock markets HFT inserts an entirely unnecessary and undesirable layer of arbitrage. The same transactions would be available directly to most traders a few seconds later, with profits and risks more directly accessible to them, without any high frequency trading whatsoever. given lightspeed delays, the delay before they can receive the same starting information is no approximate 100 msec, even on the other side of the world. Given analysis delays, the ability of other algorithmic orders to make their trades is no more than 1 second. But the HFT traders have already bought and sold and bought and sold the same stock a dozen times before the ordinary trader can respond, shaving most of the available profit right out of the transaction.

Unnecessary middle men are a bane of many markets. The HFT systems insert themselves not as a single middle man, but as many middle men transactions shaving off profits in numerous thin slices as a stock price shifts rather than in the manageable segments available to ordinary traders without their size and their tools.

Your salary is not part of your credit report.

http://www.investopedia.com/as...

Seems there are plenty of methods, no more difficult than shorting pretty much anything else.

That got 5 insightful? Slashdot, your standards are dropping

http://www.investopedia.com/ne...

What is a 'Bubble'
A bubble is an economic cycle characterized by rapid escalation of asset prices followed by a contraction. It is created by a surge in asset prices unwarranted by the fundamentals of the asset M and driven by exuberant market behavior.

Broken window fallacy. If there hadn't been any storms, the money those places will now have to spend on repairs would've been spent on other business instead. So that construction boom comes at the cost of other business jobs. i.e. There's no net increase in number of jobs, it's just that money has been siphoned away from other jobs to pay for construction jobs.

Also see opportunity cost. Like most people, you are incorrectly calculating opportunity cost by comparing to a vacuum (construction repair jobs vs nothing). A correct analysis compares the benefits of construction vs what was given up to pay for that construction.

Broken window fallacy. If there hadn't been any storms, the money those places will now have to spend on repairs would've been spent on other business instead. So that construction boom comes at the cost of other business jobs. i.e. There's no net increase in number of jobs, it's just that money has been siphoned away from other jobs to pay for construction jobs.

Also see opportunity cost. Like most people, you are incorrectly calculating opportunity cost by comparing to a vacuum (construction repair jobs vs nothing). A correct analysis compares the benefits of construction vs what was given up to pay for that construction.

You can't stop progress, robots are so much better and cheaper (in the end) than using humans for a lot of things (especially factory/warehouse stuff).

HA! If that were actually true then my job would be a lot easier. My day job is to run a manufacturing plant. I'm an industrial engineer as well as a cost accountant and I make these sorts of decisions regarding automation daily. Your estimation of the cost/benefit of automation is not even close to reality for all but a few corner cases. Robots only make economic sense when you are talking about relatively large unit volumes or certain types of high value precision work or very dangerous jobs. They are not always faster or better and they sure as hell are not always cheaper. Yes that includes "factory/warehouse stuff".

Simple example. My company makes wire harnesses. There isn't a machine in existence that can automate a substantial portion of what we make for anything remotely resembling a reasonable cost. The machines that do exist to make some limited portions of what we manufacturing are either limited to fairly narrow jobs like lead making (cutting, stripping, and crimping wires) or ones that can do wider numbers of jobs cost literally millions of dollars each. Some specialty jobs they do faster or better but not nearly as many as you are probably imagining. To replace humans in general you will have to come up with a robot that is as trainable, as dexterous, and cheaper than a human. Good luck with that because we are no where close to that level of automation much less getting there for economically reasonable cost.

With the current rate of automation we are actually already to late do handle the loss of jobs and how to figure out how we could give those people a better live.

There is no data to support this assertion. Unemployment is well within normal ranges and showing no signs of changing. There has been no measurable long term displacement of workers by robots. What data there is shows that worker displacement is a result of poor economic and education policy, not automation. In places like the US the losses in manufacturing jobs are in reality a function of labor costs, not automation. What happened is the labor intensive jobs went to places with low labor costs. When politicians talk about bringing manufacturing jobs back what they are really promising (though they don't know it) is to lower wages to compete with places like China because that is the ONLY way those jobs are coming back. Do you really want people working for $1-2/hour?

After WWII when the rest of the world was rebuilding for a few decades folks in the US had a remarkable run of economic prosperity in large part due to a lack of competition. Those days are gone and now the US and other prosperous countries are going to have to compete globally. If you think automation is the biggest threat to your economic prosperity then you are delusional. The biggest threat is the 50% of the world's population in Asia (esp China and India) who have been sitting on the economic sidelines for over a century. Now that China has woken up and India is threatening to do so the game is different. You can worry about automation killing jobs in the short run if you want but you are worrying about the wrong thing.

having 4 companies control wireless telephone system over the entire United States, and absurdly high barriers of entry, is enough to make them a monopoly IMHO.

I'll disagree with your take on this, and I mean this in the kindest of ways, but your use of "monopoly" makes me question whether you know what it means. Yes, they're huge, yes, they're dug in, and yes, I wish there was more competition, but, monopolies are defined by their exclusive (or near-exclusive) control over a market, so none of those factors means these companies are monopolies. It just means that the market has high barriers to entry and that the current players are entrenched. If anything, the fact that there are four of them competing with one another points towards a lack of a monopoly.

T-Mobile is a monopoly. They have exclusive rights to certain frequencies, granted to them by the US government.

Now that's a far more interesting point to make, and one I hadn't heard before. Even so, it still doesn't make them a monopoly (at least in any meaningful sense of the word) for one simple reason: individual frequencies are not a market. Individual frequencies are part of a much larger market, of which T-Mobile only controls a small portion.

Think of it this way: any given apple farmer has the exclusive right to use their farmland (which, like a frequency, is a limited resource) to grow their apples, but that doesn't mean they have a monopoly over either the market for farmland or the market for apples. Yes, their patch of dirt is different than everyone else's, and yes, they have exclusive control over their unique location, but that doesn't mean they have a monopoly (again: exclusive control of a market), since there's plenty of other farmland that's just as useful and plenty of other farmers producing apples.

Likewise, there are plenty of other frequencies that are just as useful for cell phone use, and plenty of other carriers providing cell service over those other frequencies. As such, T-Mobile neither has a monopoly over the market for frequencies nor over the market for cell services. That may change in the future, but for the moment, that's where things stand.

As for whether Netflix being bundled is a good or bad thing, so long as consumers have alternatives to T-Mobile and T-Mobile doesn't prioritize Netflix's traffic, things should shake out acceptably, though I'll admit that the market may go in directions we may not like along the way, in much the same way that most of us loathe cable TV bundles.

Meh. The unemployment rates also provide actual facts, and facts that paint a much more accurate and complete picture than the labor participation rate.

• U-1 tells the long-term unemployed (out of work for over 15 weeks) who are still actively looking for jobs as a percentage of the LPR.
• U-2 gives the number of just-now unemployed (who lost jobs during the most recent reporting period) as a percentage of the LPR.
• U-3 gives the total number of people currently collecting unemployment benefits who have no job at all (not including underemployed) as a percentage of the LPR.
• U-4 gives U-3 plus the number of people who have stopped looking for work and who gave a job-market-related reason for doing so, as a percentage of [LPR + people who stopped looking for market reasons].
• U-5 gives U-4 plus people who have looked for work at some point within the last year, but are no longer actively looking for work, regardless of the reasons for doing so, as a percentage of [LPR + all people who stopped looking]
• U-6 gives U-5 plus involuntary part-time workers, as a percentage of [LPR + all people who stopped looking + involuntary part-time employees].

The declining labor participation rate is largely because of:

• Baby boomers retiring
• More people deferring work for college

both of which significantly reduce the number of people who are out looking for jobs, and neither of which is a sign of actual unemployment. That's why U-3 uses the LPR as a baseline. It removes the bias that would otherwise be caused by non-job-market-related trends in employment numbers.

The original pyramid investment scheme takes it's name from this phenomena.

http://www.historic-uk.com/His...

http://www.investopedia.com/fe...

I really don't know how their hardware unit is going to survive with only $4.15bn in revenue.

Kindly acquaint yourself with the difference between revenue and profit.

I really don't know how their hardware unit is going to survive with only $4.15bn in revenue.

Kindly acquaint yourself with the difference between revenue and profit.

Is it unhackable?

No. There is an inherent flaw in the design, the 51% attack.

"The mining pool ghash.io briefly exceeding 50% of the bitcoin network's computing power in July 2014, leading the pool to voluntarily commit to reducing its share of the network. It said in a statement that it would not reach 40% of the total mining power in the future."
http://www.investopedia.com/te...

Another flaw in bitcoin is that its design assumes that anyone can be a miner. That was an incorrect assumption. CPUs and GPUs can not economically mine bitcoin, specialized ASIC hardware is necessary. So mining is not done by the masses as assumed, it is done by a specialized few.

Re 51% attack - that's getting pretty close to impossible even for governments.

It wasn't a government, but Bitcoin has already had a single entity in a position to launch a 51% attack, fortunately they did not desire to "attack".

"The mining pool ghash.io briefly exceeding 50% of the bitcoin network's computing power in July 2014, leading the pool to voluntarily commit to reducing its share of the network. It said in a statement that it would not reach 40% of the total mining power in the future."
http://www.investopedia.com/te...

It's always fun when someone runs in, days later, to reply to a comment with something so brief and nonsensical. It probably won't be read by anyone else, it probably won't be moderated up or down, and it's probably not going to convince the parent poster that he or she was wrong.

People keep saying that, but here we are in 2017 and BTC is trading at more than $4,000 USD.

My tiger-repelling cologne has also never failed to disappoint. That does not mean that it is actually tiger-repelling.

The GP stated that "there is nothing less real about Bitcoin than other fiat currency." I've identified a difference, in that nobody threatens actual force to require an entire population to transact in Bitcoin. Whether a small number of people are currently willing to purchase Bitcoin for some surprisingly large number of dollars does not change that. In fact, I have yet to attempt a purchase in which someone would only accept Bitcoin. It's a second- or third- tier payment option outside of the "Dark Web." It effectively does not exist for me.

I and essentially everyone I know must have dollars to pay Federal, state, and local taxes. That means that we all need dollars, and will transact in dollars, for a large portion of our economic needs. Bitcoin is merely a speculative investment. You'd be an idiot to sell it according to your apparent logic. That's the opposite of fiat currencies that are expected to operate as stable-valued mediums of exchange.

Norway has no minimum wage, and has higher incomes and less inequality than America. Other countries with no minimum wage: Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland.

So, if the stock goes down, will Amazon have to pay higher taxes? That doesn't make much sense..

No. Amazon's taxes should not change no matter what the stock does, they deduct that expense when they pay the employee just like they deduct any salary or bonus. If it goes up the employee pays more taxes on it when they cash it out.

Not if UK income tax law works like US income tax law (and the article implies it does). Such stock grants are not considered income to the employee or an expense to the company until they vest, which happens well after the grant and on some specific schedule.

In the US, these are called Restricted Stock Units. http://www.investopedia.com/te...

Interesting. In the US, that would count as ordinary income in the year the stock was given; the tax effects make it an uncommon practice

False, on both counts.

In the US, such stock grants are called Restricted Stock Units (RSUs), and they're actually quite common in large tech companies, and in some other parts of industry. My employer (Google) grants them, and I get them; in fact they constitute about a third of my income.

The way it works is that the grants vest on some schedule. For example, each year after my performance review I'm given another bloc of RSUs, on a four-year vesting schedule. Each month, 1/48th of each grant vests. At the point in time when the stock vests, not when it is granted, it becomes income to the employee and a cost to the company. At vesting time, some of the shares are sold to cover income taxes and the rest are deposited into a brokerage account for the employee.

(Actually, I have asked to have my shares automatically sold upon vesting and the cash deposited into my bank account, then I move it to my brokerage and invest it in index funds, on the theory that my financial future is already tightly bound with Google's success, so I should diversify. I recommend that anyone who receives stock or option grants consider doing the same.)

        http://money.cnn.com/2017/08/0...

Man talk of the wrong link, the first paste tried to take one to facebook Correct link: http://www.investopedia.com/as...

No, the way it works is they sell an offshore subsidiary their IP then their US corp pays royalties on the IP they license from the offshore subsidiary wiping out their profits in the US.

One version of that scheme is Double Irish with a Dutch Sandwich

Or they could open a bank with their money and loan it out at fantastical-yet-perfectly-legel cash-to-debit ratios that make modern banks possible.

At some point all successful programs grow until they read mail.

At some point all successful for-profit-only companies grown until they become banks.

Nope, you are trying to claim that all liquid assets are cash. No, it's another way round, cash is one type of liquid asset.

... oh my god. You're trying to use ECON100 from high school!

Hey, what's bringing the price of LCD monitors down? A boom year for LCD monitor crops?

Putting aside the attempt to lean on the broken ideal that supply-and-demand is the primary factor in prices, no, I'm not confounding factors. I'm using the DEFINITION OF INFLATION. You're saying a penis is a long, narrow body part, like the five penises on your hand; and I'm saying a penis is exclusively the thing between your legs. One of us is wrong.

Mabye you can read up on inflation.

You say things like, "When inflation is low...", but you miss something: central banks keep inflation at a specified rate. In the US, we try to keep 2% inflation per year. Technical progress constantly causes deflation; we create an inflation benchmark--a measure of the change in prices of various groups of goods--and try to adjust that to be +2% per year on average.

So our CPI inflation is, ideally, 2%. Let's say we nail it one year, and the CPI considers $102 2018 dollars to be equivalent to $100 2017 dollars. Does that mean the central bank issued enough dollars to drive prices up by 2%?

No, not exactly.

Most likely, technical progress has brought the inflation benchmark goods down by 0.5% or so. That means the central bank has had to drive up those prices by an average 2.5%, creating 2% inflation.

That "2%" number is the reduction in purchasing power of a fixed sum of money (e.g. $100). The portion of that inflation caused by the increase in money supply is 2.5% (i.e. more than that 2%).

Inflation isn't the change in price caused by some source; it's the change in prices. Full stop. The definition of inflation doesn't care about the source, just like the definition of a meter doesn't change whether you're using a ruler or a tape measure to measure it.

https://www.usnews.com/news/be...
http://www.kitsapsun.com/story...
http://www.investopedia.com/ar...

You can also see it in the cost of a 26' UHaul between Texas and California/NY
Los Angeles, CA to Dallas, TX: $2,558
Dallas TX to Los Angeles: $1,232

NY, NY to Dallas, TX: $2,772
Dallas TX to NY, NY: $653

Everyone who wanted one in the short term snapped them up right before the tax went into effect.

There's definitely that going on, but not only was there a big fat goose egg for registrations in April, there were only 5 in May: http://www.investopedia.com/ne... Anyway you look at it, that's a huge drop off in demand because a government subsidy was taken away.

Prisons have instituted ridiculously expensive phone plans to help pay for their costs.

This is wrong, placing an undue burden on both the families and the prisoners.

More to the point of the article, it creates what economists would call a market distortion that encourages a thriving black market in cellphones. As long as they don't allow phone service at anything approaching market rates, there will be black market phone service. This is as close as economics has to an immutable law. This situation is no different than the USSR back in the day trying (and failing miserably) to set their own currency conversion rates. Or Canute trying to order the tide.

So the contraband phone problem is 100% their own fault.

Do you even ever read the things you write or do you just like to make rectally sourced claims with affected authority.

You're arguing that there's little profit in residential electricity sales, even though this is something that you can actually look up (the first hit gives an average margin of 8-10% worldwide).

You're arguing that the low profits are what keeps other people from opening electrical utility companies, which is ludicrous. These are the the quintessential natural monopolies.

Then you finish up with the assertion that implementing rate-following metering would make it hard for utilities to stay afloat, even though I described direct experience with a co-op that has been doing that for decades.

Very convincing.

Why dont crypto currency exchanges learn from the history of stock markets? This is a known issue and is solved in stock markets using "Circuit breakers" : http://www.investopedia.com/te... Will exchanges go through all the teething problems that stock markets faced, or will they leverage what stock markets have learnt over the last few decades?

The source of all of this is the back-room, corner-office rants of Comcast, AT&T, Charter and other carriers that Google, Amazon, Uber and Netflix have made billions over their pipes. It's the same thing that if the mafia boss hadn't been scaring off the petty thieves from robbing your store, you wouldn't be successful today, so pay up the protection racket and be happy with it. I suppose building out an internet from backbone to last mile is a thankless, un-sexy job compared to making movies and selling stuff. Why shouldn't they get a piece of that action? I'm sure major Activest Investors are pressuring CEO's with that question all the time. Comcast, at least, put the question a little bit to bed by buying NBC/Universal and becoming content-creators themselves.

But Net Neutrality will never be quite as simple as common-carrier was with the plain-old telephone system (POTS). No, Comcast shouldn't be able to extort more money out of Netflix, even though Netflix may be the service that's choking up their antiquated lines somewhere, generating complaints and forcing them to pay for upgrades in a region they weren't planning to upgrade for a while. But what about E911? or catastrophe alerts? Should that get prioritized? What about when surgeons start running robots on the operating table over the internet... should they get the opportunity to arrange for a near-real-time point-to-point pipe? Wall Street will pay big bucks for that kind of throughput, if that means they can robo-trade just one nano-second ahead of their competitors.

These are policy questions that need smart, thoughtful far-sighted people to work out in a way that benefits everyone in the right way. But our current political climate is a lot of shouting, short-sighted fake-news FUD, coupled with I'm-just-looking-out-for-me bullshit. So, I'm not holding my breath for any resolution soon. "Net Neutrality" will keep coming up, generate a lot of shouting, followed by confused looks, and then out-and-out falsehoods on Fox and Friends:

what is this "neutrality" anyway? isn't this just a way to shut down the bloggers? this is a free country, I have strong opinions and I shouldn't be forced to be "neutral" on the Internet if I don't want to be...

whereupon Net Neutrality will go dormant for a month or two before another big tech CEO brings it back up again.

http://www.investopedia.com/te...

but America losing it's manufacturing base probably hit them just as hard.

Several problems with that statement.

1) America hasn't lost its manufacturing base. That is a myth unsupported by facts. American manufacturing is alive and well and produces over $3 TRILLION in goods annually. The manufacturing that has left is labor intensiveNobody's encouraging kids to go into EE anymore because there's no jobs to speak of (out side of the top end design work, which just doesn't employ that many). I'm not gonna buy my kid a bunch of electronics to learn for a career that finished going overseas in the 90s.

False. My day job is to run a manufacturing company that makes wire harnesses. Your prediction of the death of electronics could not be less true. I deal with this stuff on a daily basis. The auto industry is hiring all the electrical people they can get as we electrify cars. A typical car has many miles of wires and more electronics than any other device most of us use on a daily basis.

i give you B- for economics

Gee thanks professor.

Republic of China had two decades of economic growth while having a deliberately set deflationary monetary policy.

I presume you are talking about Taiwan. Please cite your source for "deliberately set deflationary monetary policy". The Taiwan Dollar exchange rate has varied quite a bit on Forex markets in relation to the dollar but never consistently deflationary.

This is a country that now supplies 90% of world's microchips

Taiwan does supply the most but the number is no where near 90% and to my knowledge never has been.

For whatever reason many, such as yourself, particularly "conservatives" fail to realized that both unions and companies engage in "collective bargaining." A company is a collection of people providing capital, a union is a collection of people providing labor. Strikes, work halts, layoffs, furloughs etc are all the same arm of different groups (using your market influence). Collective groups exercising their power to get better terms.

If you don't think union's represent the interest's of a labor provider you are ignorant of both the statistical evidence https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2... (there are a multitude of papers detailing the correlation between union power and increased wages) and basic economics http://www.investopedia.com/te...

"One of the main purposes of inflation and interest policy is to prevent people from saving all their money and postponing purchases."

No, we have inflation and low interest rates because of excessive borrowing. It is not a policy per se

Yes, it is:
"While excessive inflation and hyperinflation have negative economic consequences, deflation's negative consequences for the economy can be just as bad or worse. Consequently, policy makers since the end of the 20th century have attempted to keep inflation steady at 2% per year"
( http://www.investopedia.com/te... )

This is macroeconomics 101 stuff.

As one who has a degree in economics I feel qualified to seriously disagree with this statement. People need to save, in order to provide capital for investment. Quantitative easing dries up capital markets, diminishing bond returns, pumping up the stock market, and discouraging saving. Again you're taking an effect and declaring it a cause.

Your degree in economics is not worth much, given the previous assertion on inflation, so I will disregard your appeal to authority. Quantitative easing has nothing to do with what the ideal consumer looks like from an economics point of view.
As to your point about investment: I was talking about the ideal consumer. There are tons of institutions that provide capital for investment, for instance:
- The government
- Enterprises
- Banks
- Insurance companies (a consumer spends his money on insurance fees, but this money does not evaporate -- instead it is pooled in an institution)
These obviously should not spend almost all their money immediately. Big, big difference.

The fantasy that Northern European countries prove that socialism works is just that, a fantasy. Their systems are simply fucked up in a different way than ours, and the people there complain just as much as people here do. Your allegations of xenophobia are false, people are nervous there because crime is going up and they are concerned about their safety due to the open border policies. I've spent quite a bit of time there, not as a tourist but as a worker, and the good old USA is still a heck of a lot nicer. Folks there want our system, did you know that?

This is pretty much all bullshit and I'm afraid you're deluding yourself. Source: I live there. Honestly, there was a time when the US was the promised land, so to speak. Almost everybody was wearing clothes with US flags on them and praising the land of the free. Things have changed, though. After the threat of the Cold War subsided, people over here slowly started to see the issues of the US. It doesn't help that apart from the tech industry the US hasn't been really improving.

I'm not joking here or trying to be a dick, but I'm guessing about 75% of Northern Europeans think Americans are out of their mind. Sure, there's a contingency of right-wing 'populists' who support Wilders, Le Pen and the likes who also like Trump, but the rest of us is very aware of the idiocy (of electing) him. We also know it was caused by years of Republican obstructionism and populism, by a political system that is corrupt to the core and principally stabilizes on a two-party oligopoly.
It has made it easier for people to see that we don't have it too bad here. Honestly, our systems aren't fucked up in a different way than yours. They aren't really fucked up at all. Hardly perfect, but not 'fucked up'. Could you give some examples of what I'm missing here?

I am at a loss to understand why you think velocity of money has anything to do with UBI.

I already explained it. Please read my statements again.

I'm also not clear how you can claim that poor people make bad decisions but if we give them welfare in a different form they will make good ones.

Because of lower stress leve

C) How the market for commodity retail goods works. Normal margins are about 3%, similar to Walmart. Do you really think they're going to destroy Walmart any time soon?

Amazon's e-commerce business is a very profitable sideline for them, but they make their money from AWS. They sell much more "stuff" overall, but 90% of Amazon's profits are from AWS.

Anyway, for retails goods which are available for any company to sell, the profit margins are always slightly over the actual sales cost. This is because there is plenty of competition which will undercut on price very quickly if you raise your prices. Amazon has distribution, sales costs and volume advantages over most other companies, so they're able to price lower for most stuff. That doesn't mean they can ever raise their prices to anything higher than their next closest competitor's costs without being undercut in turn. They know that, so they keep their prices lower than the competition in order to keep their customer base.

It probably just looks that way to you from the employee side because you overlook everything that the company does buy for you, and concentrate on the few things you want/need but the company hasn't bought yet.

From the employer's viewpoint, the cost to hire an employee is typically 1.5x to 3x the employee's salary. 1% is roundoff error.

Traders are finding it too difficult to make money with High Frequency Trading (HFT) since everyone and there mother is doing it.

http://www.investopedia.com/news/high-frequency-trading-flash-boys-losing-steam/

Aha -- some reflexive mod found the -1, TruthHurts option. That certainly makes up for the utter lack of ability for anyone to cogently articulate what they think the real endgame will be -- can be -- to trying to regulate the latest act in the tragedy of the commons.

hahahah-, oh wow you're serious, let me laugh some more.

marginal production cost: the cost to produce one additional item. In the software world, you build an app, test it and load it on the server. The marginal production cost is the cost of one more person clicking on your 'Download' link.

I'm guessing that you don't work anywhere in or around the software business.

China disagrees, and has prospered because of it:

The Chinese yuan has had a currency peg for years. This approach makes Chinese exports cheaper and, therefore, more attractive relative to those of other nations. By providing the global marketplace with greater motivation to buy its goods, China can help ensure its economic prosperity.

As long as a currency peg keeps the yuan low relative to other currencies, consumers using foreign currencies can buy more of China's exports than they would if the yuan was more expensive. For example, if the People's Bank of China keeps the yuan weak compared to the U.S. dollar, consumers using the greenback can buy more Chinese exports than they would otherwise.

Perhaps you have a different definition of backlog than me.

The great news there for us technical folk is that if 20 programmers are working today, you can be sure they will need 40 in a few years to clean up the mess the 20 left.

Maybe, maybe not. High Frequency Trading is losing its luster and might be on the way out.

http://www.investopedia.com/news/high-frequency-trading-flash-boys-losing-steam/

There are only two possibilities: either the programmer in question is a hobbyist, or a pro.

My question was about the transition from the first of these "two possibilities" to the second. But first, let me make sure we agree on definitions. To me, a "professional" means one who has been paid for his work in a particular field. Am I right? Or are you instead defining it as one who seeks to be paid for such?

I thought one's project to become a professional had to be done with hobbyist tools in order to afford professional tools for the next project. The only ways I can see around this are A. to earn money for the required tools in a day job in a different industry, or B. to release hobby projects to establish one's reputation and then crowdfund the tools needed for a simultaneous 5-platform release of one's first professional project. Which one is more practical?

If the former, then Virtualbox (or whatever other emulator/virtualization system is applicable) would be fine.

I thought it was copyright infringement to run macOS in "VirtualBox (or whatever other emulator/virtualization system is applicable)" on anything but a Mac.

If the latter, then two phones and a Mac Mini is affordable.

Do you consider it a desirable state of affairs to give Apple a monopoly over computers used by developers? If so, why is this an exception to the inefficiency of monopoly?

"I've been a tech journalist on and off for 21 years and I can't remember any company having a worse month news cycle-wise than Uber is now."

Not that Uber isn't evil, because they are. But it would be interesting to know who holds the most shorts on them.

And, pay a lawyer enough, and they'll "sign off" on anything. Doing it for obstruction of justice seems to be a risky proposition, though. I'd think that would (or should) put the lawyers into a disbarring type situation, if not criminal sanctions.

You buy a $100K car to run Uber?! Take responsibility for your actions if it doesn't work out.

Depends - if you buy the $100K car because of representations made by Uber, then yes, Uber would have a case to answer for. (In some jurisdictions, you can actually sue for things like that- although I don't know how easily or if it would really work.) Of course, you would have do your own due diligence too.

Going up market never made sense

Well, only Google knows the real reasons for the Chrome Pixel, but the speculation I have seen is that it was intended as a "halo" product, to show how nifty a ChromeOS device could potentially be. It's not desirable for customers to think of ChromeOS as being the OS you have to put up with on dirt-cheap hardware. Showing off ChromeOS on hardware about as nice as a MacBook Air has some value; whether it's sufficient value to really be worth it, I won't speculate.

It's possible that making a sexy notebook for Google people to carry around was one of the reasons as well.

Keep in mind that one of its features is a colorful light strip with no functional purpose; Wikipedia claims it is there "purely for its cool factor".

Also keep in mind that Google developed the inexplicable Nexus Q. Someone at Google thought that was a good idea. The Chromebook Pixel was a giant success in comparison. (My own theory: the Nexus Q would be a pretty nifty device to set up in a college dorm room, assuming that everyone who routinely wanted to use it had an NFC-equipped mobile device. I think that's why it was made with built-in amplifier adequate for driving small speakers. For any other use case its feature mix was... questionable.)

Now that I know you are from Russia, I can start to understand your viewpoint. You saw the absolute worst-case scenario for how communism could turn out, so it's only natural you would embrace the exact opposite of the spectrum.

The real joke of it all is that the US is the worst-case scenario for capitalism.

All the evils you saw in communism growing up, I see those same evils in capitalism. Both systems served to enrich the powerful at the expense of the weak, the only difference was the particular lie they used.

Instead of a small group of men controlling the means of production in the name of the greater good (the communist lie) it's a small group of men doing the exact same thing in the name of individualism and self-betterment (the capitalist lie)

No system of government or economy that humans can create will ever be immune to the slow rot of corruption, the only solution is to tear it down and start over every once in a while (or wait for a war to tear it down for you, which was the whole point of the original article)

however, it is consumption of goods that were *not paid for* that causes the trade deficit.

I'm not sure you understand what a trade deficit is. It doesn't mean China sent the US stuff and the US never paid for it (like some gigantic unpaid bar tab). It just means that the US bought more stuff from China than China bought from the US, leading to a steady flow of money into China that never comes back. http://www.investopedia.com/te....

The debt that the US owes to China is a totally separate issue, where the US federal government has been constantly borrowing money from China to cover the yearly budget deficit, and is now stuck paying tons of interest on that loan because they can't even begin to pay it off.

As far as taxes being theft like you said before, a government needs money somehow. Every government in the world either collects taxes (Europe, US/Canada, etc) or confiscates natural resources such as oil and gold to sell to other countries. (Middle east and parts of Africa). There is also the 3rd option, which is to just spend nothing on government and let the warlords figure it out (parts of South America and Africa)

If you know of a way a government can pay for itself without collecting taxes or taking natural resources from the people (or simply descending into anarchy), I would love to hear your solution.

That's an argument for closing tax loopholes, not for building regressiveness into the system.

Yeah, I'd like to close all the tax loopholes and make the system much simpler and transparent. The more complicated you make it, the more likely people will find ways to game it. I'm willing to give up a lot of potential perfection and tuning to get simplicity.

We probably need a better definition of "regressive". I think my idea differs from yours. I think we both agree the SS tax is regressive: you tend to pay a lower percentage of your income as your income goes up. Income tax is progressive, you generally pay a higher rate as your income increases. How about your typical state sales tax? I don't think that's progressive or regressive: everyone pays the same rate, regardless of income. It sounds like you believe it is regressive because you're looking at the tax dollar as a percent of income, not a percent of what's being taxed.

I got curious and looked up the definition of a "progressive tax" and found both of our definitions. Wikipedia thinks if the rate goes up as the taxed amount goes up, it's progressive. Investopedia thinks a progressive tax has a higher rate for higher income people, not on the value of what is taxed. Interesting.