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One thing all stock market crashes have in common is debt. Stock declines force margin calls, which forces selling, leading to more declines, a vicious cycle.

Margin trading for individual investors is a recent development. Previously, individual investors were not allowed to open margin accounts. As this old article explains, China brokerages became nervous of the margin debt at the peak. As soon as brokerages tightened margin requirements, the selloff began. This article from December 2014 goes into a little more detail on the recent history of margin in the China markets.

There is also Shadow debt in the market, off-balance-sheet debt invested in the market, sometimes at a leverage of 3 to 1. Normal margin accounts are much more restrictive, about 9%. This shadow debt has been around for a few years now, but the latest boom is much more recent.

It should be noted that the China market has had huge booms and busts in the past, without the more recent leverage.

One thing all stock market crashes have in common is debt. Stock declines force margin calls, which forces selling, leading to more declines, a vicious cycle.

Margin trading for individual investors is a recent development. Previously, individual investors were not allowed to open margin accounts. As this old article explains, China brokerages became nervous of the margin debt at the peak. As soon as brokerages tightened margin requirements, the selloff began. This article from December 2014 goes into a little more detail on the recent history of margin in the China markets.

There is also Shadow debt in the market, off-balance-sheet debt invested in the market, sometimes at a leverage of 3 to 1. Normal margin accounts are much more restrictive, about 9%. This shadow debt has been around for a few years now, but the latest boom is much more recent.

It should be noted that the China market has had huge booms and busts in the past, without the more recent leverage.

Aside from maybe some tshirts I really cannot think of any "ironic embrace of vintage" that resulted in a meaningful resurgence of a product

How about Pabst Blue Ribbon beer? Or the otherwise inexplicable growth of vinyl record sales?

True to the nature of hipster-ism, these things will decline again at some point. But the presence of cool tastemakers interested in retro stuff is a real thing that impacts sales beyond just their own ranks. God help us all if these people rediscover fax machines.

Don't worry, continentals. You'll be catching up to us soon: http://qz.com/89553/europeans-...

Well, at least your wine, beer and cheese is better... oh wait, it's not.
http://www.worldbeercup.org/wi...

Examples of abuses this is to prevent in the future?

First, Comcast throttles Netflix as it competes with their own services, Netflix then is forced into paying Comcast for a connection (rather than their hosted proxies that worked for years):
http://qz.com/256586/the-insid...

The FCC specifically declined to intervene in this. From their published rationale:

As discussed, Internet traffic exchange agreements have historically been and will continue to be commercially negotiated. We do not believe that it is appropriate or necessary to subject arrangements for Internet traffic exchange (which are subsumed within broadband Internet access service) to the rules we adopt today.

Different example please?

Then Verizon decides to hop on the bandwagon, Netflix is forced into buying a connection from Verizon too, then Verizon is still throttling them:
http://www.extremetech.com/com...

I buy a 100Mbps connection from a local data center. Explain to me how that's different than "throttling."

If they're really getting less than their contract provides for, couldn't they just use the courts?

Why do you need the FCC?

Netflix pays for internet access already (through L3 I believe)
I requested them to send me traffic, and I am on Verizon.
Verizon has NO right to throttle traffic that I as a customer of theirs has requested.
The throttling was so bad, I wasn't even able to play 320P video over my 75Mbit symmetric connection.
They did the same thing to Youtube, constant buffering breaks in videos.

This is not what the internet is supposed to be, I pay for a huge pipe, I should not be punished for trying to use 1/10 of it to watch a video.

What evidence do you have that Netflix video content is uniquely being throttled? That if I were to host my video website on L3, it wouldn't have the same connection issues?

Keep in mind Netflix is a majority of Internet traffics, so symmetric pipes are necessarily impossible.

If the FCC was really going to help, isn't that a failure of the premise of Title II regulations in the first place?

Examples of abuses this is to prevent in the future?

First, Comcast throttles Netflix as it competes with their own services, Netflix then is forced into paying Comcast for a connection (rather than their hosted proxies that worked for years):
http://qz.com/256586/the-insid...

Then Verizon decides to hop on the bandwagon, Netflix is forced into buying a connection from Verizon too, then Verizon is still throttling them:
http://www.extremetech.com/com...

Netflix pays for internet access already (through L3 I believe)
I requested them to send me traffic, and I am on Verizon.
Verizon has NO right to throttle traffic that I as a customer of theirs has requested.
The throttling was so bad, I wasn't even able to play 320P video over my 75Mbit symmetric connection.
They did the same thing to Youtube, constant buffering breaks in videos.

This is not what the internet is supposed to be, I pay for a huge pipe, I should not be punished for trying to use 1/10 of it to watch a video.

Degrees donâ(TM)t matter anymore, skills do
http://qz.com/340304/degrees-d...

Wish it was easy.
http://qz.com/380153/black-par...

Black parents are homeschooling their children to avoid racism
http://qz.com/380153/black-par...

You really want Zuckerberg to be providing internet on top of the spring loaded trap called Facebook?

Facebook’s plan to find its next billion users: convince them the internet and Facebook are the same

http://qz.com/5180/facebooks-p...

"They trust me — dumb fucks,"
-Zuckerberg
http://gawker.com/5636765/face...

3 million may not make or break things...

What about the 3 million working fast food? If they keep demanding $15/hr, at some point robots start to make sense. They might cost half a million or whatever, but they work 24/7/365.

What about all the coffee shops?

http://qz.com/134661/briggo-co...

"Starbucksâ(TM) 95,000 baristas have a competitor. It doesnâ(TM)t need sleep. Itâ(TM)s precise in a way that a human could never be. It requires no training. It canâ(TM)t quit. It has memorized every one of its customersâ(TM) orders. Thereâ(TM)s never a line for its perfectly turned-out drinks."

Yea, that will take awhile to happen as well, and you might say "but it won't make my double mocha whatever just the way I like it and I'd never trust anyone else but my guy to do it right", but millions of people don't care and just want a decent cup of coffee.

Imagine if the price could come down by a dollar a cup and taste the same? Imagine if there was no pressure from $15/hr demands from workers who turn over faster than the moon rises?

--

A whole lot more than 3 million jobs can be replaced by robots.

Yes, it might take 25-50 years to see it happen, just like it has taken that amount of time to see the first home computers go from "weird hobbyist things" to common every day things. But it will happen.

Look back to the Apple 1 in 1976 and ask yourself if anyone from that time would think that we'd all be carrying around a computer in our pocket with a wireless connection to the information of the world and enough storage to put any big business computer of that era to shame, and everyone would laugh at you.

That is where robots are today. Laugh all you want, but in 25-50 years, they may be as common as a smartphone is today, and just as cheap.

The only product Apple has that's actually end to end encrypted is iMessages.

also facetime audio and factime video. they basically have a secure communication platform, except for email.

Keeping servers fully blind as to the data they're working with is an open field of academic research. It's not something that Google or Facebook or Twitter or DropBox or whoever are holding back from because they hate privacy. It's just a really hard problem.

google makes all their billions from reading people's communications and tracking their searches then advertising against it. they have incentive to not solve this "hard problem".

Advertising as a business model may not be perfect but it's the reason that people in Africa can buy smartphones for $30 and use services like Google Maps, Search, Photos, etc. People who live outside affluent countries matter too.

this is a fair point and something that I need to think on some more. but it could be argued that many people who rejoice at a $30 phone don't fully understand how much they're giving up when they get one.

The advantage Apple has is that they don't rely on advertising for any significant part of their revenue.

That's the theory Apple is peddling. It doesn't match up very well with reality though.

Firstly, don't get me wrong, I love Tim Cook's stance. I love that Apple is pushing encryption. I don't want to see them stop. But Silicon Valley needs to move as one here, and this sort of competitive sniping isn't really helping.

The only product Apple has that's actually end to end encrypted is iMessages. But WhatsApp is also encrypted in the same way, and that's owned by Facebook, which makes its money by advertising. So much for that theory.

All the other cloud products Apple has work in exactly the same way as their competitors do: you upload unencrypted documents to Apple, who then store and process them for you. And this is a technological constraint, not a business model constraint. Keeping servers fully blind as to the data they're working with is an open field of academic research. It's not something that Google or Facebook or Twitter or DropBox or whoever are holding back from because they hate privacy. It's just a really hard problem.

And finally Apple does of course have an advertising product. It has iAds. That has not been a successful product for them, but it's not for lack of trying.

So when you actually examine the details of Apple's products, you see that they're not really any different to what their competitors are doing. Cook's statements sound good to the non-expert listener, but it's just marketing.

What's more, there's a rather problematic assumption underlying Cook's position. Apple indeed makes most of its money from the extremely fat margins it makes from iPhone buyers, who consistently pay way over the odds for what they're getting. But it's only possible for Apple to subsidise its cloud offerings via fat hardware margins because Apple ignores the low end of the market. Indeed, given their attempts to destroy Android, it's fair to say Apple not only ignores the low end but would be quite happy if people too poor to buy an iPhone had no smartphone technology at all. Advertising as a business model may not be perfect but it's the reason that people in Africa can buy smartphones for $30 and use services like Google Maps, Search, Photos, etc. People who live outside affluent countries matter too.

" let educational professionals decide how best to invest that money"

That's a bad idea if there ever was one. The quality of schools in the US has been steadily declining ever since the federal government started sticking its nose in. More and more bureaucracy, regulations and administration. Less and less effective teaching.

You know, if federal control of schools were any good at all, the schools in Washington D.C. would shine. Instead, despite their huge budget (second highest in the country), D.C> schools are the worst in the country.

Send all of the "educational professionals" to flip hamburgers. Return schools to state and local control. Hire teachers who hold degrees in the subjects, instead of in education (this might be important). Some places will be disasters (but they already are). Others will finally be able to do something about fixing their schools. Without all the federal regulation, it'll probably cost a lot less, too...

Chile's Calbuco volcano erupted on April 22, "at around 1800 local time". The second picture in this article shows the eruption at sunset. From that picture, you can see that the ash and smoke from the eruption have begun to spread. According to this web page, sunset in Chile these days is about 7:10 pm. So about an hour after the eruption, the clouds of dust and smoke had already started to spread.

Does anyone know if the smoke and ash particles are magnetic? If so, then maybe we can cut down on their spread through the atmosphere, by putting billions of magnetically-charged balloons into the atmosphere above Yellowstone, just before the eruption. Hopefully they would attract some of the smoke and ash particles, and eventually fall back to the earth.

(Of course, this assumes that we'll have a few hours warning before the eruption, and that the balloons are all ready to go.)

• I create a website which propagates falsehoods about Pastafarians. I tie up with the ISPs to allow free access to my website. Lots of people start fanatically believing everything that they read on my website since they do not have access to other websites which offer unbiased opinions.
• I create an app for transferring money. For each transaction I deduct a certain amount for my services but my app itself can be accessed for free. People end up paying for each transaction even though there might be other apps(not tied up with ISPs) which transfer money without any extra charges. In fact, a certain percentage of people won't even know that other alternatives exist.

In a traditional peering arrangement the traffic is bidirectional and costs would balance out. With Netflix traffic, that's no longer true

You are missing the point. The traffic for Comcast will always be less bidirectional than for a transit provider, because they are a last-mile provider. In other words, the majority of traffic entering Comcast's network is for delivery to its customers, not transit to another network. This has always been true and has not changed because of Netflix.

That border is congested because Netflix is sending data through it in large volumes. Netflix is profiting from this traffic, and is paying their ISP -- but not Comcast, who is now expected to upgrade their border connections to make Netflix happy and more profitable. Who pays for that?

Nonsense. If this were about a few thousand dollars worth of hardware upgrades, it could have been settled a long time ago in a number of different ways,
1) Comcast and Cogent renegotiate their peering arrangement. This doesn't happen because the peering arrangement actually works fine. Cogent can definitely pass the costs of a new peering arrangement back up to Netflix. This hasn't happened.
2) Level 3 offers to buy Comcast routers for their congested points. This has happened. Comcast refused.
3) Netflix offers to host a CDN within Comcast's network, paying all the costs of maintaining and running that CDN. This has happened. Comcast refused.
4) Comcast asks its customers to pay more for the extra bandwidth they are using. This hasn't happened.

Instead, Comcast went with,
5) Let the service degrade to such a point that Netflix has no other option but to pay their extortion fee.

Don't be fooled. Comcast knows exactly what they are doing. They don't want Netflix competing with their cable and video-on-demand services, that they sell to the same customers that also buy their ISP service. They want a cut of Netflix's profits, the same way a traditional cable delivery arrangement is made with other content providers.

This article breaks it down pretty well,
http://qz.com/256586/the-insid...

Pay attention to the figure at the end. After Netflix started paying, quality returned to 720p within one week. There are no hardware issues here. Comcast flips a switch and it is done.

Uhh, no. Neither "net neutrality" as a concept nor "net neutrality" as enacted by the FCC ruling is about cable companies. Both are about ISPs. Cable television is a different service.

You are missing the point again. Comcast is a cable company. It makes money selling cable channels and service to its customers. Those same customers also buy ISP service. Comcast has seen demand for cable decrease as online video has become more popular: Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, Apple, etc. This is a problem for Comcast because it makes a lot more money, and has a much stronger negotiating position, with its cable services than its ISP service. It doesn't want to lose the control it has over content providers on its cable service to "the Internet".

It wasn't going to take long for all of the last-mile networks to try to turn themselves into cable companies.

What an interesting statement.

Verizon, not being a traditional cable company, does want to sell their own video-on-demand service. So it makes complete sense that they would be in the same boat as Comcast. As soon as there is precedence for differential agreements on content, every ISP will want a piece of the action. Don't think Comcast will be the only one trying to get a piece of Netflix.

So go to a different ISP.

Sure, as soon as there is another one in my area (not seeing that happen any time so

That's just my own personal experience. You don't have to look very far to see the many, many other unbelievably stupid litigations that have made the news (hint: they all seem to resolve around the courts in a certain East Texas district). And the one failure I pointed out happened to cost my company a lot of money to resolve. Why should we keep putting businesses through the wringer for the sake of lawyers and patent trolls?

So, yeah, I wouldn't mind tossing the concept of software patents altogether. By any reasonable standard, it's been a disaster for the software development industry over the past few decades. How many more years of failure would you like to see before you're convinced it's a bad idea? Maybe another few decades of patchwork fixes and band-aids?

The idea of patenting software is and always has been a dubious notion at best. Just because it's the law of the land now doesn't make it a good idea in the slightest. We should follow New Zealand's example and simply assert that software is not an invention and therefore shouldn't be patentable.

Yo ass-hole http://qz.com/256586/the-insid... enough said.

In fact women of great standing within tech have long said the exact opposite and that it's the constant lies and fearmongering from Social Justice types convincing people there's a wage gap that doesn't exist.

There's a word for when someone uses fear and lies to control someone else's behavior for their own gain. Generally we call that an abusive relationship.

http://qz.com/256586/the-insid...
Similar stories with Verizon and other ISPs.
Of course, Hulu doesn't have to pay those fees because they're backed by the cable companies.

Hell, certain "High Speed Internet" providers aren't even willing to apply a 10GB Fiber from one rack, to another, to help their users get content faster.

http://qz.com/256586/the-insid...

I remember seeing an interview with someone at Netflix, which basically said "Comcast has the bandwidth to carry all Netflix traffic, without issue. Netflix has the bandwidth to carry all the traffic requested by Comcast customers to Comcast, without issue. We have the capacity, they have the capacity, and if they need networking equipment so we can add a 10GB connection from our rack to their rack (at the COLO) we're willing to buy everything needed. They just won't do it"

The truth is Music Publishers want to "Kill" Pandora - They want keep a obsolete business model - this would also benefit the NAB (terrestrial radio - which is dying) http://qz.com/197344/pandora-a...

So, a little bit of reality here...

In India, what we take for granted as a "background check" is actually not possible. While here in the US we have a massive database called NCIC (which is really the name of the organization that runs it, but everyone calls it NCIC anyways) there's not really such a clearinghouse in India. The individual municipalities keep their own records...often on paper...about past crimes, but there's no centralized source where you can go and check. As a result, "background checks" basically don't exist, because they are exercises in futility unless you're looking to check on a specific event related to a person.

Now, to be 100% accurate, I will say that India did just recently create a centralized database, a year ago I believe. But the database is barely getting any input at all at this point. And on top of that, fake documentation is really easy to obtain in India, there's a lot of corruption...there's a larger systemic issue with just being able to take someone's unique identifying information and do a "background check" to make sure they haven't been convicted of raping a whole school or something in the past.

I've run into this before, with regard to situations where certain kinds of business processes and information handling couldn't be outsourced because of regulatory requirements for background checks, but I also found an interesting analysis that is in the context of this situation with Uber: http://qz.com/308888/the-secre...

So, a little bit of reality here...

In India, what we take for granted as a "background check" is actually not possible. While here in the US we have a massive database called NCIC (which is really the name of the organization that runs it, but everyone calls it NCIC anyways) there's not really such a clearinghouse in India. The individual municipalities keep their own records...often on paper...about past crimes, but there's no centralized source where you can go and check. As a result, "background checks" basically don't exist, because they are exercises in futility unless you're looking to check on a specific event related to a person.

Now, to be 100% accurate, I will say that India did just recently create a centralized database, a year ago I believe. But the database is barely getting any input at all at this point. And on top of that, fake documentation is really easy to obtain in India, there's a lot of corruption...there's a larger systemic issue with just being able to take someone's unique identifying information and do a "background check" to make sure they haven't been convicted of raping a whole school or something in the past.

I've run into this before, with regard to situations where certain kinds of business processes and information handling couldn't be outsourced because of regulatory requirements for background checks, but I also found an interesting analysis that is in the context of this situation with Uber: http://qz.com/308888/the-secre...

Malaysia is the most obese country in Asia.

Malaysia: 44% adult men overweight or obese

USA: 71%

Western Europe: 61% average (e.g. UK 67%)

Thailand: 32%

Thailand's adults are a lot slimmer than the average European, but Thai children have mostly caught up to European children's weight.

"Care to point to the source"

Haha is this wikipedia? I'm telling you things you can google, not applying for a job as your bitch.

You know that statement about extraordinary claims needing extraordinary proof?
Well, ordinary claims just need you to use a search engine, or even just start on wikipedia. You don't get to play skeptic with life, assuming that before you change your precious worldview something has to be tied up and cited. You have the power to google it your goddamned self.

But, fuck it. I'm on vacation.

You can find a TON of first hand accounts of crazy fucking bullshit in North Korea. Here's some who talk on social media after having been there as a tourist:
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/c...
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/c...

Here's one on social media who mentions having taught there, and brings up the "repelled incursions" I referred to, in addition to crazier shit involving netting on cars:
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/c...

Also you can find firsthand accounts all over, not only from social media:
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/c...
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/c... ..but from other media as well
http://www.cracked.com/article...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
http://www.dailylife.com.au/li...

Essentially ALL of these mention that the internet is pretty well shut down and only the North Korean fake version is available- in Pyongyang. You know, their BIG CITY.

Here's a wikipedia link.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...

Some quotes:
"As of late 2014 there are 1,024 IP addresses in the country."
"Despite the incident, many citizens of North Korea may be oblivious to the existence of the internet."

http://qz.com/315969/in-north-...
http://money.cnn.com/2014/12/2...

"Nearly all of the country's Internet traffic is routed through China. Firms that monitor that traffic say it is comparable to only about 1,000 high-speed homes in the United States."

I'd like to repeat my earlier point, however:
You don't need to source a claim to be correct. The world isn't wikipedia.

A Quartz article says the DHS accidentally released more than 800 pages "demonstrating how easy it was to hack elements in power and water systems."

The article says the DoD bought devices that would protect power plants from attack:

“DOD bought several of the iGR-933, they bought them to give them away to utilities with critical substations,” Weiss said. “Even though DOD was trying to give them away, they couldn’t give them to any of the utilities because any facility they put them in would become a ‘critical facility’ and the facility would be open to NERC-CIP audits.”

Assuming this article is accurate (I don't know how power stations work), I hope the new Congress will care enough about security to force utilities to secure themselves. I'm not holding my breath, though.

Google disagrees.

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/20...

The Russian Internet giant Mail.ru said on Tuesday that it had bought the remaining stake in Vkontakte, the country’s largest social network, that it did not already own for $1.47 billion.

Mail.ru is owned by Alisher B. Usmanov.

From http://qz.com/268023/this-puti... :

Usmanov is one of Russian president Vladimir Putin’s “oligarchs,” a group of businessmen with close ties to the Kremlin, and last year Putin awarded him Russia’s highest civilian award, the Order for Service to the Fatherland.

That ought to clear up who is running/owns VKontakte.

Voting should be a civic obligation for everyone in this country. The United States is supposed to be the role model for democracy, but 58 other countries have better voter turnout. Some third-world countries are able to get 90% voters out to the polls. Americans suck as voters.

Yeah right, living of Hartz IV is just great.

Historically Germans always preferred renting over owning a home.

It is pretty much impossible to evict somebody, and there is strict rent control. So there is no downside for the tenant, (believe me I know, I own a house in Heidelberg and there's hardly any profit in it. Just got lucky that the renter is building himself a house, so I can sell it fairly soon untenanted).

I never stated plumbing was a lucrative job, I don't even think I hinted at it. Automation has it's place, but many things are not better given our current ability to automate.

These wealthy tech billionaires see the writing on the wall and are trying to help equip the masses to be more relevant in tomorrow's job market.

These wealthy billionaires did not become wealthy billionaires by altruism, sorry. I appreciate your opinion, but I don't believe for one second that they have societies best interest in mind with this push. I consider that they read the reference I provided and took the message of Sophistry and Machiavelli instead of altruism. I could be wrong, but you would have to provide with evidence and we would have to debate case by case.

WW II? Think WW I

http://qz.com/290183/in-2014-c...

In addition to being a Microsoft loyalist, he was perceived as being willing to change things and look outside an insular culture. More importantly, perhaps, he is a genuinely nice person who both Steve and Bill love, and who people seem to actually want to follow. Gates decision to take a more active role also required someone he could work closely with.

http://qz.com/278237/heres-how...

An alternate link to the article at quartz: http://qz.com/281619/what-it-t...

I attended a talk a couple years ago by someone from Harvey Mudd who talked about how they increased their CS undergrads from 10% women to 40% women. The most relevant change was probably

As part of this first step, the professors divided the class into groups—Gold for those with no coding experience and Black, for those with some coding experience. Then they implemented Operation Eliminate the Macho Effect: guys who showed-off in class were taken aside in class and told, “You’re so passionate about the material and you’re so well prepared. I’d love to continue our conversations but let’s just do it one on one.”

I'd like to highlight that while this helps women succeed, it does not involve any sort of preference for women: it helps everyone in a way that is most visible by the increased retention of women.

The other major thing they did (and this does not scale at all) was taking all of their CS women undergrads to the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, so they could be in an environment where they were not the minority.

The latest recession was never called the mancession.

How is this rated informative? It is plain wrong.

You could find the same few examples (among many others) with a simple Google search, but since that is obviously too much work ...

Mancession Definition
The Mancession
Thanks to the “mancession,” metrosexuals have become “manfluencers”
One Mancession Later, Are Women Really Victors in the New Economy?
Economy: The Man-cession and the He-covery
It's Not Just a Recession. It's a Mancession!

If all Americans understood that A) global warming is occurring, and B) we are causing it, then I think you'd find much stronger support for action. Why? Because most people are not like you. Most people are, I think, willing to take some pain now for the benefit of coming generations. Your ideas about climate are reckless, to say the least. Most people aren't so reckless.

I'm willing to take some pain for the benefit of coming generations. But all you and climate change activists have to offer is a massive con job: take a lot of money, hand it over to greedy corporations, and not affect the climate one bit. And all of that for something that doesn't even look like it's going to be a problem for centuries to come, if ever.

How can you say it's not going to be a problem for centuries to come, when it's already a huge problem, and we've already got decades more pain loaded into the pipeline? What does it take for something to rise to the level of "a problem" for you? When your ocean-front property is under the waves? I'll grant you, that might not occur for centuries to come (depending on the elevation of your property and rates of Greenland/Antarctic ice melting). Is it only "a problem" if you're uncomfortably hot? Does the ecosystem matter at all? Does the unprecedented (since the dinos) rate of species extinction come into play in your thinking? Or are those going-extinct species just another greedy vested interest?

It's clear what the industrialists have to gain in trying to discredit climate scientists (and science generally, as fallout).

Really? Like what do they have to gain? What difference does it make to "industrialists" whether they sell you fossil fuel-related crap or green energy related crap?

Money is what they have to gain. Energy companies (and the stock market) treat fossil fuel reserves as money. If it cannot ultimately be burned, that means the energy companies don't have that money after all - so they lost money directly. How much money? According to http://qz.com/139907/climate-c... (my first Google hit), about $6 trillion. Now _that_ is money! And it doesn't end with energy companies.

Ultimately, the issue is that we all depend for our delicate existence on the health of our Earth. And yet, companies pay no costs when they damage our Earth. Therefore, they have and will continue to do what any good profit-maximizing enterprise would do in such circumstances: not care about damaging the the Earth!

What "agenda" do you imagine the environmentalist lobby has, anyway?

There is no "environmentalist lobby". There are politicians, non-profits, journalists, bloggers, and scientists, and they all behave in the same way, whether they are conservatives or progressives. All of them get rewarded big for saving society from destruction; that's why both progressives and conservatives love to constantly invent threats.

You can't seriously believe this. You're going to equate the $6 trillion which energy companies have at stake, with, essentially, book sales. That's what I anticipated you would do earlier in the discussion. I was hoping you'd come up with more than that.

browser extentions were created for that very purpose http://qz.com/125642/new-brows...

they have to constantly produce it an improve it

Netflix told shareholders it's currently filming eight new and continuing series, two of which are big hits with fans and drawing subscribers by themselves, of which there are 50 million as of Q2 2014. I noticed in that list they omitted at least one Netflix property of which I'm personally a fan, so it's not comprehensive.

You're arguing with success here, for some strange reason. Yes, Netflix doesn't have Warner Bros. or Paramount profits. That's not a bad thing. Their operating income is ~$228e6 and they employ about ~2000 full time. It's a cost effective operation that can't milk its famously cost sensitive customer base and become another media behemoth. They're commoditizing media and I can't think of a single thing we're going to lose as a consequence that I'm going to miss.

there's not that much to mention about the iphone6 except nfc.

That's a ridiculous thing to say.

it costs less for apple to make the 6 than what it cost for them to make 5 when 5 came out. much less.

What's your source for this? The profit margin on the iPhone 6 is lower than for earlier iPhone models at the time of release.

I'm not sure I agree with the explanation in the article, but it does look like Apple tried to make the phones look artificially thinner

http://qz.com/262355/apple-use...

Actually sales are tapering off a bit: http://qz.com/122921/the-chart...

Still impressive of course, but it isn't true to say that sales have grown every year.

There are also the large copyists who rip off innovative startups. See http://qz.com/250346/a-google-... Innovative startups, particularly in the life sciences but also in other industries that require large and long-term investments, need patents. Google doesn't need them, and it's working hard to crush the system. So what happens if Google succeeds? We'd still have government and non-profit (e.g. open source) innovation. Private innovation would still happen in fast-moving fields with first-mover advantages, in fields where trade secrets are effective, and in large enterprises that recoup innovation costs in other areas (Google now, or Bell Labs in the past). That leaves large swathes of technology where innovation by startups goes away because no investor would have any hope of making money. See China's hyper-competitive ripoff culture for a hint of what that would look like.

Tesla's profits are not based on GAAP. Furthermore, if you remove their income from selling electric car credits, they lose a lot of money.

Morgan Stanley is excited about the potential use of gigafactory batteries for home energy storage and grid independence, and thinks they might make more on that than on cars. (I would have thought good old lead acid car batteries were cheaper for this?)

... it only cost Apple 500 bucks

If you believe IP == worthless, then yes.

No, Apple believes Chinese children are worthless.

im just going to leave these here,

Most Profitable airlines
Most Profitable airlines

Intriguing. As a white male, I found it both insulting and sexist when my bisexual partner was caught out staring down the top of a girl beside her, but I was immediately blamed by everyone around the table, even though I was actually on the other side of a person between myself and the girl being leered at.

Let me be very clear on this: I could not have looked at her even if I wanted to, yet I was accused of it after my partner was caught checking her out simply because I was male. One of the women at the table said "I know what men like." That statement in itself is sexist - assuming that one group are defined by a stereotype.

Several weeks later, I was walking along with my partner and several (female) friends. As a group, they started insulting me, they call it "man-bashing," but the correct term is actually "sexism." For some reason I can't recall, my partner threw a chop intended to strike me in the testicles and put me on the ground. She ended up blocked, with her wrist trapped so she couldn't do it again. No pain was inflicted, no strike took place, a simple catch and hold.

All of the females started shouting about me hitting my partner - which I did not. I said "Fine, call the police. It was self-defense and she'll be done for assault." They all immediately explained that they would lie to a police officer because a male can't be allowed to do to a female what I just did. They could not - would not - comprehend what they were doing as wrong: I had been assaulted, and I had acted in self-defense. A group were willing to persecute me solely for having the temerity of simply being male.

That's not only stupid, it's bigotry.

Many, many years ago, I applied for a data entry job at the library. At that time I was typing at 80wpm, but I failed to get the job. My brother, who worked at the library, discovered that the reason I wasn't hired was because I was a male and men can't type as well as women - a demeaning statement forcing a negative stereotype upon both genders, thus satisfying all the twists and turns of sexism.

The woman they hired to do the job quit after a week or two because she couldn't actually type faster than 15 words a minute and fell too far behind. I did not get a call back when I applied a second time.

This kind of thing happens all the time. For example, everyone knows that domestic violence is a serious issue for men to deal with, as they are hurting innocent women all the time.

In reality, women commit

approximately 50% of unreciprocated assaults in domestic violence cases, and around 80% of those cases are where weapons are used, resulting in serious injury for the male requiring medical attention.

Some months ago, a user on Slashdot cited "The Gender of Sexuality" by Rutter and Schwartz, explaining that one in six straight women will be raped by their partner during their lives, yet one in THREE lesbians will be raped by their partner. I think that person summarised it by saying something very close to "When you remove strength as a factor, women are bigger rapists than men."

I've even seen someone in this thread claiming that women are paid worse than men in most fields. This is patently false, a story linked to by Slashdot some months ago.

If you want to go to anecdotal evidence, at my work place I'm paid minimum wage, as are my four co-workers. The step above me, at $15/hour, there are two men and three woman. The step above them, at $17/hour, is a woman. Then we get into the managers and other senior staff, which are all highly specialised roles given that I work for a television broadcaster. Well, perhaps not the CEO, but there's some serious nepotism going on there.

Now, let's talk about racism.

I was doing a course many years ago. We had to do a class on multiculturalism. It was vaguely interesting, but during the first lecture - before we'd even filed into the classroom - t