hence the quotes. Just because it isn't always real double tax doesn't mean that isn't the talking point or the way the public generally understands it.
I'm not in the US, so I'm not familiar with FICA particularly, nor was it in reference to US law. As I explicitly said "lots of countries".
Sure they are. That's not the point. Everyone knows india is corrupt top to bottom, and there are people using every means possible to dodge tax, legally or otherwise.
The issue is whether or not the law would, if applied, seriously stifle investment. Which, assuming the text is correct, it would. The intent of laws and there impact don't always align, this seems to be one of those cases, where either the people who wrote the law don't really grasp the spillover effects, or the people who are writing about it don't understand what the law says.
Now the thing is, lots of countries have 'double taxation' where the profits a corporation makes are taxes, *and* the dividends to shareholders are taxed. In this case they're saying investment in the company would be taxed as well, which could be triple taxation, or it could just be a stupid way of trying to collect existing owed taxes.
And yes, of course, if you set up your own business and invest in it you could be trying to dodge tax (Sri's game testing and cat sitting services, who's sole customer is Sri, who is, incidentally, the sole investor). I don't dispute the possibility of that being widespread and damaging to the economy and tax base.
How many rappers do the same thing to establish an 'image' or 'brand' or whatever you want to call it for themselves though.
Just because you buy a car, and call it the 'crack dispenser' doesn't actually mean you're using it to sell crack, or name your band 'ho wreckers' or (the not fictional) "Barenaked Ladies" doesn't mean you actually are or have any of the above. That's kind of the problem. Kim Dotcom was building a brand up around himself and his business, you can argue (probably correctly) that was to establish an illegal clientèle, but that doesn't necessarily mean what he was doing was illegal. That goes to steve jobs driving around without a licence plate. Being a dick is part of (their) creating brand recognition, and getting free publicity.
that would be one of many reasons. Bureaucracy sometimes exists to serve the bureaucracy, sometimes some broader strategic interest etc. Should the police be looking to seize assets as the property of an individual who is accused of, seizing the assets of the principle owner of a corporation accused of, seizing the assets of the corporation, being used for the principle owner etc. etc. etc.
I'm not a lawyer, australian or otherwise, but the way I vaguely understand other commonwealth law is that Megaupload is a legally existing corporation (even if all of its activities are accused of being illegal), and everything in question (the hosting of copyrighted works) was done in the capacity of the corporation. That's different than kim dotcom hosting the files on his own, and means that even though he could be arrested and have his assets seized as part of his role in the corporation, they are supposed to go after the corporation, and as part of going after a corporation. I'm not sure in the end it makes much practical difference, but the paperwork is different (and that might determine how it is counted for statistics purposes and funding purposes).
It could also be that felony laws need to adjusted based on new inflation values and so on.
Or it means that the police should start to take seriously the theft of 500 dollar items. Which is somewhat problematic given the costs of taking things seriously.
There are phones that are thousands of dollars, those you would expect to be treated on par with comparably jewelry, but a 500 dollar item is in a messy place. It's cheap enough that your insurance deductible usually won't make it worth making a claim on (yes, some people have less than 500 dollar deductibles) in a lot of cases. So you just eat the loss? What consequences does this have for kids in schools who regularly steal stuff from each other? None of these things are handled well by laws written when 500 dollars had probably double or triple the buying power it does today, but it's still a lot of money.
which neatly summarizes the difference between how science is actually done, and how the media, including apparently/. cover science.
In real science when you do an experiment you just have results. You may not like the result, you may not want that to be the result, and you may think there is something wrong with the results. But that's what you did, that's what happened and if you can't figure out why the results are the way they are, well then you need the broader scientific community to help, and you write it all down in papers so that other people can learn from what happened to you.
There's also different kinds of work. If you're in the armed forces you may work a lot more than 60 hours a week, but the whole organization is structured around that (and I don't just mean in combat operations which I think is a separate discussion).
Some people have jobs where you have to be there if something goes wrong, but there's not a lot to do if nothing is happening. Or you're overseeing other people who are only working 40 hours a week, and your presence is more to inspire fear than it is to actually accomplish much directly.
Or you could be only really doing 15 or 20 hours of meaningfully challenging work, and the rest of it is a long series of trivial tasks.
Or you can burn out and wreck the place or make a lot of mistakes. Which happens, a lot.
Just below your comment there's one from an AC titled "Missed the real story" indicating the exploit code was released from within MS.
That might mean some jackass got the brilliant idea that if there's going to be an exploit soon anyway, it may as well be the original one, and that will scare people into deploying the patch *right now*.
I read Ultra64's post as sarcasm. If he couldn't get 45k in loans what would have happened? to get 45k in loans to pay for criminal charges you have to have assets that will cover that, since you can't guarantee future earnings will be able to make up for 45k.
Sure, in the grand scheme of things 45K isn't that much money, at least, it shouldn't be for someone in the US/canada that is a 'computer programmer'. Lots of programming students face that much in debt coming out of school. But if you don't have it, or can't borrow it what would he have done? Run out of money and ended up in jail having to give up his defence? That hardly seems fair.
right... but copying currency and attempting to use it as currency is a crime too... sort of playing into their hand here.
Currency has value because we constructed a legal and trust system around the premise that you can exchange money for anything, without those protections the whole economy would implode back to a barter system. The physical currency itself is worthless, just as a DVD or blu ray disk is essentially worthless by itself. If anyone could print legal money it would rapidly become worthless. All the money you have is a copy of the money other people have, and only the issuer of that money has the right to print more of it. In the extreme, if they print enough of it, money becomes worth no more than its base materials cost (which for paper money is especially problematic). The challenge with governments having the power to print money is that they have a vested interest in the value of the money, but the problem with a fully independent central bank is that they have no reason to use currency to actually help solve problems, their vested interest is in holding onto the value they have. (This would be the difference between why the US, despite its massive debt does not face crippling interest rates, whereas the European central bank has mostly refused quantitative easing and so driven greece, italy, spain and portugal to the brink of bankruptcy and past the point of being able to borrow money in some cases). It's hard to pin down the right analogy for copyright, since in some ways it's like the ECB, independent of the 'broader interest' and mostly concerned with their own wealth, so I guess that's the closest approximation, but the MPAA/RIAA alliances are more like the federal reserve system, where several of the vested players get together and decide how to try and value copyright, but not *all* the vested players.
The entire creative content industry exists in its current form because you can own the distribution rights to something that can be exchanged for money. If you can't own the distribution rights then you have to go back to charging for performances. That is sort of manageable for something like music, where radio and online would be advertising for concerts (although the experience of a concert is very different than the experience of listening to music in my office). It's not great, because a recording of a concert may be 'better' than going to the concert itself, but movies and games can't really be 'performed' as theatre. In those cases you only get paid because someone pays you for a copy of the work you did.
Being rich exposes you to much more volatility in your net worth, no doubt. But as you say, when you're rich you can handle the fluctuations better.
They've also seen huge wage growth proportionately in the last 30 years, and they had this bizare blip in average income from around 2000 -2002 which bounced way back up, so they may be back where they were in 2000 as a percent of total income, although with the general wage declines it's harder to know (note, that's on the chart I linked before, it's just kinda hard to see, the same figures seem to be http://acivilamericandebate.wordpress.com/2011/04/10/the-30-year-growth-of-income-inequality with a couple of other images).
Unfortunately I can't find figures for post 2007, which isn't a huge surprise.
Benefited from, and required are not the same thing. The SU survived without US help. It pushed back the other way *faster* because of US help, and the UK who traded destroyers for bases *benefited* from US help, but they would have survived without it. The Afrika Korps was doomed 6 months after the US entered the war, and was mostly a separate operation.
Don't get me wrong. The US helped, a even before it entered the war. But once the germans gave up on the air battle for britain, and once the failed at barbarossa it was a matter of rate, not eventuality. The US hastened germanies defeat, and significantly altered the manner of that defeat, but germany and italy were doomed. The british basically dealt with africa on its own, it was the invasion of france, the south pacific and the pace of buildup and mobility that lend lease gave the allies. Had it not been for lend lease we probably would have been looking at an invasion of france in 47 or something along those lines.
The aid to the soviet union came after they blunted the axis attack. From then on it was a matter of how many millions of people were going to die over how long a period. The UK is essentially the same, by the time the US was trading destroyers for bases the UK was capable, but the longer it dragged on the more likely it was that people would starve.
It's not like you can do a comprehensive analysis and say 'if the US didn't exists at all' because by virtue of existing at all it altered the play of the war. Resources that are easier to produce in the US (oil and trucks for example) were produced in the US rather than elsewhere. Would japan have launched an aggressive war if the Philippines still belonged to Spain? Does that sort of question even make sense? The fact that they were no longer getting oil from the US made the US involved, so you can't entirely decouple them. But if you crunch the numbers, the British empire and soviet union had the upper hand once the SU signed a non aggression pact with japan, after that it was all a matter of rate, and losses to get there.
Other than the richest 0.1% of the population who is seeing wage increases these days? It's called the wage productivity gap and basically, everyone who isn't running companies is getting screwed, it's not just engineers. The wealthiest 1%, 0.1% and 0.01% are getting wage increases sure (though more the top 0.1% than 1%, but anyway)
http://currydemocrats.org/in_perspective/american_pie.html from 2007 and obviously slightly biased but it has a couple of good figures on it. Pay since about 1988 has been significantly decoupling from productivity, and where has it been going? Right, not to the people at the bottom.
Therein lies the crux of all of the problem for people who aren't in the upper class in the US (and to a lesser extent everywhere else). If you worked more productively you would get more money, but not so much anymore, since someone else will work for less.
Engineering, and CS are still good programmes (yes, english spelling) to be in, since you still get more money than other fields generally. The other sciences are sort of a crap shoot, if you can't get a PhD, or can't get a technician job they're really bad to have done, but otherwise they can work out ok. The problem is that a construction worker with no education past highschool will make as much as a degree in biology or physics will during say, a post doc, and the scientists will have needed 10 years to get to that point, where the construction worker starts out close to that.
You can buy a company with stock. You don't need cash. And you don't need to buy all of it. If Yahoo is only worth 17 billion dollars then probably 5 billion dollars will get you a controlling interest. You'd need to buy from the right investors, but 2 billion in cash and 3 billion in facebook stock looks like a much better place to have your money than 5 billion dollars in yahoo right now.
This works the other way too. Yahoo will probably ask for 5% of facebook or the like. Suddenly that increases their value as a company to 22 billion dollars (assuming facebook sits at a 100 billion dollar valuation). If facebook tanks they're out the cost of some lawyers time, and if facebook suddenly becomes a 300 billion dollar company they will have doubled their own value.
5% is a made up number. It seems like it's big enough to convey they point, but small enough as to not sound absurd, but really, I have no idea what it should be.
Unlikely. The British empire combined with the SU would have defeated Germany and Italy. The issue is more the state of europe at the end of it all. One can reasonably presume the soviets would have been farther west and the british not as far east proportionately. But without the US the war might have taken a very different flavour, the british forming the southern or northern flanks of a combined operation, that sort of thing. Africa would have probably ended up basically the same, given that the British controlled the med and the surface of the atlantic by the time the US entered the war. Asia is a different mess, because the US and britain entered the war at the same time. I'm not sure the Japanese could have gone after the allies minus the US in quite so grandiose a way.
From the moment the germans failed to force the soviets to capitulate in barbarossa they were doomed (and that was about 3 weeks after the US entered the war, so not much the US did). How europe would have been carved up between the british and soviets would have been very different without the americans on the british side to be sure.
Besides that, it's sort of a nonsense statement. A lot has happened since 1945. 70 years before WW2 the world looked at germany as a beacon of political progress. Just because the US picked the right war 70 years ago doesn't mean it was right or wrong about anything in particular that has happened since. If you really want to air 70 year old dirty laundry why did the US do bugger all when their oldest friend was being marched over by the Nazi's? Right. Being right once doesn't make you always right.
Britain and france were on the right side of WW2 also, and what did that get them. Suez, Algeria, Vietnam etc. etc. aren't exactly beacons of justice, and the US has just as much dirty laundry post ww2 as they do.
Well and as I have learned the hard way lately, if it's going to cost 500k per year to run IT for a couple of hundred employee outfit when it's government money, someone will complain. When I did private sector stuff the biggest issue was downtime, a million dollars, no problem if that means good uptime. I used to go into insurance companies and banks at 4pm, the regular staff left at 5 -5:30, if it wasn't ready to go the next day by 8 or 9am you were in seriously trouble. In government it's all about how much money they have to explain to some jackass who wants to make political hay out of it.
The way I count it from http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/opinions/graphics/2006stafflistsalary.html the white house has about 400 employees. Figure 350k a year in desktop computers alone, for IT staff, another couple of hundred K in 'mobile' and accessory devices, ancillary office equipment you could easily be looking at 1.5 million or for just the non classified IT stuff. That isn't, in the grand scheme of things, a lot of money, but you have to know that whomever isn't in charge is going to want to curtail that spending, because it's 'wasteful'.
(how you count IT spending can vary wildly. When you're up into that many people you have a lot of dedicated IT staff in various sub groups who may or may not count towards the total and so on). On top of the mess that would be trying to deal with 400 spoiled brats who want everything their way (I'm sorry, executives who want to maximize their productivity), you have to try and plug into everything else in government and have the secured computers/networks as well. That isn't cheap.
The same applies to britannica though. If you're at the point where wikipedia isn't a valid reference, then no encyclopedia is really good enough, and if you just have teacher who doesn't get it, well, you have a teacher who doesn't get it. Happens with anything.
It may also be that people don't seem to get a lot of value for their training dollars, so don't want to invest in it. If you pay to train someone you may be paying them to leave (sad reality), and if you send someone to a course on networking they may come back without any more idea how to do whatever planning/redundancy/programming networking related problem you have to actually solve.
Most practical IT is a matter of learning to do background research. Find how this problem is solved, and do that. In my experience most IT training focus either on general principles which are so general as to be useless, or so specific as to only solve the immediate problem, and they don't prepare people for anything in the future. That isn't to say you can't train someone in IT properly, and maybe my experience has just been bad, but if that happens enough you get burned paying for it.
Besides, why invest in making people when you can just hire new people for less money, who already know what to do, and then fire them, and hire new people in a couple of years.
The only real SEO is paying google to make sure you're at the top of the list when your website shows up in a search query. Everything else is going to still put you below the people who are paying.
I gave a longer winded reply to the AC above you, but the same basic point applies. There's a huge difference between the fundamental research (which in just about every field is done in academia), and being able to bring that research to market with a consistent quality and properly informing the relevant people that it's available.
To somewhat over simplify. Drug companies do chemical engineering. Universities do chemistry and biochemistry.
The idea that only handful of truly important drugs have been brought to market recently sounds like talking point waffle as much as you're describing the other view as conservative cliff notes. How do you define important drugs, what's your time frame? Even if you are riding on a gut feeling that doesn't mean it's any more accurate than my impression that trying to build new drugs and failing is as important as trying to build new drugs and succeeding. If you knew in advance it would work it wouldn't be research.
1. Drugs don't do any good if doctors don't know they exist to prescribe them. When you are looking at thousands of drugs identified by archaic codes this is a legitimately serious issue. Nor is it relevant where 'most' of the money is spent. Every business spends money on marketing, you have to or you don't stay in business. Marketing in 200 countries, to hundreds of thousands of doctors pharmacies and health agencies is a very different problem than developing in one, and marketing is a problem you can throw bodies at, PhD level research in biochemistry is not. Apply your same test to electronics, cars, games anything. If you separate 'core' R&D from manufacturing R&D from manufacturing from marketing very quickly you start to see that advertising can easily take up a big chunk of a budget for anything, and easily the largest share in some cases. Get used to it.
2. Proof? Stats? Applicability to this particular drug? Manufacturing costs? Capacitive touch screens were probably developed in a lab somewhere, quite possibly a university lab, but there's a difference between spending 200K to make one screen with 4 grad students and a professor, and being able to manufacture 10 million of them a year for 100 dollars a pop with a 0.01% variation. Now apply that to a chemical at a consistent quantity and quality.
3. You can settle for a 50% pay cut while we're on the discussion of arbitrarily giving people too much money. Oh, 50% is too harsh? How's 75%? Ya, I'll stick to 75%, that feels like a good fair number for how much is too much money for you to make. Don't want to work for me anymore? That goes to:
4. And you're going to find people with that expertise? Sure, some indian or chinese company that doesn't care about IP will come and manufacture the drug, and they might be 'good enough'. Maybe the error in their concentrations is 0.1% whereas bayer it's 0.01 (or 3% and 1% or whatever the number happens to be), or maybe it's the same, and the costs of labour are just lower in India and China. So why don't we just have bayer move all of its drug manufacturing to india and china, screw the people who actually developed all the processes being copied in the first place.
Get real about making anything. Yes universities (including the one I'm at) do the fundamental chemistry research, that's a high risk business because for every 1 successful chemical there are a lot of people who make unsuccessful ones. But making one chemical is not the same as making a drug, or making sure it gets to market, or into patients in the right doeses.
That doesn't mean bayers price isn't too high either. As I say, we probably should be outsourcing all drug manufacturing to india and china, after all, if they can make it for 1/30th the price then we should fire everyone who makes drugs in western countries and move it overseas. Still liking this plan? Good, cause I am. You know how I offered you a 50% pay cut, but that didn't feel right, so I went with a 75% cut. Now I have a better offer for you. 90% pay cut, and you move to india, or you're out of work. That you just spent the last 20 years helping me optimize my manufacturing process is why I'm being generous at giving you a chance to keep your job at all.
"Development" isn't just figuring out how to make something in a lab. That's critical to the entire process, but from there you need to convert that into manufacturing at a consistent quality and quantity, convince people that it's worth using (or even experimenting with to try), and then maybe going from there. India is benefiting from Bayer having done all of the rest of the work that goes with the drug, and from buying or otherwise acquiring manufacturing techniques from someone else. Again, that doesn't mean the price of this particular drug isn't too high or too low, but spewing random talking points as though they connect with actually building a safe drug isn't helping anyone understand the difference between 'chemistry' and 'chemical engineering' essentially.
I suspect that ARM is going to be the 'gadget' line of windows and the IA64 stuff will remain the serious users. They may even have the same form factor, but even if it cost me 20% more, I would much rather my touchscreen tablet was a slate form factor (like an iPad or android), and ran the same OS for seamless integration, and the same deal on my phone.
I grant, they might be too late to the party. But I don't really see them losing the desktop market, and everything else exists only because it's attached to the desktop. so I'm not convinced Windows ARM is anything other than trying to keep intel on its toes and to produce a 6 year old computer in a cell phone.
Slashdot Mirror
hence the quotes. Just because it isn't always real double tax doesn't mean that isn't the talking point or the way the public generally understands it.
I'm not in the US, so I'm not familiar with FICA particularly, nor was it in reference to US law. As I explicitly said "lots of countries".
Sure they are. That's not the point. Everyone knows india is corrupt top to bottom, and there are people using every means possible to dodge tax, legally or otherwise.
The issue is whether or not the law would, if applied, seriously stifle investment. Which, assuming the text is correct, it would. The intent of laws and there impact don't always align, this seems to be one of those cases, where either the people who wrote the law don't really grasp the spillover effects, or the people who are writing about it don't understand what the law says.
Now the thing is, lots of countries have 'double taxation' where the profits a corporation makes are taxes, *and* the dividends to shareholders are taxed. In this case they're saying investment in the company would be taxed as well, which could be triple taxation, or it could just be a stupid way of trying to collect existing owed taxes.
And yes, of course, if you set up your own business and invest in it you could be trying to dodge tax (Sri's game testing and cat sitting services, who's sole customer is Sri, who is, incidentally, the sole investor). I don't dispute the possibility of that being widespread and damaging to the economy and tax base.
How many rappers do the same thing to establish an 'image' or 'brand' or whatever you want to call it for themselves though.
Just because you buy a car, and call it the 'crack dispenser' doesn't actually mean you're using it to sell crack, or name your band 'ho wreckers' or (the not fictional) "Barenaked Ladies" doesn't mean you actually are or have any of the above. That's kind of the problem. Kim Dotcom was building a brand up around himself and his business, you can argue (probably correctly) that was to establish an illegal clientèle, but that doesn't necessarily mean what he was doing was illegal. That goes to steve jobs driving around without a licence plate. Being a dick is part of (their) creating brand recognition, and getting free publicity.
Er, new zealander or otherwise. My mistake.
that would be one of many reasons. Bureaucracy sometimes exists to serve the bureaucracy, sometimes some broader strategic interest etc. Should the police be looking to seize assets as the property of an individual who is accused of, seizing the assets of the principle owner of a corporation accused of, seizing the assets of the corporation, being used for the principle owner etc. etc. etc.
I'm not a lawyer, australian or otherwise, but the way I vaguely understand other commonwealth law is that Megaupload is a legally existing corporation (even if all of its activities are accused of being illegal), and everything in question (the hosting of copyrighted works) was done in the capacity of the corporation. That's different than kim dotcom hosting the files on his own, and means that even though he could be arrested and have his assets seized as part of his role in the corporation, they are supposed to go after the corporation, and as part of going after a corporation. I'm not sure in the end it makes much practical difference, but the paperwork is different (and that might determine how it is counted for statistics purposes and funding purposes).
It could also be that felony laws need to adjusted based on new inflation values and so on.
Or it means that the police should start to take seriously the theft of 500 dollar items. Which is somewhat problematic given the costs of taking things seriously.
There are phones that are thousands of dollars, those you would expect to be treated on par with comparably jewelry, but a 500 dollar item is in a messy place. It's cheap enough that your insurance deductible usually won't make it worth making a claim on (yes, some people have less than 500 dollar deductibles) in a lot of cases. So you just eat the loss? What consequences does this have for kids in schools who regularly steal stuff from each other? None of these things are handled well by laws written when 500 dollars had probably double or triple the buying power it does today, but it's still a lot of money.
which neatly summarizes the difference between how science is actually done, and how the media, including apparently /. cover science.
In real science when you do an experiment you just have results. You may not like the result, you may not want that to be the result, and you may think there is something wrong with the results. But that's what you did, that's what happened and if you can't figure out why the results are the way they are, well then you need the broader scientific community to help, and you write it all down in papers so that other people can learn from what happened to you.
There's also different kinds of work. If you're in the armed forces you may work a lot more than 60 hours a week, but the whole organization is structured around that (and I don't just mean in combat operations which I think is a separate discussion).
Some people have jobs where you have to be there if something goes wrong, but there's not a lot to do if nothing is happening. Or you're overseeing other people who are only working 40 hours a week, and your presence is more to inspire fear than it is to actually accomplish much directly.
Or you could be only really doing 15 or 20 hours of meaningfully challenging work, and the rest of it is a long series of trivial tasks.
Or you can burn out and wreck the place or make a lot of mistakes. Which happens, a lot.
Just below your comment there's one from an AC titled "Missed the real story" indicating the exploit code was released from within MS.
That might mean some jackass got the brilliant idea that if there's going to be an exploit soon anyway, it may as well be the original one, and that will scare people into deploying the patch *right now*.
I read Ultra64's post as sarcasm. If he couldn't get 45k in loans what would have happened? to get 45k in loans to pay for criminal charges you have to have assets that will cover that, since you can't guarantee future earnings will be able to make up for 45k.
Sure, in the grand scheme of things 45K isn't that much money, at least, it shouldn't be for someone in the US/canada that is a 'computer programmer'. Lots of programming students face that much in debt coming out of school. But if you don't have it, or can't borrow it what would he have done? Run out of money and ended up in jail having to give up his defence? That hardly seems fair.
right... but copying currency and attempting to use it as currency is a crime too... sort of playing into their hand here.
Currency has value because we constructed a legal and trust system around the premise that you can exchange money for anything, without those protections the whole economy would implode back to a barter system. The physical currency itself is worthless, just as a DVD or blu ray disk is essentially worthless by itself. If anyone could print legal money it would rapidly become worthless. All the money you have is a copy of the money other people have, and only the issuer of that money has the right to print more of it. In the extreme, if they print enough of it, money becomes worth no more than its base materials cost (which for paper money is especially problematic). The challenge with governments having the power to print money is that they have a vested interest in the value of the money, but the problem with a fully independent central bank is that they have no reason to use currency to actually help solve problems, their vested interest is in holding onto the value they have. (This would be the difference between why the US, despite its massive debt does not face crippling interest rates, whereas the European central bank has mostly refused quantitative easing and so driven greece, italy, spain and portugal to the brink of bankruptcy and past the point of being able to borrow money in some cases). It's hard to pin down the right analogy for copyright, since in some ways it's like the ECB, independent of the 'broader interest' and mostly concerned with their own wealth, so I guess that's the closest approximation, but the MPAA/RIAA alliances are more like the federal reserve system, where several of the vested players get together and decide how to try and value copyright, but not *all* the vested players.
The entire creative content industry exists in its current form because you can own the distribution rights to something that can be exchanged for money. If you can't own the distribution rights then you have to go back to charging for performances. That is sort of manageable for something like music, where radio and online would be advertising for concerts (although the experience of a concert is very different than the experience of listening to music in my office). It's not great, because a recording of a concert may be 'better' than going to the concert itself, but movies and games can't really be 'performed' as theatre. In those cases you only get paid because someone pays you for a copy of the work you did.
Moving drugs across a border for personal use is still moving them across a border illegally.
Being rich exposes you to much more volatility in your net worth, no doubt. But as you say, when you're rich you can handle the fluctuations better.
They've also seen huge wage growth proportionately in the last 30 years, and they had this bizare blip in average income from around 2000 -2002 which bounced way back up, so they may be back where they were in 2000 as a percent of total income, although with the general wage declines it's harder to know (note, that's on the chart I linked before, it's just kinda hard to see, the same figures seem to be http://acivilamericandebate.wordpress.com/2011/04/10/the-30-year-growth-of-income-inequality with a couple of other images).
Unfortunately I can't find figures for post 2007, which isn't a huge surprise.
Benefited from, and required are not the same thing. The SU survived without US help. It pushed back the other way *faster* because of US help, and the UK who traded destroyers for bases *benefited* from US help, but they would have survived without it. The Afrika Korps was doomed 6 months after the US entered the war, and was mostly a separate operation.
Don't get me wrong. The US helped, a even before it entered the war. But once the germans gave up on the air battle for britain, and once the failed at barbarossa it was a matter of rate, not eventuality. The US hastened germanies defeat, and significantly altered the manner of that defeat, but germany and italy were doomed. The british basically dealt with africa on its own, it was the invasion of france, the south pacific and the pace of buildup and mobility that lend lease gave the allies. Had it not been for lend lease we probably would have been looking at an invasion of france in 47 or something along those lines.
The aid to the soviet union came after they blunted the axis attack. From then on it was a matter of how many millions of people were going to die over how long a period. The UK is essentially the same, by the time the US was trading destroyers for bases the UK was capable, but the longer it dragged on the more likely it was that people would starve.
It's not like you can do a comprehensive analysis and say 'if the US didn't exists at all' because by virtue of existing at all it altered the play of the war. Resources that are easier to produce in the US (oil and trucks for example) were produced in the US rather than elsewhere. Would japan have launched an aggressive war if the Philippines still belonged to Spain? Does that sort of question even make sense? The fact that they were no longer getting oil from the US made the US involved, so you can't entirely decouple them. But if you crunch the numbers, the British empire and soviet union had the upper hand once the SU signed a non aggression pact with japan, after that it was all a matter of rate, and losses to get there.
Other than the richest 0.1% of the population who is seeing wage increases these days? It's called the wage productivity gap and basically, everyone who isn't running companies is getting screwed, it's not just engineers. The wealthiest 1%, 0.1% and 0.01% are getting wage increases sure (though more the top 0.1% than 1%, but anyway)
http://currydemocrats.org/in_perspective/american_pie.html from 2007 and obviously slightly biased but it has a couple of good figures on it. Pay since about 1988 has been significantly decoupling from productivity, and where has it been going? Right, not to the people at the bottom.
Therein lies the crux of all of the problem for people who aren't in the upper class in the US (and to a lesser extent everywhere else). If you worked more productively you would get more money, but not so much anymore, since someone else will work for less.
Engineering, and CS are still good programmes (yes, english spelling) to be in, since you still get more money than other fields generally. The other sciences are sort of a crap shoot, if you can't get a PhD, or can't get a technician job they're really bad to have done, but otherwise they can work out ok. The problem is that a construction worker with no education past highschool will make as much as a degree in biology or physics will during say, a post doc, and the scientists will have needed 10 years to get to that point, where the construction worker starts out close to that.
You can buy a company with stock. You don't need cash. And you don't need to buy all of it. If Yahoo is only worth 17 billion dollars then probably 5 billion dollars will get you a controlling interest. You'd need to buy from the right investors, but 2 billion in cash and 3 billion in facebook stock looks like a much better place to have your money than 5 billion dollars in yahoo right now.
This works the other way too. Yahoo will probably ask for 5% of facebook or the like. Suddenly that increases their value as a company to 22 billion dollars (assuming facebook sits at a 100 billion dollar valuation). If facebook tanks they're out the cost of some lawyers time, and if facebook suddenly becomes a 300 billion dollar company they will have doubled their own value.
5% is a made up number. It seems like it's big enough to convey they point, but small enough as to not sound absurd, but really, I have no idea what it should be.
Unlikely. The British empire combined with the SU would have defeated Germany and Italy. The issue is more the state of europe at the end of it all. One can reasonably presume the soviets would have been farther west and the british not as far east proportionately. But without the US the war might have taken a very different flavour, the british forming the southern or northern flanks of a combined operation, that sort of thing. Africa would have probably ended up basically the same, given that the British controlled the med and the surface of the atlantic by the time the US entered the war. Asia is a different mess, because the US and britain entered the war at the same time. I'm not sure the Japanese could have gone after the allies minus the US in quite so grandiose a way.
From the moment the germans failed to force the soviets to capitulate in barbarossa they were doomed (and that was about 3 weeks after the US entered the war, so not much the US did). How europe would have been carved up between the british and soviets would have been very different without the americans on the british side to be sure.
Besides that, it's sort of a nonsense statement. A lot has happened since 1945. 70 years before WW2 the world looked at germany as a beacon of political progress. Just because the US picked the right war 70 years ago doesn't mean it was right or wrong about anything in particular that has happened since. If you really want to air 70 year old dirty laundry why did the US do bugger all when their oldest friend was being marched over by the Nazi's? Right. Being right once doesn't make you always right.
Britain and france were on the right side of WW2 also, and what did that get them. Suez, Algeria, Vietnam etc. etc. aren't exactly beacons of justice, and the US has just as much dirty laundry post ww2 as they do.
Well and as I have learned the hard way lately, if it's going to cost 500k per year to run IT for a couple of hundred employee outfit when it's government money, someone will complain. When I did private sector stuff the biggest issue was downtime, a million dollars, no problem if that means good uptime. I used to go into insurance companies and banks at 4pm, the regular staff left at 5 -5:30, if it wasn't ready to go the next day by 8 or 9am you were in seriously trouble. In government it's all about how much money they have to explain to some jackass who wants to make political hay out of it.
The way I count it from http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/opinions/graphics/2006stafflistsalary.html the white house has about 400 employees. Figure 350k a year in desktop computers alone, for IT staff, another couple of hundred K in 'mobile' and accessory devices, ancillary office equipment you could easily be looking at 1.5 million or for just the non classified IT stuff. That isn't, in the grand scheme of things, a lot of money, but you have to know that whomever isn't in charge is going to want to curtail that spending, because it's 'wasteful'.
(how you count IT spending can vary wildly. When you're up into that many people you have a lot of dedicated IT staff in various sub groups who may or may not count towards the total and so on). On top of the mess that would be trying to deal with 400 spoiled brats who want everything their way (I'm sorry, executives who want to maximize their productivity), you have to try and plug into everything else in government and have the secured computers/networks as well. That isn't cheap.
The same applies to britannica though. If you're at the point where wikipedia isn't a valid reference, then no encyclopedia is really good enough, and if you just have teacher who doesn't get it, well, you have a teacher who doesn't get it. Happens with anything.
It may also be that people don't seem to get a lot of value for their training dollars, so don't want to invest in it. If you pay to train someone you may be paying them to leave (sad reality), and if you send someone to a course on networking they may come back without any more idea how to do whatever planning/redundancy/programming networking related problem you have to actually solve.
Most practical IT is a matter of learning to do background research. Find how this problem is solved, and do that. In my experience most IT training focus either on general principles which are so general as to be useless, or so specific as to only solve the immediate problem, and they don't prepare people for anything in the future. That isn't to say you can't train someone in IT properly, and maybe my experience has just been bad, but if that happens enough you get burned paying for it.
Besides, why invest in making people when you can just hire new people for less money, who already know what to do, and then fire them, and hire new people in a couple of years.
The only real SEO is paying google to make sure you're at the top of the list when your website shows up in a search query. Everything else is going to still put you below the people who are paying.
I gave a longer winded reply to the AC above you, but the same basic point applies. There's a huge difference between the fundamental research (which in just about every field is done in academia), and being able to bring that research to market with a consistent quality and properly informing the relevant people that it's available.
To somewhat over simplify. Drug companies do chemical engineering. Universities do chemistry and biochemistry.
The idea that only handful of truly important drugs have been brought to market recently sounds like talking point waffle as much as you're describing the other view as conservative cliff notes. How do you define important drugs, what's your time frame? Even if you are riding on a gut feeling that doesn't mean it's any more accurate than my impression that trying to build new drugs and failing is as important as trying to build new drugs and succeeding. If you knew in advance it would work it wouldn't be research.
1. Drugs don't do any good if doctors don't know they exist to prescribe them. When you are looking at thousands of drugs identified by archaic codes this is a legitimately serious issue. Nor is it relevant where 'most' of the money is spent. Every business spends money on marketing, you have to or you don't stay in business. Marketing in 200 countries, to hundreds of thousands of doctors pharmacies and health agencies is a very different problem than developing in one, and marketing is a problem you can throw bodies at, PhD level research in biochemistry is not. Apply your same test to electronics, cars, games anything. If you separate 'core' R&D from manufacturing R&D from manufacturing from marketing very quickly you start to see that advertising can easily take up a big chunk of a budget for anything, and easily the largest share in some cases. Get used to it.
2. Proof? Stats? Applicability to this particular drug? Manufacturing costs? Capacitive touch screens were probably developed in a lab somewhere, quite possibly a university lab, but there's a difference between spending 200K to make one screen with 4 grad students and a professor, and being able to manufacture 10 million of them a year for 100 dollars a pop with a 0.01% variation. Now apply that to a chemical at a consistent quantity and quality.
3. You can settle for a 50% pay cut while we're on the discussion of arbitrarily giving people too much money. Oh, 50% is too harsh? How's 75%? Ya, I'll stick to 75%, that feels like a good fair number for how much is too much money for you to make. Don't want to work for me anymore? That goes to:
4. And you're going to find people with that expertise? Sure, some indian or chinese company that doesn't care about IP will come and manufacture the drug, and they might be 'good enough'. Maybe the error in their concentrations is 0.1% whereas bayer it's 0.01 (or 3% and 1% or whatever the number happens to be), or maybe it's the same, and the costs of labour are just lower in India and China. So why don't we just have bayer move all of its drug manufacturing to india and china, screw the people who actually developed all the processes being copied in the first place.
Get real about making anything. Yes universities (including the one I'm at) do the fundamental chemistry research, that's a high risk business because for every 1 successful chemical there are a lot of people who make unsuccessful ones. But making one chemical is not the same as making a drug, or making sure it gets to market, or into patients in the right doeses.
That doesn't mean bayers price isn't too high either. As I say, we probably should be outsourcing all drug manufacturing to india and china, after all, if they can make it for 1/30th the price then we should fire everyone who makes drugs in western countries and move it overseas. Still liking this plan? Good, cause I am. You know how I offered you a 50% pay cut, but that didn't feel right, so I went with a 75% cut. Now I have a better offer for you. 90% pay cut, and you move to india, or you're out of work. That you just spent the last 20 years helping me optimize my manufacturing process is why I'm being generous at giving you a chance to keep your job at all.
"Development" isn't just figuring out how to make something in a lab. That's critical to the entire process, but from there you need to convert that into manufacturing at a consistent quality and quantity, convince people that it's worth using (or even experimenting with to try), and then maybe going from there. India is benefiting from Bayer having done all of the rest of the work that goes with the drug, and from buying or otherwise acquiring manufacturing techniques from someone else. Again, that doesn't mean the price of this particular drug isn't too high or too low, but spewing random talking points as though they connect with actually building a safe drug isn't helping anyone understand the difference between 'chemistry' and 'chemical engineering' essentially.
No, they just have security that is set to deal with it, whereas sony was, apparently, focused on state sponsored theft.
I suspect that ARM is going to be the 'gadget' line of windows and the IA64 stuff will remain the serious users. They may even have the same form factor, but even if it cost me 20% more, I would much rather my touchscreen tablet was a slate form factor (like an iPad or android), and ran the same OS for seamless integration, and the same deal on my phone.
I grant, they might be too late to the party. But I don't really see them losing the desktop market, and everything else exists only because it's attached to the desktop. so I'm not convinced Windows ARM is anything other than trying to keep intel on its toes and to produce a 6 year old computer in a cell phone.