Because employees got mad and leaked it. But the claim was that this was a PR move... if it were that, it would have been announced and not set up to be leaked by angry employees who put a negative spin on it.
I'm sure Alphabet wrote it off on their taxes. So your present was a donation to charity and a tax break for your parent company.
Well, it's a writeoff either way. Spending money on employees or donating cash to charity, either way it reduces a company's net profit and reduces tax liability.
Every GOP dominated state has severely failing economies. See Kansas as a perfect example.
Define "failing". Red states, by and large, have lower economic growth because they are more rural, and urban centers generate more economic activity. That's a generality, though. If you look at a list of states by GDP per capita, some red states rank very highly. https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Li....
If you're talking about fiscal responsibility, it's pretty much exactly the opposite of what you say. The states that are on the edge of bankruptcy are nearly all blue states, while those with the healthiest governments are red states. https://www.mercatus.org/state...
Kansas, BTW, is firmly middle of the pack on both measures. Kansas is #25 of 50 in terms of GDP per capita, and according to the Mercatus rankings, they're #27. So Kansas isn't a perfect example.
What I considered really interesting was the question: if cesarean became the normal method of delivery for an extended period of time (many generations) could humans end up at a point where natural birth was not possible?
I think it's likely that before too many more generations the normal process will be to grow babies in artificial wombs, and that could eventually make it so that a significant percentage of women become unable to bear children the old-fashioned way. Although we'd lose the evolutionary pressure for wide hips for birthing, it doesn't seem like there are any evolutionary pressures against wide hips, so I don't see why they'd disappear.
Anyone who defends this convenience-over-privacy should download and print Jihadi-type information, nuke plans, bio-weapons info, etc. through this service and see how long it is before there is a knock on their door.
Sure. Got a link? I have absolutely zero concern about any sort of problem like that.
I can't believe people willingly send their documents to Google where they will be processed by their systems and stored for however long.
I love it. It's super convenient to be able to print to my printer from any device, anywhere. Even when I'm printing from a computer rather than my phone or tablet, I frequently find that the native print drivers are unreliable and buggy over the network, and especially over Wifi. Not so much that I can't get it to connect and print with a little fiddling but Google Cloud Print just works, every time. As for Google "processing" the documents, (a) I'm fairly certain they don't data mine Cloud Print data and (b) I don't care. Most of what I print I either created in Google Docs or received in Gmail anyway. And even where that's not the case, the only thing Google would do with anything learned from my print jobs is to make better choices about what ads I might find interesting.
However... my printer is an Epson, and it was bootlooping a couple of days ago (I turned it off). I assumed the printer itself was having some problem and was planning to investigate when I have time this weekend. Sounds like I just need to wait for Google to sort this problem out and I'll be good.
Note that I work for Google, though not on Cloud Print. I'm just a (usually) happy user of Cloud Print.
I almost never go to the cinema. It's useful when you're a kid wanting to date as neutral ground (although from what I understand kids don't date anymore- just hook up).
I'd much rather watch in the Living room than the cinema. No overly loud sound. No uncomfortable squished together seats. No popcorn stuck to the floor. The cinema isn't exactly a positive experience.
We must have much better theaters where I live than you do. Here it's all big, comfy stadium seating and they do a great job of keeping the floors clean. We tend to go to early shows (4-5PM usually), so we often have the theater to ourselves. At most there are few dozen others. And even when we do go to a later show where the house is closer to full, I can't remember the last time noise was a problem.
Anyway, my answer to the question is: Absolutely not. My wife and go see a movie pretty much every week. We have a weekly date night and we like movies. There's absolutely no way we'd want to watch those movies at home, because the primary motivation for the date is to go out, to get away from the house, the kids, etc. If the theater were an unpleasant place, we just wouldn't watch movies at all because we'd find something else to do on date night and we don't have a lot of spare time for movie-watching the rest of the week.
That's just me, of course, but judging by the people I see at the theater, I'm far from alone in that. Lots of people like going to the theater. There's a lot more to it than just watching the movie.
Buying "carbon credits" and the like don't mean that you're actually using sustainable energy. What happens when the wind plants and solar plants aren't producing? Covering average demand is ONLY covering average demand. Idiots.
Its an accounting trick. They are actually using energy produced by non-renewable generators much of the time. They are simply signing contracts and paying a bit more to say it comes from renewables. Meanwhile, every neighbor is using the exact same mix of power from the exact same generators. The only difference is the piece of paper..
No, there's a little more to it than that. The fact that they're paying more for renewable means that utilities can afford to invest in more renewable production. Buying renewable energy, even if it does get all mixed together with non-renewable in the grid, actually causes renewable energy production to be built out -- and eventually to replace non-renewable production.
They can't pay it out as dividends without repatriating it, nor can they invest it in anything in the US.
So they bring it back and pay taxes on it, and pay the remainder as a dividend. Then they tell the shareholders they would have got more if not for those taxes and deflect the blame, easy peasy.
And their stock price would take a big hit as they reduced the assets on their balance sheet by a huge amount, to no benefit. Shareholders would be pissed, and the blame deflection would not work. At all.
Bottom line: the reason they have big piles of cash is because the US has the highest corporate income tax rate in the developed world.
No, it's because the US has a pathetic tax structure that makes it easy to dodge taxes.
You don't know what you're talking about. The taxes we're talking about here are taxes that companies in most countries wouldn't pay at all. The US is nearly unique in trying to tax overseas profits.
They don't have to repatriate it to do useful things with it. Believe it or not you can actually do interesting things outside the USA. I know right? Who knew?
Lose the snark. They already do about as much as they can with their cash outside of the US. There are a lot of reasons they keep the bulk of their operations in the US, and in Silicon Valley.
Have you wondered why Apple has taken out loans in recent years despite having gobs of cash and no actual need for the money?
No, I haven't wondered because it's blindingly obvious, and it's not the reason you state. The reason they do it is because they can borrow against overseas capital and use it to obtain cash for operations and growth in the US. It's a way of partially working around exactly the problem I described.
Over 50% of Apple's business is outside the US.
Revenues, yes. Operations, no.
The effective tax rate in the US for corporations is actually below the world average.
Only because many corporations have big writeoffs available due to depreciation, losses, etc. Apple already uses all of those to reduce their tax liability for US revenues. They'd pay full rate on money they repatriated.
I won't bother rebutting the remainder point by point, because it's all predicated on your above errors.
Double or triple pane windows usually have argon as the fill gas
High end ones do. I bought new windows a few years back, and argon fill added a non-trivial amount to the price. I bought it, and I suspect most people do, but it was definitely optional and not cheap.
I think artists of the progressive rock genre are ones that suffer most from streaming
I think they are probably among those who suffer least.
Artists in most of the less mainstream forms of rock have basically never made any money from royalties. Their album sales have always served primarily to feed fan interest in their live shows, and they've made most of their their money from merchandising at the shows. I'd expect prog rock to be in this category. And for artists who make most of their money from touring, YouTube is a *good* thing because it does an even better job of feeding fan interest, enabling a lot more interaction with fans. YouTube does this so well it's enabled artists who would never have made it in the old world to make a decent living with their music. One of my favorite examples is Lindsay Stirling, the dancing pop violinist. She actually makes considerable money from YouTube streaming (because she doesn't go through a label), and sells out concerts in respectable venues worldwide.
The artists who in decades past made their money from royalties rather than touring are the ones who are most hurt by streaming, because their contracts generally pay them a pittance of streaming revenues. On the other hand, the artists in question, the ones to generate massive royalties on album sales, are the big pop acts who are rolling in cash in spite of being ripped off by their labels.
Please don't interpret this as a defense of the labels. I spent a while writing a royalty calculation system for a big label, and it's crazy how much crap they get away with and how badly they rip off the artists, with or without streaming. They suck, and I'm rooting for artists to exploit YouTube, iTMS, Google Play, etc., and social media to reach their fans directly and cut the bloodsucking leeches out completely.
Double glazed windows have a vacuum (or sometimes a noble gas) between the panes.
Or dry air. There's no need to use anything other than air to avoid condensation. You just need to make sure the air is dry and the windows are sealed so humid air can't get in. I doubt many windows are vacuum-filled; that's just begging for trouble, and would also limit the size of panes. 15 pounds per square inch adds up to a lot of pressure very quickly.
To achieve a one million - to - one ratio, requires 20 bits.
4K video uses 36 bits per pixel, 12 bits per color. So you couldn't get a million intensities of one color, but it seems likely that the color gamut easily includes a million intensity levels.
Apple : "We have so much money we literally don't know what to do with it anymore."
That's alright. Neither do Google or Microsoft and a few others. They simply can't find investment opportunities large enough and profitable enough to do anything with their piles of cash. So the pile keeps growing. Eventually I expect it to attract a dragon or something.
Really they should be paying it back as dividends if they can't figure out what to do with the money.
The reason they have large piles of cash isn't that they can't figure out what to do with it, it's that it's cash they generated overseas they can't move it to the US without giving 35% of it to the federal government. They can't pay it out as dividends without repatriating it, nor can they invest it in anything in the US. Since most of their operations are in the US, that means they spend a little on overseas operations and put the rest in high-liquidity overseas investments -- high-liquidity in case they get an opportunity to repatriate it cheaply, or have a sudden need that makes the big tax bite acceptable.
Bottom line: the reason they have big piles of cash is because the US has the highest corporate income tax rate in the developed world.
Don't try that crap with Frontier, or you will 100% get screwed. They leave early on purpose so they can make people pay the re-ticketing fee.
If they close the door too early (not sure what the line is), they not only can't charge you, they have "involuntarily refused boarding", in FAA terms, and they are required to buy you a ticket on the next available flight (on any carrier) to your destination, and pay you a cash penalty ($500?). This actually happened to me once.
Ah yes, pay the extortion fee to regain your rights back as a conditional privilege. Thanks for making our lives easier, Toilet Safety Administration!
Yep, it sucks. But as a practical matter, if you travel regularly it makes your life much easier. Most of the time. You don't always get TSA Pre, even after paying the extortion fee. But you get it 90+% of the time, and are happy you did, especially when lines are long and you are carrying a lot of crap.
TSA Pre has allowed me to return to my pre-9/11 habit of arriving at the airport 25-30 minutes prior to departure, so that by the time I reach the gate I can walk right on. BTW, I don't recommend this habit unless you can afford to miss the flight, because maybe one time in 30, you will. But the 29*0.5 = 14.5 hours you'll save by doing it are worth the two or three hours you lose when you miss your flight and have to catch the next one. When the flight I'm on is the last of the day, I make sure to arrive 60 minutes before.
It's also well worth the effort (and it is a lot of effort) to read the third volume, Sorting and Searching. The second volume (Seminumerical Methods) may be useful if you do certain kinds of work, but Fundamental Algorithms and Sorting and Searching are worth almost any professional programmer's time.
I have to admit I haven't bought 4A yet.
I really hope that Knuth is grooming someone to take over the work of completing the full set when he dies, or becomes unable to continue.
Slashdot Mirror
yeah, but here we are talking about it.
Because employees got mad and leaked it. But the claim was that this was a PR move... if it were that, it would have been announced and not set up to be leaked by angry employees who put a negative spin on it.
This wasn't publicly announced.
It's even cheaper if you don't make a formal announcement.
How so? A press release doesn't cost anything.
Giving bonuses to employees is not tax deductible like donating to charities is.
For a business, it's exactly the same.
This is just an failed attempt at good PR.
This wasn't publicly announced.
I'm sure Alphabet wrote it off on their taxes. So your present was a donation to charity and a tax break for your parent company.
Well, it's a writeoff either way. Spending money on employees or donating cash to charity, either way it reduces a company's net profit and reduces tax liability.
Every GOP dominated state has severely failing economies. See Kansas as a perfect example.
Define "failing". Red states, by and large, have lower economic growth because they are more rural, and urban centers generate more economic activity. That's a generality, though. If you look at a list of states by GDP per capita, some red states rank very highly. https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Li....
If you're talking about fiscal responsibility, it's pretty much exactly the opposite of what you say. The states that are on the edge of bankruptcy are nearly all blue states, while those with the healthiest governments are red states. https://www.mercatus.org/state...
Kansas, BTW, is firmly middle of the pack on both measures. Kansas is #25 of 50 in terms of GDP per capita, and according to the Mercatus rankings, they're #27. So Kansas isn't a perfect example.
What I considered really interesting was the question: if cesarean became the normal method of delivery for an extended period of time (many generations) could humans end up at a point where natural birth was not possible?
I think it's likely that before too many more generations the normal process will be to grow babies in artificial wombs, and that could eventually make it so that a significant percentage of women become unable to bear children the old-fashioned way. Although we'd lose the evolutionary pressure for wide hips for birthing, it doesn't seem like there are any evolutionary pressures against wide hips, so I don't see why they'd disappear.
Anyone who defends this convenience-over-privacy should download and print Jihadi-type information, nuke plans, bio-weapons info, etc. through this service and see how long it is before there is a knock on their door.
Sure. Got a link? I have absolutely zero concern about any sort of problem like that.
Update: Just turned my printer back on, and it looks like the problem is fixed.
I can't believe people willingly send their documents to Google where they will be processed by their systems and stored for however long.
I love it. It's super convenient to be able to print to my printer from any device, anywhere. Even when I'm printing from a computer rather than my phone or tablet, I frequently find that the native print drivers are unreliable and buggy over the network, and especially over Wifi. Not so much that I can't get it to connect and print with a little fiddling but Google Cloud Print just works, every time. As for Google "processing" the documents, (a) I'm fairly certain they don't data mine Cloud Print data and (b) I don't care. Most of what I print I either created in Google Docs or received in Gmail anyway. And even where that's not the case, the only thing Google would do with anything learned from my print jobs is to make better choices about what ads I might find interesting.
However... my printer is an Epson, and it was bootlooping a couple of days ago (I turned it off). I assumed the printer itself was having some problem and was planning to investigate when I have time this weekend. Sounds like I just need to wait for Google to sort this problem out and I'll be good.
Note that I work for Google, though not on Cloud Print. I'm just a (usually) happy user of Cloud Print.
I almost never go to the cinema. It's useful when you're a kid wanting to date as neutral ground (although from what I understand kids don't date anymore- just hook up).
I'd much rather watch in the Living room than the cinema. No overly loud sound. No uncomfortable squished together seats. No popcorn stuck to the floor. The cinema isn't exactly a positive experience.
We must have much better theaters where I live than you do. Here it's all big, comfy stadium seating and they do a great job of keeping the floors clean. We tend to go to early shows (4-5PM usually), so we often have the theater to ourselves. At most there are few dozen others. And even when we do go to a later show where the house is closer to full, I can't remember the last time noise was a problem.
Anyway, my answer to the question is: Absolutely not. My wife and go see a movie pretty much every week. We have a weekly date night and we like movies. There's absolutely no way we'd want to watch those movies at home, because the primary motivation for the date is to go out, to get away from the house, the kids, etc. If the theater were an unpleasant place, we just wouldn't watch movies at all because we'd find something else to do on date night and we don't have a lot of spare time for movie-watching the rest of the week.
That's just me, of course, but judging by the people I see at the theater, I'm far from alone in that. Lots of people like going to the theater. There's a lot more to it than just watching the movie.
The US is nearly unique in trying to tax overseas profits.
This empire has to be paid for somehow. You get a lot of oppression for your money.
Indeed, and there seems little interest in the electorate for scaling that back. Sigh.
Lick my balls, bro.
Buying "carbon credits" and the like don't mean that you're actually using sustainable energy. What happens when the wind plants and solar plants aren't producing? Covering average demand is ONLY covering average demand. Idiots.
Its an accounting trick. They are actually using energy produced by non-renewable generators much of the time. They are simply signing contracts and paying a bit more to say it comes from renewables. Meanwhile, every neighbor is using the exact same mix of power from the exact same generators. The only difference is the piece of paper..
No, there's a little more to it than that. The fact that they're paying more for renewable means that utilities can afford to invest in more renewable production. Buying renewable energy, even if it does get all mixed together with non-renewable in the grid, actually causes renewable energy production to be built out -- and eventually to replace non-renewable production.
They can't pay it out as dividends without repatriating it, nor can they invest it in anything in the US.
So they bring it back and pay taxes on it, and pay the remainder as a dividend. Then they tell the shareholders they would have got more if not for those taxes and deflect the blame, easy peasy.
And their stock price would take a big hit as they reduced the assets on their balance sheet by a huge amount, to no benefit. Shareholders would be pissed, and the blame deflection would not work. At all.
Bottom line: the reason they have big piles of cash is because the US has the highest corporate income tax rate in the developed world.
No, it's because the US has a pathetic tax structure that makes it easy to dodge taxes.
You don't know what you're talking about. The taxes we're talking about here are taxes that companies in most countries wouldn't pay at all. The US is nearly unique in trying to tax overseas profits.
They don't have to repatriate it to do useful things with it. Believe it or not you can actually do interesting things outside the USA. I know right? Who knew?
Lose the snark. They already do about as much as they can with their cash outside of the US. There are a lot of reasons they keep the bulk of their operations in the US, and in Silicon Valley.
Have you wondered why Apple has taken out loans in recent years despite having gobs of cash and no actual need for the money?
No, I haven't wondered because it's blindingly obvious, and it's not the reason you state. The reason they do it is because they can borrow against overseas capital and use it to obtain cash for operations and growth in the US. It's a way of partially working around exactly the problem I described.
Over 50% of Apple's business is outside the US.
Revenues, yes. Operations, no.
The effective tax rate in the US for corporations is actually below the world average.
Only because many corporations have big writeoffs available due to depreciation, losses, etc. Apple already uses all of those to reduce their tax liability for US revenues. They'd pay full rate on money they repatriated.
I won't bother rebutting the remainder point by point, because it's all predicated on your above errors.
Double or triple pane windows usually have argon as the fill gas
High end ones do. I bought new windows a few years back, and argon fill added a non-trivial amount to the price. I bought it, and I suspect most people do, but it was definitely optional and not cheap.
I think artists of the progressive rock genre are ones that suffer most from streaming
I think they are probably among those who suffer least.
Artists in most of the less mainstream forms of rock have basically never made any money from royalties. Their album sales have always served primarily to feed fan interest in their live shows, and they've made most of their their money from merchandising at the shows. I'd expect prog rock to be in this category. And for artists who make most of their money from touring, YouTube is a *good* thing because it does an even better job of feeding fan interest, enabling a lot more interaction with fans. YouTube does this so well it's enabled artists who would never have made it in the old world to make a decent living with their music. One of my favorite examples is Lindsay Stirling, the dancing pop violinist. She actually makes considerable money from YouTube streaming (because she doesn't go through a label), and sells out concerts in respectable venues worldwide.
The artists who in decades past made their money from royalties rather than touring are the ones who are most hurt by streaming, because their contracts generally pay them a pittance of streaming revenues. On the other hand, the artists in question, the ones to generate massive royalties on album sales, are the big pop acts who are rolling in cash in spite of being ripped off by their labels.
Please don't interpret this as a defense of the labels. I spent a while writing a royalty calculation system for a big label, and it's crazy how much crap they get away with and how badly they rip off the artists, with or without streaming. They suck, and I'm rooting for artists to exploit YouTube, iTMS, Google Play, etc., and social media to reach their fans directly and cut the bloodsucking leeches out completely.
Right wing fake news is always angry. I wonder why that is?
Because angry memes are more effective at spreading: https://youtu.be/rE3j_RHkqJc
Double glazed windows have a vacuum (or sometimes a noble gas) between the panes.
Or dry air. There's no need to use anything other than air to avoid condensation. You just need to make sure the air is dry and the windows are sealed so humid air can't get in. I doubt many windows are vacuum-filled; that's just begging for trouble, and would also limit the size of panes. 15 pounds per square inch adds up to a lot of pressure very quickly.
To achieve a one million - to - one ratio, requires 20 bits.
4K video uses 36 bits per pixel, 12 bits per color. So you couldn't get a million intensities of one color, but it seems likely that the color gamut easily includes a million intensity levels.
Apple : "We have so much money we literally don't know what to do with it anymore."
That's alright. Neither do Google or Microsoft and a few others. They simply can't find investment opportunities large enough and profitable enough to do anything with their piles of cash. So the pile keeps growing. Eventually I expect it to attract a dragon or something.
Really they should be paying it back as dividends if they can't figure out what to do with the money.
The reason they have large piles of cash isn't that they can't figure out what to do with it, it's that it's cash they generated overseas they can't move it to the US without giving 35% of it to the federal government. They can't pay it out as dividends without repatriating it, nor can they invest it in anything in the US. Since most of their operations are in the US, that means they spend a little on overseas operations and put the rest in high-liquidity overseas investments -- high-liquidity in case they get an opportunity to repatriate it cheaply, or have a sudden need that makes the big tax bite acceptable.
Bottom line: the reason they have big piles of cash is because the US has the highest corporate income tax rate in the developed world.
provides Google with an additional source of revenue when they go to sell this new-and-improved database to 3rd parties
Google doesn't sell user data to third parties.
Don't try that crap with Frontier, or you will 100% get screwed. They leave early on purpose so they can make people pay the re-ticketing fee.
If they close the door too early (not sure what the line is), they not only can't charge you, they have "involuntarily refused boarding", in FAA terms, and they are required to buy you a ticket on the next available flight (on any carrier) to your destination, and pay you a cash penalty ($500?). This actually happened to me once.
Ah yes, pay the extortion fee to regain your rights back as a conditional privilege. Thanks for making our lives easier, Toilet Safety Administration!
Yep, it sucks. But as a practical matter, if you travel regularly it makes your life much easier. Most of the time. You don't always get TSA Pre, even after paying the extortion fee. But you get it 90+% of the time, and are happy you did, especially when lines are long and you are carrying a lot of crap.
TSA Pre has allowed me to return to my pre-9/11 habit of arriving at the airport 25-30 minutes prior to departure, so that by the time I reach the gate I can walk right on. BTW, I don't recommend this habit unless you can afford to miss the flight, because maybe one time in 30, you will. But the 29*0.5 = 14.5 hours you'll save by doing it are worth the two or three hours you lose when you miss your flight and have to catch the next one. When the flight I'm on is the last of the day, I make sure to arrive 60 minutes before.
It's also well worth the effort (and it is a lot of effort) to read the third volume, Sorting and Searching. The second volume (Seminumerical Methods) may be useful if you do certain kinds of work, but Fundamental Algorithms and Sorting and Searching are worth almost any professional programmer's time.
I have to admit I haven't bought 4A yet.
I really hope that Knuth is grooming someone to take over the work of completing the full set when he dies, or becomes unable to continue.