2 points: first, companies, just like individuals, may justifiably want to hold cash in order to deal with unexpected contingencies. In tough times, they want to hold more cash, and make less investments, despite the fact that it makes everybody worse off.
I haven't studies Keynes but if Apple is has cash in the bank, the bank can loan that money out. It's not really sitting idle unless the bank needs it for capital reserves, but that has nothing to do with Apple. But that's not my main point.
My understanding was there are limits to how much earnings a company can retain. By holding cash and not paying dividends or doing stock buybacks, they're essentially deferring taxes forever. To prevent that, the Feds imposed an upper limit on how much a company can retain. I remember when Microsoft paid their first dividend, somewhere in the late '90s/early '00s, and the argument was the same. I'm frankly amazed Apple was allowed to accumulate so much cash without being required to justify how they might need it somehow. But I'm not a tax lawyer either.
One could argue that the retained earnings are reflected in the stock price and thus when I sell appreciated Apple stock, I'm effectively paying more capital gains tax based on the retained earnings. So maybe it doesn't really matter, someone is paying taxes somehow.
Apple contributes to society by producing great products that delight their customers. Millions of users have happier lives, thousands of employees have jobs they love, earning wages they prefer to any other available alternative (otherwise they'd work somewhere else). Millions of stockholders earn great returns on their investment. Their success spurs competitors to burn the midnight oil trying to out do Apple, causing a virtuous cycle of steadily improving products at decreasing costs.
One nit, there isn't one "price the market will bear." If you drop prices, you and the industry as a whole will typically sell more units as customers on the margin now find your product just barely worth buying, where at the old price, they did not. In fact, "price the market will bear" pretty much has it backwards. There's an amount the market wants to buy at certain price ("demand the price will bear") and an amount the producers will make at a certain price. In both cases, price is the independent variable, not supply or demand. But I don't think that's the dominant effect here.
Yes, you pick B. In the short term, customers run from your competitors to your door and the increased sales overwhelms the some of the potential profit per widget. You cackle with glee as you roll in your vast piles of (honestly earned) dollars. But from there our stories differs because virtually every market that's not a legally enforced monopoly is "extremely competitive".
Imagine I'm the competitor, watching my shrinking sales with dismay. I will go out of business if I do nothing so I respond any way I can. Simplest is I just cut my profit to zero to match your prices. I'm desperate to turn the tables so I look for any innovation I can. Practically speaking, I don't believe you can stop me from finding some new, creative idea. If I can't find anything, I don't really deserve to be in business and I fold up shop. But with enough elbow grease, I find a different way to cut production costs by 55%. Now I can lower prices below you and smirk.
This leads to a virtuous (to the consumer) race to the bottom with each company fighting and clawing to be the most efficient and produce the most value for the money to earn your business. In the long term, the companies left in business will be selling widgets for much closer to the 50% price. And this is why 50% reductions in cost are really, really rare. Competition has already squeezed out all the easy stuff so people sweat blood to get a percent here and there.
There are, of course, a many corner cases. Someone who actually took Econ 101 as opposed to just reading some econ books can explain cases where the price-supply, price-demand, and customer preference equivalence curves lead to different results. That person is not me. But in general, that's how it works.
Don't believe me? Look at one of Slashdot's favorite whipping boys, cell phone service. You used to pay by the minute. You used to pay for long distance. You used to pay for mobile-to-mobile calls. You used to pay for roaming. You used to pay for each text. You used to have unlimited dat...er, well let's just skip that one. But just in the last two years, all the major carriers have started bundling more and more stuff in plans while keeping prices with dimes of each other. I'm more familiar with family plans because what's what I buy and just in the last two years, they're including more stuff for basically the same price.
You missed one: a significant beneficiary are the consumers of the goods, who now get better products cheaper than they ever could before. Based on supply and demand curves, the benefit will wind up split up among workers, the shareholders, executives, and consumers in ways that are hard to generalize.
As a produce of a single good with limited appeal (enterprise software) and a consumer of more goods than I can count, I'm all in favor of looking at things from a consumer point of view and trusting everything else will work itself out.
Smithsonian, National Geographic, Technology Review.
I wonder which magazines correlate with which others. I be there's tons of Smithsonian/NG readers. And I think those two are a secret cabal: they seem to do stories on identical subjects way too often for it to be pure chance.
Re:Such systems have been proposed before
on
The Zuckerberg Tax
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· Score: 1
Well, first off, property taxes on homes have serious problems. People having to move because they couldn't afford their property taxes is why Prop 13 passed in California.
Second, what happens when I pay taxes on my paper wealth, then the asset decreases in value. Do I get a tax rebate the next year? Given that many assets are held for many years, this seems like a ton of unnecessary checks going to and fro.
Finally, many assets are hard to value. You don't know the true value until they are sold. The beauty of income taxes over wealth taxes is I know exactly what I sold something for so there's no need for an assessor to determine this year's fair market value.
b) that altruism is idiotic, (You _have_ heard of Philanthropy, right? I guess no one does anything for the betterment of mankind for free.)
Turns out the profit motive is a terrific way to get people to do useful things. Who'da thunk that people were willing to work so hard in order to get ahead. Amazing, isn't it?
Now I don't disagree with you that, yes, money provides a great incentive, but thankfully dinosaurs that think money is the _only_ way to motivate people are dying.
Charity and philanthropy are all well and good. The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation does wonderful things and has a huge budget. But in terms of scale, charitable activities are dwarfed by for-profit activity (my guess is by two or three orders of magnitude). Far from being dead, for-profit dinosaurs are alive, kicking ass and taking names. The open source/free software world is an anomaly and only works because software development can sometimes be done for very little cost other than your time. Don't fool yourself into thinking the rest of the world works anything like that.
This kind of logic has FAILED US EVERY FUCKING TIME IT HAS BEEN USED.
It must be sad on your planet. Here on Earth, telecommunications, cars, houses, home appliances, clothes, food, entertainment devices, computers, travel, and zillions of other products are better and cheaper because companies are competing for my business in a free(ish) market.
Supply and demand is just one aspect of pricing. At the end of the day, without subsidy, you can't price lower than cost. 3 or 4 years of tuition at university level, with all the buildings, staff, equipment and other things that come into that isn't ever going to be cheap enough for a young person with minimum wage earning parent(s).
Two comments: first, tuition has grown far faster than inflation yet real estate, salaries, etc. have not. The implication is costs grew somewhere and we ought to be able to squeeze that cost back down. Second, if you're earning minimum wage, things are going to be tough no matter what. Minimum wage isn't a wage for a comfortable suburban lifestyle, it's one step above starvation. I'd love to have inexpensive paths for bright but poor kids to live up to their potential but four years in ivy-covered halls might not be realistic.
Replace "minimum" with "median" and you've got a stronger argument. But income tends to grow with age so by the time one has kids going to college, I'd hope many parents are tending to the high side of median.
You could but as it turns out, it's incredibly handy to have one comprehensive database that everyone uses (and codes to). There's really no value in multiple people doing the grunt work and probably getting it wrong.
I looked up TCP over SMS a while back, assuming someone must have written an April Fool's RFC. Turns out some guy submitted a patent application for it (#20080146257).
And IIRC, that was the other part of the license agreement: you had to charge the same amount for in-app and out-of-app purchases. So no, you can't mark up the in-app purchase price to cover the Apple tax.
I'm grudgingly willing to allow that Apple can set whatever rules they want about what apps running in their ecosystem must and must not do. I'm much more pissed off that they're setting pricing policies for third parties, especially for purchases that don't go through any part of the Apple store.
Yeah, this is going to be a challenge to make work. I kept thinking about all the steps that have to work first time, on time, like all the explosive bolts, the radar working, the wheels deploying, descent rockets firing at just the right altitude, finding a nice smooth spot to hover over with 30 seconds (or whatever) of fuel, etc. etc.
In theory, I'm sure all of these can be solved. If they all work, I'll be impressed as hell. Forget finding life, just solving an engineering challenge like this is inspiring enough to me.
Nothing cynical about protecting their bottom line. Virtually everything Apple (or any other company does) has to consider how this affects sales and profits. That's just what companies do: they produce something I like more than I like the money in my pocket. We make a trade, everyone's happy. If they fail, I keep the money, I'm happy, they're out of business.
The beauty of competition is it forces companies to do things I like even if they're not thrilled about it.
Once income passes a certain point, it is detrimental to the rest of society.
Interesting assertion. Do you have any evidence to back up that point?
Trivial case is if 1 person gets 100% of the societies income, everyone else will either starve or murder the 1 person.
The only way that would happen is if that one person did all the work and produced all the value while everyone else lolled around eating bon-bons. That's not very realistic.
And the problem with capitalism is that no one ever explains properly how you can produce money from nothing.in a way that you can't with socialism.
Sure it does, the lure of profits and threat of competition motivates individuals to constantly look for more efficient ways to produce more value at less cost. Socialism tends to minimize both forces (less profit for sure and indirectly less competition) so innovation is slower.
Not every company exists solely for profit. A few notable exceptions (e.g. Ben and Jerrys, HP in the pre-Carly days) explicitly put social goods in their corporate goals. I'm pretty sure the owner of a business I patronize gives huge discounts to some of the other customers because of their life circumstances. And there are no end to non-profits.
But I think you misread my comment. A business is nothing more than the people (investors, executives, managers, line workers) that compose it. Businesses don't do anything, the people that work there do things.
Personally, I enjoy giving things away but that doesn't pay my bills. I have to charge enough to pay my salary and keep the investors happy (otherwise the employees don't show up and the investors take their money elsewhere). And because my company has competition, I can't charge whatever I want. The vast majority of companies are in this boat—yes we'd charge more if we could but we just can't because our competitors are thrilled to undercut us by just enough to get the sale. I suppose I could take a pay cut and keep more people on the payroll but I'll admit it, I'm greedy and would prefer to work harder and get paid more.
Monopolies are different and that's why we have anti-trust laws. But true monopolies are quite rare. Off the top of my head, I can't think of more than a handful and all those are because my city has exclusive contracts for things like water, electricity, trash pick up and the like. Everyone else has to fight for my dollars so they can't charge what they'd like.
Now, you might not like some things some companies do, or like their prices but that's different. You've almost always got the choice of not buying or buying somewhere else. I used to not buy Microsoft products, but now see Apple as more obnoxious, so I won't buy Apple. Not that I expect very many people to agree with that, but it makes me happier.
Why is the corporate profit motive never questioned, but the motive to provide for one's family and oneself is discounted?
What nonsense. Businesses exist to help people cooperate and create enough value for their customers that the customers are willing to give them money. If that's more than the company spent, yay! we have a profit, otherwise the company eventually disbands.
My motivation as a worker is to find a way to use the least amount of my time to generate the most amount of value so people give me the most amount of money so I can spend it on my family (modulo not doing something I hate, is illegal, etc.). Meter readers just found out they made a bad call like many buggy whip makers, stone carvers, hand cart pushers, machinists and zillions of other obsolete occupations. They don't add any value any more, not when a $25 piece of electronics can do it for them. And as a rate payer, I'm not paying them to be inefficient.
If you take your reasoning to it's next logical step, we should ban email, faxes, video conferencing, robots, computers, most software and the wheel. Won't anyone think of the hunter-gatherers?!?
In what way is prohibiting voluntary binding contracts between a consenting adult and a private company a libertarian (big or little L) position? That's a Liberal (in the socially intrusive, not liberty-loving sense) idea.
First thing I do to new computers is remap caps lock to control, the way God and RMS intended. I move escape too. Annoys the snot out of my wife and kids, but that's hardly my problem.
I'm not really sure why that much keyboard real estate needs to be dedicated to search. Seems like a goofy default.
I think the key bit is not to filer or prioritize based on source or destination.
I'm OK with the idea of prioritizing or throttling based the type of traffic. If the link is congested, perhaps all streaming video gets throttled so VoIP still works. But the important neutrality bit is all video gets throttled regardless of whether it comes from YouTube, NetFlix, NBC or barnyardanimalsex.com.
Slashdot Mirror
2 points: first, companies, just like individuals, may justifiably want to hold cash in order to deal with unexpected contingencies. In tough times, they want to hold more cash, and make less investments, despite the fact that it makes everybody worse off.
I haven't studies Keynes but if Apple is has cash in the bank, the bank can loan that money out. It's not really sitting idle unless the bank needs it for capital reserves, but that has nothing to do with Apple. But that's not my main point.
My understanding was there are limits to how much earnings a company can retain. By holding cash and not paying dividends or doing stock buybacks, they're essentially deferring taxes forever. To prevent that, the Feds imposed an upper limit on how much a company can retain. I remember when Microsoft paid their first dividend, somewhere in the late '90s/early '00s, and the argument was the same. I'm frankly amazed Apple was allowed to accumulate so much cash without being required to justify how they might need it somehow. But I'm not a tax lawyer either.
One could argue that the retained earnings are reflected in the stock price and thus when I sell appreciated Apple stock, I'm effectively paying more capital gains tax based on the retained earnings. So maybe it doesn't really matter, someone is paying taxes somehow.
Apple contributes to society by producing great products that delight their customers. Millions of users have happier lives, thousands of employees have jobs they love, earning wages they prefer to any other available alternative (otherwise they'd work somewhere else). Millions of stockholders earn great returns on their investment. Their success spurs competitors to burn the midnight oil trying to out do Apple, causing a virtuous cycle of steadily improving products at decreasing costs.
So how exactly are they not contributing?
One nit, there isn't one "price the market will bear." If you drop prices, you and the industry as a whole will typically sell more units as customers on the margin now find your product just barely worth buying, where at the old price, they did not. In fact, "price the market will bear" pretty much has it backwards. There's an amount the market wants to buy at certain price ("demand the price will bear") and an amount the producers will make at a certain price. In both cases, price is the independent variable, not supply or demand. But I don't think that's the dominant effect here.
Yes, you pick B. In the short term, customers run from your competitors to your door and the increased sales overwhelms the some of the potential profit per widget. You cackle with glee as you roll in your vast piles of (honestly earned) dollars. But from there our stories differs because virtually every market that's not a legally enforced monopoly is "extremely competitive".
Imagine I'm the competitor, watching my shrinking sales with dismay. I will go out of business if I do nothing so I respond any way I can. Simplest is I just cut my profit to zero to match your prices. I'm desperate to turn the tables so I look for any innovation I can. Practically speaking, I don't believe you can stop me from finding some new, creative idea. If I can't find anything, I don't really deserve to be in business and I fold up shop. But with enough elbow grease, I find a different way to cut production costs by 55%. Now I can lower prices below you and smirk.
This leads to a virtuous (to the consumer) race to the bottom with each company fighting and clawing to be the most efficient and produce the most value for the money to earn your business. In the long term, the companies left in business will be selling widgets for much closer to the 50% price. And this is why 50% reductions in cost are really, really rare. Competition has already squeezed out all the easy stuff so people sweat blood to get a percent here and there.
There are, of course, a many corner cases. Someone who actually took Econ 101 as opposed to just reading some econ books can explain cases where the price-supply, price-demand, and customer preference equivalence curves lead to different results. That person is not me. But in general, that's how it works.
Don't believe me? Look at one of Slashdot's favorite whipping boys, cell phone service. You used to pay by the minute. You used to pay for long distance. You used to pay for mobile-to-mobile calls. You used to pay for roaming. You used to pay for each text. You used to have unlimited dat...er, well let's just skip that one. But just in the last two years, all the major carriers have started bundling more and more stuff in plans while keeping prices with dimes of each other. I'm more familiar with family plans because what's what I buy and just in the last two years, they're including more stuff for basically the same price.
You missed one: a significant beneficiary are the consumers of the goods, who now get better products cheaper than they ever could before. Based on supply and demand curves, the benefit will wind up split up among workers, the shareholders, executives, and consumers in ways that are hard to generalize.
As a produce of a single good with limited appeal (enterprise software) and a consumer of more goods than I can count, I'm all in favor of looking at things from a consumer point of view and trusting everything else will work itself out.
Smithsonian, National Geographic, Technology Review.
I wonder which magazines correlate with which others. I be there's tons of Smithsonian/NG readers. And I think those two are a secret cabal: they seem to do stories on identical subjects way too often for it to be pure chance.
Well, first off, property taxes on homes have serious problems. People having to move because they couldn't afford their property taxes is why Prop 13 passed in California.
Second, what happens when I pay taxes on my paper wealth, then the asset decreases in value. Do I get a tax rebate the next year? Given that many assets are held for many years, this seems like a ton of unnecessary checks going to and fro.
Finally, many assets are hard to value. You don't know the true value until they are sold. The beauty of income taxes over wealth taxes is I know exactly what I sold something for so there's no need for an assessor to determine this year's fair market value.
b) that altruism is idiotic, (You _have_ heard of Philanthropy, right? I guess no one does anything for the betterment of mankind for free.)
Turns out the profit motive is a terrific way to get people to do useful things. Who'da thunk that people were willing to work so hard in order to get ahead. Amazing, isn't it?
Now I don't disagree with you that, yes, money provides a great incentive, but thankfully dinosaurs that think money is the _only_ way to motivate people are dying.
Charity and philanthropy are all well and good. The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation does wonderful things and has a huge budget. But in terms of scale, charitable activities are dwarfed by for-profit activity (my guess is by two or three orders of magnitude). Far from being dead, for-profit dinosaurs are alive, kicking ass and taking names. The open source/free software world is an anomaly and only works because software development can sometimes be done for very little cost other than your time. Don't fool yourself into thinking the rest of the world works anything like that.
Wells-Fargo free for 20 years and have never looked back. Second best move I ever made.
This kind of logic has FAILED US EVERY FUCKING TIME IT HAS BEEN USED.
It must be sad on your planet. Here on Earth, telecommunications, cars, houses, home appliances, clothes, food, entertainment devices, computers, travel, and zillions of other products are better and cheaper because companies are competing for my business in a free(ish) market.
Supply and demand is just one aspect of pricing. At the end of the day, without subsidy, you can't price lower than cost. 3 or 4 years of tuition at university level, with all the buildings, staff, equipment and other things that come into that isn't ever going to be cheap enough for a young person with minimum wage earning parent(s).
Two comments: first, tuition has grown far faster than inflation yet real estate, salaries, etc. have not. The implication is costs grew somewhere and we ought to be able to squeeze that cost back down. Second, if you're earning minimum wage, things are going to be tough no matter what. Minimum wage isn't a wage for a comfortable suburban lifestyle, it's one step above starvation. I'd love to have inexpensive paths for bright but poor kids to live up to their potential but four years in ivy-covered halls might not be realistic.
Replace "minimum" with "median" and you've got a stronger argument. But income tends to grow with age so by the time one has kids going to college, I'd hope many parents are tending to the high side of median.
You could but as it turns out, it's incredibly handy to have one comprehensive database that everyone uses (and codes to). There's really no value in multiple people doing the grunt work and probably getting it wrong.
I looked up TCP over SMS a while back, assuming someone must have written an April Fool's RFC. Turns out some guy submitted a patent application for it (#20080146257).
And IIRC, that was the other part of the license agreement: you had to charge the same amount for in-app and out-of-app purchases. So no, you can't mark up the in-app purchase price to cover the Apple tax.
I'm grudgingly willing to allow that Apple can set whatever rules they want about what apps running in their ecosystem must and must not do. I'm much more pissed off that they're setting pricing policies for third parties, especially for purchases that don't go through any part of the Apple store.
Yeah, this is going to be a challenge to make work. I kept thinking about all the steps that have to work first time, on time, like all the explosive bolts, the radar working, the wheels deploying, descent rockets firing at just the right altitude, finding a nice smooth spot to hover over with 30 seconds (or whatever) of fuel, etc. etc.
In theory, I'm sure all of these can be solved. If they all work, I'll be impressed as hell. Forget finding life, just solving an engineering challenge like this is inspiring enough to me.
Nothing cynical about protecting their bottom line. Virtually everything Apple (or any other company does) has to consider how this affects sales and profits. That's just what companies do: they produce something I like more than I like the money in my pocket. We make a trade, everyone's happy. If they fail, I keep the money, I'm happy, they're out of business.
The beauty of competition is it forces companies to do things I like even if they're not thrilled about it.
I think you can find plans in back issues of Popular Science.
Is there scum and villainy too?
Once income passes a certain point, it is detrimental to the rest of society.
Interesting assertion. Do you have any evidence to back up that point?
Trivial case is if 1 person gets 100% of the societies income, everyone else will either starve or murder the 1 person.
The only way that would happen is if that one person did all the work and produced all the value while everyone else lolled around eating bon-bons. That's not very realistic.
And the problem with capitalism is that no one ever explains properly how you can produce money from nothing.in a way that you can't with socialism.
Sure it does, the lure of profits and threat of competition motivates individuals to constantly look for more efficient ways to produce more value at less cost. Socialism tends to minimize both forces (less profit for sure and indirectly less competition) so innovation is slower.
Not every company exists solely for profit. A few notable exceptions (e.g. Ben and Jerrys, HP in the pre-Carly days) explicitly put social goods in their corporate goals. I'm pretty sure the owner of a business I patronize gives huge discounts to some of the other customers because of their life circumstances. And there are no end to non-profits.
But I think you misread my comment. A business is nothing more than the people (investors, executives, managers, line workers) that compose it. Businesses don't do anything, the people that work there do things.
Personally, I enjoy giving things away but that doesn't pay my bills. I have to charge enough to pay my salary and keep the investors happy (otherwise the employees don't show up and the investors take their money elsewhere). And because my company has competition, I can't charge whatever I want. The vast majority of companies are in this boat—yes we'd charge more if we could but we just can't because our competitors are thrilled to undercut us by just enough to get the sale. I suppose I could take a pay cut and keep more people on the payroll but I'll admit it, I'm greedy and would prefer to work harder and get paid more.
Monopolies are different and that's why we have anti-trust laws. But true monopolies are quite rare. Off the top of my head, I can't think of more than a handful and all those are because my city has exclusive contracts for things like water, electricity, trash pick up and the like. Everyone else has to fight for my dollars so they can't charge what they'd like.
Now, you might not like some things some companies do, or like their prices but that's different. You've almost always got the choice of not buying or buying somewhere else. I used to not buy Microsoft products, but now see Apple as more obnoxious, so I won't buy Apple. Not that I expect very many people to agree with that, but it makes me happier.
Why is the corporate profit motive never questioned, but the motive to provide for one's family and oneself is discounted?
What nonsense. Businesses exist to help people cooperate and create enough value for their customers that the customers are willing to give them money. If that's more than the company spent, yay! we have a profit, otherwise the company eventually disbands.
My motivation as a worker is to find a way to use the least amount of my time to generate the most amount of value so people give me the most amount of money so I can spend it on my family (modulo not doing something I hate, is illegal, etc.). Meter readers just found out they made a bad call like many buggy whip makers, stone carvers, hand cart pushers, machinists and zillions of other obsolete occupations. They don't add any value any more, not when a $25 piece of electronics can do it for them. And as a rate payer, I'm not paying them to be inefficient.
If you take your reasoning to it's next logical step, we should ban email, faxes, video conferencing, robots, computers, most software and the wheel. Won't anyone think of the hunter-gatherers?!?
In what way is prohibiting voluntary binding contracts between a consenting adult and a private company a libertarian (big or little L) position? That's a Liberal (in the socially intrusive, not liberty-loving sense) idea.
First thing I do to new computers is remap caps lock to control, the way God and RMS intended. I move escape too. Annoys the snot out of my wife and kids, but that's hardly my problem.
I'm not really sure why that much keyboard real estate needs to be dedicated to search. Seems like a goofy default.
I seem to recall Xilinx offering a FPGA with an embedded PowerPC core 8-ish years ago. Or maybe it was four cores, I heard it from a co-worker.
Seemed like a fun part to hack around with. Too bad we never got to use any.
I think the key bit is not to filer or prioritize based on source or destination.
I'm OK with the idea of prioritizing or throttling based the type of traffic. If the link is congested, perhaps all streaming video gets throttled so VoIP still works. But the important neutrality bit is all video gets throttled regardless of whether it comes from YouTube, NetFlix, NBC or barnyardanimalsex.com.