Please test that theory on another country first. I don't want to be a guinea pig for Fox Labs.
Don't get me wrong. I have no idea where on the Laffer curve we are. Maybe raising rates will raise tax revenue, maybe it will lower it.
I do know that a tax rate of 0% yields zero revenue, a tax rate of 100% will also raise zero revenue. Any tax rate in between will raise some revenue so there must be at least one maxima somewhere. Where it is is anyone's guess and don't find the theory useful to determining tax policy.
You are technically correct. The best kind of correct.
What's the difference between theory and practice? In theory, nothing. Yuk, yuk, yuk.
Here in the real world however, the two will wind up being exactly the same thing, and business owners will pay no tax.
And this is where we differ. If you tax a company, it must react in one of a few ways. It can raise prices. It can cut wages or benefits. It can try to make it's suppliers accept lower prices for inputs. It can cut its profit margin. It can lower quality. What exactly it does will depend on the specifics of the markets it's operating in. For example, if labor is tight, cutting wages is very hard. If they sell products in a very competitive market, raising prices may be a non-starter.
Thus if you tax a company, it's very hard to predict which actual people will bear the burden of the tax. If you tax the business owners, you know exactly who will bear the burden, the people who make a profit from the business.
One can, of course, ask whether that's the people you want to tax. Perhaps you want to tax return on investment. Perhaps you'd rather tax wages or benefits. Maybe a sales tax is best. No matter which you like, I think it's much clearer when you know who you're taxing and what they did to get taxed.
TFA says: "In his Budget statement this afternoon, Chancellor Phillip Hammond revealed a two percent "digital services tax" on large tech firms such as Amazon, Facebook and Google." Judging from the way that sentence is structured I don't think the tax is limited to those three, it applies to all these tech giants so you can untwist your panties, turn off the klaxons, cancel the panic mode warning, stand down the life pods and just generally relax. Apple will be paying this tax too.
I'm still not clear why this is only being levied on large corporations (and why tech over non-tech). It hardly seems cricket to only tax large corporations.
They tried that theory in Kansas a few years ago with terrible results: it blew the budget to heck.
I assume by "this" you mean remove the Kansas corporate income tax. Did they increase their property or income taxes at the same time? If you cut taxes without cutting spending, of course your budget will be shredded (at least in the short term). In the longer term, perhaps the Laffer curve will save you but that will take time.
...in many countries the upper class (landowners and business owners) paid no tax. The costs of running the nations fell on everyone else.
Not taxing businesses and not taxing business owners are different things. I don't think anyone is saying someone who earns money from a business (i.e. receives a dividend) shouldn't pay tax on that income. What people (including me) are proposing is you only tax dividends when paid out. If I sell a stock share at a profit, that's because I expect futuredividends to be higher than when I bought. But I haven't actually received those dividends so don't tax them yet.
Theory aside, I like the idea because taxes are ultimately paid by people. I think it makes it more visible how much tax you're paying if only actual real, live people pay taxes for real, actual income they receive.
For CAES with tanks, the economics push you towards pressures of 200 - 250 bar.
Any comments about heat? If Google isn't lying to me, 1 bar is about 1 atmosphere. If you compress air to 200 bar, it becomes 200 times hotter (in Kelvins). Room temperature air is 300 K, right? So compress that to 200 bar and it's at 60,000 Kelvin. Yikes, that's warm!
So to store air at that pressure, you'll need to cool it. But that's a lot of heat (I don't know how to calculate how much). If fact, I suspect most of the energy you put into the air is in the heat. In fact, isn't it all of the energy?
Just what I was wondering. See a post I made above. If you compress the air to 100 PSI, it'll come out at around 600 C. You'd want to cool it to around room temperature, call it 0 C. Thing is, at that point you're essentially storing the energy as heat, not pressure, aren't you? Why not just use the electricity to melt salt and be done with it?
No numbers at all. Pretty much just, "Hey, they would be a great idea".
Gotta concur. One of my first thoughts is why use an electrical compressor? How about just mechanically linking the windmill and the compressor?
I can think of several reasons why that might not work out so well, especially from the diagram. If your wind farm isn't located at a spot with a handy local salt cavern, you've got a problem. Converting to electricity lets you separate the two. It seems you'll have some energy loss but maybe that's not so bad. I also don't know what sort of mechanical losses you'd get running some gearboxes and a long drive shaft.
I was also wondering about heat. If you compress ordinary air to 100 PSI, it'll heat up. If I'm doing the math right, to 900 Kelvin (32 PSI to 100 PSI is 3x, air is around 300 K, PV=nRT so temperature grows linearly with pressure. What'd I get wrong?) That's pretty hot! Anyway, you don't want to lose that heat energy or the air won't re-expand when you vent it through the turbines. I wonder how one deals with that?
Well, it's still science fiction and will be for a while. Perhaps forever. Silly as it sounds, the physics is pretty solid. Operating it, especially at a profit, that's something else entirely.
Don't forget that any mass you hoist up this mythical elevator needs to achieve orbital velocity, just like a rocket does. That takes energy. Where does that come from, who pays for it? Why does this fairy tale keep coming back? Now let's build a Dyson Sphere, it's equally as probable.
I'm not entirely sure but I think the energy comes from the Earth's rotation. As you climb, the tether pulls you forward, increasing your horizontal velocity as you go.
This has been common practice at every high tech company I've worked at over the last 30 years. They all had a mix of permanent and contract employees.
There are any number of reasons to do this, some good, some misguided. It's like buying versus leasing a car, or buying versus renting a home. Depending on the circumstances, you might want a temporary relationship.
Yes, but that doesn't mean that they are gaining equally from that transaction.
Yup. The estimate I've seen is that consumers capture about 97% of the value of tech companies, the companies about 3%. It's quite unequal. Since people keep starting companies, capturing just 3% is must be enough.
Thanks for saving me the trouble of writing this exact post. I've got one addition:
It also ignores that their employees were on welfare and food stamps _before_ walmart hired them.
More important, we neglect the benefit the customers get. Are we really better off paying higher prices at Bob's Hardware versus getting it at barely over wholesale at Walmart/Target/Home Depot/Costco/Amazon? I don't think so and nether to a few hundred million other people.
...and their revenues go back into the community instead of all the profit being shoved off to some douche's new San Francisco campus.
So, the fares they pay drivers doesn't go back into the local community? And taxi companies don't have douche's collecting the profit to buy houses in the Hamptons?
To explain the above subject line: If it were up to me, my philosophy with regards to public health would be to consider something to be potentially harmful until proven, through fact- and scientific method-based reasoning, that it's not harmful. Highly irresponsible otherwise.
At some point this becomes prohibitively expensive. Perhaps fidget spinners cause carpal tunnel syndrome. Should we not release them until we've definitively proven they don't? And should we ban them not because they're annoying but because 1% of users might get painful wrists?
Practically speaking, if the inventor of fidget spinners had to prove beyond some level of doubt that fidget spinners couldn't possibly harm anyone, they'd just close up shop and never release them. Of course, I picked fidget spinners because they are frivolous and no great loss if never invented. But there are lots of other products which are beneficial but not so valuable that it's worth the cost to prove they are harmless.
Anyway.
Reading the actual document, it sounds like the proposal is to make all the evidence public so the public can review what data was used to determine a product was or was not harmful. I can't see much wrong with that, sunlight is a good thing. Sadly, I found TFA was pretty vague about which paragraphs and sentences the author(s) were concerned about.
Until you do those experiments though I think it is prudent to assume "that even one bazillionth has to be harmful".
Maybe. There's prudent and there's paranoid. If you're too prudent, everything gets gummed down in safety studies and it's impossible to release new products.
Here's a story. My daughter got a job at an oil company. She's going to be working on improving the efficiency of diesel and jet fuels. Yay for her! If you improve the efficiency of diesel, you may save the planet to reducing carbon dioxide emissions. But maybe you'll introduce some new combustion products. Do you really want to do a large scale study of the health benefits of this change before you introduce it? You never know, it might be a tiny bit more toxic than the existing exhaust.
You could spin this story about virtually any new product. At some point, you just have to take a leap of faith that something is more beneficial than harmful.
Watch as a bunch of businesses re-incorporate in another state.
I read the law. It's funny, it specifies the company's "principal executive offices", not where the company is incorporated. That's not what I expected. I have no idea whether this is legal or enforceable. Can you fine a company just because 51% of the executives have their offices in this state? What happens if, like Amazon is planning, the company has two headquarters?
Because the goal is not to force equal numbers, it's to overcome a specific obstacle. By requiring one woman on every board the hope is that it gets easier for the second woman or the non-old-white-guy.
Fair enough. There are a lot of the problems in the world, we might as well start by addressing the largest one first.
Do you see the opposing point? This is not a scalable strategy. There is also a lack of black, hispanic, disabled, veteran, LBGTQ, and many other labeled groups on corporate boards. Is the intent to add other requirements going forward? If we do, will we drop the female board member requirement or retain it? At some point, it will become virtually impossible to represent every identifiable aspect of humanity on every board.
So I have several objections to this law.
First, what happened to liberty? I own part of the company, why can't I elect the board member I see as the best custodian of my cash? Why should I have to accept either a fee or a less qualified candidate? Where's the ethical support for that?
What gives California the right to impose this fee just because a company has their "principle executive offices" here? I thought companies were governed largely by the state in which they are incorporated. Many companies incorporate outside of California for just this reason. What makes the location of your executive headquarters so special?
Why aren't women being elected to boards already? If, as diversity advocates assert, having diverse boards is so productive, why haven't greedy shareholders already figured this out and hired women? Boards and shareholders are frequently depicted as being extremely motivated to increase profit, this seems like an easy way to do it. So are all boards really so biased against women that they all are passing on the quick bucks? That seems implausible to me.
I think it will be ineffective and counterproductive. If I ran a large corporation, I'd basically scoff at the fees. The maximum is $300k per director seat, so it maxes out at $900k per company per year to elect no directors. If I'm running Apple, I'd just suck it up. That's trivial. I could argue that the difference between the best director and the best woman director is likely to affect Apple's profit by much more than $300k a year. As a result, the fee just becomes another cost of doing business in California. Who this will affect are small companies who are just starting. They can't ignore a fee of $100k or $300k. Those are also the companies who most depend on expert board members so you're really imposing a burden on the companies who can least afford it. Since we like to encourage startups, this seems like poor policy.
I think this will harm women in the long run and make it harder for qualified women to get on boards. Like it or not, every woman elected to a board will now have a cloud over them. Were they the best candidate or were they the diversity token? Will corporations create board positions with little power or influence, just to fill with token individuals to avoid the fine? When that woman wants another board position, will people (perhaps unconsciously) discount her experience on the assumption she was just there to fill a quota? Do all women really want that stigma?
And what about other groups? If I were Hispanic or black, I'd immediately start clamoring for a similar quota. I could see veterans and disabled people doing the same. Shortly it's going to be virtually impossible to elect a board which fulfills all the quotas. That would be catastrophic.
So. That's a long-winded response. What I expect to happen is a few things. First, some companies will go along and propose more women on the recommended slate. Other companies will just ignore it and pay the fine. Some companies will decide to set up their headquarters in Seattle, Austin, or Boston instead of LA or San Jose. Some women will get their big break and a seat in the board room. Many more women will get elected to boards but will be treated as second-class members.
I can see a growing market in being a trans female (that's male to female, right?) gay, black, hispanic, low income, differently-abled, veteran, single parent of a challenged child. You can check so many diversity buttons, you'd be a shoe-in for every board in the commun...er...state of California.
It makes more sense to spend the money on a M&A than do the research yourself.
Could be, could be. That was definitely the Cisco approach in the '90s. Many companies seem to do that now and many pre-IPO investors have that as their exit strategy (to be acquired instead of going public).
OTOH, if I'm a VC and invest $10 million in 10 companies, and one does well, I'm going to want a lot more than $100 million for my stake in the winner. The acquiring company will need to pay a premium for the reduced risk. Neither strategy seems fundamentally wrong to me, it's all how one wants to run your business.
You haven't proven that any will succeed any more than you've defined success.
You could say that about any innovation. Internal combustion--you're going to deliberately set off thousands of explosions inside a sealed, iron box? Steam power? Microprocessors? Fire itself?
Imagine the first person who proposed "we're going to build a boat out of steel and it's not going to sink!" It's ludicrous! Steel is expensive. And everyone knows metal sinks and wood floats. Why on God's green Earth would you make a boat out of steel instead of good old fashioned wood?!? I'm not going to listen until you prove you have a working business model.
We won't know if any of these companies will succeed until one does. I can't predict which one it will be so I'm not willing to invest. Others have greater risk tolerance than I do, yay for them. In the mean time, I wish them all the best because the promise is amazing.
I guess mobile broadband is good enough if you don't need internet in your line of work.
Well, that's what bugs me about this. Isn't "good enough" a really personal opinion? What's good enough for my dad wouldn't be good enough for me. Never mind that mobile and fixed internet are different products. I've got some IoT devices which I want connected all the time, not just when I'm home. No, mobile isn't good enough, not for that application.
What I really don't see is why the FCC needs to try deciding what's not good enough. Surely the person buying the service should be making that decision.
The goal is now and always has been to extract as much profit while providing the bare minimum service that they can get away with.
Well, of course it is. Have you ever run or worked in a business? That's the nature of the beast.
Thing is, competition and customer freedom is what keeps "the bare minimum" much higher than the company would like. If AT&T sets their caps too low and T-Mobile doesn't, you'll see people flood to T-Mobile. So long as there are competitors, companies are compelled to provide better and better products.
That being said, have some perspective people. Remember the bad old days of, say, 2008? When you desperately hit the cancel button on your flip phone because you didn't want to pay for data service by the minute and by the megabyte? And how that changed overnight when Apple introduced the iPhone with unlimited data? Why do you suppose AT&T went along with that? Because they made a zillion dollars by offering a great service that people were willing to pay for.
Such quotas can be enforced in two ways: increasing the amount of local contents (as desired by the EU) or reducing the amount of foreign content
I'm kind of curious how the "make it prominent" bit will work. I'm guessing most people go to the Netflix home page and pick something out of the first page of recommendations. A cup of coffee says 80% of people never scroll off the initial page (people from Netflix (who I am absolutely certain measure this sort of thing) with actual data, please let us know).
So what does the EU envision? That the initial page must show me 30% local content, even if the recommendation algorithm doesn't think I'm interested in any of it? I mean, I admit, I'm a philistine, I watch a lot of Marvel content. And Dr. Who, which won't count after Brexit. Is Netflix supposed to dilute the value of the very limited home screen real estate?
Slashdot Mirror
Please test that theory on another country first. I don't want to be a guinea pig for Fox Labs.
Don't get me wrong. I have no idea where on the Laffer curve we are. Maybe raising rates will raise tax revenue, maybe it will lower it.
I do know that a tax rate of 0% yields zero revenue, a tax rate of 100% will also raise zero revenue. Any tax rate in between will raise some revenue so there must be at least one maxima somewhere. Where it is is anyone's guess and don't find the theory useful to determining tax policy.
You are technically correct. The best kind of correct.
What's the difference between theory and practice? In theory, nothing. Yuk, yuk, yuk.
Here in the real world however, the two will wind up being exactly the same thing, and business owners will pay no tax.
And this is where we differ. If you tax a company, it must react in one of a few ways. It can raise prices. It can cut wages or benefits. It can try to make it's suppliers accept lower prices for inputs. It can cut its profit margin. It can lower quality. What exactly it does will depend on the specifics of the markets it's operating in. For example, if labor is tight, cutting wages is very hard. If they sell products in a very competitive market, raising prices may be a non-starter.
Thus if you tax a company, it's very hard to predict which actual people will bear the burden of the tax. If you tax the business owners, you know exactly who will bear the burden, the people who make a profit from the business.
One can, of course, ask whether that's the people you want to tax. Perhaps you want to tax return on investment. Perhaps you'd rather tax wages or benefits. Maybe a sales tax is best. No matter which you like, I think it's much clearer when you know who you're taxing and what they did to get taxed.
TFA says: "In his Budget statement this afternoon, Chancellor Phillip Hammond revealed a two percent "digital services tax" on large tech firms such as Amazon, Facebook and Google." Judging from the way that sentence is structured I don't think the tax is limited to those three, it applies to all these tech giants so you can untwist your panties, turn off the klaxons, cancel the panic mode warning, stand down the life pods and just generally relax. Apple will be paying this tax too.
I'm still not clear why this is only being levied on large corporations (and why tech over non-tech). It hardly seems cricket to only tax large corporations.
They tried that theory in Kansas a few years ago with terrible results: it blew the budget to heck.
I assume by "this" you mean remove the Kansas corporate income tax. Did they increase their property or income taxes at the same time? If you cut taxes without cutting spending, of course your budget will be shredded (at least in the short term). In the longer term, perhaps the Laffer curve will save you but that will take time.
...in many countries the upper class (landowners and business owners) paid no tax. The costs of running the nations fell on everyone else.
Not taxing businesses and not taxing business owners are different things. I don't think anyone is saying someone who earns money from a business (i.e. receives a dividend) shouldn't pay tax on that income. What people (including me) are proposing is you only tax dividends when paid out. If I sell a stock share at a profit, that's because I expect futuredividends to be higher than when I bought. But I haven't actually received those dividends so don't tax them yet.
Theory aside, I like the idea because taxes are ultimately paid by people. I think it makes it more visible how much tax you're paying if only actual real, live people pay taxes for real, actual income they receive.
For CAES with tanks, the economics push you towards pressures of 200 - 250 bar.
Any comments about heat? If Google isn't lying to me, 1 bar is about 1 atmosphere. If you compress air to 200 bar, it becomes 200 times hotter (in Kelvins). Room temperature air is 300 K, right? So compress that to 200 bar and it's at 60,000 Kelvin. Yikes, that's warm!
So to store air at that pressure, you'll need to cool it. But that's a lot of heat (I don't know how to calculate how much). If fact, I suspect most of the energy you put into the air is in the heat. In fact, isn't it all of the energy?
Just what I was wondering. See a post I made above. If you compress the air to 100 PSI, it'll come out at around 600 C. You'd want to cool it to around room temperature, call it 0 C. Thing is, at that point you're essentially storing the energy as heat, not pressure, aren't you? Why not just use the electricity to melt salt and be done with it?
No numbers at all. Pretty much just, "Hey, they would be a great idea".
Gotta concur. One of my first thoughts is why use an electrical compressor? How about just mechanically linking the windmill and the compressor?
I can think of several reasons why that might not work out so well, especially from the diagram. If your wind farm isn't located at a spot with a handy local salt cavern, you've got a problem. Converting to electricity lets you separate the two. It seems you'll have some energy loss but maybe that's not so bad. I also don't know what sort of mechanical losses you'd get running some gearboxes and a long drive shaft.
I was also wondering about heat. If you compress ordinary air to 100 PSI, it'll heat up. If I'm doing the math right, to 900 Kelvin (32 PSI to 100 PSI is 3x, air is around 300 K, PV=nRT so temperature grows linearly with pressure. What'd I get wrong?) That's pretty hot! Anyway, you don't want to lose that heat energy or the air won't re-expand when you vent it through the turbines. I wonder how one deals with that?
Well, it's still science fiction and will be for a while. Perhaps forever. Silly as it sounds, the physics is pretty solid. Operating it, especially at a profit, that's something else entirely.
Don't forget that any mass you hoist up this mythical elevator needs to achieve orbital velocity, just like a rocket does. That takes energy. Where does that come from, who pays for it? Why does this fairy tale keep coming back? Now let's build a Dyson Sphere, it's equally as probable.
I'm not entirely sure but I think the energy comes from the Earth's rotation. As you climb, the tether pulls you forward, increasing your horizontal velocity as you go.
This has been common practice at every high tech company I've worked at over the last 30 years. They all had a mix of permanent and contract employees.
There are any number of reasons to do this, some good, some misguided. It's like buying versus leasing a car, or buying versus renting a home. Depending on the circumstances, you might want a temporary relationship.
Yes, but that doesn't mean that they are gaining equally from that transaction.
Yup. The estimate I've seen is that consumers capture about 97% of the value of tech companies, the companies about 3%. It's quite unequal. Since people keep starting companies, capturing just 3% is must be enough.
Thanks for saving me the trouble of writing this exact post. I've got one addition:
It also ignores that their employees were on welfare and food stamps _before_ walmart hired them.
More important, we neglect the benefit the customers get. Are we really better off paying higher prices at Bob's Hardware versus getting it at barely over wholesale at Walmart/Target/Home Depot/Costco/Amazon? I don't think so and nether to a few hundred million other people.
...and their revenues go back into the community instead of all the profit being shoved off to some douche's new San Francisco campus.
So, the fares they pay drivers doesn't go back into the local community? And taxi companies don't have douche's collecting the profit to buy houses in the Hamptons?
I don't see a difference.
To explain the above subject line: If it were up to me, my philosophy with regards to public health would be to consider something to be potentially harmful until proven, through fact- and scientific method-based reasoning, that it's not harmful. Highly irresponsible otherwise.
At some point this becomes prohibitively expensive. Perhaps fidget spinners cause carpal tunnel syndrome. Should we not release them until we've definitively proven they don't? And should we ban them not because they're annoying but because 1% of users might get painful wrists?
Practically speaking, if the inventor of fidget spinners had to prove beyond some level of doubt that fidget spinners couldn't possibly harm anyone, they'd just close up shop and never release them. Of course, I picked fidget spinners because they are frivolous and no great loss if never invented. But there are lots of other products which are beneficial but not so valuable that it's worth the cost to prove they are harmless.
Anyway.
Reading the actual document, it sounds like the proposal is to make all the evidence public so the public can review what data was used to determine a product was or was not harmful. I can't see much wrong with that, sunlight is a good thing. Sadly, I found TFA was pretty vague about which paragraphs and sentences the author(s) were concerned about.
Until you do those experiments though I think it is prudent to assume "that even one bazillionth has to be harmful".
Maybe. There's prudent and there's paranoid. If you're too prudent, everything gets gummed down in safety studies and it's impossible to release new products.
Here's a story. My daughter got a job at an oil company. She's going to be working on improving the efficiency of diesel and jet fuels. Yay for her! If you improve the efficiency of diesel, you may save the planet to reducing carbon dioxide emissions. But maybe you'll introduce some new combustion products. Do you really want to do a large scale study of the health benefits of this change before you introduce it? You never know, it might be a tiny bit more toxic than the existing exhaust.
You could spin this story about virtually any new product. At some point, you just have to take a leap of faith that something is more beneficial than harmful.
Watch as a bunch of businesses re-incorporate in another state.
I read the law. It's funny, it specifies the company's "principal executive offices", not where the company is incorporated. That's not what I expected. I have no idea whether this is legal or enforceable. Can you fine a company just because 51% of the executives have their offices in this state? What happens if, like Amazon is planning, the company has two headquarters?
Because the goal is not to force equal numbers, it's to overcome a specific obstacle. By requiring one woman on every board the hope is that it gets easier for the second woman or the non-old-white-guy.
Fair enough. There are a lot of the problems in the world, we might as well start by addressing the largest one first.
Do you see the opposing point? This is not a scalable strategy. There is also a lack of black, hispanic, disabled, veteran, LBGTQ, and many other labeled groups on corporate boards. Is the intent to add other requirements going forward? If we do, will we drop the female board member requirement or retain it? At some point, it will become virtually impossible to represent every identifiable aspect of humanity on every board.
So I have several objections to this law.
First, what happened to liberty? I own part of the company, why can't I elect the board member I see as the best custodian of my cash? Why should I have to accept either a fee or a less qualified candidate? Where's the ethical support for that?
What gives California the right to impose this fee just because a company has their "principle executive offices" here? I thought companies were governed largely by the state in which they are incorporated. Many companies incorporate outside of California for just this reason. What makes the location of your executive headquarters so special?
Why aren't women being elected to boards already? If, as diversity advocates assert, having diverse boards is so productive, why haven't greedy shareholders already figured this out and hired women? Boards and shareholders are frequently depicted as being extremely motivated to increase profit, this seems like an easy way to do it. So are all boards really so biased against women that they all are passing on the quick bucks? That seems implausible to me.
I think it will be ineffective and counterproductive. If I ran a large corporation, I'd basically scoff at the fees. The maximum is $300k per director seat, so it maxes out at $900k per company per year to elect no directors. If I'm running Apple, I'd just suck it up. That's trivial. I could argue that the difference between the best director and the best woman director is likely to affect Apple's profit by much more than $300k a year. As a result, the fee just becomes another cost of doing business in California. Who this will affect are small companies who are just starting. They can't ignore a fee of $100k or $300k. Those are also the companies who most depend on expert board members so you're really imposing a burden on the companies who can least afford it. Since we like to encourage startups, this seems like poor policy.
I think this will harm women in the long run and make it harder for qualified women to get on boards. Like it or not, every woman elected to a board will now have a cloud over them. Were they the best candidate or were they the diversity token? Will corporations create board positions with little power or influence, just to fill with token individuals to avoid the fine? When that woman wants another board position, will people (perhaps unconsciously) discount her experience on the assumption she was just there to fill a quota? Do all women really want that stigma?
And what about other groups? If I were Hispanic or black, I'd immediately start clamoring for a similar quota. I could see veterans and disabled people doing the same. Shortly it's going to be virtually impossible to elect a board which fulfills all the quotas. That would be catastrophic.
So. That's a long-winded response. What I expect to happen is a few things. First, some companies will go along and propose more women on the recommended slate. Other companies will just ignore it and pay the fine. Some companies will decide to set up their headquarters in Seattle, Austin, or Boston instead of LA or San Jose. Some women will get their big break and a seat in the board room. Many more women will get elected to boards but will be treated as second-class members.
I can see a growing market in being a trans female (that's male to female, right?) gay, black, hispanic, low income, differently-abled, veteran, single parent of a challenged child. You can check so many diversity buttons, you'd be a shoe-in for every board in the commun...er...state of California.
Having lived in the DC burbs since '82, I've yet to find the cheap ones. Could you please send directions?
Point taken. They're pricey whores and totally worth every small, unmarked bill.
It makes more sense to spend the money on a M&A than do the research yourself.
Could be, could be. That was definitely the Cisco approach in the '90s. Many companies seem to do that now and many pre-IPO investors have that as their exit strategy (to be acquired instead of going public).
OTOH, if I'm a VC and invest $10 million in 10 companies, and one does well, I'm going to want a lot more than $100 million for my stake in the winner. The acquiring company will need to pay a premium for the reduced risk. Neither strategy seems fundamentally wrong to me, it's all how one wants to run your business.
You haven't proven that any will succeed any more than you've defined success.
You could say that about any innovation. Internal combustion--you're going to deliberately set off thousands of explosions inside a sealed, iron box? Steam power? Microprocessors? Fire itself?
Imagine the first person who proposed "we're going to build a boat out of steel and it's not going to sink!" It's ludicrous! Steel is expensive. And everyone knows metal sinks and wood floats. Why on God's green Earth would you make a boat out of steel instead of good old fashioned wood?!? I'm not going to listen until you prove you have a working business model.
We won't know if any of these companies will succeed until one does. I can't predict which one it will be so I'm not willing to invest. Others have greater risk tolerance than I do, yay for them. In the mean time, I wish them all the best because the promise is amazing.
I guess mobile broadband is good enough if you don't need internet in your line of work.
Well, that's what bugs me about this. Isn't "good enough" a really personal opinion? What's good enough for my dad wouldn't be good enough for me. Never mind that mobile and fixed internet are different products. I've got some IoT devices which I want connected all the time, not just when I'm home. No, mobile isn't good enough, not for that application.
What I really don't see is why the FCC needs to try deciding what's not good enough. Surely the person buying the service should be making that decision.
The goal is now and always has been to extract as much profit while providing the bare minimum service that they can get away with.
Well, of course it is. Have you ever run or worked in a business? That's the nature of the beast.
Thing is, competition and customer freedom is what keeps "the bare minimum" much higher than the company would like. If AT&T sets their caps too low and T-Mobile doesn't, you'll see people flood to T-Mobile. So long as there are competitors, companies are compelled to provide better and better products.
That being said, have some perspective people. Remember the bad old days of, say, 2008? When you desperately hit the cancel button on your flip phone because you didn't want to pay for data service by the minute and by the megabyte? And how that changed overnight when Apple introduced the iPhone with unlimited data? Why do you suppose AT&T went along with that? Because they made a zillion dollars by offering a great service that people were willing to pay for.
Such quotas can be enforced in two ways: increasing the amount of local contents (as desired by the EU) or reducing the amount of foreign content
I'm kind of curious how the "make it prominent" bit will work. I'm guessing most people go to the Netflix home page and pick something out of the first page of recommendations. A cup of coffee says 80% of people never scroll off the initial page (people from Netflix (who I am absolutely certain measure this sort of thing) with actual data, please let us know).
So what does the EU envision? That the initial page must show me 30% local content, even if the recommendation algorithm doesn't think I'm interested in any of it? I mean, I admit, I'm a philistine, I watch a lot of Marvel content. And Dr. Who, which won't count after Brexit. Is Netflix supposed to dilute the value of the very limited home screen real estate?