I think you're right, without regulation the cable-based ISPs would ramp up data costs so high that video streaming would have been crushed and cable would be the only possible TV option. Netflix would still be only a disc delivery service. It's not clear to me that even the Commerce Department would view it as a monopolistic practice.
I'm not even sure if the existing regulations would have actually stopped it. They wouldn't get away with it now because streaming is too popular and there would be political blowback.
But early on? You wonder why they didn't start with high per GB prices. It would have been pretty easy, and in most places the only competition (when there is any at all) is DSL with serious limits on speed, so it's not like they would have faced a bunch of defection, especially with discounts for TV subscriptions.
Frankly, I don't think per GB charges are a terrible idea. I end up paying about $0.60 per GB when I divide my cost by transit volume. I don't know if my monthly transit of about 160 GB per month is high, low or average.
The good part about per GB charges is that it would in theory eliminate caps as a policy and undermine any argument for them, since in theory the transit pricing would actually reflect the cost to deliver the service, so heavy users would actually be paying for what they consumed, and as consumption went up, the infrastructure could be expanded with the additional revenue.
The bad things, well, artificially high prices just lower than LTE cellular. Not seeing transit revenue as a source of infrastructure investment, just a source of more profits. And there's always the chance that "average" users really only consume 20-30 GB per month and they're subsidizing everyone and that the per GB transit cost would actually be much higher even on a dollar-for-dollar revenue basis to account for "average" users getting a much lower bill.
This is the only reason I usually use Google Maps on iOS -- working in an unfamiliar location and wanting to know what restaurants are available, and searching for "food" or something actually finds restaurants.
iOS Maps has been fine for navigation, but its search results are usually poor.
Education has been seized by the idea of solving the "achievement gap" and using the public school system as a social welfare delivery service.
The former only increases the desire for the latter because underachieving demographics are highly correlated with poverty.
It would make some sense, but the task of social welfare exceeds both the expertise and resources of a school district. When they nevertheless focus on social welfare, they end up biasing the talent pool towards social welfare delivery experts and away from education, in addition to diverting the limited funding pool from education to social welfare delivery.
Furthering the problem, poverty in and of itself isn't the primary problem of education underachievement, it has much more to do with the social environment of the home, the parents' emphasis on educational obtainment and other factors that can't be bought with social welfare transfers. So the diversion of limited resources has limited return and probably is more corrosive to the larger educational mission than it is beneficial to underachieving students.
Given the political pressure to "solve" the underachievement problem, racial politics and the left-leaning nature of the educational system I don't see any of this changing.
I've considered that -- the wages being too low to attract competent help, but I'm skeptical that explains all that I've seen.
For one, I see a ton of fast food places advertising higher than minimum wages -- $10+ dollars per hour. Maybe that's still too low to attract competent people, but it's above the minimum wage.
Two, the poaching argument makes some sense, but ultimately I would expect any appreciable level of churn to actually result in slightly better employee competence since they would end up with hybridized skills -- ie, learning the system at places A, B and C ought to be make them marginally better as there's skill overlap, the process at most fast food places isn't that different, which ought to make learning C after learning A and B better since they would be able to focus on the unique aspects of C and focus less on the commonalities.
I'd also expect poaching to have something of limited impact, since I would imagine low wage fast food workers are somewhat geography bound and likely to stick to jobs within a certain geographic area. Nobody is quitting McDonalds for a Taco Bell 10 miles away over 25 cents an hour.
And the thing with service, you do go to McDonald's or similar fast food places for the service -- brisk and efficient. I've been like the second guy in line and waited 10-odd minutes to get my order taken and receive my food, when they used to turn something like that around during a slower period in less than 5 minutes.
And it's not just the lowest end of fast food places I've seen this at, it includes "better" counter service places like Smashburger where you order at the counter and they bring your food to the table.
I'd guess the answer is really multifactorial -- low wages attract low grade employees, a high demand for workers in the sector has probably made getting a job there so easy that people may view it more as temping, a job to be taken and then walked away from when they decide its no longer desirable. And I have a hard time escaping the notion that the socioeconomic demographic of "fast food worker" has literally gone downhill with declines in education quality and all the other socioeconomic toxins of the working class.
These two stories about jammers seem to indicate that the only reason these people got caught is that they had dumb jammers that just continuously broadcast, making their triangulation easy.
Where are the smart jammers that operate at low power thresholds and operate intermittently -- some pattern of briefly on, then off, then on again, in a kind of random backoff cycle before going off? Or have some kind of passive radio detection to not transmit unless there is a nearby handset in use signature?
The idea would be a jammer that produced enough interference to disrupt and discourage use in a narrow local window, but with a limited on profile such that it was much harder to detect.
I don't get a perception of people being surly or not wanting to work.
It's more like they're operating beyond their cognitive limits and just aren't capable of doing the job well.
Maybe the MBA process geniuses have made running a fast food place overly complex. Maybe the economy is good enough that the fast food places can't find anyone competent to work at their wage rates. Or perhaps more disturbingly, the socioeconomic strata that has always worked at fast food places has degraded, and this is what society is now producing.
Is it just me, or has the quality of worker at fast food places really hit rock bottom in the last couple of years?
I try not to eat it, but sometimes its that or go hungry and I've noticed that the service in a lot of fast food places (many places throughout the metro area I visit) has gone right into the toilet. Employees that can hardly grok an order if its not "number 3 with coke" and this includes ordering stuff right off their own menu.
I've ordered countless McDonald's lattes "large latte, no flavor, whole milk" -- and had the employee then ask me what flavor and did I want skim milk or sound confused because I gave them the entire order with answers to their questions. And then watched as more than one employee at different locations managed to not be able to work the totally automatic, touch-screen driven Franke espresso machine.
And at some locations I'm at more often, the turnover is unbelievable, with successive waves of employees seeming to be worse than the previous ones, and this is at presumably "prestige" locations in wealthy suburban malls.
About the only place I haven't seen this downward spiral has been at Starbucks or similar chains (Caribou). I don't know if they screen better or what. I do notice their employee base seems to include a lot of older people (like, over 35).
While I'm sure the fast food industry would like to hold down wages to avoid capital spending on machinery (even if they are wonder robots from the future), I wonder if some of their real motivation isn't just trying to make the business run without dealing with people who seem to be borderline mentally deficient.
My guess is that the increase in the security state was a deliberate outcome.
Every single Federal intelligence and security was caught completely flat footed and their reflexive argument was "we don't have enough power" to gather the right amount of intelligence to weed these threats out. Without making that argument they were likely exposed to questions of competency, legitimate and otherwise.
Of course nobody would make the argument that the threat was transcendent and unavoidable, even if it's likely correct because it still exposes you to questions of competency and doesn't expand your power.
I think it was formed for two reasons, one being political -- W Bush wanting to look strong and as if he was doing something about the threat of terrorism. The second reason was to enhance the security state, to create a layer of strong, law-enforcement control in a place where Americans were least likely to object to increased surveillance and searches.
I think the "doing something" part *may* have had some merit, as airport security screening was somewhat haphazard and non-standard across airports previously.
Read the excellent book "The Skies Belong To Us" about the rash of hijackings in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Up through that period there was NO security screening at all -- you just walked through the concourse to your flight. Even after a wave of hijackings, airlines didn't want security security screening. They were happy to pay the ransom, get the people and their planes back.
Fast-forward to 9/11 and you have the byproduct of a somewhat reluctant security screening process with an emphasis on cost containment and passenger efficiency in which there were probably legitimate arguments about its efficacy.
That the TSA has become another giant bureaucracy with a host of parasitic lobbyists, contractors and vendors is just the natural result of its scale and the internalized belief that its security mandate makes it permanent, along with a self-important status as a quasi-law enforcement organization with national security implications.
While annoying, the bonus thing seems entirely unsurprising. Incentive pay is one of those MBA concepts from the private sector that you'd expect them to ape, believing its both necessary for staff retention and good for achieving results. That its execution was flawed and political in Government practice doesn't seem to be an unexpected outcome. At least it was $90k and not $9 million.
I wonder what the chances are that Microsoft will invoke a totally forced upgrade for:
(a)...all Windows 7 PCs, regardless of GWX registry settings or install type (home/pro/enterprise)
(b)...all Windows 7 PCs missing GWX registry?
(c)...all Windows 7 Home and Pro editions with/without GWX registry?
I guess at this point I can see them pulling the pin on it and just not giving a shit as many customers have no choice but to keep running Windows, and while for some it may totally break their software, for possibly many others it will just piss them off and they will keep working but MS will have "won" having upgraded them off 7..
Does Apple pay enough dividend to make the difference between 5% and 25% meaningful to shareholders, or are we just playing the stock price appreciation game where shareholders don't give a shit about fundamentals as long as the stock price increases?
Pardon my cynicism, but I think corporations should have to provide compelling reasons to hoard cash on this scale or pay dividends. This just seems like lazy management, coasting on high profit products while failing to do the hard work of business expansion because it will ruin the stock market cosmetics of high net margins. And shame on investors for just surfing stock price increases and not giving a shit about how these companies are managed.
I know, tiresome moralizing, but it seems like a shitty feedback loop that results in bad business management.
If 100,000 people deposit $10,000 in a bank, the bank can reasonably assume that they won't all demand all their money at the same time.
If a single company deposits that same $1 billion in a single account, it represents a significant liquidity risk to the bank. If the bank ties up some significant portion of that one account holder's cash as loans to other people or firms and the company decides it needs $500 million right now, the bank has to come up with $500 million. It can't call in the loans it made on that money.
For banks, these large cash holdings become a liability and from what I've read they've started charging negative interest on them to dissuade being dumping grounds for hoards of cash they can't effectively use for working capital.
I strongly doubt that they're in non-working assets. I don't know about the others, but I know that Google aggressively invests its cash holdings, and gets a nice rate of return.
My assumption is that the term "cash" is used to denote a specific asset class, i.e., highly liquid holdings of actual cash balance accounts or extremely liquid instruments like short-term T-bills.
Assets held as working, long-term investments aren't really all that liquid and I wouldn't necessarily call them "cash", especially if converting them into cash requires an investment bank or market-maker to buy the securities or some kind of longer time horizon to convert them to cash.
I think the articles I've read tried to chalk this up to the slow growth of the economy generally. There just aren't enough productive investments to put the money into.
Although that seems kind of a thin excuse; these firms aren't investment banks and presumably seek profitable growth through their principal business function, not investment in capital markets.
I think I mostly agree with you that it represents a kind of deficit in terms business growth. Rather than investing in business growth through new products or markets, they're content to make high profits on existing products and just hoard the profits as cash.
It's funny in the case of Apple; as their sales slide, the lack of business investment and organic product growth seems exposed. They don't have emerging products that would have resulted from their investment of their cash hoard.
Our current dishwasher is a Bosch, bought about a year and a half ago. It was as close as we could get to the highest Consumer Reports dishwasher (fscking manufacturers seem to play model number games, meaning you can't necessarily even find the specific model rated highly...).
It replaced a Sears (oem'd by KitchenAide, I think) dishwasher which was about 8 years old. That one worked well with the same detergent we use now, until it didn't.
I couldn't really figure out why, it passed the built-in diagnostics tests but left scummy deposits on the dishware. My assumption is that with dishwashers, the internal plumbing and/or sensors eventually build up films that prevent them from cycling intelligently.
I guess I just accept that they're appliances with a lifespan of 10 years or less, probably made somewhat worse by weak detergents that don't usefully suspend or break down food chemistry enough. And if I stop to think about, I usually consider it a miracle they last that long considering the scum they're exposed to and being cycled 250 times a year.
It would be great if the entire system was comprised of marine grade stainless steel, running at 1000 psi and 50 C water temps and capable of being flushed with sodium hydroxide, but then again, I'd like to pay less than $1000 for it and not have it draw 5 kwh to do the dishes, either.
Are there any longer term data on the nature of their cash holdings -- ie, has this amount increased over time or is it fairly static?
I'm also curious about the economic impact of cash hoarding like this. Presumably having this much capital tied up in short-term non-working assets is suboptimal in a macroeconomic sense.
My understanding is that it mostly gets parked in high liquidity accounts and instruments, and that even banks have begun charging negative interest rates on large deposits because the short term nature and liquidity demands prevent them from being able to use it as capital.
I'm also curious how shareholders feel about this. It would seem kind of obnoxious for a corporation to hoard cash that could be paid out as dividends. Obviously some amount of cash (even relatively large) is a good idea for future investments and acquisitions, but maybe not at the levels shown here.
We use the detergent packs in the dishwasher and the dishes get really clean, with no residue and minimal pre-rinsing involved (usually just to get the vegetable residue off, as the more fibrous stuff doesn't disolve and gets trapped in the filter).
I've read that the packs have an advantage in that they're the right amount and combination of detergents to work effectively, which is important now that they've removed the truly effective phosphates from detergents.
For clothes washing, we just use unscented Costco liquid detergent in our front-loader and I don't notice any odors or cleaning issues. But the default wash setting is for 'warm' water, not cold.
We quit using paper towels several years ago and now keep a huge supply of white terry cloths to use instead. We wash these in bulk about once a week, so they sit in their own hamper, damp and filthy with all kinds of nasty organic residue but always seem clean and odor free. But I also bleach them, which may be partly why.
I think the real pressure is coming from major news organizations like the New York Times. Since this story has bubbled up, they've run multiple pieces largely critical of Facebook's business focus on one stop shopping for information and desire to be a news source.
Clearly this boils down to a business vs. business struggle, but by planting the seed of doubt about Facebook's murky willingness to manipulate content, they undermine Facebook's credibility as a news source. And being taken seriously seems to be a major desire of Zuckerberg.
I wasn't arguing against pumped hydro, it obviously has many great advantages.
The two things going against it, though, are that it requires water, and a lot of it, and it requires someplace uphill to impound that same volume of water.
For better or for worse, a lot of places that can generate free energy necessary to pump that water have neither, an uphill place or the water to pump -- like deserts or flat plains, both of which happen to be great places to put solar or wind generators.
IMHO, concerns about storage energy losses when the source power system (solar for sure, wind mostly) is capable of generating power but for which there is no useful work for it seem to throw away useful ideas.
If a solar farm can produce 10 megawatts of power and the grid demand is 5, does it really matter much if the storage system is only able to reproduce 1 megawatt of the surplus 5? Sure, you've lost 4 megawatts, but not doing anything at all is a loss of 5 megawatts.
Obviously there are some economics in play -- if the construction and operation costs and the facility life of the storage system don't work, then it's an economic problem, but still not really an energy problem. And even if the construction costs are high, it's not hard to see some more esoteric systems with extremely low maintenance costs and long facility lives might make sense even at high energy losses.
With wind I can see arguments where braking the turbines may make more sense than high loss storage if you take into account that a turbine is a mechanical system that will wear out.
I read about this system and it seems interesting and it makes me wonder if there are any other forays into mechanical storage of energy, such as some kind of larger scale clockwork system of raised weights.
A lot of the locations able to generate power surpluses are in remote regions with poor access to the geography and water for pumped hydro, but generally have a lot of square footage that could be used to house some kind of mechanical storage system.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you're right, without regulation the cable-based ISPs would ramp up data costs so high that video streaming would have been crushed and cable would be the only possible TV option. Netflix would still be only a disc delivery service. It's not clear to me that even the Commerce Department would view it as a monopolistic practice.
I'm not even sure if the existing regulations would have actually stopped it. They wouldn't get away with it now because streaming is too popular and there would be political blowback.
But early on? You wonder why they didn't start with high per GB prices. It would have been pretty easy, and in most places the only competition (when there is any at all) is DSL with serious limits on speed, so it's not like they would have faced a bunch of defection, especially with discounts for TV subscriptions.
Frankly, I don't think per GB charges are a terrible idea. I end up paying about $0.60 per GB when I divide my cost by transit volume. I don't know if my monthly transit of about 160 GB per month is high, low or average.
The good part about per GB charges is that it would in theory eliminate caps as a policy and undermine any argument for them, since in theory the transit pricing would actually reflect the cost to deliver the service, so heavy users would actually be paying for what they consumed, and as consumption went up, the infrastructure could be expanded with the additional revenue.
The bad things, well, artificially high prices just lower than LTE cellular. Not seeing transit revenue as a source of infrastructure investment, just a source of more profits. And there's always the chance that "average" users really only consume 20-30 GB per month and they're subsidizing everyone and that the per GB transit cost would actually be much higher even on a dollar-for-dollar revenue basis to account for "average" users getting a much lower bill.
This is the only reason I usually use Google Maps on iOS -- working in an unfamiliar location and wanting to know what restaurants are available, and searching for "food" or something actually finds restaurants.
iOS Maps has been fine for navigation, but its search results are usually poor.
Education has been seized by the idea of solving the "achievement gap" and using the public school system as a social welfare delivery service.
The former only increases the desire for the latter because underachieving demographics are highly correlated with poverty.
It would make some sense, but the task of social welfare exceeds both the expertise and resources of a school district. When they nevertheless focus on social welfare, they end up biasing the talent pool towards social welfare delivery experts and away from education, in addition to diverting the limited funding pool from education to social welfare delivery.
Furthering the problem, poverty in and of itself isn't the primary problem of education underachievement, it has much more to do with the social environment of the home, the parents' emphasis on educational obtainment and other factors that can't be bought with social welfare transfers. So the diversion of limited resources has limited return and probably is more corrosive to the larger educational mission than it is beneficial to underachieving students.
Given the political pressure to "solve" the underachievement problem, racial politics and the left-leaning nature of the educational system I don't see any of this changing.
I've considered that -- the wages being too low to attract competent help, but I'm skeptical that explains all that I've seen.
For one, I see a ton of fast food places advertising higher than minimum wages -- $10+ dollars per hour. Maybe that's still too low to attract competent people, but it's above the minimum wage.
Two, the poaching argument makes some sense, but ultimately I would expect any appreciable level of churn to actually result in slightly better employee competence since they would end up with hybridized skills -- ie, learning the system at places A, B and C ought to be make them marginally better as there's skill overlap, the process at most fast food places isn't that different, which ought to make learning C after learning A and B better since they would be able to focus on the unique aspects of C and focus less on the commonalities.
I'd also expect poaching to have something of limited impact, since I would imagine low wage fast food workers are somewhat geography bound and likely to stick to jobs within a certain geographic area. Nobody is quitting McDonalds for a Taco Bell 10 miles away over 25 cents an hour.
And the thing with service, you do go to McDonald's or similar fast food places for the service -- brisk and efficient. I've been like the second guy in line and waited 10-odd minutes to get my order taken and receive my food, when they used to turn something like that around during a slower period in less than 5 minutes.
And it's not just the lowest end of fast food places I've seen this at, it includes "better" counter service places like Smashburger where you order at the counter and they bring your food to the table.
I'd guess the answer is really multifactorial -- low wages attract low grade employees, a high demand for workers in the sector has probably made getting a job there so easy that people may view it more as temping, a job to be taken and then walked away from when they decide its no longer desirable. And I have a hard time escaping the notion that the socioeconomic demographic of "fast food worker" has literally gone downhill with declines in education quality and all the other socioeconomic toxins of the working class.
These two stories about jammers seem to indicate that the only reason these people got caught is that they had dumb jammers that just continuously broadcast, making their triangulation easy.
Where are the smart jammers that operate at low power thresholds and operate intermittently -- some pattern of briefly on, then off, then on again, in a kind of random backoff cycle before going off? Or have some kind of passive radio detection to not transmit unless there is a nearby handset in use signature?
The idea would be a jammer that produced enough interference to disrupt and discourage use in a narrow local window, but with a limited on profile such that it was much harder to detect.
You know, I read a post-apocalyptic story like that once, about virus that had the effect of reducing most people's IQ by double-digit percentages.
I don't get a perception of people being surly or not wanting to work.
It's more like they're operating beyond their cognitive limits and just aren't capable of doing the job well.
Maybe the MBA process geniuses have made running a fast food place overly complex. Maybe the economy is good enough that the fast food places can't find anyone competent to work at their wage rates. Or perhaps more disturbingly, the socioeconomic strata that has always worked at fast food places has degraded, and this is what society is now producing.
Is it just me, or has the quality of worker at fast food places really hit rock bottom in the last couple of years?
I try not to eat it, but sometimes its that or go hungry and I've noticed that the service in a lot of fast food places (many places throughout the metro area I visit) has gone right into the toilet. Employees that can hardly grok an order if its not "number 3 with coke" and this includes ordering stuff right off their own menu.
I've ordered countless McDonald's lattes "large latte, no flavor, whole milk" -- and had the employee then ask me what flavor and did I want skim milk or sound confused because I gave them the entire order with answers to their questions. And then watched as more than one employee at different locations managed to not be able to work the totally automatic, touch-screen driven Franke espresso machine.
And at some locations I'm at more often, the turnover is unbelievable, with successive waves of employees seeming to be worse than the previous ones, and this is at presumably "prestige" locations in wealthy suburban malls.
About the only place I haven't seen this downward spiral has been at Starbucks or similar chains (Caribou). I don't know if they screen better or what. I do notice their employee base seems to include a lot of older people (like, over 35).
While I'm sure the fast food industry would like to hold down wages to avoid capital spending on machinery (even if they are wonder robots from the future), I wonder if some of their real motivation isn't just trying to make the business run without dealing with people who seem to be borderline mentally deficient.
The licensing is so bad with 2016 that I know places that would spin up farms of 2k8 if it meant getting free upgrades to 2016.
Per core licensing, sold in 8 core increments. Got a 10 core CPU? You just bought 4 more cores worth of licensing than you wanted.
My guess is that the increase in the security state was a deliberate outcome.
Every single Federal intelligence and security was caught completely flat footed and their reflexive argument was "we don't have enough power" to gather the right amount of intelligence to weed these threats out. Without making that argument they were likely exposed to questions of competency, legitimate and otherwise.
Of course nobody would make the argument that the threat was transcendent and unavoidable, even if it's likely correct because it still exposes you to questions of competency and doesn't expand your power.
I think it was formed for two reasons, one being political -- W Bush wanting to look strong and as if he was doing something about the threat of terrorism. The second reason was to enhance the security state, to create a layer of strong, law-enforcement control in a place where Americans were least likely to object to increased surveillance and searches.
I think the "doing something" part *may* have had some merit, as airport security screening was somewhat haphazard and non-standard across airports previously.
Read the excellent book "The Skies Belong To Us" about the rash of hijackings in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Up through that period there was NO security screening at all -- you just walked through the concourse to your flight. Even after a wave of hijackings, airlines didn't want security security screening. They were happy to pay the ransom, get the people and their planes back.
Fast-forward to 9/11 and you have the byproduct of a somewhat reluctant security screening process with an emphasis on cost containment and passenger efficiency in which there were probably legitimate arguments about its efficacy.
That the TSA has become another giant bureaucracy with a host of parasitic lobbyists, contractors and vendors is just the natural result of its scale and the internalized belief that its security mandate makes it permanent, along with a self-important status as a quasi-law enforcement organization with national security implications.
While annoying, the bonus thing seems entirely unsurprising. Incentive pay is one of those MBA concepts from the private sector that you'd expect them to ape, believing its both necessary for staff retention and good for achieving results. That its execution was flawed and political in Government practice doesn't seem to be an unexpected outcome. At least it was $90k and not $9 million.
I wonder what the chances are that Microsoft will invoke a totally forced upgrade for:
(a) ...all Windows 7 PCs, regardless of GWX registry settings or install type (home/pro/enterprise)
(b) ...all Windows 7 PCs missing GWX registry?
(c) ...all Windows 7 Home and Pro editions with/without GWX registry?
I guess at this point I can see them pulling the pin on it and just not giving a shit as many customers have no choice but to keep running Windows, and while for some it may totally break their software, for possibly many others it will just piss them off and they will keep working but MS will have "won" having upgraded them off 7..
Does Apple pay enough dividend to make the difference between 5% and 25% meaningful to shareholders, or are we just playing the stock price appreciation game where shareholders don't give a shit about fundamentals as long as the stock price increases?
Pardon my cynicism, but I think corporations should have to provide compelling reasons to hoard cash on this scale or pay dividends. This just seems like lazy management, coasting on high profit products while failing to do the hard work of business expansion because it will ruin the stock market cosmetics of high net margins. And shame on investors for just surfing stock price increases and not giving a shit about how these companies are managed.
I know, tiresome moralizing, but it seems like a shitty feedback loop that results in bad business management.
Banks have liquidity requirements.
If 100,000 people deposit $10,000 in a bank, the bank can reasonably assume that they won't all demand all their money at the same time.
If a single company deposits that same $1 billion in a single account, it represents a significant liquidity risk to the bank. If the bank ties up some significant portion of that one account holder's cash as loans to other people or firms and the company decides it needs $500 million right now, the bank has to come up with $500 million. It can't call in the loans it made on that money.
For banks, these large cash holdings become a liability and from what I've read they've started charging negative interest on them to dissuade being dumping grounds for hoards of cash they can't effectively use for working capital.
I strongly doubt that they're in non-working assets. I don't know about the others, but I know that Google aggressively invests its cash holdings, and gets a nice rate of return.
My assumption is that the term "cash" is used to denote a specific asset class, i.e., highly liquid holdings of actual cash balance accounts or extremely liquid instruments like short-term T-bills.
Assets held as working, long-term investments aren't really all that liquid and I wouldn't necessarily call them "cash", especially if converting them into cash requires an investment bank or market-maker to buy the securities or some kind of longer time horizon to convert them to cash.
I think the articles I've read tried to chalk this up to the slow growth of the economy generally. There just aren't enough productive investments to put the money into.
Although that seems kind of a thin excuse; these firms aren't investment banks and presumably seek profitable growth through their principal business function, not investment in capital markets.
I think I mostly agree with you that it represents a kind of deficit in terms business growth. Rather than investing in business growth through new products or markets, they're content to make high profits on existing products and just hoard the profits as cash.
It's funny in the case of Apple; as their sales slide, the lack of business investment and organic product growth seems exposed. They don't have emerging products that would have resulted from their investment of their cash hoard.
Our current dishwasher is a Bosch, bought about a year and a half ago. It was as close as we could get to the highest Consumer Reports dishwasher (fscking manufacturers seem to play model number games, meaning you can't necessarily even find the specific model rated highly...).
It replaced a Sears (oem'd by KitchenAide, I think) dishwasher which was about 8 years old. That one worked well with the same detergent we use now, until it didn't.
I couldn't really figure out why, it passed the built-in diagnostics tests but left scummy deposits on the dishware. My assumption is that with dishwashers, the internal plumbing and/or sensors eventually build up films that prevent them from cycling intelligently.
I guess I just accept that they're appliances with a lifespan of 10 years or less, probably made somewhat worse by weak detergents that don't usefully suspend or break down food chemistry enough. And if I stop to think about, I usually consider it a miracle they last that long considering the scum they're exposed to and being cycled 250 times a year.
It would be great if the entire system was comprised of marine grade stainless steel, running at 1000 psi and 50 C water temps and capable of being flushed with sodium hydroxide, but then again, I'd like to pay less than $1000 for it and not have it draw 5 kwh to do the dishes, either.
Are there any longer term data on the nature of their cash holdings -- ie, has this amount increased over time or is it fairly static?
I'm also curious about the economic impact of cash hoarding like this. Presumably having this much capital tied up in short-term non-working assets is suboptimal in a macroeconomic sense.
My understanding is that it mostly gets parked in high liquidity accounts and instruments, and that even banks have begun charging negative interest rates on large deposits because the short term nature and liquidity demands prevent them from being able to use it as capital.
I'm also curious how shareholders feel about this. It would seem kind of obnoxious for a corporation to hoard cash that could be paid out as dividends. Obviously some amount of cash (even relatively large) is a good idea for future investments and acquisitions, but maybe not at the levels shown here.
We use the detergent packs in the dishwasher and the dishes get really clean, with no residue and minimal pre-rinsing involved (usually just to get the vegetable residue off, as the more fibrous stuff doesn't disolve and gets trapped in the filter).
I've read that the packs have an advantage in that they're the right amount and combination of detergents to work effectively, which is important now that they've removed the truly effective phosphates from detergents.
For clothes washing, we just use unscented Costco liquid detergent in our front-loader and I don't notice any odors or cleaning issues. But the default wash setting is for 'warm' water, not cold.
We quit using paper towels several years ago and now keep a huge supply of white terry cloths to use instead. We wash these in bulk about once a week, so they sit in their own hamper, damp and filthy with all kinds of nasty organic residue but always seem clean and odor free. But I also bleach them, which may be partly why.
What's new is binaural recordings with web tracking, ads, patent encumbered and DRM controlled formats.
I think the real pressure is coming from major news organizations like the New York Times. Since this story has bubbled up, they've run multiple pieces largely critical of Facebook's business focus on one stop shopping for information and desire to be a news source.
Clearly this boils down to a business vs. business struggle, but by planting the seed of doubt about Facebook's murky willingness to manipulate content, they undermine Facebook's credibility as a news source. And being taken seriously seems to be a major desire of Zuckerberg.
You jest, I know, but it does make you wonder why nobody came up with a business process patent for running an IP trolling firm.
Maybe there's not enough patentable there, but since when has that stopped anyone?
I wasn't arguing against pumped hydro, it obviously has many great advantages.
The two things going against it, though, are that it requires water, and a lot of it, and it requires someplace uphill to impound that same volume of water.
For better or for worse, a lot of places that can generate free energy necessary to pump that water have neither, an uphill place or the water to pump -- like deserts or flat plains, both of which happen to be great places to put solar or wind generators.
IMHO, concerns about storage energy losses when the source power system (solar for sure, wind mostly) is capable of generating power but for which there is no useful work for it seem to throw away useful ideas.
If a solar farm can produce 10 megawatts of power and the grid demand is 5, does it really matter much if the storage system is only able to reproduce 1 megawatt of the surplus 5? Sure, you've lost 4 megawatts, but not doing anything at all is a loss of 5 megawatts.
Obviously there are some economics in play -- if the construction and operation costs and the facility life of the storage system don't work, then it's an economic problem, but still not really an energy problem. And even if the construction costs are high, it's not hard to see some more esoteric systems with extremely low maintenance costs and long facility lives might make sense even at high energy losses.
With wind I can see arguments where braking the turbines may make more sense than high loss storage if you take into account that a turbine is a mechanical system that will wear out.
I read about this system and it seems interesting and it makes me wonder if there are any other forays into mechanical storage of energy, such as some kind of larger scale clockwork system of raised weights.
A lot of the locations able to generate power surpluses are in remote regions with poor access to the geography and water for pumped hydro, but generally have a lot of square footage that could be used to house some kind of mechanical storage system.