The only way the federal government will survive its debt and obligations is to inflate.
Nonsense. The US had greater debt obligations as a % of GDP at the end of WWII and dealt with them without printing money. They just raised taxes and lowered spending to an appropriate level rather than pretending that we can borrow endlessly and somehow magically bring in more tax revenue by collecting less taxes.
And when it does you can kiss the value of this 40 year bond goodbye.
That only matters if you are worried about the secondary market value of the bond. Personally I can't imagine why anyone would want to buy this bond given how low the rate of return is but obviously there were some parties interested (ahem... sorry for the pun)
Without a new breakthrough technology in our pocket, batteries technology should be determined by the real use case. Lithium ion is a good technology when weight is very important, but a lousy technology when does not matter. Why use a bad technology when a pretty good on is on hand?
Several reasons, all economic.
1) Economies of scale. Producing two types of batteries is more expensive than producing the same number of a single type of battery.
2) Standardization. Picking the exact optimal battery type for every application instead of using a standard battery actually results in product fragmentation and added cost. It's actually cheaper in many cases to use a standardized product instead of an optimized one.
3) Excess capacity. If you already are producing a product it's often cheaper to make extras and use those than to build a whole new production system for another product for marginal efficiency gains.
Given that in most of the elections in that period a democrat won, that hardly seems shocking.
So the fact that republicans won the presidency in 3 of 7 elections despite winning the vote in just 1 of 7 doesn't concern you? It sure as hell concerns me. Especially given how bad George W Bush was as president and how terrible Trump is shaping up to be.
And since the electoral/popular split has only happened 5 times in US history, it is not a common occurrence, even if it has happened twice in the last sixteen years.
When a rare thing starts happening with unusual frequency responsible parties should be asking why things have changed. Might be nothing to worry about but then again it might be worth worrying about a lot.
When you need a doctor do you instead ask anyone on the street for medical advice? After all, there is no reason to assume that they may not be a doctor.
If I don't know what I'm doing then yes I'm going to ask if anyone around me for help. First question will be "are you a medical professional?" I won't assume they either know something or don't until I bother to find out.
Dismissing someone as uninformed about a subject without any evidence either way is idiotic. Bill Gates may know nothing about climate change or he may know a quite a bit about it. But to dismiss him as "software guy" and presume he couldn't possibly be anything else because of a job he had 15 years ago is both prejudiced and stupid.
Cover art: Vinyl is the best way to deliver large scale artwork
The "best" way to deliver art work (that almost no one gives a shit about and is largely orthogonal to the music experience) is to put it on an obsolete and fragile storage medium that no one buys or wants? How about just making a print on paper instead? It's the same art work either way. Not like you are buying the original work.
But that's not the point, the point is to have a physical recording of music that I love that'll still work when we can no longer play our DVD-As and CDs, and to be able to appreciate the printed artwork.
We'll have the ability to play CDs for just as long as we have the ability to play vinyl records. And the artwork isn't any better just because you print it on a larger piece of cardboard.
Ever wondered why you sometimes have to wait months after an album's launch to get the music on vinyl?
Nope. It's absurdly obvious. Why would they go to the trouble of building the infrastructure to mass product quickly a niche product that won't sell a huge number of copies? I literally know of no one who actually listens to vinyl records anymore. The only people I know who even own turntables are people in the baby boomer generation. I'm confident most people reading this also don't know many people who listen to vinyl if they know any at all. Manufacturing takes time and there has to be enough demand to build the supply chain if you want it done fast. As the saying goes you can have it fast, cheap, or good. Pick two. There simply hasn't been enough demand for vinyl records to justify upgrading the manufacturing supply chain from where it was before CDs became a thing.
This particular quote was accepted by the world as fact for at least two, possibly three decades. And then all of a sudden, a few years ago, we were told it wasn't true anymore. I don't believe it.
So just because a falsehood was repeated for a long time you refuse to acknowledge that it was false all along when there is no actual evidence? Hope you aren't in the sciences because you'd be rather terrible at it. If you think it is true then please go and cite the source of the quotation. Otherwise you are just passing along what is nothing more than an old wives tale with no actual evidence to back it up. Just because people couldn't be bothered to question a quotation for a long time (after all it didn't actually matter) doesn't mean that it is true or that it was actually said. Lots of famous "quotes" were never actually uttered by the person they are attributed to.
People assume all politicians are lying all the time anyway, so just say anything because people care about the message, not if it is true or not.
No, people assume politicians that oppose their ideology are lying all the time. They tend to assume their guy is "a straight talker" or some other baloney. Exhibit A is the irrational believe on our political right that Hillary Clinton is some sort of pathological liar and crook. This in spite the the actual objective evidence that she is not at all outside the range of normal for a high profile politician. In actuality she is relatively honest among that crowd. (a low bar I know) The same people seem to believe that Trump is telling the truth despite objective evidence that he lies FAR more often.
Even so, it doesn't actually seem to have damaged Trump very much.
That's just because the people he was running against weren't very well liked either. Not one of the Republican candidates (including Trump) was a serious statesman with real gravitas. Easy targets for a guy who has made his life's work self promotion. Hillary Clinton for whatever reason just isn't very charismatic to a big portion of the population - and even the she actually won the popular vote.
(Do you realize that only once since 1988 has a Republican candidate actually won the popular vote? That's 6 of the last 7 elections. Talk about evidence of a screwed up election system...)
The average new car may be $33k, but that's in a world where a new Tesla is $100k. . You can get a Hyundai Elantra for $17k
Why are you comparing a high end luxury car to an econobox? If you want to compare with a Nissan Leaf or Chevy Bolt, fine but don't insult our intelligence with stupid and irrelevant comparisons.
Call me when I can buy an electric car for less than $15 grand.
Nice job moving the goal posts. If it isn't cheap enough for everyone then nobody should bother? What a stupid argument.
Oh and to address your challenge to get an electric car for under $15K, here you go.
es, electric cars are "greener" than the old gas guzzler I drive but... guess what, the gas guzzler costs 10k, the electric equivalent 40k.
You are comparing a used gasoline powered car with a new electric vehicle. The average NEW car in the US is $33,560. You can purchase a new Chevy Volt for $33,220. A Tesla Model 3 is supposed to be $35,000. A Chevy Bolt costs around $36,000. And these are MSRP prices, not what would actually be paid. Furthermore electric/hybrid vehicles will be available for steep discounts on the used marker as well going forward.
If you want people to "go green", you have to make it affordable.
Actually, as I recall, Mr. Gates' credibility is in software development and marketing. I don't see any particular expertise in atmospheric physics or meteorology. ..
People can develop plenty of credibility on a subject once they retire from their previous work. Gates hasn't had software as his primary job for well over a decade now and he's been putting his brainpower and money into other areas of technical expertise. Climate change appears to be among these and there is no reason he could not have become well informed over the last 15 years on the subject. I do not pretend to know if he is in fact well informed. I'm merely pointing out that there is no reason to assume he couldn't be.
Why we trust the opinions of people with no proven expertise in a subject is beyond. ..
In this case because he is rich enough to actually consult directly with the people who are subject matter experts and he appears to have done so. (have you?) Further in spite of whatever other flaws he might have you can't really argue that Bill Gates isn't smart enough to understand what those experts are saying to him. Nobody is arguing that he he is stupid. Finally he appears to actually be putting his money where his mouth is and actually doing something beyond just complaining. That's more than I can say for a lot of people.
Don't forget about removing the key on laptops to delete the character in front of the cursor. (you have to press 2 keys to do this super common function)
Don't forget about removing older style USB ports from their "pro" laptop that are almost in ubiquitous use.
Don't forget about how IOS and OS X still for some bizarre reason don't cooperate especially well and they don't provide a cable for their smartphone to plug into their "pro" laptop out of the box.
Apple seems to have forgotten that good design is about a lot more than a pretty case and some fancy fonts and the latest interface fads. Form should always follow function and they are forgetting about function in a lot of places.
I wonder if Microsoft realizes how much trouble Windows is in.
Microsoft is making tens of billions in profit from Windows every year with no end in sight. If that's trouble then give me some of that. PCs might not be the dominant force they once were but they aren't going away any time soon and there is nothing that is likely to displace Windows as the dominant operating system in PCs either. Furthermore Microsoft is the only ones doing anything even kind of innovative in traditional PCs these days. Their work in merging tablets and laptops is actually working in some areas (after a LOT of false starts) whereas Apple's big "innovations" are removing keys that nobody had a problem with and taking away ports people actually use. I'm not going to be a Windows fan any time soon but at least they are trying. Apple seems to not give a shit about the Macs anymore and they certainly haven't done anything in that space worth mentioning for several years now.
Pence knows how the government works. He's not going to sit around signing symbolic executive orders that have no basis in law. Trump is in for a rude awakening when he finds out that he's not a dictator.
If the republican congress remains behind Trump then he is for all practical purposes a dictator. The only thing protecting your civil liberties is the fact that the republicans don't have a 3/5 supermajority in the senate and the fact that the Supreme court hasn't gone full tilt conservative yet. That's a very thin line. I think Trump is going to do a lot of damage to a lot of people in this country in the next two years until the next congressional election.
The fact that Pence knows how government works isn't comforting to those of us who find his brand of politics reprehensible. In his own way he is almost as much of a Bond villain as Trump is.
But this is the stock market. At the stock market, there can be a price for anything, even if it is impossible to define what the sold service actually is.
No it is NOT the stock market. It is information relating to stocks but that is not the same thing. We're talking about purchasing stock analysis reports, not stocks themselves. Information has a value but it's not easy to pin down and the vendor cannot possibly know the value of a single stock report to a given client. Worse, the client buying the report won't know its value until after they have read it.
Investors now see research as a product that must stand on its own rather than a freebie offered as part of a broader relationship with an investment bank
If true then that is rather problematic. The problem with information is that it's typically impossible for a vendor to know how much a particular piece of information is worth to their customer. Worse, the customer for the information only knows what it is worth AFTER they have consumed it so they have to trust the information vendor to be likely to provide useful and relevant information reliably before it is worth paying for. Selling information as a standalone product is a very challenging business.
Let's use newspapers as an example. Newspapers have absolutely no idea which of their stories are going to be interesting and/or relevant to you as a reader. At best they know that certain types of stories in aggregate tend to interest a demographic of readers but they can't be sure for any given customer. So they have to bundle a lot of stories together in the hopes that some of them will be worth enough to keep you as a subscriber. If you hear about the information from another source before they can get it to you then the sales value of that information goes straight to zero since the reader already has it.
Same is true for stock information. Companies doing stock analysis have no reliable way to know how much you might value a given bit of data. They also have no way to know which bits of data you'll think are worth paying for. So selling information as a business only works if you can provide open access to a wide variety of information that customers can reasonably trust to be reliable. Think Bloomberg or the New York Times. They've built a reputation for being trustworthy places to get information but they don't try to sell you specific stories ala-carte because they can't. There is no way to price the information rationally. That's the problem with selling stock tips. No customer or vendor can tell in advance that a given stock tip is going to be worth the price so there is no reliable market.
The older phones are STILL selling well. Look at the prices on eBay.
Secondary markets are irrelevant as far as LG is concerned. And just because you see a few of them selling on eBay does not mean they are "selling well". Selling well in the context of a company like LG means selling tens of millions of units. Guarantee you aren't seeing that on eBay. A high price on eBay doesn't necessarily mean it was popular - it often means that it was rare.
Operating losses, meanwhile, sunk to around $400.2 million despite "strong sales" of the V20.
This is a fancy way of saying you can generate a lot of revenue selling $2 bills for $1. Just because they sell a lot of something doesn't mean they are selling it at a price that is profitable. If the only way you can move a lot of product is to sell it below cost then it's probably a good idea to get out of that market.
Which is really a pity - they are probably one of the last producers of phones with changeable batteries and sd card slot. My LG G3 is 2.5 years old and still going strong as day 1.
Which might tell you something about how little most customers care about those features. Nothing wrong with those features but they add cost and if people aren't willing to pay extra for them then there is no point in building them into the product.
If anybody from the LG is reading this: keep doing what you were doing, only "modular" thing needed on the phone are battery and memory card. Keep the headphone jack, keep the excellent build quality and do as minimal changes as you must to the original android UI.
Keeping doing what they are doing is what got them into this situation in the first place. Obviously whatever they are doing isn't what customers are willing to pay for so they need to do something else. Exactly what that is I don't pretend to know.
Where their revenue is made is irrelevant. What created the revenue IS relevant. If American-based ingenuity is still their moneymaker, then their hiring practices should reflect that.
Presumably IBM is well aware of the source of their "moneymaker". Probably far better than you and certainly better than me. Show me your evidence that US based talent would provide a better outcome (greater profits) to IBM than what they are doing. Frankly you are talking in unsupported hypothetical ideas rather than evidence based facts.
Furthermore where their revenue is made is very much a relevant consideration as is the location of the best talent to make it. IBM is a global company and has the resources to identify talent wherever it might come from. The notion that 5% of the world's population would constitute a disproportionate share of the talent pool is an irrational assumption unsupported by evidence and IBM is big enough to actually have that evidence. Also conveniently you also have neglected to consider costs which only a fool would ignore. The purpose of a company is to make profit, not revenue. You cannot consider profit without considering both revenue and costs. If they can get the same or similar outcomes with lower priced foreign talent, what possible justification is there for hiring overpriced US workers? What makes US workers such special snowflakes?
Look I get it that there are huge and real problems with stuff like H1B hires and the like but there is a reason that companies feel the pressure to do that sort of thing. US labor is among the most expensive in the world. Only a fool buys something more expensive if the performance doesn't justify the extra cost.
Just a reminder that the name of the company is INTERNATIONAL Business Machines, not American Business Machines. Just because the company is based in the US doesn't mean it will necessarily hire people in the US. IBM gets roughly 65% of their revenue outside the US. One would expect their staffing to reflect that fact.
I am NOT trying to defend IBM's actions. Merely pointing out that they aren't necessarily surprising and without more context it's hard to make an informed judgement about them. I'm all for the home team but that may or may not make sense for that particular company.
She's a traitor, a habitual liar, incompetent, self-serving, and saggy-boobs deep in pay-for-play.
"Traitor"? Seriously? Can I have some of what you are smoking? And claiming that Clinton is less of a self serving liar than Trump is just idiotic.
Think on that. We elected an IDIOT because he's better than the alternative. If he gets our soldiers killed or sells us out, it'll be because he's dumb and incompetent, not because he's sleazy and malicious.
Trump is dumb and incompetent AND sleazy and malicious. It's not either/or. The man collects vendettas like a teenager collects Pokemon cards. Whatever you imagine Clinton's faults to be, Trump has matched or exceeded each and every one of them. Trump is a reprehensible, cruel, ignorant, narcissist, whose only real talent is self promotion.
At least with him, there's a chance.
If you actually believe that then you are dumber than you claim Trump is.
Slashdot Mirror
The only way the federal government will survive its debt and obligations is to inflate.
Nonsense. The US had greater debt obligations as a % of GDP at the end of WWII and dealt with them without printing money. They just raised taxes and lowered spending to an appropriate level rather than pretending that we can borrow endlessly and somehow magically bring in more tax revenue by collecting less taxes.
And when it does you can kiss the value of this 40 year bond goodbye.
That only matters if you are worried about the secondary market value of the bond. Personally I can't imagine why anyone would want to buy this bond given how low the rate of return is but obviously there were some parties interested (ahem... sorry for the pun)
Without a new breakthrough technology in our pocket, batteries technology should be determined by the real use case. Lithium ion is a good technology when weight is very important, but a lousy technology when does not matter. Why use a bad technology when a pretty good on is on hand?
Several reasons, all economic.
1) Economies of scale. Producing two types of batteries is more expensive than producing the same number of a single type of battery.
2) Standardization. Picking the exact optimal battery type for every application instead of using a standard battery actually results in product fragmentation and added cost. It's actually cheaper in many cases to use a standardized product instead of an optimized one.
3) Excess capacity. If you already are producing a product it's often cheaper to make extras and use those than to build a whole new production system for another product for marginal efficiency gains.
Anyone who's president should not have any stocks whatsoever. Conflict of interest.
Same is true of Congress. However Congress has given themselves the legal right to engage in insider trading.
Given that in most of the elections in that period a democrat won, that hardly seems shocking.
So the fact that republicans won the presidency in 3 of 7 elections despite winning the vote in just 1 of 7 doesn't concern you? It sure as hell concerns me. Especially given how bad George W Bush was as president and how terrible Trump is shaping up to be.
And since the electoral/popular split has only happened 5 times in US history, it is not a common occurrence, even if it has happened twice in the last sixteen years.
When a rare thing starts happening with unusual frequency responsible parties should be asking why things have changed. Might be nothing to worry about but then again it might be worth worrying about a lot.
When you need a doctor do you instead ask anyone on the street for medical advice? After all, there is no reason to assume that they may not be a doctor.
If I don't know what I'm doing then yes I'm going to ask if anyone around me for help. First question will be "are you a medical professional?" I won't assume they either know something or don't until I bother to find out.
Dismissing someone as uninformed about a subject without any evidence either way is idiotic. Bill Gates may know nothing about climate change or he may know a quite a bit about it. But to dismiss him as "software guy" and presume he couldn't possibly be anything else because of a job he had 15 years ago is both prejudiced and stupid.
Cover art: Vinyl is the best way to deliver large scale artwork
The "best" way to deliver art work (that almost no one gives a shit about and is largely orthogonal to the music experience) is to put it on an obsolete and fragile storage medium that no one buys or wants? How about just making a print on paper instead? It's the same art work either way. Not like you are buying the original work.
But that's not the point, the point is to have a physical recording of music that I love that'll still work when we can no longer play our DVD-As and CDs, and to be able to appreciate the printed artwork.
We'll have the ability to play CDs for just as long as we have the ability to play vinyl records. And the artwork isn't any better just because you print it on a larger piece of cardboard.
Ever wondered why you sometimes have to wait months after an album's launch to get the music on vinyl?
Nope. It's absurdly obvious. Why would they go to the trouble of building the infrastructure to mass product quickly a niche product that won't sell a huge number of copies? I literally know of no one who actually listens to vinyl records anymore. The only people I know who even own turntables are people in the baby boomer generation. I'm confident most people reading this also don't know many people who listen to vinyl if they know any at all. Manufacturing takes time and there has to be enough demand to build the supply chain if you want it done fast. As the saying goes you can have it fast, cheap, or good. Pick two. There simply hasn't been enough demand for vinyl records to justify upgrading the manufacturing supply chain from where it was before CDs became a thing.
This particular quote was accepted by the world as fact for at least two, possibly three decades. And then all of a sudden, a few years ago, we were told it wasn't true anymore. I don't believe it.
So just because a falsehood was repeated for a long time you refuse to acknowledge that it was false all along when there is no actual evidence? Hope you aren't in the sciences because you'd be rather terrible at it. If you think it is true then please go and cite the source of the quotation. Otherwise you are just passing along what is nothing more than an old wives tale with no actual evidence to back it up. Just because people couldn't be bothered to question a quotation for a long time (after all it didn't actually matter) doesn't mean that it is true or that it was actually said. Lots of famous "quotes" were never actually uttered by the person they are attributed to.
People assume all politicians are lying all the time anyway, so just say anything because people care about the message, not if it is true or not.
No, people assume politicians that oppose their ideology are lying all the time. They tend to assume their guy is "a straight talker" or some other baloney. Exhibit A is the irrational believe on our political right that Hillary Clinton is some sort of pathological liar and crook. This in spite the the actual objective evidence that she is not at all outside the range of normal for a high profile politician. In actuality she is relatively honest among that crowd. (a low bar I know) The same people seem to believe that Trump is telling the truth despite objective evidence that he lies FAR more often.
Even so, it doesn't actually seem to have damaged Trump very much.
That's just because the people he was running against weren't very well liked either. Not one of the Republican candidates (including Trump) was a serious statesman with real gravitas. Easy targets for a guy who has made his life's work self promotion. Hillary Clinton for whatever reason just isn't very charismatic to a big portion of the population - and even the she actually won the popular vote.
(Do you realize that only once since 1988 has a Republican candidate actually won the popular vote? That's 6 of the last 7 elections. Talk about evidence of a screwed up election system...)
The average new car may be $33k, but that's in a world where a new Tesla is $100k. . You can get a Hyundai Elantra for $17k
Why are you comparing a high end luxury car to an econobox? If you want to compare with a Nissan Leaf or Chevy Bolt, fine but don't insult our intelligence with stupid and irrelevant comparisons.
Call me when I can buy an electric car for less than $15 grand.
Nice job moving the goal posts. If it isn't cheap enough for everyone then nobody should bother? What a stupid argument.
Oh and to address your challenge to get an electric car for under $15K, here you go.
Enough said.
Except that there is no evidence that he actually said it. Go ahead. Find an irrefutable citation that he actually said it. We'll wait.
es, electric cars are "greener" than the old gas guzzler I drive but ... guess what, the gas guzzler costs 10k, the electric equivalent 40k.
You are comparing a used gasoline powered car with a new electric vehicle. The average NEW car in the US is $33,560. You can purchase a new Chevy Volt for $33,220. A Tesla Model 3 is supposed to be $35,000. A Chevy Bolt costs around $36,000. And these are MSRP prices, not what would actually be paid. Furthermore electric/hybrid vehicles will be available for steep discounts on the used marker as well going forward.
If you want people to "go green", you have to make it affordable.
Ok, done. What are you waiting for?
Actually, as I recall, Mr. Gates' credibility is in software development and marketing. I don't see any particular expertise in atmospheric physics or meteorology. . .
People can develop plenty of credibility on a subject once they retire from their previous work. Gates hasn't had software as his primary job for well over a decade now and he's been putting his brainpower and money into other areas of technical expertise. Climate change appears to be among these and there is no reason he could not have become well informed over the last 15 years on the subject. I do not pretend to know if he is in fact well informed. I'm merely pointing out that there is no reason to assume he couldn't be.
Why we trust the opinions of people with no proven expertise in a subject is beyond. . .
In this case because he is rich enough to actually consult directly with the people who are subject matter experts and he appears to have done so. (have you?) Further in spite of whatever other flaws he might have you can't really argue that Bill Gates isn't smart enough to understand what those experts are saying to him. Nobody is arguing that he he is stupid. Finally he appears to actually be putting his money where his mouth is and actually doing something beyond just complaining. That's more than I can say for a lot of people.
Don't forget about removing the key on laptops to delete the character in front of the cursor. (you have to press 2 keys to do this super common function)
Don't forget about removing older style USB ports from their "pro" laptop that are almost in ubiquitous use.
Don't forget about how IOS and OS X still for some bizarre reason don't cooperate especially well and they don't provide a cable for their smartphone to plug into their "pro" laptop out of the box.
Apple seems to have forgotten that good design is about a lot more than a pretty case and some fancy fonts and the latest interface fads. Form should always follow function and they are forgetting about function in a lot of places.
I wonder if Microsoft realizes how much trouble Windows is in.
Microsoft is making tens of billions in profit from Windows every year with no end in sight. If that's trouble then give me some of that. PCs might not be the dominant force they once were but they aren't going away any time soon and there is nothing that is likely to displace Windows as the dominant operating system in PCs either. Furthermore Microsoft is the only ones doing anything even kind of innovative in traditional PCs these days. Their work in merging tablets and laptops is actually working in some areas (after a LOT of false starts) whereas Apple's big "innovations" are removing keys that nobody had a problem with and taking away ports people actually use. I'm not going to be a Windows fan any time soon but at least they are trying. Apple seems to not give a shit about the Macs anymore and they certainly haven't done anything in that space worth mentioning for several years now.
Pence knows how the government works. He's not going to sit around signing symbolic executive orders that have no basis in law. Trump is in for a rude awakening when he finds out that he's not a dictator.
If the republican congress remains behind Trump then he is for all practical purposes a dictator. The only thing protecting your civil liberties is the fact that the republicans don't have a 3/5 supermajority in the senate and the fact that the Supreme court hasn't gone full tilt conservative yet. That's a very thin line. I think Trump is going to do a lot of damage to a lot of people in this country in the next two years until the next congressional election.
The fact that Pence knows how government works isn't comforting to those of us who find his brand of politics reprehensible. In his own way he is almost as much of a Bond villain as Trump is.
But this is the stock market. At the stock market, there can be a price for anything, even if it is impossible to define what the sold service actually is.
No it is NOT the stock market. It is information relating to stocks but that is not the same thing. We're talking about purchasing stock analysis reports, not stocks themselves. Information has a value but it's not easy to pin down and the vendor cannot possibly know the value of a single stock report to a given client. Worse, the client buying the report won't know its value until after they have read it.
Investors now see research as a product that must stand on its own rather than a freebie offered as part of a broader relationship with an investment bank
If true then that is rather problematic. The problem with information is that it's typically impossible for a vendor to know how much a particular piece of information is worth to their customer. Worse, the customer for the information only knows what it is worth AFTER they have consumed it so they have to trust the information vendor to be likely to provide useful and relevant information reliably before it is worth paying for. Selling information as a standalone product is a very challenging business.
Let's use newspapers as an example. Newspapers have absolutely no idea which of their stories are going to be interesting and/or relevant to you as a reader. At best they know that certain types of stories in aggregate tend to interest a demographic of readers but they can't be sure for any given customer. So they have to bundle a lot of stories together in the hopes that some of them will be worth enough to keep you as a subscriber. If you hear about the information from another source before they can get it to you then the sales value of that information goes straight to zero since the reader already has it.
Same is true for stock information. Companies doing stock analysis have no reliable way to know how much you might value a given bit of data. They also have no way to know which bits of data you'll think are worth paying for. So selling information as a business only works if you can provide open access to a wide variety of information that customers can reasonably trust to be reliable. Think Bloomberg or the New York Times. They've built a reputation for being trustworthy places to get information but they don't try to sell you specific stories ala-carte because they can't. There is no way to price the information rationally. That's the problem with selling stock tips. No customer or vendor can tell in advance that a given stock tip is going to be worth the price so there is no reliable market.
There's another subject matter domain that can help with this, it's referred to as: common sense.
Turns out common sense isn't especially common.
The older phones are STILL selling well. Look at the prices on eBay.
Secondary markets are irrelevant as far as LG is concerned. And just because you see a few of them selling on eBay does not mean they are "selling well". Selling well in the context of a company like LG means selling tens of millions of units. Guarantee you aren't seeing that on eBay. A high price on eBay doesn't necessarily mean it was popular - it often means that it was rare.
Operating losses, meanwhile, sunk to around $400.2 million despite "strong sales" of the V20.
This is a fancy way of saying you can generate a lot of revenue selling $2 bills for $1. Just because they sell a lot of something doesn't mean they are selling it at a price that is profitable. If the only way you can move a lot of product is to sell it below cost then it's probably a good idea to get out of that market.
Which is really a pity - they are probably one of the last producers of phones with changeable batteries and sd card slot. My LG G3 is 2.5 years old and still going strong as day 1.
Which might tell you something about how little most customers care about those features. Nothing wrong with those features but they add cost and if people aren't willing to pay extra for them then there is no point in building them into the product.
If anybody from the LG is reading this: keep doing what you were doing, only "modular" thing needed on the phone are battery and memory card. Keep the headphone jack, keep the excellent build quality and do as minimal changes as you must to the original android UI.
Keeping doing what they are doing is what got them into this situation in the first place. Obviously whatever they are doing isn't what customers are willing to pay for so they need to do something else. Exactly what that is I don't pretend to know.
Where their revenue is made is irrelevant. What created the revenue IS relevant. If American-based ingenuity is still their moneymaker, then their hiring practices should reflect that.
Presumably IBM is well aware of the source of their "moneymaker". Probably far better than you and certainly better than me. Show me your evidence that US based talent would provide a better outcome (greater profits) to IBM than what they are doing. Frankly you are talking in unsupported hypothetical ideas rather than evidence based facts.
Furthermore where their revenue is made is very much a relevant consideration as is the location of the best talent to make it. IBM is a global company and has the resources to identify talent wherever it might come from. The notion that 5% of the world's population would constitute a disproportionate share of the talent pool is an irrational assumption unsupported by evidence and IBM is big enough to actually have that evidence. Also conveniently you also have neglected to consider costs which only a fool would ignore. The purpose of a company is to make profit, not revenue. You cannot consider profit without considering both revenue and costs. If they can get the same or similar outcomes with lower priced foreign talent, what possible justification is there for hiring overpriced US workers? What makes US workers such special snowflakes?
Look I get it that there are huge and real problems with stuff like H1B hires and the like but there is a reason that companies feel the pressure to do that sort of thing. US labor is among the most expensive in the world. Only a fool buys something more expensive if the performance doesn't justify the extra cost.
Just a reminder that the name of the company is INTERNATIONAL Business Machines, not American Business Machines. Just because the company is based in the US doesn't mean it will necessarily hire people in the US. IBM gets roughly 65% of their revenue outside the US. One would expect their staffing to reflect that fact.
I am NOT trying to defend IBM's actions. Merely pointing out that they aren't necessarily surprising and without more context it's hard to make an informed judgement about them. I'm all for the home team but that may or may not make sense for that particular company.
She's a traitor, a habitual liar, incompetent, self-serving, and saggy-boobs deep in pay-for-play.
"Traitor"? Seriously? Can I have some of what you are smoking? And claiming that Clinton is less of a self serving liar than Trump is just idiotic.
Think on that. We elected an IDIOT because he's better than the alternative. If he gets our soldiers killed or sells us out, it'll be because he's dumb and incompetent, not because he's sleazy and malicious.
Trump is dumb and incompetent AND sleazy and malicious. It's not either/or. The man collects vendettas like a teenager collects Pokemon cards. Whatever you imagine Clinton's faults to be, Trump has matched or exceeded each and every one of them. Trump is a reprehensible, cruel, ignorant, narcissist, whose only real talent is self promotion.
At least with him, there's a chance.
If you actually believe that then you are dumber than you claim Trump is.