You can't charge students taking a test for the camera pointing at them.
Sure they can. I've taken tests at testing centers where they did exactly that. What do you think those test fees are for? They just divide up the cost of operating the camera among the number of people taking the test. It's trivial to do that. I'm an accountant and in cost accounting we do stuff like this all the time. It's called cost allocation. Some costs are easy to attribute to a specific activity. Others aren't so easy but ultimately you have to allocate all the costs somehow and there is usually a rational way to do it. Allocating the cost of operating a camera is relatively easy.
How many of these surgeons simply get 8 hours of sleep a night like people are supposed to?
More than you'd think unless they are on call. The majority of the practicing surgeons I know have busy but not insane schedules and they usually get reasonable amounts of sleep except for the nights they have to be on call. The ones who get screwed on sleep are the residents for the most part. A residency is tantamount to a state sponsored hazing program.
Every drug user thinks they are fine or better while under the influence. Its the nature of addiction.
You don't know any actual drug users do you? I do - mostly reformed ones anyway. I have a guy who works for me who is an alcoholic. He's been sober for many years but once upon a time he did prison time related to his addiction and he still isn't allowed to have a driver's license. He would be the first to tell you that very few people who are addicts actually believe they do better under the influence or are "fine" while using. They know better and they have no illusions. Oh there are a deluded few I'm sure but they are the exception. Most understand perfectly well that the negative impact of their use of drugs or alcohol. The reasons why they take them have nothing to do with their job performance or any delusion that they perform better while using.
I'm not condoning getting impaired by any means. We test for drugs as a condition of employment at my company. We work with dangerous equipment and impairment could get somebody hurt badly. So I'm on board with reasonable measures to ensure safety. But you seem to have a very poor understanding of the realities surrounding drug use. Honestly if someone smoked pot a month ago, they would probably test positive but wouldn't be impaired today. Do I care? Probably not as long as they aren't high while on the job. If someone has a drink (alcohol is a drug) at home, that isn't really any concern of mine as a boss. If they show up to work smelling of alcohol though, now we have a problem. Blanket statements about wanting nothing to do with anyone who has ever used a drug simply don't make any sense in the real world. You have to apply a bit of common sense and rationality.
You test doctors for legal drugs that effect their performance as surgeons.
Good luck with that. Do you have the foggiest idea how many tens of thousands of drugs and chemicals there are out there that can affect performance? Both in positive and negative ways. You literally cannot test for all of them. It's not possible. The cost alone would be astronomical even if it were technologically possible - which it isn't since we don't have tests for everything. Even if you could somehow test for all the possible forms of impairment, you cannot test often enough to actually ensure that the physician was not impaired at any time. Drugs leave the system after a time so unless you are going to test all physicians unrealistically often, you simply cannot hope to prevent the possibility of them ever being impaired.
Furthermore, who do you think is going to know the most about how to ensure a negative result on a drug test? That's right, physicians. They know better than anyone what the limitations of the drug tests are and how to get around them. You think Lance Armstrong figured out how to evade all those doping controls by himself? No, he had physicians telling him what to do and when to do it. Physicians are actually one of the highest risk groups for drug abuse precisely because they have access and they know better than anyone how to administer the drugs.
A doctor on a heavy dose of legally proscribed opiates should not be doing operations.
It's nice that the world is so simple for you. Those of us who live in the real world understand that sometimes life is more complicated than that. While I'd agree as a general proposition that a doctor who is receiving a treatment that is likely to significantly affect cognitive performance should ideally not be operating, it isn't always that simple. Corner cases abound. First off, drugs have different effects on different people and not all drugs that are prohibited cause impairment. You can develop standards for what dosages are acceptable, but ultimately it will be up to the physician to recuse himself if he thinks it will be a problem. Second, there are circumstances where even an impaired doctor is a better option than no doctor. Doctors routinely are needed to work under less than ideal circumstances - while sick, while injured, etc. Most of the time it's not a problem but sometimes circumstances are less than ideal. Third, you should be FAR more concerned about things like lack of sleep or inexperience - you know, like a resident that is at the tail end of a 36 hour shift or a first year resident who has just started their training. Honest mistakes by well intentioned medical staff are much more likely to kill you than the unlikely chance that a doctor is chemically impaired.
I know several surgeons personally who have themselves routinely tested at an independent laboratory to protect themselves from legal claims of impairment. Then when a lawyer tries to imply that they were impaired they can present a long string of clean drug tests as evidence in their defense. Obviously they can't test for everything but it is a way to establish that they were not impaired in certain ways.
I think it's almost certain to double within ten years - simply based on iPhone replacement sales, and services revenue growth alone.
Possible but like I said I have my doubts. Apple is a good company and I think it's stock is fairly valued. I just have my doubts about their ability to continue to grow the company without a new hit product and without avoiding any missteps along the way. It think it's a good investment but I think there are better ones out there.
Or, the fact that CurrentC just folded, leaving all sorts of high end stores (like Target) to start accepting ApplePay... Another factor is that Apple is continuously buying back its own shares.
It's unclear how much impact ApplePay will have long term. I like the product but we just don't know yet. (BTW calling Target a "high end store" is pretty funny - I think you meant big retailers)
Share buybacks are ok but personally I prefer a dividend in most cases, even in light of the tax consequences. Reason being that neither I nor the company have any way to know right now if the price the company is buying the stock for is a good price. Think of it as something of a bird-in-hand argument. If the best thing the company can think of to do with cash is to bet on its own stock in the casino that is the stock market, I'd rather they just give the money to me and let me invest it where I think prudent. I'm well aware there is evidence that stock buybacks can often provide better returns than dividends but I don't think that given Apple's current market cap that they are getting any sort of amazing return by buying back AAPL. I think AAPL is priced fairly but not cheaply.
Nope. Even if new people stopped buying iPhones today (unlikely in the extreme) replacement and services growth would easily increase revenue (if slowly).
IPhone sales volume actually fell last quarter for the first time. That is a possible indicator of a maturing and/or saturated market. If Apple wants to grow substantially they will need a new hit product within a few years. Just replacing existing phones will not justify a doubling of the market cap of Apple. If you want to see what would happen if iPhone sales slowed you can look at what is happening to their iPad business. People are still buying them but at a substantially slower pace and profits have fallen on that part of the business. It's still profitable but that's not where their growth is coming from.
The stock price has already cratered. Why do you think Berkshire has bought in now?
No the stock price has not cratered unless you are using a very different definition of crating from me. A real cratering would look VERY different. If Apple really cratered we'd be hearing about little else on the financial news. I would say the recent drawback is a correction or maybe even an over-reaction but definitely not a cratering.
Checking... Yep, Ives is still alive and working at Apple. Jobs was a great editor, but there are lots of visionaries still very much alive and working at Apple.
Tell me then. How many major products have these "visionaries" at Apple created since Jobs died? The Apple Watch is pretty much it so far and that has been anything but a runaway success. They've had a few projects with potential down the road (ApplePay, HealthKit, HomeKit, etc) but those haven't paid off yet. While the jury is still out we haven't seen the evidence that Apple can create another major hit product without Jobs at the helm. I wish them well and hope they can do it but they haven't proved it yet.
Right, because a P/E of 290 is not at all risky to buy into and a stock price of 700/share is not at all buying in at a peak...
P/E ratios are not the end-all of investment analysis. In fact the best time to buy an otherwise solid company is when the P/E is out of whack, either very large (meaning
Actually, Samsung beat Apple in profits a few years ago.
Samsung has beat Apple for short periods from time to time but over longer periods Apple has substantially out performed Samsung in profits from smartphones. With some slightly odd mathematics last year Apple had 92% of all profits from smartphones. Samsung had about 15%. Together they actually have more than 100% of the profits because other smartphone makers actually lost money. Nobody else made any meaningful profits. You are correct that Samsung has taken the low margin high volume route and they have done well but they haven't been able to match Apple's profits.
don't agree. They've had bad iPhones. They've bent over users with updates. It will take a lot more than that to get the iFanboys to switch.
They've had flawed iPhones but not a truly bad one. I'm talking one with flaws so bad it actually affects sales. I'm talking a seriously screwed up device. Something much worse than any problem we've seen so far. Geeks here on slashdot tend to overreact to what in reality are relatively minor missteps by Apple. Antenna-gate for example was a problem but since almost everyone puts their phones in cases anyway it didn't really matter much from a business perspective.
Alternatively the other way Apple could run into trouble would be through margin pressure on the iPhone. It's not hard to envision the smartphone market getting mature like PCs and prices experiencing downward pressure. If Apple can't continue to come up with new features (or can't do it fast enough) people are willing to pay a premium for this will eventually happen. If phones become more commoditized Apple isn't really built to compete on price. I think the margin pressure scenario is actually somewhat more likely than the Bad iPhone scenario but either is a real possibility.
Apple is running into the law of big numbers. There simply aren't a lot of products they can make that can generate enough revenue to grow the company meaningfully. I think Apple hasn't paid enough attention to web services. There's some potential there. I could maybe see them getting into home automation or appliances. We've heard rumors about a car but the auto business is WAY different than consumer electronics (I'm in the auto industry myself) and it's unclear if Apple can develop real competency there. Apple is really a software business with a bit of design competency thrown in. Hard to see that translating gracefully to cars though I suppose anything is possible. I suppose if Elon Musk can figure it out I don't see why Apple couldn't. I think more likely they will end up buying one or more large companies and diversifying their revenue streams to some degree. Right now all their eggs are in consumer electronics but they have the cash to buy their way into other industries for the right price. A telecom (think something like buying AT&T) would be an intriguing purchase and Apple has enough cash to make it happen.
You think they'll finally be profitable in only a few years?
Yes I expect Amazon will eventually show profits. When? I don't pretend to know. They could be profitable tomorrow if they wanted to be though I think that would be a mistake. I think the real profit engine from Amazon will probably be their web services and maybe their media business. Their retail business (the stuff the ship in boxes) is really more of a cash generating engine than anything else. It provides the cash flow to fund these other business lines. But it's a low margin high volume business and it's not inconceivable that competitors like Walmart could catch up to them. So far though Amazon has made it really easy to do business with them and nobody else has managed to match them in online retail.
That said, your concern about profits does have considerable merit. Ideally as an investor you'd like to see them growing AND making profits along the way like Apple has done. But I think in the long run if Amazon doesn't do anything stupid it is a better investment today than Apple.
There was never a public release of a MeeGo device.
Not true. The Nokia N9 was released to the public and was the only device from Nokia with MeeGo on it sold to the public. You can get them on eBay today. It was not released in the US and much of Europe but it was sold for a time.
Pretty obvious from that why "nobody gave a shit about MeeGo in 2010 aside from some fanboys" - nobody else had even heard of that unreleased product!
Oh there was a fair bit of press about the N9 and MeeGo but it was met with a huge yawn by most and puzzlement by anyone with a brain. Why would anyone buy a phone with an OS that would be dead and unsupported by the maker of the product? Why they even bothered to actually bring it to market is a mystery. Nokia had already announced their intention to go to Windows so the product was effectively dead on arrival.
Hence the words, which you even quoted "the newer device with MeeGo was an incremental improvement". Why bother replying if you have got things that messed up?
Oh I understood you just fine. However you were conflating two operating systems and implying that sales of the N900 somehow were evidence that there was widespread demand for MeeGo. I obviously disagree and the evidence seems to back me up. If you can show me a logical narrative backed by evidence of how a few thousand N900 sales somehow implied MeeGo would be a game changer I'd be impressed but so far I'm not buying that argument at all.
Goalpost shift detected.
Only if you fail to understand my point completely. Nokia's problems started well before Elop got on the scene and I said so right from the start. There is plenty of evidence of this and I provided some. Nokia was hemorrhaging market share before they hired Elop and Nokia was several years behind the curve in the smartphone market. Elop merely accelerated the already underway decline through some spectacularly idiotic decision making and/or conflicts of interest.
I wrote "more mobile telephones than any other company in the world" which is correct.
And irrelevant. Most of those "mobile telephones" sold by Nokia were not smartphones and that was clearly not where the growth or profits were by 2010. Smartphones didn't outsell "dumb" phones until 2013 but the writing was on the wall by 2010 to anyone with a functioning brain. Nokia sold a lot of Symbian phones and that accounted for the nearly all of their smartphone sales prior to 2011. However Symbian was technologically behind Android and iOS by quite a lot in 2010. Nokia knew this and was working on new systems to replace Symbian. Maemo and MeeGo had statistically insignificant market share so any argument based on Nokia's market share for their success implies that Nokia could transition all those Symbian customers to the new system(s) which is a hard trick to pull off without much evidence that Nokia was up to the task. Worse the fact that Nokia was dabbling in several system made the picture confusing for developers. The fact that Nokia still led the world in handset sales by quantity in 2010 is true but badly misses the bigger picture of what was going on.
Writing "fact is" in front of opinions doesn't make them reality either.
Find me any objective evidence that there was widespread interest in MeeGo in 2010 and that it had any realistic chance to displace Android or iOS or even Blackberry and I'll concede the point. Good luck with that.
Still stuck to my "never an individual stock. Always funds. Always index funds".
Nothing wrong with that. You might leave some money on the table (or not) but you should stick with an investment strategy that fits your appetite for risk. Index funds are fine investment vehicle. Don't apologize for using them.
Personally I haven't purchased AAPL for a different reason. Three reasons actually. First the stock is already quite valuable so the chance for it to double is not as high as with some other companies. Yes the PE is still reasonable but that is predicated on profits remaining where they are which is to say VERY high. Second, the dividend yield on AAPL isn't amazing, currently at about 2.4%. While that's not bad it isn't better than inflation so I'd still be depending on stock growth to make any money. Compare with companies like Royal Dutch Shell which pay 7-8% dividend yield and are less subject to consumer whims. Third and probably most important, Apple's product strategy is kind of a high wire act. All it would take for the stock price to crater would be a single bad iPhone. While Apple has a great track record, they aren't free from screwups. Apple's stock price remaining high will depend on them introducing another hit product in the next 5-10 years. Unclear if they will be able to pull that off without their visionary leader.
For a tech stock I think AAPL isn't a terrible investment but I think AMZN has more upside potential as a stock if you want to play in that sector and are thinking a few years down the road.
Why they didn't hedge their bets with an android model is beyond me.
That's really easy to explain. Profits. The profits on smartphones aren't in the hardware but in the software. Hardware-wise there is basically no real difference between an iPhone and a similarly equipped Android smartphone. All the real difference is in the software. If Apple were to put Android on their phones their profit margins would evaporate faster than you could say "shareholder lawsuit". There would be nothing really different about it and thus no real reason to pay more. Nokia would have been in the same boat.
The dominant reason Apple is able to charge more is because people are willing to pay more for their software. (No it isn't because of "marketing" - marketing is not magic pixie dust - there has to be products that people like behind any marketing) Apple's software is what really makes their products unique. There is only one company that has made substantial profits selling Android phones (Samsung) and there is no particular reason to believe Nokia would have been able to capture substantial profits on the Android platform. Even Samsung makes far less profit than Apple. For Nokia to really be profitable they needed software that made their phones different from everyone else's. Nokia knew this but were unable to fix the problem. There was really very little upside for Nokia on the Android platform and a large chance they would end up with little to no profits.
So Nokia bet the farm first on Maemo/MeeGo and then on Windows. The bet didn't work out for a variety of reasons but it's easy to understand why they did it. They were gambling on being able to control the platform which is where the real profits in smartphones are.
The N900 sold all available units on little more than word of mouth and the newer device with MeeGo was an incremental improvement - thus a fair assumption.
First, the N900 sold with Maemo, not MeeGo. MeeGo was made for the never sold to the public N950 and the well received but dead on arrival N9. Second, one product selling a handful of units to some core fans is hardly sufficient evidence to believe that MeeGo would have been "highly likely" to succeed. The N900 sold less than 100,000 units in it's first 5 months which on the market. That's a rounding error. The iPhone sold somewhere close to 16 million units during the same period. And you think such ludicrously bad sales figures are evidence it was going to take the market by storm? There is NO objective evidence to realistically believe that MeeGo was likely to capture substantial market share. None.
Putting a manager from a rival in as his first ever attempt at being a CEO did that. Before Elop turned up Nokia was selling more mobile telephones than any other company in the world.
Nokia was already fading in the smartphone business before Elop showed up. Elop became CEO in September 2010. Nokia's market share had fallen from near 50% in 2007 to about 40% at the start of 2010. Their market share fell to around 32% in 2010 prior to Elop taking over. So the fall was well underway long before Elop arrived. He merely threw gas on the fire. That is a 25% fall in market share in 9 months. This is after MeeGo was released and before Elop took over. If people were really excited about MeeGo (which they weren't) then it makes little sense that Nokia would have seen continued market share erosion after its release and before Elop killed the platform in February 2011. Fact is that almost nobody gave a shit about MeeGo in 2010 aside from some fanboys. It wasn't that it was a bad product but it was WAY too late to the party to really matter in all likelihood.
MeeGo was very likely to be hugely successful. It could be the dominant platform now, or going head to head with Android
And what evidence do you base this hypothesis on? Is it possible that it could have been successful? Sure. It's conceivable it might have been a player. "Highly likely"? I don't see any reason to believe that. Nokia (the major backer along with Intel) was already on shaky ground by the point MeeGo became a viable product. It was always more likely to fail than to succeed just like most projects. That's not a critique of the technology or it's merits or the efforts of its backers but rather the fact that it's really frickin hard to develop a commercially successful OS that captures substantial market share. Even Microsoft with all it's billions of dollars has struggled to capture even a fraction of the market share they have on the desktop in mobile.
I agree that Elop really screwed Nokia in a big way but he really just hastened the demise that was already underway. Nokia didn't realize until too late who their real customer was. They thought it was the telecom companies and they developed phones with that in mind. Apple proved that the customer was really the person holding the phone. By the time Nokia figured that out, handset buyers were already heading for the exits and it was too late to stop them. Nokia's hardware was (mostly) great but their software was terrible. Symbian wasn't good enough and MeeGo was too late to the market. They gave Apple and Android a 3 year head start in the market before MeeGo was introduced (2007 vs 2010) which is an eternity. While MeeGo had a lot of positives, it simply was too late to be likely to capture substantial market share. Obviously we can never know for sure but it seems hard to envision a scenario where MeeGo really turned into a game changer in the face of Apple and Google.
Most travellers don't just walk to the nearest park and spend a year walking laps of it. That's not travel.
What park are you going to that is traveling 4.6 miles per second 300 miles above the Earth's surface? The ISS is a vehicle, not a park. If you want an analogy it's like taking a rocket to a jet that is already flying around the globe, making an in-flight transfer and then spending several months in the plane while it flies around the world. Just because you aren't standing on terra-firma doesn't mean it isn't traveling.
The ISS is effectively parked. (parked in an awesome spot.) Sure it is moving relative to the centre of the earth, but so is the car on blocks. 24 hour circuit vs 90 minutes.
The ISS is moving relative to every part of the earth at a ludicrous velocity. Your car on blocks is fixed to a point on the Earth's surface. You seriously can't see the difference?
Research by Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) has found that the 'maths gender gap', the relative under performance of girls at maths, is much wider in societies with poor rates of gender equality.
Shocking. Societies that let girls study math results in girls who are better at math. Who would have guessed?
Productivity has increased 72% in last 15 years but real wages only 8%. Guests who benefited?
I can't be bothered to verify your numbers but taking them as a given the answer is we all benefited. Maybe not equitably but that huge increase in productivity is a big part of the reason why many people in the US still have a job at all. We've had among the highest labor costs in the world for well over 40 years now. With countries like China growing fast ANY growth in real wages is good news. Maybe not as good as we'd like but when you already are at the top of the wages per capita chart it's kind of unrealistic to presume that productivity growth and wage growth will remain highly correlated.
I'm not arguing that wage inequality isn't a big problem but that's a separate discussion. I'm merely addressing the fact that they US work force is among the most productive in the world and also among the highest paid in the world. The US economy is larger than that of India and China combined despite having something like 1/8 of the population. Do you really think that is a state of affairs that will last forever without any impact on wage growth?
The US has nowhere near the highest labor costs in the world. We're not even in the top 10.
If you actually believe that labor costs in the US aren't among the highest in the world then you haven't actually bothered to look at the data. Depending on how you measure it the labor costs in the US are mostly somewhere between 5th and 20th per capita. Yes there are some countries with higher labor costs but not very many of them. The fact that we don't have THE highest labor costs per capita is not important. What is important is that our labor costs are WELL above the mean globally. If you want to know why manufacturing companies have moved to China (and elsewhere) for labor intensive manufacturing, labor costs are by far the biggest factor. There are a lot of products that simply cannot be made in the US for the hourly wages that a US based manufacturer would have to pay.
I used to do global sourcing for a living. I've traveled all over Eastern Asia, Southeast Asia, and Central America for manufacturing companies. I work in manufacturing and I buy products and commodities from around the world. The US without question has some of the highest labor rates in the world. It's not even a debate. If you think otherwise you don't know what you are talking about.
Americans today are horrendous at efficiency because their government made them absolutely inefficient.
Don't let a little thing like actual facts contradict your ideological rant. Sadly for your argument the US is among the most efficient and productive workforces in the world. (#3 in GDP per capita behind only Norway and Luxembourg) The notion that the US government has made the US hugely inefficient is not supported by any actual evidence.
As to what makes a person efficient - capital savings and investment into labour saving devices.
Which as it turns out the US economy is impressively good at. What do you think the computer you are typing this on is but a labor saving device? The US leads the world in utilization of many forms of automation.
It's more of a shock that anyone is still paid well considering hype literal billions of cheap labor outside America.
Try trillions of cheap labor. We have this deluded notion that we can have both the highest labor costs in the world AND keep labor intensive work. That does not and cannot work over the long term. China has 4 people for every 1 in the US. That means all other things being equal, labor costs in China will be 1/4 that in the US on average. There is no reason China cannot have productivity equal to that of the US. Therefore it is illogical to continue to believe that the US can continue to have exceptionally high wages in the face of competition with a clear labor cost advantage.
Sure, we could fix the visa problem, but if companies are forced to use expensive (globally speaking) labor, they'll just leave the country.
Some will, some won't. If they get good value for money they'll stay. If the work can be done comparably well for less elsewhere then they'll leave. Honestly we should expect US wages to experience some form of reversion to the mean. If you want to have the highest wages in the world you should expect labor intensive work to go elsewhere. That's just Economics 101.
I suggest everyone start saving their money, because the gravy train is ending.
If the US wants to stay ahead then we will need to stop spending money on stupid things (wars, oversized military, interest on national debt) and start spending money on R&D, education, infrastructure and an efficient health care system. You know, things that will actually improve quality of life and incomes and productivity. Failure to do this will eventually result in the US experiencing a reversion to the mean in GDP per capita.
Ever eat at a grocery store? Guess what? You are eating products that were worked on by imported labor and I bet you aren't complaining about the lower prices. This is nothing unusual and I don't think less of Tesla for trying to get a better deal. As long as Tesla followed whatever regulations are in place for bringing in their workforce and paying them, I don't really see a problem here. If they broke some laws then appropriate and proportional punishment should follow. If the laws are allowing something they shouldn't then the answer is to change the laws. See some of the H1B abuse if you need an example of laws that are being abused.
While most of the imported workers were happy with their wages, one worker was earning the equivalent of $5 an hour while his American counterpart was earning as much as $52, and they worked 10-hour days -- without overtime -- up to seven days a week.
If someone is willing to pay the American worker $52/hour (roughly $100K/year with 8 hour work day) and gets good value for their money then where is the problem? On the other hand I cannot imagine paying $52/hour for that sort of work unless I had no alternative. Heck, my little company doesn't pay skilled trades $52/hour and we're a pimple on a gnat's ass in size compared with Tesla. I respect skilled trades immensely but Tesla would be nuts to pay that sort of labor rate if they could get the same work done for less. Just because this hypothetical American skilled trade worker is asking $52/hour doesn't mean Tesla or anybody else should be prohibited from looking for a better deal. Would you pay 10X the cost for work on your house solely because the worker is a US citizen and not because they do any better work? If you say yes I'm going to call you a liar.
Say for years 1-5 keep it low and then slowly up it for years 5-20 but after 20 then start really jacking it up so the mouse can keep theirs but some abandonware / movies that bomb does not.
Easy to do. You start at $0.01 (indexed for inflation). You then double the fee each year thereafter. It wouldn't cost much to keep a work out of the public domain for about $20 years but few works would make it past 25-30 years. Virtually none would make it past 40. Give unregistered copyrights a flat 20 years with no fees but no extension either. I would be fine with giving a 10 year free period with registration occurring any time in that 10 years. This would effectively cap copyright at somewhere close to 40-50 years, it would establish a way to allow authors to profit from genuinely valuable works for an actual limited time proportional to its value, and it would ensure works actually do get into the public domain without congress extending copyright indefinitely.
In any case, I don't want to see the copyright system based on the patent system, because I think the patent system is even more broken than the copyright system is.
While I could pick nits, there is only one thing that is truly broken in copyright law right now and that is the term of the copyright. Congress has twisted the definition of "temporary" into something absurd. Copyright should 30-50 years at most and quite possibly less. There is no socially beneficial reason I can come up with for it to be longer than that. Extending a copyright beyond the death of the author is unnecessary and ridiculous. It should be 20-40 years from creation of the work, regardless of whether they are alive or dead.
I actually like the idea of a progressive copyright fee. (would work for patents too with a few tweaks) Basically the author gets 10 years of free use of their copyright. Before year 10 they then have to register the copyright to keep it and the get charged a fee of $0.01. Each year thereafter the fee doubles. $0.02 in year 2, $0.04 in year 3, etc. They keep the copyright for as many years as they find it valuable. It would be fine to pay in advance and the money goes to fund the copyright office. When they cease paying to keep the copyright then the work becomes public domain. Index the fee schedule for inflation. This would make most works trivial to keep out of the public domain for about 25 years but it would be a rare work indeed that would stay out of the public domain beyond 40 years. If a copyright isn't worth registering it probably wasn't very valuable to begin with. So unregistered works get a flat 20 years with no option to extend.
In this particular instance, I think it isn't all of Yahoo Mail's fault. People need to be wary of the links they click on.
That's not how Congress rolls. They refuse to take personal responsibility for everything and they have the authority to make someone else pay for their incompetence and/or corruption.
To be frank however, I cannot see any sane reason why our elected officials are not using official government email accounts supported by official government IT workers. It's not like congress doesn't know where to find the money to do it. Why on Earth they would be using Yahoo accounts while on the job is a mystery without a responsible answer.
Economists seem to agree that robot automation poses real threats to human labour within the next few decades.
Which economist are these? Citation please. I'm not aware of any credible economist who has a blanket view that robots will replace human labor substantially within the next few decades with no alternative work being available. There has not been a single instance in human history where automation has resulted in a long term labor shortage. It causes some short term dislocations in specific industries but those affected always eventually find other work.
Most economists I've ever spoken with and read think that quite a lot of jobs are actually wasteful to have a human performing. What value is there in having a human drive a truck to deliver goods? Unless you think of truck driving as a make-work jobs program (which is dumb) it make sense to automate that when we can and have those people doing something more economically productive. Something that actually is worthy of the human brain and faculties. We only have people driving trucks right now because we lack the technology to put them to work doing something more valuable. And there is no lack of more valuable jobs to do. There is however a lack of people who are well trained and available to do them.
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You can't charge students taking a test for the camera pointing at them.
Sure they can. I've taken tests at testing centers where they did exactly that. What do you think those test fees are for? They just divide up the cost of operating the camera among the number of people taking the test. It's trivial to do that. I'm an accountant and in cost accounting we do stuff like this all the time. It's called cost allocation. Some costs are easy to attribute to a specific activity. Others aren't so easy but ultimately you have to allocate all the costs somehow and there is usually a rational way to do it. Allocating the cost of operating a camera is relatively easy.
How many of these surgeons simply get 8 hours of sleep a night like people are supposed to?
More than you'd think unless they are on call. The majority of the practicing surgeons I know have busy but not insane schedules and they usually get reasonable amounts of sleep except for the nights they have to be on call. The ones who get screwed on sleep are the residents for the most part. A residency is tantamount to a state sponsored hazing program.
Every drug user thinks they are fine or better while under the influence. Its the nature of addiction.
You don't know any actual drug users do you? I do - mostly reformed ones anyway. I have a guy who works for me who is an alcoholic. He's been sober for many years but once upon a time he did prison time related to his addiction and he still isn't allowed to have a driver's license. He would be the first to tell you that very few people who are addicts actually believe they do better under the influence or are "fine" while using. They know better and they have no illusions. Oh there are a deluded few I'm sure but they are the exception. Most understand perfectly well that the negative impact of their use of drugs or alcohol. The reasons why they take them have nothing to do with their job performance or any delusion that they perform better while using.
I'm not condoning getting impaired by any means. We test for drugs as a condition of employment at my company. We work with dangerous equipment and impairment could get somebody hurt badly. So I'm on board with reasonable measures to ensure safety. But you seem to have a very poor understanding of the realities surrounding drug use. Honestly if someone smoked pot a month ago, they would probably test positive but wouldn't be impaired today. Do I care? Probably not as long as they aren't high while on the job. If someone has a drink (alcohol is a drug) at home, that isn't really any concern of mine as a boss. If they show up to work smelling of alcohol though, now we have a problem. Blanket statements about wanting nothing to do with anyone who has ever used a drug simply don't make any sense in the real world. You have to apply a bit of common sense and rationality.
You test doctors for legal drugs that effect their performance as surgeons.
Good luck with that. Do you have the foggiest idea how many tens of thousands of drugs and chemicals there are out there that can affect performance? Both in positive and negative ways. You literally cannot test for all of them. It's not possible. The cost alone would be astronomical even if it were technologically possible - which it isn't since we don't have tests for everything. Even if you could somehow test for all the possible forms of impairment, you cannot test often enough to actually ensure that the physician was not impaired at any time. Drugs leave the system after a time so unless you are going to test all physicians unrealistically often, you simply cannot hope to prevent the possibility of them ever being impaired.
Furthermore, who do you think is going to know the most about how to ensure a negative result on a drug test? That's right, physicians. They know better than anyone what the limitations of the drug tests are and how to get around them. You think Lance Armstrong figured out how to evade all those doping controls by himself? No, he had physicians telling him what to do and when to do it. Physicians are actually one of the highest risk groups for drug abuse precisely because they have access and they know better than anyone how to administer the drugs.
A doctor on a heavy dose of legally proscribed opiates should not be doing operations.
It's nice that the world is so simple for you. Those of us who live in the real world understand that sometimes life is more complicated than that. While I'd agree as a general proposition that a doctor who is receiving a treatment that is likely to significantly affect cognitive performance should ideally not be operating, it isn't always that simple. Corner cases abound. First off, drugs have different effects on different people and not all drugs that are prohibited cause impairment. You can develop standards for what dosages are acceptable, but ultimately it will be up to the physician to recuse himself if he thinks it will be a problem. Second, there are circumstances where even an impaired doctor is a better option than no doctor. Doctors routinely are needed to work under less than ideal circumstances - while sick, while injured, etc. Most of the time it's not a problem but sometimes circumstances are less than ideal. Third, you should be FAR more concerned about things like lack of sleep or inexperience - you know, like a resident that is at the tail end of a 36 hour shift or a first year resident who has just started their training. Honest mistakes by well intentioned medical staff are much more likely to kill you than the unlikely chance that a doctor is chemically impaired.
Do you test your heart surgeon for legal drugs?
I know several surgeons personally who have themselves routinely tested at an independent laboratory to protect themselves from legal claims of impairment. Then when a lawyer tries to imply that they were impaired they can present a long string of clean drug tests as evidence in their defense. Obviously they can't test for everything but it is a way to establish that they were not impaired in certain ways.
I think it's almost certain to double within ten years - simply based on iPhone replacement sales, and services revenue growth alone.
Possible but like I said I have my doubts. Apple is a good company and I think it's stock is fairly valued. I just have my doubts about their ability to continue to grow the company without a new hit product and without avoiding any missteps along the way. It think it's a good investment but I think there are better ones out there.
Or, the fact that CurrentC just folded, leaving all sorts of high end stores (like Target) to start accepting ApplePay... Another factor is that Apple is continuously buying back its own shares.
It's unclear how much impact ApplePay will have long term. I like the product but we just don't know yet. (BTW calling Target a "high end store" is pretty funny - I think you meant big retailers)
Share buybacks are ok but personally I prefer a dividend in most cases, even in light of the tax consequences. Reason being that neither I nor the company have any way to know right now if the price the company is buying the stock for is a good price. Think of it as something of a bird-in-hand argument. If the best thing the company can think of to do with cash is to bet on its own stock in the casino that is the stock market, I'd rather they just give the money to me and let me invest it where I think prudent. I'm well aware there is evidence that stock buybacks can often provide better returns than dividends but I don't think that given Apple's current market cap that they are getting any sort of amazing return by buying back AAPL. I think AAPL is priced fairly but not cheaply.
Nope. Even if new people stopped buying iPhones today (unlikely in the extreme) replacement and services growth would easily increase revenue (if slowly).
IPhone sales volume actually fell last quarter for the first time. That is a possible indicator of a maturing and/or saturated market. If Apple wants to grow substantially they will need a new hit product within a few years. Just replacing existing phones will not justify a doubling of the market cap of Apple. If you want to see what would happen if iPhone sales slowed you can look at what is happening to their iPad business. People are still buying them but at a substantially slower pace and profits have fallen on that part of the business. It's still profitable but that's not where their growth is coming from.
The stock price has already cratered. Why do you think Berkshire has bought in now?
No the stock price has not cratered unless you are using a very different definition of crating from me. A real cratering would look VERY different. If Apple really cratered we'd be hearing about little else on the financial news. I would say the recent drawback is a correction or maybe even an over-reaction but definitely not a cratering.
Checking... Yep, Ives is still alive and working at Apple. Jobs was a great editor, but there are lots of visionaries still very much alive and working at Apple.
Tell me then. How many major products have these "visionaries" at Apple created since Jobs died? The Apple Watch is pretty much it so far and that has been anything but a runaway success. They've had a few projects with potential down the road (ApplePay, HealthKit, HomeKit, etc) but those haven't paid off yet. While the jury is still out we haven't seen the evidence that Apple can create another major hit product without Jobs at the helm. I wish them well and hope they can do it but they haven't proved it yet.
Right, because a P/E of 290 is not at all risky to buy into and a stock price of 700/share is not at all buying in at a peak...
P/E ratios are not the end-all of investment analysis. In fact the best time to buy an otherwise solid company is when the P/E is out of whack, either very large (meaning
Actually, Samsung beat Apple in profits a few years ago.
Samsung has beat Apple for short periods from time to time but over longer periods Apple has substantially out performed Samsung in profits from smartphones. With some slightly odd mathematics last year Apple had 92% of all profits from smartphones. Samsung had about 15%. Together they actually have more than 100% of the profits because other smartphone makers actually lost money. Nobody else made any meaningful profits. You are correct that Samsung has taken the low margin high volume route and they have done well but they haven't been able to match Apple's profits.
don't agree. They've had bad iPhones. They've bent over users with updates. It will take a lot more than that to get the iFanboys to switch.
They've had flawed iPhones but not a truly bad one. I'm talking one with flaws so bad it actually affects sales. I'm talking a seriously screwed up device. Something much worse than any problem we've seen so far. Geeks here on slashdot tend to overreact to what in reality are relatively minor missteps by Apple. Antenna-gate for example was a problem but since almost everyone puts their phones in cases anyway it didn't really matter much from a business perspective.
Alternatively the other way Apple could run into trouble would be through margin pressure on the iPhone. It's not hard to envision the smartphone market getting mature like PCs and prices experiencing downward pressure. If Apple can't continue to come up with new features (or can't do it fast enough) people are willing to pay a premium for this will eventually happen. If phones become more commoditized Apple isn't really built to compete on price. I think the margin pressure scenario is actually somewhat more likely than the Bad iPhone scenario but either is a real possibility.
Apple is running into the law of big numbers. There simply aren't a lot of products they can make that can generate enough revenue to grow the company meaningfully. I think Apple hasn't paid enough attention to web services. There's some potential there. I could maybe see them getting into home automation or appliances. We've heard rumors about a car but the auto business is WAY different than consumer electronics (I'm in the auto industry myself) and it's unclear if Apple can develop real competency there. Apple is really a software business with a bit of design competency thrown in. Hard to see that translating gracefully to cars though I suppose anything is possible. I suppose if Elon Musk can figure it out I don't see why Apple couldn't. I think more likely they will end up buying one or more large companies and diversifying their revenue streams to some degree. Right now all their eggs are in consumer electronics but they have the cash to buy their way into other industries for the right price. A telecom (think something like buying AT&T) would be an intriguing purchase and Apple has enough cash to make it happen.
You think they'll finally be profitable in only a few years?
Yes I expect Amazon will eventually show profits. When? I don't pretend to know. They could be profitable tomorrow if they wanted to be though I think that would be a mistake. I think the real profit engine from Amazon will probably be their web services and maybe their media business. Their retail business (the stuff the ship in boxes) is really more of a cash generating engine than anything else. It provides the cash flow to fund these other business lines. But it's a low margin high volume business and it's not inconceivable that competitors like Walmart could catch up to them. So far though Amazon has made it really easy to do business with them and nobody else has managed to match them in online retail.
That said, your concern about profits does have considerable merit. Ideally as an investor you'd like to see them growing AND making profits along the way like Apple has done. But I think in the long run if Amazon doesn't do anything stupid it is a better investment today than Apple.
There was never a public release of a MeeGo device.
Not true. The Nokia N9 was released to the public and was the only device from Nokia with MeeGo on it sold to the public. You can get them on eBay today. It was not released in the US and much of Europe but it was sold for a time.
Pretty obvious from that why "nobody gave a shit about MeeGo in 2010 aside from some fanboys" - nobody else had even heard of that unreleased product!
Oh there was a fair bit of press about the N9 and MeeGo but it was met with a huge yawn by most and puzzlement by anyone with a brain. Why would anyone buy a phone with an OS that would be dead and unsupported by the maker of the product? Why they even bothered to actually bring it to market is a mystery. Nokia had already announced their intention to go to Windows so the product was effectively dead on arrival.
Hence the words, which you even quoted "the newer device with MeeGo was an incremental improvement". Why bother replying if you have got things that messed up?
Oh I understood you just fine. However you were conflating two operating systems and implying that sales of the N900 somehow were evidence that there was widespread demand for MeeGo. I obviously disagree and the evidence seems to back me up. If you can show me a logical narrative backed by evidence of how a few thousand N900 sales somehow implied MeeGo would be a game changer I'd be impressed but so far I'm not buying that argument at all.
Goalpost shift detected.
Only if you fail to understand my point completely. Nokia's problems started well before Elop got on the scene and I said so right from the start. There is plenty of evidence of this and I provided some. Nokia was hemorrhaging market share before they hired Elop and Nokia was several years behind the curve in the smartphone market. Elop merely accelerated the already underway decline through some spectacularly idiotic decision making and/or conflicts of interest.
I wrote "more mobile telephones than any other company in the world" which is correct.
And irrelevant. Most of those "mobile telephones" sold by Nokia were not smartphones and that was clearly not where the growth or profits were by 2010. Smartphones didn't outsell "dumb" phones until 2013 but the writing was on the wall by 2010 to anyone with a functioning brain. Nokia sold a lot of Symbian phones and that accounted for the nearly all of their smartphone sales prior to 2011. However Symbian was technologically behind Android and iOS by quite a lot in 2010. Nokia knew this and was working on new systems to replace Symbian. Maemo and MeeGo had statistically insignificant market share so any argument based on Nokia's market share for their success implies that Nokia could transition all those Symbian customers to the new system(s) which is a hard trick to pull off without much evidence that Nokia was up to the task. Worse the fact that Nokia was dabbling in several system made the picture confusing for developers. The fact that Nokia still led the world in handset sales by quantity in 2010 is true but badly misses the bigger picture of what was going on.
Writing "fact is" in front of opinions doesn't make them reality either.
Find me any objective evidence that there was widespread interest in MeeGo in 2010 and that it had any realistic chance to displace Android or iOS or even Blackberry and I'll concede the point. Good luck with that.
Still stuck to my "never an individual stock. Always funds. Always index funds".
Nothing wrong with that. You might leave some money on the table (or not) but you should stick with an investment strategy that fits your appetite for risk. Index funds are fine investment vehicle. Don't apologize for using them.
Personally I haven't purchased AAPL for a different reason. Three reasons actually. First the stock is already quite valuable so the chance for it to double is not as high as with some other companies. Yes the PE is still reasonable but that is predicated on profits remaining where they are which is to say VERY high. Second, the dividend yield on AAPL isn't amazing, currently at about 2.4%. While that's not bad it isn't better than inflation so I'd still be depending on stock growth to make any money. Compare with companies like Royal Dutch Shell which pay 7-8% dividend yield and are less subject to consumer whims. Third and probably most important, Apple's product strategy is kind of a high wire act. All it would take for the stock price to crater would be a single bad iPhone. While Apple has a great track record, they aren't free from screwups. Apple's stock price remaining high will depend on them introducing another hit product in the next 5-10 years. Unclear if they will be able to pull that off without their visionary leader.
For a tech stock I think AAPL isn't a terrible investment but I think AMZN has more upside potential as a stock if you want to play in that sector and are thinking a few years down the road.
Why they didn't hedge their bets with an android model is beyond me.
That's really easy to explain. Profits. The profits on smartphones aren't in the hardware but in the software. Hardware-wise there is basically no real difference between an iPhone and a similarly equipped Android smartphone. All the real difference is in the software. If Apple were to put Android on their phones their profit margins would evaporate faster than you could say "shareholder lawsuit". There would be nothing really different about it and thus no real reason to pay more. Nokia would have been in the same boat.
The dominant reason Apple is able to charge more is because people are willing to pay more for their software. (No it isn't because of "marketing" - marketing is not magic pixie dust - there has to be products that people like behind any marketing) Apple's software is what really makes their products unique. There is only one company that has made substantial profits selling Android phones (Samsung) and there is no particular reason to believe Nokia would have been able to capture substantial profits on the Android platform. Even Samsung makes far less profit than Apple. For Nokia to really be profitable they needed software that made their phones different from everyone else's. Nokia knew this but were unable to fix the problem. There was really very little upside for Nokia on the Android platform and a large chance they would end up with little to no profits.
So Nokia bet the farm first on Maemo/MeeGo and then on Windows. The bet didn't work out for a variety of reasons but it's easy to understand why they did it. They were gambling on being able to control the platform which is where the real profits in smartphones are.
The N900 sold all available units on little more than word of mouth and the newer device with MeeGo was an incremental improvement - thus a fair assumption.
First, the N900 sold with Maemo, not MeeGo. MeeGo was made for the never sold to the public N950 and the well received but dead on arrival N9. Second, one product selling a handful of units to some core fans is hardly sufficient evidence to believe that MeeGo would have been "highly likely" to succeed. The N900 sold less than 100,000 units in it's first 5 months which on the market. That's a rounding error. The iPhone sold somewhere close to 16 million units during the same period. And you think such ludicrously bad sales figures are evidence it was going to take the market by storm? There is NO objective evidence to realistically believe that MeeGo was likely to capture substantial market share. None.
Putting a manager from a rival in as his first ever attempt at being a CEO did that. Before Elop turned up Nokia was selling more mobile telephones than any other company in the world.
Nokia was already fading in the smartphone business before Elop showed up. Elop became CEO in September 2010. Nokia's market share had fallen from near 50% in 2007 to about 40% at the start of 2010. Their market share fell to around 32% in 2010 prior to Elop taking over. So the fall was well underway long before Elop arrived. He merely threw gas on the fire. That is a 25% fall in market share in 9 months. This is after MeeGo was released and before Elop took over. If people were really excited about MeeGo (which they weren't) then it makes little sense that Nokia would have seen continued market share erosion after its release and before Elop killed the platform in February 2011. Fact is that almost nobody gave a shit about MeeGo in 2010 aside from some fanboys. It wasn't that it was a bad product but it was WAY too late to the party to really matter in all likelihood.
MeeGo was very likely to be hugely successful. It could be the dominant platform now, or going head to head with Android
And what evidence do you base this hypothesis on? Is it possible that it could have been successful? Sure. It's conceivable it might have been a player. "Highly likely"? I don't see any reason to believe that. Nokia (the major backer along with Intel) was already on shaky ground by the point MeeGo became a viable product. It was always more likely to fail than to succeed just like most projects. That's not a critique of the technology or it's merits or the efforts of its backers but rather the fact that it's really frickin hard to develop a commercially successful OS that captures substantial market share. Even Microsoft with all it's billions of dollars has struggled to capture even a fraction of the market share they have on the desktop in mobile.
I agree that Elop really screwed Nokia in a big way but he really just hastened the demise that was already underway. Nokia didn't realize until too late who their real customer was. They thought it was the telecom companies and they developed phones with that in mind. Apple proved that the customer was really the person holding the phone. By the time Nokia figured that out, handset buyers were already heading for the exits and it was too late to stop them. Nokia's hardware was (mostly) great but their software was terrible. Symbian wasn't good enough and MeeGo was too late to the market. They gave Apple and Android a 3 year head start in the market before MeeGo was introduced (2007 vs 2010) which is an eternity. While MeeGo had a lot of positives, it simply was too late to be likely to capture substantial market share. Obviously we can never know for sure but it seems hard to envision a scenario where MeeGo really turned into a game changer in the face of Apple and Google.
Most travellers don't just walk to the nearest park and spend a year walking laps of it. That's not travel.
What park are you going to that is traveling 4.6 miles per second 300 miles above the Earth's surface? The ISS is a vehicle, not a park. If you want an analogy it's like taking a rocket to a jet that is already flying around the globe, making an in-flight transfer and then spending several months in the plane while it flies around the world. Just because you aren't standing on terra-firma doesn't mean it isn't traveling.
The ISS is effectively parked. (parked in an awesome spot.) Sure it is moving relative to the centre of the earth, but so is the car on blocks. 24 hour circuit vs 90 minutes.
The ISS is moving relative to every part of the earth at a ludicrous velocity. Your car on blocks is fixed to a point on the Earth's surface. You seriously can't see the difference?
Research by Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) has found that the 'maths gender gap', the relative under performance of girls at maths, is much wider in societies with poor rates of gender equality.
Shocking. Societies that let girls study math results in girls who are better at math. Who would have guessed?
Did we really need a study to confirm this?
Productivity has increased 72% in last 15 years but real wages only 8%.
Guests who benefited?
I can't be bothered to verify your numbers but taking them as a given the answer is we all benefited. Maybe not equitably but that huge increase in productivity is a big part of the reason why many people in the US still have a job at all. We've had among the highest labor costs in the world for well over 40 years now. With countries like China growing fast ANY growth in real wages is good news. Maybe not as good as we'd like but when you already are at the top of the wages per capita chart it's kind of unrealistic to presume that productivity growth and wage growth will remain highly correlated.
I'm not arguing that wage inequality isn't a big problem but that's a separate discussion. I'm merely addressing the fact that they US work force is among the most productive in the world and also among the highest paid in the world. The US economy is larger than that of India and China combined despite having something like 1/8 of the population. Do you really think that is a state of affairs that will last forever without any impact on wage growth?
The US has nowhere near the highest labor costs in the world. We're not even in the top 10.
If you actually believe that labor costs in the US aren't among the highest in the world then you haven't actually bothered to look at the data. Depending on how you measure it the labor costs in the US are mostly somewhere between 5th and 20th per capita. Yes there are some countries with higher labor costs but not very many of them. The fact that we don't have THE highest labor costs per capita is not important. What is important is that our labor costs are WELL above the mean globally. If you want to know why manufacturing companies have moved to China (and elsewhere) for labor intensive manufacturing, labor costs are by far the biggest factor. There are a lot of products that simply cannot be made in the US for the hourly wages that a US based manufacturer would have to pay.
I used to do global sourcing for a living. I've traveled all over Eastern Asia, Southeast Asia, and Central America for manufacturing companies. I work in manufacturing and I buy products and commodities from around the world. The US without question has some of the highest labor rates in the world. It's not even a debate. If you think otherwise you don't know what you are talking about.
Americans today are horrendous at efficiency because their government made them absolutely inefficient.
Don't let a little thing like actual facts contradict your ideological rant. Sadly for your argument the US is among the most efficient and productive workforces in the world. (#3 in GDP per capita behind only Norway and Luxembourg) The notion that the US government has made the US hugely inefficient is not supported by any actual evidence.
As to what makes a person efficient - capital savings and investment into labour saving devices.
Which as it turns out the US economy is impressively good at. What do you think the computer you are typing this on is but a labor saving device? The US leads the world in utilization of many forms of automation.
It's more of a shock that anyone is still paid well considering hype literal billions of cheap labor outside America.
Try trillions of cheap labor. We have this deluded notion that we can have both the highest labor costs in the world AND keep labor intensive work. That does not and cannot work over the long term. China has 4 people for every 1 in the US. That means all other things being equal, labor costs in China will be 1/4 that in the US on average. There is no reason China cannot have productivity equal to that of the US. Therefore it is illogical to continue to believe that the US can continue to have exceptionally high wages in the face of competition with a clear labor cost advantage.
Sure, we could fix the visa problem, but if companies are forced to use expensive (globally speaking) labor, they'll just leave the country.
Some will, some won't. If they get good value for money they'll stay. If the work can be done comparably well for less elsewhere then they'll leave. Honestly we should expect US wages to experience some form of reversion to the mean. If you want to have the highest wages in the world you should expect labor intensive work to go elsewhere. That's just Economics 101.
I suggest everyone start saving their money, because the gravy train is ending.
If the US wants to stay ahead then we will need to stop spending money on stupid things (wars, oversized military, interest on national debt) and start spending money on R&D, education, infrastructure and an efficient health care system. You know, things that will actually improve quality of life and incomes and productivity. Failure to do this will eventually result in the US experiencing a reversion to the mean in GDP per capita.
Ever eat at a grocery store? Guess what? You are eating products that were worked on by imported labor and I bet you aren't complaining about the lower prices. This is nothing unusual and I don't think less of Tesla for trying to get a better deal. As long as Tesla followed whatever regulations are in place for bringing in their workforce and paying them, I don't really see a problem here. If they broke some laws then appropriate and proportional punishment should follow. If the laws are allowing something they shouldn't then the answer is to change the laws. See some of the H1B abuse if you need an example of laws that are being abused.
While most of the imported workers were happy with their wages, one worker was earning the equivalent of $5 an hour while his American counterpart was earning as much as $52, and they worked 10-hour days -- without overtime -- up to seven days a week.
If someone is willing to pay the American worker $52/hour (roughly $100K/year with 8 hour work day) and gets good value for their money then where is the problem? On the other hand I cannot imagine paying $52/hour for that sort of work unless I had no alternative. Heck, my little company doesn't pay skilled trades $52/hour and we're a pimple on a gnat's ass in size compared with Tesla. I respect skilled trades immensely but Tesla would be nuts to pay that sort of labor rate if they could get the same work done for less. Just because this hypothetical American skilled trade worker is asking $52/hour doesn't mean Tesla or anybody else should be prohibited from looking for a better deal. Would you pay 10X the cost for work on your house solely because the worker is a US citizen and not because they do any better work? If you say yes I'm going to call you a liar.
Say for years 1-5 keep it low and then slowly up it for years 5-20 but after 20 then start really jacking it up so the mouse can keep theirs but some abandonware / movies that bomb does not.
Easy to do. You start at $0.01 (indexed for inflation). You then double the fee each year thereafter. It wouldn't cost much to keep a work out of the public domain for about $20 years but few works would make it past 25-30 years. Virtually none would make it past 40. Give unregistered copyrights a flat 20 years with no fees but no extension either. I would be fine with giving a 10 year free period with registration occurring any time in that 10 years. This would effectively cap copyright at somewhere close to 40-50 years, it would establish a way to allow authors to profit from genuinely valuable works for an actual limited time proportional to its value, and it would ensure works actually do get into the public domain without congress extending copyright indefinitely.
In any case, I don't want to see the copyright system based on the patent system, because I think the patent system is even more broken than the copyright system is.
While I could pick nits, there is only one thing that is truly broken in copyright law right now and that is the term of the copyright. Congress has twisted the definition of "temporary" into something absurd. Copyright should 30-50 years at most and quite possibly less. There is no socially beneficial reason I can come up with for it to be longer than that. Extending a copyright beyond the death of the author is unnecessary and ridiculous. It should be 20-40 years from creation of the work, regardless of whether they are alive or dead.
I actually like the idea of a progressive copyright fee. (would work for patents too with a few tweaks) Basically the author gets 10 years of free use of their copyright. Before year 10 they then have to register the copyright to keep it and the get charged a fee of $0.01. Each year thereafter the fee doubles. $0.02 in year 2, $0.04 in year 3, etc. They keep the copyright for as many years as they find it valuable. It would be fine to pay in advance and the money goes to fund the copyright office. When they cease paying to keep the copyright then the work becomes public domain. Index the fee schedule for inflation. This would make most works trivial to keep out of the public domain for about 25 years but it would be a rare work indeed that would stay out of the public domain beyond 40 years. If a copyright isn't worth registering it probably wasn't very valuable to begin with. So unregistered works get a flat 20 years with no option to extend.
In this particular instance, I think it isn't all of Yahoo Mail's fault. People need to be wary of the links they click on.
That's not how Congress rolls. They refuse to take personal responsibility for everything and they have the authority to make someone else pay for their incompetence and/or corruption.
To be frank however, I cannot see any sane reason why our elected officials are not using official government email accounts supported by official government IT workers. It's not like congress doesn't know where to find the money to do it. Why on Earth they would be using Yahoo accounts while on the job is a mystery without a responsible answer.
Economists seem to agree that robot automation poses real threats to human labour within the next few decades.
Which economist are these? Citation please. I'm not aware of any credible economist who has a blanket view that robots will replace human labor substantially within the next few decades with no alternative work being available. There has not been a single instance in human history where automation has resulted in a long term labor shortage. It causes some short term dislocations in specific industries but those affected always eventually find other work.
Most economists I've ever spoken with and read think that quite a lot of jobs are actually wasteful to have a human performing. What value is there in having a human drive a truck to deliver goods? Unless you think of truck driving as a make-work jobs program (which is dumb) it make sense to automate that when we can and have those people doing something more economically productive. Something that actually is worthy of the human brain and faculties. We only have people driving trucks right now because we lack the technology to put them to work doing something more valuable. And there is no lack of more valuable jobs to do. There is however a lack of people who are well trained and available to do them.