We can't lose all of Asia. We'd lose some capacity in some places. We could lose a chunk of Korea but Thailand would be fine. We lost Thailand but Taiwan is fine, etc...
But let's assume we did lose all of Asia, which is impossible. First off we've had falloffs in international trade before. We had a massive drop in trade after WWI from about 1/3rd of the economies of western nations to a few percentage points, which is more drastic than your Asia situation and that didn't cause a return to the dark ages. The world's oil supplies are not mostly in Asia, unless you mean Asia proper (i.e. the middle east) and don't mean just east Asia, in which case I don't see how we lose Japan and Saudi Arabia and still have any life on the planet. In addition demand for oil has dropped.
We have processors, memory... on other continents. Certainly Asia has well more than 1/2 but it is not non-existant elsewhere and there is no reason that in 5 years these supplies can't be restarted. So for example you could see a regression from smartphones to much less complex dumphones as component prices go up because they are needed elsewhere. But I don't see how that drives a regression to people not wanting to communicate at all with the next town over. You could see a situation where televisions go from $200 back to $2000 and so people don't have one in every room, but I don't see how that eliminates the whole concept of mass entertainment.
And no you can't forget the internet. The internet is valuable, we can use older gear to keep it running. Maybe not as well but an internet at 1/5 the current speed is far better than not having it at all. And 1/5 is easily accomplishable using almost any sort of souped up gear. People have dealt with scarcity before and using suboptimal components. It is done everyday all over the planet in poor countries and is commonplace during emergencies even now even in the USA.
There is no way a democratic society gets outraged and determined enough to pull this off fast enough.
That's what capitalism is for. Sudden shortages of various components create huge spikes in price create lots of effort to bring supply online fast. And of course in a situation where 1/2 the planet has just died there is going to be understanding in a Democratic society that infrastructure is going to be badly damaged and there need to be studies and budget allocations to replace infrastructure. They government can outright step in and buy infrastructure that's not going to be terribly controversial.
If you are talking about a global winter lasting a year you are talking 20km asteroid which is incredibly rare. I can't imagine what causes a 20 year global winter and doesn't heat the surface well beyond the survival point. So I'd reject your scenario.
But even if it were the case. You would have a huge shift in temperature forcing a large scale migration from the northern regions into the Southern. You would also have mass death. You might drop down to 100m or so on the planet. I still don't see a dark age. And if if the northern people did die off. The southern people have access to modern technology and computers. As well as they know English.
I believe a mile wide asteroid destroys everything for about 100 miles and would be killing 200 miles on out. So for example a mile wide asteroid hitting New York kills most everyone in Philadelphia. So let's assume that happens. Note you are picking an almost worst case scenario with the eastern seaboard. We instantly kill say 20m people. GDP would drop a minimum of 10% but the dislocation is bad and say it drops more like 30% instantly (i.e. 27% per capita) That's an incredibly deep depression in the USA. So things are bad. Globally that's going to hit other countries in terms of trade. So UK, China... lose say.3*.2*.25 = 1.5%. We'll make it 2% drop for our trading partners so they have a normal moderate recession.
But... the we know how to fix supply chains. I'd assume we have growth on the order of 8% or more annually from that depressed level easily in the USA and similarly globally as we fix that dislocation. It might even be faster than 8% since 30% is such a depressed level.
A return to the dark ages would be something on the order of a 98% drop per capita that we don't recover from. You can see it is not even close.
Certainly a few specialities by chance might get hit particularly hard. And the information used by those specialists are in libraries, are known by professionals, are known by other specialists are in computers.... How difficult would it be to replace those specialists in a generation?
Remember the claim was another dark ages not a deep recession.
one really nasty impact could easily send us back to the dark ages.
I agree with everything you wrote till this. Obviously a huge sub planet sized object and we are done. But something like a comet a few miles across how would that cause technological collapse planet wide? Lose 1/2 or 2/3rds of the population wouldn't do that. A technological regress requires a fragile society not just a sudden jolt.
One group of customers that seems to really like Blackberry are teenage to twenty something girls who love the keyboard + good chat integration. I don't get why they don't focus on a potentially huge market that is genuinely enthusiastic about their products.
I love the idea of BlackBerry balance and wish they focused more on this. The idea of two way security is a unique feature. They should market to enterprise workers based on that.
That position doesn't hold up. Leonardo da Vinci's studies in the alps showed that the fossil record is inconsistent with any great flood type origin for the fossil record. Those mountains with the greatest degree of were not the ones with the most remains of fish. He was able to conclude the alps were under water at some point, collected fossils and then eroded which is not what you would see with a sudden deluge of high pressure water.
600 years later, why is this still even being debated?
Which party is it that's in favor of cutting food stamps to give tax breaks to the rich?
The Republicans but we were discussing stat ranking not food stamps. As for Microsoft not being broken up.... that was the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.
I agree with you Republicans are nuts... but in all fairness. Microsoft is a Democrat company. Ballmer is a Democrat. Stack ranking has been popular with Democrats and Republican like Welch. This one isn't partisan.
Actually stack ranking was born in the legal profession (Cravath System) and from there the US military. GE then implemented it and Welch proposed it across the board for CEOs.
More of less the article says that NPEs encourage innovation by allowing people to sell patents. Everyone agrees that patent trolls/ NPE by being willing to buy patents help to make having a portfolio of patents a valuable asset. That's not a point in question. The point in question is whether the damage NPEs cause exceeds the benefits of their funding since the money for those buys comes from lawsuits. And Forbes doesn't even attempt to answer that question. Lots of terrible things often have some side advantages that don't come close to covering the downside of the terrible thing.
If they wanted to keep Nokia they could have. Finland could have waived the requirements for unemployment that drove the high restructuring costs that required the subsidies from Microsoft. They didn't. Finland didn't step up and nationalize Nokia. If the realistic alternatives are: Microsoft buys Nokia and Nokia dies they pick Microsoft.
They don't need to use anything to block the merger. They want to block it they can. But no one is talking about blocking the merger because they want Nokia to live as a division of Microsoft.
Huh? Margins are part of financial statements they are public information released under penalty of perjury. They are the easiest data by far to track.
Those aren't classic workstations. We are talking from the 1980s or mid 1990s. And it is much different if you are taking advantage of the subsystems that make them special not just trying to get them to run.
It is a very complex driver. But the difference is the subsystem is tweaked to the driver not the driver tweaked to the subsystem. That's more like the way the workstation market used to work than the way x86 hardware works.
If Nokia walks away from this deal they walk away from their Windows exclusive subsidies. They walk away from some of the promotional money for Lumia, They don't own their own OS anymore. So what do they get: the ability to fight with Asian manufacturers over who can put parts in the box more cheaply?
The stock shot up on the news of this buyout. Why would the shareholders not be interested? The US is going to approve it. The EU is going to be thrilled that Microsoft's phone division is going to be based out of Finland for years to come. Likely this helps EU/Microsoft relations.
Microsoft was paying Nokia fees for an exclusive ($250m / quarter). When the renewals came up the 2 or 3 year cost was likely so high (probably at least double that) that Microsoft realized it would just be cheaper to buy the phone division outright....
Slashdot Mirror
We can't lose all of Asia. We'd lose some capacity in some places. We could lose a chunk of Korea but Thailand would be fine. We lost Thailand but Taiwan is fine, etc...
But let's assume we did lose all of Asia, which is impossible. First off we've had falloffs in international trade before. We had a massive drop in trade after WWI from about 1/3rd of the economies of western nations to a few percentage points, which is more drastic than your Asia situation and that didn't cause a return to the dark ages. The world's oil supplies are not mostly in Asia, unless you mean Asia proper (i.e. the middle east) and don't mean just east Asia, in which case I don't see how we lose Japan and Saudi Arabia and still have any life on the planet. In addition demand for oil has dropped.
We have processors, memory... on other continents. Certainly Asia has well more than 1/2 but it is not non-existant elsewhere and there is no reason that in 5 years these supplies can't be restarted. So for example you could see a regression from smartphones to much less complex dumphones as component prices go up because they are needed elsewhere. But I don't see how that drives a regression to people not wanting to communicate at all with the next town over. You could see a situation where televisions go from $200 back to $2000 and so people don't have one in every room, but I don't see how that eliminates the whole concept of mass entertainment.
And no you can't forget the internet. The internet is valuable, we can use older gear to keep it running. Maybe not as well but an internet at 1/5 the current speed is far better than not having it at all. And 1/5 is easily accomplishable using almost any sort of souped up gear. People have dealt with scarcity before and using suboptimal components. It is done everyday all over the planet in poor countries and is commonplace during emergencies even now even in the USA.
That's what capitalism is for. Sudden shortages of various components create huge spikes in price create lots of effort to bring supply online fast. And of course in a situation where 1/2 the planet has just died there is going to be understanding in a Democratic society that infrastructure is going to be badly damaged and there need to be studies and budget allocations to replace infrastructure. They government can outright step in and buy infrastructure that's not going to be terribly controversial.
If you are talking about a global winter lasting a year you are talking 20km asteroid which is incredibly rare. I can't imagine what causes a 20 year global winter and doesn't heat the surface well beyond the survival point. So I'd reject your scenario.
But even if it were the case. You would have a huge shift in temperature forcing a large scale migration from the northern regions into the Southern. You would also have mass death. You might drop down to 100m or so on the planet. I still don't see a dark age. And if if the northern people did die off. The southern people have access to modern technology and computers. As well as they know English.
I believe a mile wide asteroid destroys everything for about 100 miles and would be killing 200 miles on out. So for example a mile wide asteroid hitting New York kills most everyone in Philadelphia. So let's assume that happens. Note you are picking an almost worst case scenario with the eastern seaboard. We instantly kill say 20m people. GDP would drop a minimum of 10% but the dislocation is bad and say it drops more like 30% instantly (i.e. 27% per capita) That's an incredibly deep depression in the USA. So things are bad. Globally that's going to hit other countries in terms of trade. So UK, China... lose say .3*.2*.25 = 1.5%. We'll make it 2% drop for our trading partners so they have a normal moderate recession.
But... the we know how to fix supply chains. I'd assume we have growth on the order of 8% or more annually from that depressed level easily in the USA and similarly globally as we fix that dislocation. It might even be faster than 8% since 30% is such a depressed level.
A return to the dark ages would be something on the order of a 98% drop per capita that we don't recover from. You can see it is not even close.
Certainly a few specialities by chance might get hit particularly hard. And the information used by those specialists are in libraries, are known by professionals, are known by other specialists are in computers.... How difficult would it be to replace those specialists in a generation?
Remember the claim was another dark ages not a deep recession.
I agree with everything you wrote till this. Obviously a huge sub planet sized object and we are done. But something like a comet a few miles across how would that cause technological collapse planet wide? Lose 1/2 or 2/3rds of the population wouldn't do that. A technological regress requires a fragile society not just a sudden jolt.
One group of customers that seems to really like Blackberry are teenage to twenty something girls who love the keyboard + good chat integration. I don't get why they don't focus on a potentially huge market that is genuinely enthusiastic about their products.
I love the idea of BlackBerry balance and wish they focused more on this. The idea of two way security is a unique feature. They should market to enterprise workers based on that.
Sorry, greatest degree of erosion.
If the alps are above the waterline how do they erode top down?
That position doesn't hold up. Leonardo da Vinci's studies in the alps showed that the fossil record is inconsistent with any great flood type origin for the fossil record. Those mountains with the greatest degree of were not the ones with the most remains of fish. He was able to conclude the alps were under water at some point, collected fossils and then eroded which is not what you would see with a sudden deluge of high pressure water.
600 years later, why is this still even being debated?
The Republicans but we were discussing stat ranking not food stamps. As for Microsoft not being broken up.... that was the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Yes. They were focused on their huge push into the server space extending their OS / Office products way up the value chain.
I agree with you Republicans are nuts... but in all fairness. Microsoft is a Democrat company. Ballmer is a Democrat. Stack ranking has been popular with Democrats and Republican like Welch. This one isn't partisan.
Actually stack ranking was born in the legal profession (Cravath System) and from there the US military. GE then implemented it and Welch proposed it across the board for CEOs.
You will need it for the lawsuits. It has to be stored.
OK, so what? We know how to build warehouses. Compared to the cost of lawsuits involving bogus patents build an extra 5000 warehouses.
More of less the article says that NPEs encourage innovation by allowing people to sell patents. Everyone agrees that patent trolls/ NPE by being willing to buy patents help to make having a portfolio of patents a valuable asset. That's not a point in question. The point in question is whether the damage NPEs cause exceeds the benefits of their funding since the money for those buys comes from lawsuits. And Forbes doesn't even attempt to answer that question. Lots of terrible things often have some side advantages that don't come close to covering the downside of the terrible thing.
The N950 never released. It wasn't ready. I don't know that there was ever a production version. What other model was killed?
If they wanted to keep Nokia they could have. Finland could have waived the requirements for unemployment that drove the high restructuring costs that required the subsidies from Microsoft. They didn't. Finland didn't step up and nationalize Nokia. If the realistic alternatives are: Microsoft buys Nokia and Nokia dies they pick Microsoft.
They don't need to use anything to block the merger. They want to block it they can. But no one is talking about blocking the merger because they want Nokia to live as a division of Microsoft.
So what? They still are a huge vendor of mobile phones like #2 for 2013.
Huh? Margins are part of financial statements they are public information released under penalty of perjury. They are the easiest data by far to track.
As far as the margin decline it was well known and discussed. For example a pre Elop article:
http://mobileopportunity.blogspot.com/2011/02/nokia-now-comes-hard-part.html
The rest seems to be you not understanding what margin means.
I said decline in margins. Try responding to what is wrote.
Those aren't classic workstations. We are talking from the 1980s or mid 1990s. And it is much different if you are taking advantage of the subsystems that make them special not just trying to get them to run.
It is a very complex driver. But the difference is the subsystem is tweaked to the driver not the driver tweaked to the subsystem. That's more like the way the workstation market used to work than the way x86 hardware works.
If Nokia walks away from this deal they walk away from their Windows exclusive subsidies. They walk away from some of the promotional money for Lumia, They don't own their own OS anymore. So what do they get: the ability to fight with Asian manufacturers over who can put parts in the box more cheaply?
The stock shot up on the news of this buyout. Why would the shareholders not be interested? The US is going to approve it. The EU is going to be thrilled that Microsoft's phone division is going to be based out of Finland for years to come. Likely this helps EU/Microsoft relations.
Microsoft was paying Nokia fees for an exclusive ($250m / quarter). When the renewals came up the 2 or 3 year cost was likely so high (probably at least double that) that Microsoft realized it would just be cheaper to buy the phone division outright....