Things like this are always maddening to me since they have such a simple solution: instead of having a hard boundary (40 hours/week) just pro-rate things. So if for a full-time employee the company pays 50% of the insurance cost and the employee pays 50%, then make the employer of the 20 hour/week employee pay 25% and the employee 75%. (And do this at a per-hour resolution, not a full time/half-time resolution). This would give employers much less of an incentive to cut hours to get below some magic number.
(Of course why we still allow insurance to be tied to employment is a whole other kettle of crazy fish.)
You are conflating public and private spending. If you are an 'average' american, you would 'only' spend about $4200/year on healthcare - but part of the problem with the costs in the USA is that the government is also spending on average $4000/year. So our total per-person costs are about $8,200 per person/per year. In comparison, the total public & private costs are about $3400/year.
This means if we were able to wave a magic wand and instantly implement the NHS for the USA, we could both give everyone free healthcare and lower taxes.
I was referring to how nobody *will* read TFA I linked to;-)
(Also the original article links to Apple's environment page, which has a link right at the top of the page for "Our Footprint", so for all of the people complaining about what 'Apple' is/isn't including in their calculation - a trivial amount of effort from the TFA would have gotten people to a page with the answer, though clearly that is much less fun than speculating and shooting down straw men.)
Don't blame Apple for the submitter's terrible headline. What Apple actually claims is on their website, and they have a clear breakdown of what they view their footprint to be is here: http://www.apple.com/environment/our-footprint/
(Broken down b/c nobody actually RTFA) 61% Manufacturing 5% Transportation 30% Product Use 2% Recycling 2% Facilities
1. On what basis do you say that they suddenly do not have an innovative product pipeline? All of their non-Jobs creative executives are still there (except their retail chief, but he was building Apple Stores not developing products).
2. How are they not acting like a "big boy" company?
1. You are forgetting that Gross Margin != Profit. Given that Apple's profit margin is usually about 40%, the costs for everything besides manufacturing costs (such as salaries for Apple's 60,000+ US employees) would be roughly 15%, so using the figure above, an iPad would actually cost roughly $668 (618 + 50), leaving an 8.5% profit margin, not 15%.
2. Apple hires plenty of US workers who are paid well.
3. Apple used to manufacture in the US, most recently iMacs, and couldn't compete. NeXT also manufactured in the US, and nobody wanted to pay the price premium.
The article sloppily refers to the iBook Store as 'iBooks', so what that sentence is actually saying is: books that are published in the iBook Store must be exclusive to the iBook Store. Which has nothing to do with what you can do with books you write using the iBooks Author software (it is your work, of course you can do whatever you want with it, the same as you can a Word document).
I've read the breakdowns, but I don't buy it. For example, I once ended up with the bangladeshi copy of a $150 physics textbook for $50. It was paperback, printed on newsprint (which is actually less glossy and therefore easier to read under bright lights), black-and-white, and page-for-page identical with the US edition (and from the same company as the original textbook, so not a pirated copy).
I'm sure many students in the US would gladly opt for a much cheaper "economy" edition if it were offered instead of the delux quality hardback, multi-color, super-glossy textbooks that we get to choose from. (Sure, some subjects benefit from color, but for most, especially math and programming, it is an unnecessary luxury. )
Even if no outright price gouging exists, it is much more lucrative to sell luxury textbooks than bare-bones ones (a fixed percentage of $150 is more than the same percentage of $50): this decision may be good for publishers, but it is bad for students.
Most of america is also car-illiterate, financially-illiterate, woodworking-illiterate, sewing-illiterate, hunting-illiterate, gardening-illiterate and cooking-illiterate.
I don't think we should ever celebrate ignorance, but there is a big difference between this and acknowledging that people only have so much time/energy/capacity to learn about how the world works and would rather spend their time living their lives.
Basic gardening is also super-easy and is beneficial both financially and health-wise, but most people don't bother with it, the same way most people don't bother spending time understanding their computer.
As we look at how to improve our society, I think concerns about cooking/food-illiteracy and financial-illiteracy are far more pressing than bemoaning that people don't bother to learn how to navigate a directory structure. It is better to discuss making "open" computing simple, easy and relevant rather than berating people for wanting to get on with their lives.
Speculative: They *only* released it because they had to. Fact: They had to release it.
Fact: Apple has benefited greatly by the proliferation of WebKit. No longer is the Mac a second-class citizen of the internet due to not having IE6.
Speculation: I don't think it is unreasonable to believe that they chose to start with an open-source project partly because it saved development time and also partly because using a widely-adopted engine as a basis for the browser is good for Mac users, which is a goal furthered by releasing the engine as open-source. I think if Konqueror didn't exist, or wasn't used as the basis of the project, Apple may have (I'd say 50/50 chance) still released WebKit as open-source. (It is also quite reasonable to argue they didn't care about the open-source part and just wanted to ship quickly - unless the people who made those decisions state them publicly, it is all speculation).
In most industries the profit margins are pretty similar across businesses that market to the same niche. This is because of competition - if you price your product at a 60% markup and somebody else is happy to sell a similar product for a 30% markup, you aren't going to do well for very long.
So while you are technically correct, usually a company's profit margin stays fixed while prices and costs of doing business fluctuate. Businesses do sometimes bite the bullet during temporary spikes in costs, but the costs of doing business can only increase so much before a price increase is necessary for doing business.
Dude, all federal agencies are run by the President (aka, Executive Branch) as it is that branch's job to execute (carry out) the laws that Congress passes. Federal agencies can make rules only because congress allows them to for the sake of expediency. Congress can always override rules a federal agency comes up with.
Why should the taxpayer pay? Because taxpayers benefit - a hurricane that destroys an unprepared business in Florida is one that reduces orders from its supplier in Georgia and increases unemployment, reducing demand for goods and services from the rest of the country.
Why do we let tiny Caribbean countries use data we are already collecting for ourselves? Because we are far richer than they are and it would be cruel to not share it with them just because they are poor. (The discussion would be different if this were something that say, Canada or Europe would benefit from, that can full well afford to split costs or do it themselves.)
We can afford the weather service as it takes up less than a fraction of a percent of our total budget. Knowing when hurricanes are coming saves thousands of lives a year (which is financially worth doing even without looking at the moral/ethical side of things.)
I agree, it is much too soon to be drawing conclusions. I hadn't thought much about the slow-replacement scenario as an alternative, but that also seems very plausible. Is the key difference if somebody has a PC or not, or is it which they use more? If somebody keeps their old PC around for a few years after they stop using it day-to-day in preference for a tablet, are they slow-replacers until they sell the old PC? Or do they become post-pc once they start using the tablet more often than the PC?
Both scenarios will likely happen, but which becomes more common (if either does) is very much in the air, and will be for the next few years.
Looking at how the "post-floppy disk" era played out, Steve Jobs killed floppy disks in iMacs in 1999, but it wasn't really until a few years later that floppies really started to fall out of favor and iirc, Dell was shipping floppy drives in desktops well into the late 00's. I wouldn't expect a Post-PC shift to take place any faster than that.
Post-PC doesn't mean there will be no more PC's, it just means that consumers are going to shift their primary usage to devices like tablets & smartphones, and many won't bother to even own a PC. It does not mean that PC's will go away nor does it mean that smartphones will become the dominant development stack.
The overall PC market in 2011 has been shrinking, while tablet and smartphone sales are growing rapidly. This trend will have to last longer than a year to be strong evidence of anything, but it does hint that the Post-PC notion might not just be "marketing hype".
For people who do not understand their PCs (most consumers), the simplicity of a tablet is very attractive. After all, functionality that you are afraid to use or avoid because it is too complicated might as well not exist. (And no, all of these people who haven't figured out a PC in the last 20 years are not going to en-masse decide figure it all out.) Anyone who has built their own PC, uses 2+ monitors, professionally requires lots of computing power or is a gamer is not going to give up their PC in a Post-PC world. (So NewEgg will be just fine, as these are their primary customers)
Nobody is arguing that professionals will give up their workstations, or even that that would make any sense. You need a PC to write iOS applications, and I would be very surprised if that changed anytime soon.
I don't understand why some people have such an issue with this. Your legal name should be in sync with the name you want to use. Period.
If you do legally change your name to be the one you want, then faceless, unthinking bureaucracies will have to use it.
But if you insist on using a name that is not your legal name, then faceless, unthinking bureaucracies will give you a hard time and make you use a name you don't like. (Or in Google's case, ban you from using any Google product or service)
Just because you think religion is crazy, doesn't mean it makes sense to eliminate all religious exceptions. Often the rules with religious exceptions are overly-strict in the first place. (Why no headgear in passport photos? Why not allow any headgear that doesn't impinge on facial recognition? Because it is easier to write a simple rule and add a loophole than to create a clearly written rule that allows for some headgear but not others.).
Religion doesn't need a free pass on everything no matter what, but most of the time accommodations requested are minor. Even if you didn't make any religious exemptions to rules, many Atheists also have sincerely-held beliefs that are different than those of other Atheists, so accommodations would still need to be made. (And if you think no exceptions to any rules should ever be made for any reason, then your love of bureaucracy and/or totalitarianism is truly terrifying)
(For the record, people who want to teach creation in school are whackos who don't understand science and/or the separation of church and state. )
First of all, thank you for taking the time to explain your position.
What does it mean to "make markets"? Stock markets have been around for a hundred years without high frequency trading, and they worked just fine.
Why do we need middlemen to quickly buy and sell stocks? They only are willing to do so if they can make money. So if I put out a sell order and want to sell my stocks for at least $5, and there is a HFT firm in the market that buys my stock for $5 one hundredth of a second later, then a few seconds later my stock is sold to Bob for $5.02, then I am loosing out on 2 cents. To me, this has *negative* value. I would like to know that, barring any significant news of the company, a few hours (or even days) wouldn't really change how much my stocks sell for. With HFT, the microsecond my stock sells matters, and this is very bad for long term investors.
(If a middleman were the only person willing to buy my stock at $5, hold on to it for a two weeks while waiting for the company's earnings report to come out, and then sell it after that report to Bob for $5.50, then I think there is value in that, because otherwise I may not have been able to sell my stock at all, making it worthless, or had to sell for much lower than the market price, making the market price worthless. But I would consider this person to be a short term investor rather than a useless middleman.
There are plenty of ways to implement the bid matching part of a gated system to eliminate the effect of bid-submission order or order size. For example, a Uniform Price Auction could be used, where everybody submits sealed bids and all of the traders willing to pay the competitive market clearing price for the round get to trade. (See wikipedia for details).
The goals of the stock market should be to efficiently and accurately value companies and allow all sizes of investors to fairly participate. The needs of people participating in the market as a casino (those who aren't trading based on information about the underlying company but only on trying to beat the system) should be ignored.
Slashdot Mirror
Why would you think that? Google has a terrible record of supporting old devices.
http://theunderstatement.com/post/11982112928/android-orphans-visualizing-a-sad-history-of-support
Hegemony is no longer fun when it is Europe doing it to us in the USA.
(However, turnabout is fair play.)
Things like this are always maddening to me since they have such a simple solution: instead of having a hard boundary (40 hours/week) just pro-rate things. So if for a full-time employee the company pays 50% of the insurance cost and the employee pays 50%, then make the employer of the 20 hour/week employee pay 25% and the employee 75%. (And do this at a per-hour resolution, not a full time/half-time resolution). This would give employers much less of an incentive to cut hours to get below some magic number.
(Of course why we still allow insurance to be tied to employment is a whole other kettle of crazy fish.)
You are conflating public and private spending. If you are an 'average' american, you would 'only' spend about $4200/year on healthcare - but part of the problem with the costs in the USA is that the government is also spending on average $4000/year. So our total per-person costs are about $8,200 per person/per year. In comparison, the total public & private costs are about $3400/year.
This means if we were able to wave a magic wand and instantly implement the NHS for the USA, we could both give everyone free healthcare and lower taxes.
(Numbers are all 2010 figures from: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2012/10/health-costs-how-the-us-compares-with-other-countries.html)
Cards? Those aren't (originally) an Android thing, they were a Palm webOS thing.
The SEIU has 2.1 million members, so that is less than $9/member being contributed.
If you are talking about political total contributions, $18 million is peanuts: $6 Billion was spent on the 2012 elections (source: http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2012/10/2012-election-spending-will-reach-6.html).
I was referring to how nobody *will* read TFA I linked to ;-)
(Also the original article links to Apple's environment page, which has a link right at the top of the page for "Our Footprint", so for all of the people complaining about what 'Apple' is/isn't including in their calculation - a trivial amount of effort from the TFA would have gotten people to a page with the answer, though clearly that is much less fun than speculating and shooting down straw men.)
Don't blame Apple for the submitter's terrible headline. What Apple actually claims is on their website, and they have a clear breakdown of what they view their footprint to be is here:
http://www.apple.com/environment/our-footprint/
(Broken down b/c nobody actually RTFA)
61% Manufacturing
5% Transportation
30% Product Use
2% Recycling
2% Facilities
1. On what basis do you say that they suddenly do not have an innovative product pipeline? All of their non-Jobs creative executives are still there (except their retail chief, but he was building Apple Stores not developing products).
2. How are they not acting like a "big boy" company?
1. You are forgetting that Gross Margin != Profit. Given that Apple's profit margin is usually about 40%, the costs for everything besides manufacturing costs (such as salaries for Apple's 60,000+ US employees) would be roughly 15%, so using the figure above, an iPad would actually cost roughly $668 (618 + 50), leaving an 8.5% profit margin, not 15%.
2. Apple hires plenty of US workers who are paid well.
3. Apple used to manufacture in the US, most recently iMacs, and couldn't compete. NeXT also manufactured in the US, and nobody wanted to pay the price premium.
The article sloppily refers to the iBook Store as 'iBooks', so what that sentence is actually saying is: books that are published in the iBook Store must be exclusive to the iBook Store. Which has nothing to do with what you can do with books you write using the iBooks Author software (it is your work, of course you can do whatever you want with it, the same as you can a Word document).
I've read the breakdowns, but I don't buy it. For example, I once ended up with the bangladeshi copy of a $150 physics textbook for $50. It was paperback, printed on newsprint (which is actually less glossy and therefore easier to read under bright lights), black-and-white, and page-for-page identical with the US edition (and from the same company as the original textbook, so not a pirated copy).
I'm sure many students in the US would gladly opt for a much cheaper "economy" edition if it were offered instead of the delux quality hardback, multi-color, super-glossy textbooks that we get to choose from. (Sure, some subjects benefit from color, but for most, especially math and programming, it is an unnecessary luxury. )
Even if no outright price gouging exists, it is much more lucrative to sell luxury textbooks than bare-bones ones (a fixed percentage of $150 is more than the same percentage of $50): this decision may be good for publishers, but it is bad for students.
That's like saying driving in the dark is hard to do without using your car's headlights. Use a debugger to figure things out.
Most of america is also car-illiterate, financially-illiterate, woodworking-illiterate, sewing-illiterate, hunting-illiterate, gardening-illiterate and cooking-illiterate.
I don't think we should ever celebrate ignorance, but there is a big difference between this and acknowledging that people only have so much time/energy/capacity to learn about how the world works and would rather spend their time living their lives.
Basic gardening is also super-easy and is beneficial both financially and health-wise, but most people don't bother with it, the same way most people don't bother spending time understanding their computer.
As we look at how to improve our society, I think concerns about cooking/food-illiteracy and financial-illiteracy are far more pressing than bemoaning that people don't bother to learn how to navigate a directory structure. It is better to discuss making "open" computing simple, easy and relevant rather than berating people for wanting to get on with their lives.
Speculative: They *only* released it because they had to.
Fact: They had to release it.
Fact: Apple has benefited greatly by the proliferation of WebKit. No longer is the Mac a second-class citizen of the internet due to not having IE6.
Speculation: I don't think it is unreasonable to believe that they chose to start with an open-source project partly because it saved development time and also partly because using a widely-adopted engine as a basis for the browser is good for Mac users, which is a goal furthered by releasing the engine as open-source. I think if Konqueror didn't exist, or wasn't used as the basis of the project, Apple may have (I'd say 50/50 chance) still released WebKit as open-source. (It is also quite reasonable to argue they didn't care about the open-source part and just wanted to ship quickly - unless the people who made those decisions state them publicly, it is all speculation).
In most industries the profit margins are pretty similar across businesses that market to the same niche. This is because of competition - if you price your product at a 60% markup and somebody else is happy to sell a similar product for a 30% markup, you aren't going to do well for very long.
So while you are technically correct, usually a company's profit margin stays fixed while prices and costs of doing business fluctuate. Businesses do sometimes bite the bullet during temporary spikes in costs, but the costs of doing business can only increase so much before a price increase is necessary for doing business.
They could have developed their own engine instead. You are working hard to split hairs, and basing it entirely on speculation.
Dude, all federal agencies are run by the President (aka, Executive Branch) as it is that branch's job to execute (carry out) the laws that Congress passes. Federal agencies can make rules only because congress allows them to for the sake of expediency. Congress can always override rules a federal agency comes up with.
Why should the taxpayer pay? Because taxpayers benefit - a hurricane that destroys an unprepared business in Florida is one that reduces orders from its supplier in Georgia and increases unemployment, reducing demand for goods and services from the rest of the country.
Why do we let tiny Caribbean countries use data we are already collecting for ourselves? Because we are far richer than they are and it would be cruel to not share it with them just because they are poor. (The discussion would be different if this were something that say, Canada or Europe would benefit from, that can full well afford to split costs or do it themselves.)
We can afford the weather service as it takes up less than a fraction of a percent of our total budget. Knowing when hurricanes are coming saves thousands of lives a year (which is financially worth doing even without looking at the moral/ethical side of things.)
I agree, it is much too soon to be drawing conclusions. I hadn't thought much about the slow-replacement scenario as an alternative, but that also seems very plausible. Is the key difference if somebody has a PC or not, or is it which they use more? If somebody keeps their old PC around for a few years after they stop using it day-to-day in preference for a tablet, are they slow-replacers until they sell the old PC? Or do they become post-pc once they start using the tablet more often than the PC?
Both scenarios will likely happen, but which becomes more common (if either does) is very much in the air, and will be for the next few years.
Looking at how the "post-floppy disk" era played out, Steve Jobs killed floppy disks in iMacs in 1999, but it wasn't really until a few years later that floppies really started to fall out of favor and iirc, Dell was shipping floppy drives in desktops well into the late 00's. I wouldn't expect a Post-PC shift to take place any faster than that.
Post-PC doesn't mean there will be no more PC's, it just means that consumers are going to shift their primary usage to devices like tablets & smartphones, and many won't bother to even own a PC. It does not mean that PC's will go away nor does it mean that smartphones will become the dominant development stack.
The overall PC market in 2011 has been shrinking, while tablet and smartphone sales are growing rapidly. This trend will have to last longer than a year to be strong evidence of anything, but it does hint that the Post-PC notion might not just be "marketing hype".
For people who do not understand their PCs (most consumers), the simplicity of a tablet is very attractive. After all, functionality that you are afraid to use or avoid because it is too complicated might as well not exist. (And no, all of these people who haven't figured out a PC in the last 20 years are not going to en-masse decide figure it all out.) Anyone who has built their own PC, uses 2+ monitors, professionally requires lots of computing power or is a gamer is not going to give up their PC in a Post-PC world. (So NewEgg will be just fine, as these are their primary customers)
Nobody is arguing that professionals will give up their workstations, or even that that would make any sense. You need a PC to write iOS applications, and I would be very surprised if that changed anytime soon.
I don't understand why some people have such an issue with this. Your legal name should be in sync with the name you want to use. Period.
If you do legally change your name to be the one you want, then faceless, unthinking bureaucracies will have to use it.
But if you insist on using a name that is not your legal name, then faceless, unthinking bureaucracies will give you a hard time and make you use a name you don't like. (Or in Google's case, ban you from using any Google product or service)
Just because you think religion is crazy, doesn't mean it makes sense to eliminate all religious exceptions. Often the rules with religious exceptions are overly-strict in the first place. (Why no headgear in passport photos? Why not allow any headgear that doesn't impinge on facial recognition? Because it is easier to write a simple rule and add a loophole than to create a clearly written rule that allows for some headgear but not others.).
Religion doesn't need a free pass on everything no matter what, but most of the time accommodations requested are minor. Even if you didn't make any religious exemptions to rules, many Atheists also have sincerely-held beliefs that are different than those of other Atheists, so accommodations would still need to be made. (And if you think no exceptions to any rules should ever be made for any reason, then your love of bureaucracy and/or totalitarianism is truly terrifying)
(For the record, people who want to teach creation in school are whackos who don't understand science and/or the separation of church and state. )
First of all, thank you for taking the time to explain your position.
What does it mean to "make markets"? Stock markets have been around for a hundred years without high frequency trading, and they worked just fine.
Why do we need middlemen to quickly buy and sell stocks? They only are willing to do so if they can make money. So if I put out a sell order and want to sell my stocks for at least $5, and there is a HFT firm in the market that buys my stock for $5 one hundredth of a second later, then a few seconds later my stock is sold to Bob for $5.02, then I am loosing out on 2 cents. To me, this has *negative* value. I would like to know that, barring any significant news of the company, a few hours (or even days) wouldn't really change how much my stocks sell for. With HFT, the microsecond my stock sells matters, and this is very bad for long term investors.
(If a middleman were the only person willing to buy my stock at $5, hold on to it for a two weeks while waiting for the company's earnings report to come out, and then sell it after that report to Bob for $5.50, then I think there is value in that, because otherwise I may not have been able to sell my stock at all, making it worthless, or had to sell for much lower than the market price, making the market price worthless. But I would consider this person to be a short term investor rather than a useless middleman.
There are plenty of ways to implement the bid matching part of a gated system to eliminate the effect of bid-submission order or order size. For example, a Uniform Price Auction could be used, where everybody submits sealed bids and all of the traders willing to pay the competitive market clearing price for the round get to trade. (See wikipedia for details).
The goals of the stock market should be to efficiently and accurately value companies and allow all sizes of investors to fairly participate. The needs of people participating in the market as a casino (those who aren't trading based on information about the underlying company but only on trying to beat the system) should be ignored.