I'm not sure I fully agree. If their product came damaged because of cheap packaging, the world would be up in arms about a $500+ device being damaged during shipping.
Apple could use considerably less expensive packaging and still keep the product safe. In a past life I owned a company that shipped about 10,000 custom packages a year. I know from first hand experience that Apple's packaging is more than is necessary to keep the product (reasonably) safe. While it is very nice, Apple's packaging is done the way it is for marketing.
Also, Apple packaging is mostly just cardboard which is easy to recycle.
Just because something can be recycled doesn't mean one should use more of it. The phrase "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" indicates the order in which those things should be done. It's better to Reduce than the Reuse and better to Reuse than Recycle. Apple could easily reduce their cardboard use by using thinner cardboard while still keeping their products intact for delivery. Since the boxes are so nice they also could offer to reuse them if you drop them off at one of their stores. Paper making is a nasty, wasteful process which consumes copious energy and water and recycling paper is only marginally less so.
Really? Their packaging is rarely larger than the item it encases by half an inch to an inch in each dimension. What makes you think they're high on the list of over packagers?
Because their boxes are seriously overbuilt. The box an iPhone comes in is very nice but is far more robust and expensive packaging than is actually required for the purpose of safely conveying the product to customer's hands. They use it for marketing and to convey a sense of quality but there is no question that they over package their products.
Instead, a slider should be marketed to people who are professionals, and who want a real keyboard. One can type some text on a phone's touch screen, but for anything but a short note, it can get slow. A good physical keyboard can improve that, and even allow decent touch typing.
Sliders still have tradeoffs. They don't sacrifice screen size necessarily but they do sacrifice space in other ways. They require extra housing, slide mechanisms, and of course the keyboard itself. You are trading size/weight and possibly features like a bigger battery in exchange for the keyboard. I'd take a few extra amp hours of battery time over a keyboard any day of the week. I would totally be fine with a thicker iPhone that had 2-3x the battery life. If you want the lightest or thinnest possible phone, a slider will not get you there. A physical keyboard also adds a lot of cost to the device, especially if the device is going to have a touch screen as well.
My basic take on typing on a phone is that if you truly need the marginal gains that you get from a (tiny) physical keyboard on a phone, you are probably using the wrong device for the task. I realize there probably are some corner cases where I'm wrong but for most people the physical keyboard just isn't the best combination of tradeoffs. Don't get me wrong, I totally get that some people just prefer a physical keyboard and if they don't mind the tradeoffs then why not use one? But most of us just don't care that much. I used to be firmly in the physical keyboard camp but eventually I realized it just didn't make enough of an improvement in my typing to really matter. It appears that most other people have come to the same conclusion.
People who were doing skilled or unskilled labor and were replaced by machines aren't suddenly going to be able to become successful in a "creative class" job.
It may not be easy but they certainly can do something else and most demonstrably do. If your job gets automated it might be economically uncomfortable for you for a while. However people are pretty resilient and most find some new way to make a living. Industries are getting disrupted constantly. It only becomes a macro-economic problem if it is too much disruption all at once without short term viable alternatives. 150 years ago, well over half the US work force was in agriculture. Now it is less than 3% by most counts. While getting there wasn't always easy people did manage and will continue to manage. Just because manufacturing has been a source of jobs for a lot of people historically doesn't mean it can or should always remain so.
On the plus side, with so many manufacturing jobs having been shipped overseas, if they actually build the automated factories here in the US then that might make some number of jobs come back.
What do you mean "if they actually build"? Automated factories are already here in the US. US labor costs are too high to compete in a lot of labor intensive work but there is plenty of manufacturing that is capital intensive and the US is second to none in that sort of manufacturing. If you go into a US factory you'll generally notice a high level of automation. That is how you compete when you have expensive labor. Europe and Japan do the same thing.
Because people still need to obtain food and shelter somehow in order to survive. How do you recommend that people obtain necessities without trading for them?
There are plenty of valuable tasks that can be performed that do not involve making widgets. Pick one.
The issue with touch screens is that you need to look at the keyboard while you type.
Speak for yourself. I've had phones both with and without physical keyboards. I cannot reliably touch type on any phone keyboard (physical or virtual) without looking at the keys at least a significant percentage of the time. And frankly for the short messages or google searches I actually do type on my phone, I don't really care whether I can touch type or not. I rarely type more than 2-3 sentences. If I need more I go find my laptop or give the person an actual phone call. (what a concept, using a phone to make a call!)
Still, with every manufacturer focusing on how thin they can make things, as if that is more important than the proportion of width to thickness, we'll never see top-end phones with a real keyboard.
That's not the fundamental reason why physical keyboards got the heave-ho. The reason is based in the trade offs. Phones are to a significant degree space constrained. Many are smaller than they (strictly speaking) need to be but no matter what size you pick, if you put a keyboard on the phone you are deciding to not to do something else in that location. For most people some extra screen real estate or maybe a larger capacity battery or just a smaller phone is more useful to them. I don't spend a lot of time typing on my phone but I spend a ton of time reading on it. Furthermore a physical keyboard is mostly wasted space the majority of the time AND it cannot be altered to optimize for the type of data being entered. The advantages of a physical keyboard are greatly outweighed by the drawbacks.
This might be one of those times when everyone in the market is pissing people off with features they don't want getting shoved down their throat (a gigantic, fragile screen with an impossible to type on touchscreen) then one company comes in with exactly what people want.
There were many attempts at smartphones with physical keyboards and they were largely rejected. The size of a phone is relatively limited by the practical constraints of portability. If you put a keyboard on it, you have to take away space from something else in the design. Generally speaking a bigger screen is a more useful feature to more people more of the time than a physical keyboard. Most of what a phone it good for does not require much data input. A physical keyboard is wasted space the majority of the time and unlike a screen cannot be used for anything else except typing. Furthermore a physical keyboard cannot be changed to suit the task at hand whereas a touchscreen keyboard can.
While a touchscreen keyboard does have noteworthy design tradeoffs, they are generally adequate to the task and the gain of a larger screen more than outweighs the drawbacks for most of us. Personally I'll take a bigger screen or a bigger battery over a physical keyboard on my phone anytime. If I really need to do a lot of typing I go find my laptop which is vastly better to type on than any phone. If I need to communicate a large volume of information to someone while on the road I CALL them rather than try to type a long message with a tiny keyboard.
Nice bit of wordsmithing while simultaneously missing the point. Perhaps intentionally missing the point.
There are no illegal wages controls in play either as far as we can tell. (you can't prove they don't exist because you can't prove a negative) Just because folks (perhaps rightly) don't like H1B visas or the fact that multiple tech companies are pushing for more of them doesn't make their actions illegal, nor does it make it a conspiracy. Yes they are trying to control wages. There is nothing illegal, immoral or fattening about that by itself. If it is affecting you directly it is ok to fight it with whatever means you have at your disposal but also recognize that the fact that your wages don't go endlessly up faster and faster probably isn't The Man trying to keep you down.
Frankly if tech workers are so bent out of shape over the number of visas being issued they have perfectly legal ways to fight the issue. Union formation, lobbying, changing employers, etc. The whole point of unions is to restrict the labor supply and drive up wages and working conditions. If you feel strongly about the issue go form a union and fight the companies you feel are trying to flood the labor market.
You may not have noticed, but every darn study there is points out that inflation-adjusted wages for nearly every lower and middle-class job has been flat or decreased for the last 30 years. There is no "supply and demand" response system in action.
You are making several errors in your argument. First, there has been considerable movement in the wages of certain professions relative to the job market as a whole. Second, if supply and demand is not working, you do not seem to have a credible alternative theory for why the most fundamental law of economics is not working. Since there are no legal wage controls in play, if wages are flat it is simply because the demand has not exceeded the supply. Because the economy is more global, workers are competing for wages with more people than ever before. At my company we bid against companies in the US, Mexico, China, Honduras and elsewhere and so we need labor rates that make us competitive. 20 years ago we could pay more (inflation adjusted) than we can today for the same job because we have to compete in a bigger market.
Heck, the place I work for increased their technical staff by over 30% in the very recent past -- a massive hiring effort -- but stuck obstinately to their target of paying 50th percentile wages.
Just because they hired more people does not mean the market rate for their services went up. Unless your technical staff was big enough to be a significant percentage of the market there is no reason they would have to pay higher than average wages or why they would drive the price up.
Whooosh!!!!! Feeling a little humor impaired today? Apparently I didn't make the joke ridiculous enough for you to get it.
Certainly there is a conspiracy, but there is nothing mysterious about it.
A conspiracy is (by definition) an agreement between two or more people to commit a crime in the future. The only way this is a conspiracy is if they somehow were contemplating committing a crime. It is not remotely clear that anything illegal is occurring. No crime contemplated = no conspiracy. (I'm not judging the ethics, just the legality here) At most it *might* be collusion though proving it in a court of law would be extremely difficult.
People like to say H1Bs make the same wages as other IT folks, and this may well be true, but they do help keep wages flat, and their overall cost is less.
No argument but this does not make it a conspiracy.
There's no shortage of STEM graduates. There's most _certainly_ a shortage of _cheap_ STEM graduates.
If something is in short supply, prices tend to go up. If the market price for STEM graduates is relatively high compared with other professions, that is strong evidence that there is indeed a tight market for STEM graduates. If there was a surplus of STEM graduates, their wages would tend to fall. Market forces are pretty good at solving this problem. Stipulating for argument's sake your claim that STEM graduates are not cheap, then by definition they must be in relatively short supply.
If I create a work, it has no inherent value out of the gate. If a major corporation comes along and sees it and figures that it's worth $5 million to them, they could easily lowball me and offer $1 million. Since my work now has a publicly known value, I owe taxes that I can't possibly afford. Now I'm forced to sell my work to a company who can easily make more for it.
An offer to buy does not mean it is worth what is being offered unless you agree to the price. No sale = no objective valuation. You could offer me $2 for my DVD of Batman begins but that doesn't mean I will sell it to you for that amount or that it is worth that much in the broader market place. While there are taxes on assets they are not based on prices thrown out during negotiations.
Sounds great in theory but in reality it is usually very difficult to do. You really can only tax a work if you can objectively value the patent or copyright. If the intangible property hasn't been sold or licensed it is usually nearly impossible to value it and many have limited market value by themselves. Without some sort of objective valuation you can't tax it in any way that makes sense. Things are only worth what others are willing to pay for them. If no one has ever bought it, you can't really say what it is worth. Might be zero or might be many millions or somewhere in between. Lots and lots of intangible property falls into this valuation grey zone. It's just really hard to say what it is worth.
Furthermore if a company does buy a piece of IP, they will have an asset on their balance sheet (which is amortized) and the may have goodwill (amount paid above market value) as well. This can have tax consequences so in many cases companies already do pay tax on IP they acquire.
Wtf, don't they have the installation project plans in the first place? This is the kind of incompetence that really pisses me off.
Project plans frequently do not accurately document where the cable was actually placed. My father worked in engineering for AT&T for several decades planning jobs like this. He always had to go check what the plans said against what was drawn on the engineering documents. What the guys in the field do often does not match what the engineer designed. Furthermore since Google is essentially buying this cable they need to audit what they are actually buying. When you are investing millions of dollars you don't take anyone's word for it, you have someone go out and check to see that the actual infrastructure is something close to what the plans say it should be.
This is exactly the opposite of incompetence. This is exactly how a rational buyer should behave when buying an expensive asset.
Nobody believes internal IT people for some reason, but outside consultants telling the same exact story as internal sources makes it more believable.
It's called an audit. You bring in outsiders to verify what the insiders are telling you is the truth. If I'm a third party making an investment, I'm not going to rely on the good word of the people I'm buying from when millions of dollars are at stake.
found that seven characteristics of Twitter profiles could identify fraudulent accounts 91% of the time.
Taking the 91% number as accurate for argument's sake, what are the false positive and false negative rates? Even a 1% false positive or false negative rate would be quite a lot of accounts when you consider how many millions of twitter accounts there are out there.
Sure they had computers, on the ship, on the ground and all, but not in the engineering department. Engineers where able to make technical drawings and hand that of to workers building the actual thing. Oh yea and they assisted and oversaw the work done, to correct any misunderstandings. It worked, why add computers.
Why add computers? Because it makes the lives of us engineers who do what you are describing (I am one) VASTLY easier. I've worked on a drafting table and I know how to use a slide rule. I've designed products and overseen their production. While it can be done without computers I don't really relish the thought of going back to the days without them. People who pine for the "good old days" when we didn't have computers to help with the work almost invariably never had to actually do real engineering without them. Trust me, it sucked.
Do you have any idea how much labor is involved in updating a set of work instructions and ensuring only the most recent version is distributed? Have you ever done a complicated product drawing on paper and then had to do it over again because of a revision? It's possible to do these things without computers but I can assure you from first hand experience that you don't really want to. It's much easier to edit a CAD model of a part and then print out the new revision. It's is FAR easier to use a versioning system to keep documentation up to date and distributed to the right places. We don't use computers just because we can. We do it because it makes us far more effective and faster at our jobs.
Don't be brainwashed by all this "process" crap. These days you have to talk to guys in their 60's and 70's to get the full oral history, but they wistfully recall days when the emphasis was on getting things done and making them work, rather than mindlessly following "process".
All that "process crap" is exactly how any successful engineering project is done. The space program in the 60's and 70's was no exception. Do some reading about the actual engineering that went on and you'll quickly realize it was ALL about developing working processes. A process is nothing more than a set of procedures used to accomplish a task. If the task has to be communicated to someone else or cannot be overlooked or is just plain complicated, documentation becomes a vital aspect of the process. You can't build something as complicated as a space ship without a huge amount of extremely robust processes and accompanying documenation. Developing effective production processes isn't mindless busywork - it is among the most challenging and important things we do. The best manufacturing companies spend a tremendous amount of resources on process development because without them they would be unable to function.
If you want to ensure that a rocket blows up, by all means ignore developing processes and don't worry about documenting or communicating the procedures used. Just be a cowboy and "get it done". When you have no way to discover what went wrong, who was responsible, when you were supposed to do it or how to do it again you might begin to understand why process is important. My company makes wire harnesses and we've made products that have gone into space. For even the simplest cable with a crimped terminal on one end we typically have about 15+ pages (and often much more) of assembly instructions, QA instructions, machine setup instructions, QA logs, shipping and packaging instructions, manufacturing orders (how many to build and when to build them), bills of material, training documentation, defect logs, packing slips, and invoices. And every bit of that documentation is genuinely important. Without robust processes in place it would be complete chaos to try to make even the most basic products, never mind something as complicated as a F1 engine. All that "process crap" lets us build a high quality product (repeatedly if needed), diagnose and correct any problems that may arise, and make sure everyone knows what they are supposed to do and when they are supposed to do it.
You may be looking for the galaxy note series from samsung. The whole series (note 1, note 2, note 10.1, note 8) have features like formula match, which reads your handwritten equations and tries to guess what the formula was, shape match for diagrams, and handwriting recognition.
I appreciate the suggestion but I very much remain dubious they will get it "right". While I don't have anything against those features they are superfluous. Someone needs to get drawing and note taking right. It should work very much like writing on a paper note pad and be very easy to use. Every pen implementation I've seen so far gets carried away with handwriting recognition and other theoretically nifty features (which rarely work very well) but don't make just writing/drawing easy which is the bit that actually matters. It's more important that *I* be able to write and recognize what I wrote than the computer. I remain hopeful but so far every attempt I've seen has fallen badly short.
I still view it (other than short e-mails) as a content consumption device, not a content creation device... even if it had a snap-on keyboard.
There is one type of content creation a tablet could in theory be good for, namely anything requiring a pen. We all still use lots of pens so the need is obviously there. A tablet could be great for drawing and note taking (think equations or diagrams which are nearly impossible on a keyboard or with fingers) if the interface was done right. There is a reason most students still take notes on paper. Problem is that we are stuck finger-painting on our tablets which doesn't work for those purposes. A tablet should be the perfect device for students to take notes on but no one makes them right now with that task in mind. A tablet could be a great content creation device for the right applications.
The problem with using a stylus on a tablet is that the software designers invariably and wrongly try to use the stylus for navigation or as a keyboard instead of just using it for what it is actually good for which is ONLY drawing. The fact that you can draw alpha-numerics or point at navigation buttons is just a bonus but they get all excited and try to use the stylus for things it does do well. They (historically) have tried to use a stylus like a mouse pointer which demonstrably doesn't work well since the interfaces were designed for keyboards/mice combos. Or they try to turn it into a keyboard for text input which doesn't work either (too slow and character recognition generally sucks). A stylus/pen is for drawing and only for drawing. Even interfaces which are designed for fingers don't really translate well to a pen - pens are for drawing thin lines, not pushing buttons. You don't (typically) use a pen to push a button when you hold a real pen so why would you do it on a tablet?
That's what a contractual obligation is - a guarantee. I didn't use those words carelessly. There would be little point to a supply agreement without any actual obligation to buy.
If I have an agreement that I may buy up to X amount for Y price, it isn't an obligation.
Correct though depending on the nature of the agreement it might be considered an asset. What your are describing is an option (properly speaking a real option) and depending on the particular way it is done the company may or may not have to report it. Typically not on the balance sheet but somewhere in the filings could be required.
Many are saying that the memory suppliers got burned by Apple time so they wouldn't enter into any fixed agreements would they?
If they got burned then they only have themselves to blame. If Apple wants to pay my company to tool up to do a big order I'm going to make sure the agreement cover most/all of my capital costs and probably the relevant fixed costs as well. Perhaps these companies took a gamble for competitive reasons but if they took that risk knowingly the first time and got burned then I don't have a lot of sympathy.
Apple pre-paid which means they would have to account for it to their stockholders and the SEC. If they made an agreement on price and supply amount without negotiating upfront money, I don't think that they have to report it.
If they have a contractual obligation that would have to appear in the financial statements whether or not there is money exchanged up front. It is a liability of the company and they would be obligated to report it. It's kind of an irrelevant point however since no supplier is going to accept orders that size without a lot of upfront money. To produce the quantity of product Apple would buy requires major capital investment (equipment, facilities, etc) and no one is going to invest that sort of coin trusting to Apple's (or anyone else's) good faith. Basically an order that size requires a big upfront payment.
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I'm not sure I fully agree. If their product came damaged because of cheap packaging, the world would be up in arms about a $500+ device being damaged during shipping.
Apple could use considerably less expensive packaging and still keep the product safe. In a past life I owned a company that shipped about 10,000 custom packages a year. I know from first hand experience that Apple's packaging is more than is necessary to keep the product (reasonably) safe. While it is very nice, Apple's packaging is done the way it is for marketing.
Also, Apple packaging is mostly just cardboard which is easy to recycle.
Just because something can be recycled doesn't mean one should use more of it. The phrase "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" indicates the order in which those things should be done. It's better to Reduce than the Reuse and better to Reuse than Recycle. Apple could easily reduce their cardboard use by using thinner cardboard while still keeping their products intact for delivery. Since the boxes are so nice they also could offer to reuse them if you drop them off at one of their stores. Paper making is a nasty, wasteful process which consumes copious energy and water and recycling paper is only marginally less so.
Really? Their packaging is rarely larger than the item it encases by half an inch to an inch in each dimension. What makes you think they're high on the list of over packagers?
Because their boxes are seriously overbuilt. The box an iPhone comes in is very nice but is far more robust and expensive packaging than is actually required for the purpose of safely conveying the product to customer's hands. They use it for marketing and to convey a sense of quality but there is no question that they over package their products.
Mostly true, yet for some of us, a physical keyboard is more important than a third day of battery life or 720p video playback.
Three days? I'd be happy with >1 day of battery life.
Instead, a slider should be marketed to people who are professionals, and who want a real keyboard. One can type some text on a phone's touch screen, but for anything but a short note, it can get slow. A good physical keyboard can improve that, and even allow decent touch typing.
Sliders still have tradeoffs. They don't sacrifice screen size necessarily but they do sacrifice space in other ways. They require extra housing, slide mechanisms, and of course the keyboard itself. You are trading size/weight and possibly features like a bigger battery in exchange for the keyboard. I'd take a few extra amp hours of battery time over a keyboard any day of the week. I would totally be fine with a thicker iPhone that had 2-3x the battery life. If you want the lightest or thinnest possible phone, a slider will not get you there. A physical keyboard also adds a lot of cost to the device, especially if the device is going to have a touch screen as well.
My basic take on typing on a phone is that if you truly need the marginal gains that you get from a (tiny) physical keyboard on a phone, you are probably using the wrong device for the task. I realize there probably are some corner cases where I'm wrong but for most people the physical keyboard just isn't the best combination of tradeoffs. Don't get me wrong, I totally get that some people just prefer a physical keyboard and if they don't mind the tradeoffs then why not use one? But most of us just don't care that much. I used to be firmly in the physical keyboard camp but eventually I realized it just didn't make enough of an improvement in my typing to really matter. It appears that most other people have come to the same conclusion.
People who were doing skilled or unskilled labor and were replaced by machines aren't suddenly going to be able to become successful in a "creative class" job.
It may not be easy but they certainly can do something else and most demonstrably do. If your job gets automated it might be economically uncomfortable for you for a while. However people are pretty resilient and most find some new way to make a living. Industries are getting disrupted constantly. It only becomes a macro-economic problem if it is too much disruption all at once without short term viable alternatives. 150 years ago, well over half the US work force was in agriculture. Now it is less than 3% by most counts. While getting there wasn't always easy people did manage and will continue to manage. Just because manufacturing has been a source of jobs for a lot of people historically doesn't mean it can or should always remain so.
On the plus side, with so many manufacturing jobs having been shipped overseas, if they actually build the automated factories here in the US then that might make some number of jobs come back.
What do you mean "if they actually build"? Automated factories are already here in the US. US labor costs are too high to compete in a lot of labor intensive work but there is plenty of manufacturing that is capital intensive and the US is second to none in that sort of manufacturing. If you go into a US factory you'll generally notice a high level of automation. That is how you compete when you have expensive labor. Europe and Japan do the same thing.
Because people still need to obtain food and shelter somehow in order to survive. How do you recommend that people obtain necessities without trading for them?
There are plenty of valuable tasks that can be performed that do not involve making widgets. Pick one.
The issue with touch screens is that you need to look at the keyboard while you type.
Speak for yourself. I've had phones both with and without physical keyboards. I cannot reliably touch type on any phone keyboard (physical or virtual) without looking at the keys at least a significant percentage of the time. And frankly for the short messages or google searches I actually do type on my phone, I don't really care whether I can touch type or not. I rarely type more than 2-3 sentences. If I need more I go find my laptop or give the person an actual phone call. (what a concept, using a phone to make a call!)
Still, with every manufacturer focusing on how thin they can make things, as if that is more important than the proportion of width to thickness, we'll never see top-end phones with a real keyboard.
That's not the fundamental reason why physical keyboards got the heave-ho. The reason is based in the trade offs. Phones are to a significant degree space constrained. Many are smaller than they (strictly speaking) need to be but no matter what size you pick, if you put a keyboard on the phone you are deciding to not to do something else in that location. For most people some extra screen real estate or maybe a larger capacity battery or just a smaller phone is more useful to them. I don't spend a lot of time typing on my phone but I spend a ton of time reading on it. Furthermore a physical keyboard is mostly wasted space the majority of the time AND it cannot be altered to optimize for the type of data being entered. The advantages of a physical keyboard are greatly outweighed by the drawbacks.
This might be one of those times when everyone in the market is pissing people off with features they don't want getting shoved down their throat (a gigantic, fragile screen with an impossible to type on touchscreen) then one company comes in with exactly what people want.
There were many attempts at smartphones with physical keyboards and they were largely rejected. The size of a phone is relatively limited by the practical constraints of portability. If you put a keyboard on it, you have to take away space from something else in the design. Generally speaking a bigger screen is a more useful feature to more people more of the time than a physical keyboard. Most of what a phone it good for does not require much data input. A physical keyboard is wasted space the majority of the time and unlike a screen cannot be used for anything else except typing. Furthermore a physical keyboard cannot be changed to suit the task at hand whereas a touchscreen keyboard can.
While a touchscreen keyboard does have noteworthy design tradeoffs, they are generally adequate to the task and the gain of a larger screen more than outweighs the drawbacks for most of us. Personally I'll take a bigger screen or a bigger battery over a physical keyboard on my phone anytime. If I really need to do a lot of typing I go find my laptop which is vastly better to type on than any phone. If I need to communicate a large volume of information to someone while on the road I CALL them rather than try to type a long message with a tiny keyboard.
That, in a nutshell, supports my position.
Nice bit of wordsmithing while simultaneously missing the point. Perhaps intentionally missing the point.
There are no illegal wages controls in play either as far as we can tell. (you can't prove they don't exist because you can't prove a negative) Just because folks (perhaps rightly) don't like H1B visas or the fact that multiple tech companies are pushing for more of them doesn't make their actions illegal, nor does it make it a conspiracy. Yes they are trying to control wages. There is nothing illegal, immoral or fattening about that by itself. If it is affecting you directly it is ok to fight it with whatever means you have at your disposal but also recognize that the fact that your wages don't go endlessly up faster and faster probably isn't The Man trying to keep you down.
Frankly if tech workers are so bent out of shape over the number of visas being issued they have perfectly legal ways to fight the issue. Union formation, lobbying, changing employers, etc. The whole point of unions is to restrict the labor supply and drive up wages and working conditions. If you feel strongly about the issue go form a union and fight the companies you feel are trying to flood the labor market.
You may not have noticed, but every darn study there is points out that inflation-adjusted wages for nearly every lower and middle-class job has been flat or decreased for the last 30 years. There is no "supply and demand" response system in action.
You are making several errors in your argument. First, there has been considerable movement in the wages of certain professions relative to the job market as a whole. Second, if supply and demand is not working, you do not seem to have a credible alternative theory for why the most fundamental law of economics is not working. Since there are no legal wage controls in play, if wages are flat it is simply because the demand has not exceeded the supply. Because the economy is more global, workers are competing for wages with more people than ever before. At my company we bid against companies in the US, Mexico, China, Honduras and elsewhere and so we need labor rates that make us competitive. 20 years ago we could pay more (inflation adjusted) than we can today for the same job because we have to compete in a bigger market.
Heck, the place I work for increased their technical staff by over 30% in the very recent past -- a massive hiring effort -- but stuck obstinately to their target of paying 50th percentile wages.
Just because they hired more people does not mean the market rate for their services went up. Unless your technical staff was big enough to be a significant percentage of the market there is no reason they would have to pay higher than average wages or why they would drive the price up.
Parent is a Troll.
Whooosh!!!!! Feeling a little humor impaired today? Apparently I didn't make the joke ridiculous enough for you to get it.
Certainly there is a conspiracy, but there is nothing mysterious about it.
A conspiracy is (by definition) an agreement between two or more people to commit a crime in the future. The only way this is a conspiracy is if they somehow were contemplating committing a crime. It is not remotely clear that anything illegal is occurring. No crime contemplated = no conspiracy. (I'm not judging the ethics, just the legality here) At most it *might* be collusion though proving it in a court of law would be extremely difficult.
People like to say H1Bs make the same wages as other IT folks, and this may well be true, but they do help keep wages flat, and their overall cost is less.
No argument but this does not make it a conspiracy.
There's no shortage of STEM graduates. There's most _certainly_ a shortage of _cheap_ STEM graduates.
If something is in short supply, prices tend to go up. If the market price for STEM graduates is relatively high compared with other professions, that is strong evidence that there is indeed a tight market for STEM graduates. If there was a surplus of STEM graduates, their wages would tend to fall. Market forces are pretty good at solving this problem. Stipulating for argument's sake your claim that STEM graduates are not cheap, then by definition they must be in relatively short supply.
It is just a ploy by large businesses to boost the H1B Visa program to increase the supply in order to push wages down.
Did they do it from the grassy knoll? Are there multiple shooters? Maybe they faked the moon landing while they were at it!
If I create a work, it has no inherent value out of the gate. If a major corporation comes along and sees it and figures that it's worth $5 million to them, they could easily lowball me and offer $1 million. Since my work now has a publicly known value, I owe taxes that I can't possibly afford. Now I'm forced to sell my work to a company who can easily make more for it.
An offer to buy does not mean it is worth what is being offered unless you agree to the price. No sale = no objective valuation. You could offer me $2 for my DVD of Batman begins but that doesn't mean I will sell it to you for that amount or that it is worth that much in the broader market place. While there are taxes on assets they are not based on prices thrown out during negotiations.
3. Property tax must be paid on IP.
Sounds great in theory but in reality it is usually very difficult to do. You really can only tax a work if you can objectively value the patent or copyright. If the intangible property hasn't been sold or licensed it is usually nearly impossible to value it and many have limited market value by themselves. Without some sort of objective valuation you can't tax it in any way that makes sense. Things are only worth what others are willing to pay for them. If no one has ever bought it, you can't really say what it is worth. Might be zero or might be many millions or somewhere in between. Lots and lots of intangible property falls into this valuation grey zone. It's just really hard to say what it is worth.
Furthermore if a company does buy a piece of IP, they will have an asset on their balance sheet (which is amortized) and the may have goodwill (amount paid above market value) as well. This can have tax consequences so in many cases companies already do pay tax on IP they acquire.
They paid $1.
They're going to be spending a LOT more than $1.
Wtf, don't they have the installation project plans in the first place? This is the kind of incompetence that really pisses me off.
Project plans frequently do not accurately document where the cable was actually placed. My father worked in engineering for AT&T for several decades planning jobs like this. He always had to go check what the plans said against what was drawn on the engineering documents. What the guys in the field do often does not match what the engineer designed. Furthermore since Google is essentially buying this cable they need to audit what they are actually buying. When you are investing millions of dollars you don't take anyone's word for it, you have someone go out and check to see that the actual infrastructure is something close to what the plans say it should be.
This is exactly the opposite of incompetence. This is exactly how a rational buyer should behave when buying an expensive asset.
Nobody believes internal IT people for some reason, but outside consultants telling the same exact story as internal sources makes it more believable.
It's called an audit. You bring in outsiders to verify what the insiders are telling you is the truth. If I'm a third party making an investment, I'm not going to rely on the good word of the people I'm buying from when millions of dollars are at stake.
found that seven characteristics of Twitter profiles could identify fraudulent accounts 91% of the time.
Taking the 91% number as accurate for argument's sake, what are the false positive and false negative rates? Even a 1% false positive or false negative rate would be quite a lot of accounts when you consider how many millions of twitter accounts there are out there.
Sure they had computers, on the ship, on the ground and all, but not in the engineering department. Engineers where able to make technical drawings and hand that of to workers building the actual thing. Oh yea and they assisted and oversaw the work done, to correct any misunderstandings. It worked, why add computers.
Why add computers? Because it makes the lives of us engineers who do what you are describing (I am one) VASTLY easier. I've worked on a drafting table and I know how to use a slide rule. I've designed products and overseen their production. While it can be done without computers I don't really relish the thought of going back to the days without them. People who pine for the "good old days" when we didn't have computers to help with the work almost invariably never had to actually do real engineering without them. Trust me, it sucked.
Do you have any idea how much labor is involved in updating a set of work instructions and ensuring only the most recent version is distributed? Have you ever done a complicated product drawing on paper and then had to do it over again because of a revision? It's possible to do these things without computers but I can assure you from first hand experience that you don't really want to. It's much easier to edit a CAD model of a part and then print out the new revision. It's is FAR easier to use a versioning system to keep documentation up to date and distributed to the right places. We don't use computers just because we can. We do it because it makes us far more effective and faster at our jobs.
Don't be brainwashed by all this "process" crap. These days you have to talk to guys in their 60's and 70's to get the full oral history, but they wistfully recall days when the emphasis was on getting things done and making them work, rather than mindlessly following "process".
All that "process crap" is exactly how any successful engineering project is done. The space program in the 60's and 70's was no exception. Do some reading about the actual engineering that went on and you'll quickly realize it was ALL about developing working processes. A process is nothing more than a set of procedures used to accomplish a task. If the task has to be communicated to someone else or cannot be overlooked or is just plain complicated, documentation becomes a vital aspect of the process. You can't build something as complicated as a space ship without a huge amount of extremely robust processes and accompanying documenation. Developing effective production processes isn't mindless busywork - it is among the most challenging and important things we do. The best manufacturing companies spend a tremendous amount of resources on process development because without them they would be unable to function.
If you want to ensure that a rocket blows up, by all means ignore developing processes and don't worry about documenting or communicating the procedures used. Just be a cowboy and "get it done". When you have no way to discover what went wrong, who was responsible, when you were supposed to do it or how to do it again you might begin to understand why process is important. My company makes wire harnesses and we've made products that have gone into space. For even the simplest cable with a crimped terminal on one end we typically have about 15+ pages (and often much more) of assembly instructions, QA instructions, machine setup instructions, QA logs, shipping and packaging instructions, manufacturing orders (how many to build and when to build them), bills of material, training documentation, defect logs, packing slips, and invoices. And every bit of that documentation is genuinely important. Without robust processes in place it would be complete chaos to try to make even the most basic products, never mind something as complicated as a F1 engine. All that "process crap" lets us build a high quality product (repeatedly if needed), diagnose and correct any problems that may arise, and make sure everyone knows what they are supposed to do and when they are supposed to do it.
You may be looking for the galaxy note series from samsung. The whole series (note 1, note 2, note 10.1, note 8) have features like formula match, which reads your handwritten equations and tries to guess what the formula was, shape match for diagrams, and handwriting recognition.
I appreciate the suggestion but I very much remain dubious they will get it "right". While I don't have anything against those features they are superfluous. Someone needs to get drawing and note taking right. It should work very much like writing on a paper note pad and be very easy to use. Every pen implementation I've seen so far gets carried away with handwriting recognition and other theoretically nifty features (which rarely work very well) but don't make just writing/drawing easy which is the bit that actually matters. It's more important that *I* be able to write and recognize what I wrote than the computer. I remain hopeful but so far every attempt I've seen has fallen badly short.
I still view it (other than short e-mails) as a content consumption device, not a content creation device... even if it had a snap-on keyboard.
There is one type of content creation a tablet could in theory be good for, namely anything requiring a pen. We all still use lots of pens so the need is obviously there. A tablet could be great for drawing and note taking (think equations or diagrams which are nearly impossible on a keyboard or with fingers) if the interface was done right. There is a reason most students still take notes on paper. Problem is that we are stuck finger-painting on our tablets which doesn't work for those purposes. A tablet should be the perfect device for students to take notes on but no one makes them right now with that task in mind. A tablet could be a great content creation device for the right applications.
The problem with using a stylus on a tablet is that the software designers invariably and wrongly try to use the stylus for navigation or as a keyboard instead of just using it for what it is actually good for which is ONLY drawing. The fact that you can draw alpha-numerics or point at navigation buttons is just a bonus but they get all excited and try to use the stylus for things it does do well. They (historically) have tried to use a stylus like a mouse pointer which demonstrably doesn't work well since the interfaces were designed for keyboards/mice combos. Or they try to turn it into a keyboard for text input which doesn't work either (too slow and character recognition generally sucks). A stylus/pen is for drawing and only for drawing. Even interfaces which are designed for fingers don't really translate well to a pen - pens are for drawing thin lines, not pushing buttons. You don't (typically) use a pen to push a button when you hold a real pen so why would you do it on a tablet?
Only if money/supply is guaranteed.
That's what a contractual obligation is - a guarantee. I didn't use those words carelessly. There would be little point to a supply agreement without any actual obligation to buy.
If I have an agreement that I may buy up to X amount for Y price, it isn't an obligation.
Correct though depending on the nature of the agreement it might be considered an asset. What your are describing is an option (properly speaking a real option) and depending on the particular way it is done the company may or may not have to report it. Typically not on the balance sheet but somewhere in the filings could be required.
Many are saying that the memory suppliers got burned by Apple time so they wouldn't enter into any fixed agreements would they?
If they got burned then they only have themselves to blame. If Apple wants to pay my company to tool up to do a big order I'm going to make sure the agreement cover most/all of my capital costs and probably the relevant fixed costs as well. Perhaps these companies took a gamble for competitive reasons but if they took that risk knowingly the first time and got burned then I don't have a lot of sympathy.
Apple pre-paid which means they would have to account for it to their stockholders and the SEC. If they made an agreement on price and supply amount without negotiating upfront money, I don't think that they have to report it.
If they have a contractual obligation that would have to appear in the financial statements whether or not there is money exchanged up front. It is a liability of the company and they would be obligated to report it. It's kind of an irrelevant point however since no supplier is going to accept orders that size without a lot of upfront money. To produce the quantity of product Apple would buy requires major capital investment (equipment, facilities, etc) and no one is going to invest that sort of coin trusting to Apple's (or anyone else's) good faith. Basically an order that size requires a big upfront payment.