If Jobs' oil corp invented the Mac, the iPhone, the iPad, or the NeXT, Pixar, or any of the other revolutionary innovations Jobs has led, then yes: Jobs the oil company CEO would be considered a genius. Even more of a genius than he actually is at running computer companies.
That's right: Liberals are the ones preventing corporations from paying their share of government expenses. Right. And Steve Jobs runs GE - or maybe some other liberal does. Sure. You're totally nuts.
You Republicans fear the boogeyman so badly that you'll call anything that moves "liberal", blurt anything that uses "liberal" as an insult. Sad little Republicans, always the victims even while you're running the country hard into the ground.
It's not the "making too much money" part that needs investigation, and really just correction. It's the "not paying taxes" part. Corporations, including rich tech corps, don't pay the costs the public pays for them to operate. In 2010, corporations paid only $176B in taxes; individuals paid over 100x that much. Corporations cost the public far more than 1% of our 2010 expenses. The $TRILLIONS spent by the public bailing them out of their failures, and of the failures of other corps they depend upon, is the bulk of our financial problems.
That they don't pay what they cost is the problem. That only about 50% of voters, the "liberals", even realize that's the problem is what keeps the problem getting worse. It's you Republicans who are to blame, which is why you're corporations' favorite suckers.
It is hard to believe a tech company can beat out an oil giant, but is the market cap really the measure of the size/influence of a company?
Of course it isn't. If it were, then the gyrations of the DJIA would mean that the total size of the representative corporations in the stock market have grown and shrunk across a 10% margin over the past couple of weeks. Those companies, and by extension the rest of publicly traded corps, and indeed business in general, have clearly not been growing and shrinking that much in any size except solely their market cap. The market cap is undeniably a contrived measure that is primarily an artifact of nothing but finance. Which in the past generation has become almost completely independent of underlying business, and even independent of any underlying reality except preferential treatment by the powerful.
Multitasking is a simulation sequential CPUs do of parallel computing FPGAs actually do. FPGA is inherently parallel. Instructions aren't un/loaded; data is routed to different instructions that exist simultaneously on the chip.
Of course FPGA has limited (even when large) capacity for simultaneous instructions, whether single or multiple instances of a given instruction needed to process different data at a single time. But there techniques from sequential computing are useful. Most programs are not fully parallelizable even with infinite computing resources (sequential dependencies of results). So the CPU can rotate circuits between instantiation and storage depending on logic of what's actually needed. It might be a long time before FPGA capacity and predictive logic keeps data fully serviced in the maximum possible parallelization, but it's taken a long time for sequential computing to evolve such strategies that we start with for reference. And along the way we've got lots more computing power to use more efficiently, so no computing resources ever sit idle.
I posted it to give credit to Franklin, before I applied it to the specific terms of the current discussion. Whose wisdom deserves quoting in full and citation every chance we get. Because the reasons for repeating it have become only more urgent and necessary. We have failed to heed it, and traded security for (the illusions of ) a little temporary safety.
It's people like you, Anonymous carping Coward, who try to sound smart by taking Franklin's guidance for granted as if it's actually practiced. Retarded, idiotic, and dumb.
"A hundred years ago" there were also problems with unfair consequences of doing things in public. The persistence of recordings of even public acts doesn't strike me as unfair. If you did something in public, that will always be true. The replay of evidence of it doesn't seem unfair. Indeed, that persistence seems more fair to the public actor, since legitimate acts are more easily defended by persistent evidence of them. Bad acts should remain available to the public - why not? Because you were stupid? How is that a defense?
The practical limits on traditional in-person (or even most technologically assisted) surveillance were never a proper protection for everyone. That's one reason why the founders of the USA built its government on instructions to protect rights such as privacy (and the next step, protection from quartered soldiers). The privacy itself must be protected, however practical it becomes to invade it. Legitimate search and seizures are limited to only people the police had a reason to focus on, and even more specifically to only the things to be searched and seized, named up front in proposing a judge authorize the search/seizure.
However, as I noted in the comment to which you replied, the abuse of cross-reference and data retention by powerful entities of even public acts requires protection. Because the powerful (government, private, and the mushrooming "hybrids" of the two) are more able to hide their public acts than are individual people. We also need more power to expose, crossreference and retain information about the public acts of powerful people and orgs. But preventing them from exploiting their full power is necessary in the real world where we'll never gain the full powers they have. Even if that's not quite "fair" to them in specific terms, it's necessary to restore some fairness to those not as powerful.
Please specify what you mean by "the critical path". You mean from opcode loading to final data storage? As I said, the mundane and fully optimized circuits will probably remain in permanent HW. But most of the logic in a program will gradually be executed in reconfigurable gates in FPGA. Even if they do link to fully optimized parallel units, including instruction decoders and MAC machines.
FPGA is logic gates, the building blocks of CPUs (and other computing chips) that can be interconnected on demand to create different logic circuits - and therefore custom instructions. Logic implemented in FPGA on a CPU can be revised by over-the-network software upgrades. FPGA was typically used by chip designers to develop candidate designs to be burned into hardware, but has become cheap and fast enough to distribute as end-product "reconfigurable computing" devices.
Imagine your multimedia codecs configured directly into logic circuits on the CPU. They'd be really fast, and lower power than moving data across the CPU/RAM/bus boundaries. Upgrades by SW, just like now. Load/unload them as circuits on demand rather than as instruction codes in banks of RAM. Bring the network wires to FPGA pins on the CPU, and the data can route to codec processors on the chip for parallel operation. Of course these features apply to any "media" data, including business data in streams or large datasets.
Intel's move to SW upgrades of CPU microcode is creating the tech and business infrastructure for regular FPGA upgrades to these new hybrids. Soon enough the literally hardwired CPU logic might become the minority of the chip. Already FPGAs with embedded DSPs are like that, so a chip that's mostly FPGA with just some ALU and CLU circuits already optimized to close to their theoretical performance (in speed or power) are foreseeable.
It's not random. It's a device you're physically connecting to your machine, or connecting to over your network. If you don't trust it, you shouldn't be doing that - let alone accepting a driver from it, which is what we currently do (though from an install disk or download, which is even further more vulnerable to attack than code installed in a physical device).
And of course we should assume the printer includes a driver that the device can run. That is the entire point of what I posted.
Most of these security problems are solvable with Java and its sandbox. Accept a "thisPrinter" object that has no access to any host resources except reading the memory given it to print - memory that is never read again by the host, and deleted immediately after the thisPrinter object finishes executing.
Those images of publicly viewable should be subject to automated searching for criminal evidence. If a billion cops could legitimately stand there watching and writing down notes, it's legit to replace them with sensors, networks, and AI.
But a billion cops would do more than stand there watching and writing down notes. Replacing them with sensors, networks and AI doesn't eliminate all the problems with using real cops. Many prohibitive problems of comprehensive public surveillance still remain when the cops are automated. Primarily the abuse potential of compiling all that info, crosstabbed and logged. A higher probability of abuses committed, a higher amount of damage doable by abuse, a higher probability that abuse will never be caught, a higher probability that abuse will not be corrected, remedied, or abusers punished. Therefore more abuses.
Until the US reforms privacy laws to comply with the Fourth Amendment, the right of the people to be secure in our persons, houses, papers, and effects (AKA "privacy"), against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall be frequently violated. All data collection that touches our private information must be subject to open review for abuse, must be required to aggregate and anonymize data wherever possible, must prevent crossreference except under legitimate court order, must report collection or crossreference events to the person measured, and must truly delete any data identified with any specific person or small group after the immediate justification for its collection has passed. The people doing the collection, crossreferencing and retention, whether directly or by either setting policy or implementing it (including programmers and legislators), must be quickly subject to stiff penalties for any abuses.
Unless there is a bright and easily defensible line kept between public and private, the public will always invade the private - typically in the interests of some favored private interest attacking the others. We are already far down this road, but not too far to back out of it.
You might think that the security and privacy aspects were so terrible that you just wouldn't install the app. However exceptional photos of a sporting or news incidents are worth money and the profit motive might be enough for you to install it.
They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Doc Gonzo: They who can give up essential privacy to obtain a little temporary cash deserve only a little temporary cash, but neither liberty nor privacy.
This app might be worth granting access to your public images, if you could trust that the app would not get permission to access your private images (or anything outside the public images you allow). But then it wouldn't have the side effect of "WON'T SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN".
So what refreshes you is the suggestion of superstition itself, not even the particular details of one superstition or another. Your religious fetish is devoted to nothing but the unsubstantiable nature of the assumptions, not the value of their filling of the gaps. You worship mystery, not knowledge.
The difference between science and religion is that when scientists might fill gaps with unsubstantiated assumptions, scientists know that it has no value except as the basis for insisting on eventual substantiation or eventual rejection. Religious people like you prize the insubstantial assumption - especially when it's ancient and perpetuated as tradition.
The difference is that what I described gives the device the connected printer's driver object when the device first connects to the printer. I described it in OOP terms because that's the best way to describe these things generically, in terms of the things and their interfaces. And because OSes are written in OOP - for that very reason.
The device doesn't need to find a printer driver. When it is first connected to the printer, the printer hands its driver over the connection to the device.
TCP/IP printers should do the same thing, when the printing host connects to it the first time - respond with its ThisPrinter subclass.
The Printer superclass in the printing host's OS would have the basic printing API implemented as clients to the remote printer's server, where the rest of the code is stored.
I don't know why the OS can't have a Printer superclass that apps all call with a single unified print API, but that the specific instance of attached printer overrides with a subclass implementing the same interface but in that printer's own ways. Printers are all USB, and can install their subclass when plugging in.
Sure, that's a lot like a driver, but the users and programmers never notice anything but calling members of the Printer object. So the reasons for eliminating "drivers" are satisfied by doing it this way.
When the Greenhouse strikes back, many times more people will be first killed, then prevented from being born, than those whose life has been enabled or even helped in the century that oil has benefited us. Because the effects will last many centuries, starting on a much larger population than oil started with. Many more factors than oil claim credit for the benefits of the late Industrial Age, but oil and coal are the biggest claimants to the coming damage.
But even so, oil's benefits are mostly in the past - that's what being past the Peak Oil point means. Exxon has already been far more than amply compensated for its benefits, both in revenues and in returns on equity. But it has paid nearly none of the damages it has caused in direct pollution (and war, and other damage). The vast balance of its damages are just catching up with it now, and will outweigh the benefits. That is a major reason why Exxon's market cap, though large, is not as large as Apple's now. Because those liabilities are finally being forced to be internalized by Exxon.
As for the US of Dumbasses, we've certainly got (more than) our share. But we've also got more than our share of developing alternatives to fossil fuel. The US is a very big country, 10x the typical European country. Despite the damage our reputation has taken from the actions of our most aggressive and visible people, the Dumbasses, the whole US of A is still the largest manufacturer in the world, and the leader in alternative energy R&D. Indeed nearly all the alternatives were invented or at least pioneered by the USA, and continue to be. We have a huge drag from Dumbasses, but others of us are also pushing forward the alternatives. I personally run the tech for a company that invents, installs and operates energy management IT in thousands of NYC buildings, that saves an average of 20% energy consumption (and controls water waste). Our tech is far ahead of the market here and around the world, and evolving quickly, as it expands beyond the Northeast USA. But there are certainly lots of competitors here - more than we see in other countries. 20% reduction is huge, far bigger than the gains from most alternative fuels. We welcome every attack on our common enemy, petrofuels. But we can see that we are among the leaders in actual cuts in the pollution that threatens us, and that most of the other leaders are also right here in the good old United States of AmeriCANs.
This plane is pretty cool, but it is a waste of money. It's not working, it costs $BILLIONS, and its "justification" is to rush nukes to some WWIII target. There is no reason at all to spend this money on it. It's nothing but military corporate welfare.
But instead Americans will have to kiss goodbye our pensions and old-age healthcare. How goddamn stupid.
And when Apple doesn't disappear tomorrow, the jobs it's created will still have enormous value. Its products will have enormous value to their users, especially in creating more value for other people.
Tomorrow when Exxon doesn't disappear, it will kill many people, some of them outright where it's drilling and pumping. The Greenhouse damage it's spewing will create more $BILLIONS in damages that gradually show up in the whole world's face, and bring days or years closer the time when it collapses civilization.
Apple's assets are not as valuable as Exxon's, as you point out - in agreement with what I posted. But Exxon's liabilities are vast compared to Apple's. If, in some meaninglessly impossible scenario, they were each to disappear, Apple's disappearance would take with it only a substantial value; no liability would be removed from humanity's balance. Exxon's disappearance would delete a huge value, but the sword Exxon keeps over all our necks would also disappear, before it chopped our head off. Hence Apple's net value is greater.
Anyone who doubts this doesn't know how basic economics works.
Slashdot Mirror
Cash flow is not profit. It is a derived measure of revenues, mismatched to costs.
The best measure of profits is the actual net revenue return after expenses invested are subtracted.
If Jobs' oil corp invented the Mac, the iPhone, the iPad, or the NeXT, Pixar, or any of the other revolutionary innovations Jobs has led, then yes: Jobs the oil company CEO would be considered a genius. Even more of a genius than he actually is at running computer companies.
That's right: Liberals are the ones preventing corporations from paying their share of government expenses. Right. And Steve Jobs runs GE - or maybe some other liberal does. Sure. You're totally nuts.
You Republicans fear the boogeyman so badly that you'll call anything that moves "liberal", blurt anything that uses "liberal" as an insult. Sad little Republicans, always the victims even while you're running the country hard into the ground.
It's not the "making too much money" part that needs investigation, and really just correction. It's the "not paying taxes" part. Corporations, including rich tech corps, don't pay the costs the public pays for them to operate. In 2010, corporations paid only $176B in taxes; individuals paid over 100x that much. Corporations cost the public far more than 1% of our 2010 expenses. The $TRILLIONS spent by the public bailing them out of their failures, and of the failures of other corps they depend upon, is the bulk of our financial problems.
That they don't pay what they cost is the problem. That only about 50% of voters, the "liberals", even realize that's the problem is what keeps the problem getting worse. It's you Republicans who are to blame, which is why you're corporations' favorite suckers.
Of course it isn't. If it were, then the gyrations of the DJIA would mean that the total size of the representative corporations in the stock market have grown and shrunk across a 10% margin over the past couple of weeks. Those companies, and by extension the rest of publicly traded corps, and indeed business in general, have clearly not been growing and shrinking that much in any size except solely their market cap. The market cap is undeniably a contrived measure that is primarily an artifact of nothing but finance. Which in the past generation has become almost completely independent of underlying business, and even independent of any underlying reality except preferential treatment by the powerful.
Multitasking is a simulation sequential CPUs do of parallel computing FPGAs actually do. FPGA is inherently parallel. Instructions aren't un/loaded; data is routed to different instructions that exist simultaneously on the chip.
Of course FPGA has limited (even when large) capacity for simultaneous instructions, whether single or multiple instances of a given instruction needed to process different data at a single time. But there techniques from sequential computing are useful. Most programs are not fully parallelizable even with infinite computing resources (sequential dependencies of results). So the CPU can rotate circuits between instantiation and storage depending on logic of what's actually needed. It might be a long time before FPGA capacity and predictive logic keeps data fully serviced in the maximum possible parallelization, but it's taken a long time for sequential computing to evolve such strategies that we start with for reference. And along the way we've got lots more computing power to use more efficiently, so no computing resources ever sit idle.
I posted it to give credit to Franklin, before I applied it to the specific terms of the current discussion. Whose wisdom deserves quoting in full and citation every chance we get. Because the reasons for repeating it have become only more urgent and necessary. We have failed to heed it, and traded security for (the illusions of ) a little temporary safety.
It's people like you, Anonymous carping Coward, who try to sound smart by taking Franklin's guidance for granted as if it's actually practiced. Retarded, idiotic, and dumb.
"A hundred years ago" there were also problems with unfair consequences of doing things in public. The persistence of recordings of even public acts doesn't strike me as unfair. If you did something in public, that will always be true. The replay of evidence of it doesn't seem unfair. Indeed, that persistence seems more fair to the public actor, since legitimate acts are more easily defended by persistent evidence of them. Bad acts should remain available to the public - why not? Because you were stupid? How is that a defense?
The practical limits on traditional in-person (or even most technologically assisted) surveillance were never a proper protection for everyone. That's one reason why the founders of the USA built its government on instructions to protect rights such as privacy (and the next step, protection from quartered soldiers). The privacy itself must be protected, however practical it becomes to invade it. Legitimate search and seizures are limited to only people the police had a reason to focus on, and even more specifically to only the things to be searched and seized, named up front in proposing a judge authorize the search/seizure.
However, as I noted in the comment to which you replied, the abuse of cross-reference and data retention by powerful entities of even public acts requires protection. Because the powerful (government, private, and the mushrooming "hybrids" of the two) are more able to hide their public acts than are individual people. We also need more power to expose, crossreference and retain information about the public acts of powerful people and orgs. But preventing them from exploiting their full power is necessary in the real world where we'll never gain the full powers they have. Even if that's not quite "fair" to them in specific terms, it's necessary to restore some fairness to those not as powerful.
Please specify what you mean by "the critical path". You mean from opcode loading to final data storage? As I said, the mundane and fully optimized circuits will probably remain in permanent HW. But most of the logic in a program will gradually be executed in reconfigurable gates in FPGA. Even if they do link to fully optimized parallel units, including instruction decoders and MAC machines.
Intel now sells Atom CPUs, with embedded FPGA. Xilinx, the top FPGA maker, offers ARM CPUs with embedded FPGA. Both CPU lines run Linux now.
FPGA is logic gates, the building blocks of CPUs (and other computing chips) that can be interconnected on demand to create different logic circuits - and therefore custom instructions. Logic implemented in FPGA on a CPU can be revised by over-the-network software upgrades. FPGA was typically used by chip designers to develop candidate designs to be burned into hardware, but has become cheap and fast enough to distribute as end-product "reconfigurable computing" devices.
Imagine your multimedia codecs configured directly into logic circuits on the CPU. They'd be really fast, and lower power than moving data across the CPU/RAM/bus boundaries. Upgrades by SW, just like now. Load/unload them as circuits on demand rather than as instruction codes in banks of RAM. Bring the network wires to FPGA pins on the CPU, and the data can route to codec processors on the chip for parallel operation. Of course these features apply to any "media" data, including business data in streams or large datasets.
Intel's move to SW upgrades of CPU microcode is creating the tech and business infrastructure for regular FPGA upgrades to these new hybrids. Soon enough the literally hardwired CPU logic might become the minority of the chip. Already FPGAs with embedded DSPs are like that, so a chip that's mostly FPGA with just some ALU and CLU circuits already optimized to close to their theoretical performance (in speed or power) are foreseeable.
The same driver transaction can happen over TCP/IP as over USB when the printing host first connects to the printer.
It's not random. It's a device you're physically connecting to your machine, or connecting to over your network. If you don't trust it, you shouldn't be doing that - let alone accepting a driver from it, which is what we currently do (though from an install disk or download, which is even further more vulnerable to attack than code installed in a physical device).
And of course we should assume the printer includes a driver that the device can run. That is the entire point of what I posted.
Most of these security problems are solvable with Java and its sandbox. Accept a "thisPrinter" object that has no access to any host resources except reading the memory given it to print - memory that is never read again by the host, and deleted immediately after the thisPrinter object finishes executing.
Those images of publicly viewable should be subject to automated searching for criminal evidence. If a billion cops could legitimately stand there watching and writing down notes, it's legit to replace them with sensors, networks, and AI.
But a billion cops would do more than stand there watching and writing down notes. Replacing them with sensors, networks and AI doesn't eliminate all the problems with using real cops. Many prohibitive problems of comprehensive public surveillance still remain when the cops are automated. Primarily the abuse potential of compiling all that info, crosstabbed and logged. A higher probability of abuses committed, a higher amount of damage doable by abuse, a higher probability that abuse will never be caught, a higher probability that abuse will not be corrected, remedied, or abusers punished. Therefore more abuses.
Until the US reforms privacy laws to comply with the Fourth Amendment, the right of the people to be secure in our persons, houses, papers, and effects (AKA "privacy"), against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall be frequently violated. All data collection that touches our private information must be subject to open review for abuse, must be required to aggregate and anonymize data wherever possible, must prevent crossreference except under legitimate court order, must report collection or crossreference events to the person measured, and must truly delete any data identified with any specific person or small group after the immediate justification for its collection has passed. The people doing the collection, crossreferencing and retention, whether directly or by either setting policy or implementing it (including programmers and legislators), must be quickly subject to stiff penalties for any abuses.
Unless there is a bright and easily defensible line kept between public and private, the public will always invade the private - typically in the interests of some favored private interest attacking the others. We are already far down this road, but not too far to back out of it.
mikejuk:
Ben Franklin:
Doc Gonzo: They who can give up essential privacy to obtain a little temporary cash deserve only a little temporary cash, but neither liberty nor privacy.
This app might be worth granting access to your public images, if you could trust that the app would not get permission to access your private images (or anything outside the public images you allow). But then it wouldn't have the side effect of "WON'T SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN".
So what refreshes you is the suggestion of superstition itself, not even the particular details of one superstition or another. Your religious fetish is devoted to nothing but the unsubstantiable nature of the assumptions, not the value of their filling of the gaps. You worship mystery, not knowledge.
The difference between science and religion is that when scientists might fill gaps with unsubstantiated assumptions, scientists know that it has no value except as the basis for insisting on eventual substantiation or eventual rejection. Religious people like you prize the insubstantial assumption - especially when it's ancient and perpetuated as tradition.
You like probably being wrong and ignorant.
The difference is that what I described gives the device the connected printer's driver object when the device first connects to the printer. I described it in OOP terms because that's the best way to describe these things generically, in terms of the things and their interfaces. And because OSes are written in OOP - for that very reason.
The device doesn't need to find a printer driver. When it is first connected to the printer, the printer hands its driver over the connection to the device.
TCP/IP printers should do the same thing, when the printing host connects to it the first time - respond with its ThisPrinter subclass.
The Printer superclass in the printing host's OS would have the basic printing API implemented as clients to the remote printer's server, where the rest of the code is stored.
Then why do Macs work that way, too? They're not Windows, and they weren't Intel until recently - and didn't have to do Intel the way MS does.
I don't know why the OS can't have a Printer superclass that apps all call with a single unified print API, but that the specific instance of attached printer overrides with a subclass implementing the same interface but in that printer's own ways. Printers are all USB, and can install their subclass when plugging in.
Sure, that's a lot like a driver, but the users and programmers never notice anything but calling members of the Printer object. So the reasons for eliminating "drivers" are satisfied by doing it this way.
How much is "not much" on a DARPA project? $100? $1000? $10,000? $100,000? $10,000,000?
When the Greenhouse strikes back, many times more people will be first killed, then prevented from being born, than those whose life has been enabled or even helped in the century that oil has benefited us. Because the effects will last many centuries, starting on a much larger population than oil started with. Many more factors than oil claim credit for the benefits of the late Industrial Age, but oil and coal are the biggest claimants to the coming damage.
But even so, oil's benefits are mostly in the past - that's what being past the Peak Oil point means. Exxon has already been far more than amply compensated for its benefits, both in revenues and in returns on equity. But it has paid nearly none of the damages it has caused in direct pollution (and war, and other damage). The vast balance of its damages are just catching up with it now, and will outweigh the benefits. That is a major reason why Exxon's market cap, though large, is not as large as Apple's now. Because those liabilities are finally being forced to be internalized by Exxon.
As for the US of Dumbasses, we've certainly got (more than) our share. But we've also got more than our share of developing alternatives to fossil fuel. The US is a very big country, 10x the typical European country. Despite the damage our reputation has taken from the actions of our most aggressive and visible people, the Dumbasses, the whole US of A is still the largest manufacturer in the world, and the leader in alternative energy R&D. Indeed nearly all the alternatives were invented or at least pioneered by the USA, and continue to be. We have a huge drag from Dumbasses, but others of us are also pushing forward the alternatives. I personally run the tech for a company that invents, installs and operates energy management IT in thousands of NYC buildings, that saves an average of 20% energy consumption (and controls water waste). Our tech is far ahead of the market here and around the world, and evolving quickly, as it expands beyond the Northeast USA. But there are certainly lots of competitors here - more than we see in other countries. 20% reduction is huge, far bigger than the gains from most alternative fuels. We welcome every attack on our common enemy, petrofuels. But we can see that we are among the leaders in actual cuts in the pollution that threatens us, and that most of the other leaders are also right here in the good old United States of AmeriCANs.
How much do those transceivers cost?
This plane is pretty cool, but it is a waste of money. It's not working, it costs $BILLIONS, and its "justification" is to rush nukes to some WWIII target. There is no reason at all to spend this money on it. It's nothing but military corporate welfare.
But instead Americans will have to kiss goodbye our pensions and old-age healthcare. How goddamn stupid.
And when Apple doesn't disappear tomorrow, the jobs it's created will still have enormous value. Its products will have enormous value to their users, especially in creating more value for other people.
Tomorrow when Exxon doesn't disappear, it will kill many people, some of them outright where it's drilling and pumping. The Greenhouse damage it's spewing will create more $BILLIONS in damages that gradually show up in the whole world's face, and bring days or years closer the time when it collapses civilization.
Apple's assets are not as valuable as Exxon's, as you point out - in agreement with what I posted. But Exxon's liabilities are vast compared to Apple's. If, in some meaninglessly impossible scenario, they were each to disappear, Apple's disappearance would take with it only a substantial value; no liability would be removed from humanity's balance. Exxon's disappearance would delete a huge value, but the sword Exxon keeps over all our necks would also disappear, before it chopped our head off. Hence Apple's net value is greater.
Anyone who doubts this doesn't know how basic economics works.