Re:Such systems have been proposed before
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The Zuckerberg Tax
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· Score: 1
I dunno, if I got paid 21 million a year, paid 6 million in taxes I could probably manage to find a way, it might be tough sure, but I could work really hard to find a way to sock away 7 or 8 million a year. If I'm doing my job well those will, on average make 10% a year, give or take, and sure, that will help after a few years, I might be penny pinching a bit to live on only 7 or 8 million for just me and the family, but I could probably manage for a 15 years or so, and by then, assuming I had 0% ROI for my investing I'd have legitimately saved around 90 million dollars. Actually once you get to that point, the 401 reinvesting in itself will be basically self sustaining and you'll be able to take home even more so I won't be living like a pauper on 7 or 8 million a year.
Mitt has been a reasonably well paid consultant since the 1970's, and his father was a chairman and CEO of american motors, so I'm guessing he did alright for himself on inheritance as well as being paid for the last 35 years as a management executive of various sorts.
Now with 5 kids, assuming they split the inheritance equally you'll want to make sure they're not left so little it's not worth the probate fees on. So you need to figure he probably wants to give each kid, a little something, 70 mill each maybe. It's not a lot, but it'll help them out in life, let them buy a small company to loot and run into the ground, or buy into a company doing alright for itself and collect some dividends to go with whatever you can earn with, only 3 kids with MBA's from harvard, one a doctor and the other (younger than I am actually) still following his father's footsteps at BYU you never know if they're going to make it. You worry about these things with your kids and want to make sure you leave them a little something, just in case.
Re:Such systems have been proposed before
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The Zuckerberg Tax
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· Score: 1
First of all, because a rich person does use those services more. They access the legal system more, they have bigger homes, more threats to their security, especially if they're very rich or very public.
They also benefit more from the system. By a lot. It really is the overly technical stuff you tried to gloss over. Their workers benefit from better public eduction, which means they benefit from pubic education because they get a cut of everything their workers do. They benefit from public healthcare because it's money they don't need to spend. They benefit from better infrastructure because it gives their products more mobility, it lets them live in bigger houses farther from their places of business and still get there in a reasonable time. They have bigger properties, and more valuable ones, so when they get robbed it's a bigger deal and they cost police more to investigate those crimes. They benefit more from public insurance (old age security for example) because by collectivizing the risk they don't have to negotiate that with individual employees.
They also benefit, as i said, because the more poor people consume, the more stuff there is to sell them, and it's rich people who are selling them things (or paying the people who sell them things).
If you decrease taxes on the poor (which depending on where you are is actually very hard, right now we have a graduated system, so the poor pay little to no taxes already) you have to increase taxes on someone else to make up lost revenue. Much of the current deficit in the US is because people who lost their jobs moved from paying taxes to collecting unemployment, which is similar to being poor. They are now recipients of money from the government, not payers into it. The only way to make up for that missing money would be to tax the rich, or borrow from the rich. The US government has largely chosen the latter.
Even if you look at mitt romney's 15% tax rate discussed below by someone else. That's higher than someone making 35k a year, who would pay about 10% + FICA (which might put the two about even, I'm not sure if Romney pays fica or not, I'm not an american so these system is somewhat confusing to me, and well, I have my own system to worry about).
The system as you have it, is actually pretty good. One can quibble over numbers, and what should or should not be taxable, and that certainly as you say, pays a lot of lawyers. But in your 'flat tax' system, which would need to be somewhere around 20% to keep the fed humming along at its current rate, someone making less than 40K a year would actually end up with about 2000 dollars less buying power compared to their current 10.8% + 5.65% tax rate they pay (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_States). It's pretty much as you say, you start with a flat tax. Then you reduce taxes on the poor. Then you adjust the system to make sure you're always taking home more money the more you earn (the marginal tax system), then you look at who has the most income left over above poverty and you raise taxes on them to increase revenue. Now the US is looking at the fairly sophisticated problem, that the wealth gap is increasing (or the gini index is increase or the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, however you want to describe it). In that situation the US has mostly abandoned it's (admittedly fictional) claim to egalitarian ideals, and if you're born rich, you can stay rich, and if you're born poor it's really f'n hard to become rich. And there's no 'middle' class to aspire to progress into from the lower class. When you stated having this problem, along with the disconnect between revenue and outlays in spending you should have been looking at the rich (literally rich, like top 1% rich, or even top 0.1% rich) as having proportionately more income than they did 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago etc, and seeing that as a place you could tax more without negatively impacting their lives particularly. Of course how you tax more might be lawyers problem, is Mitt Romneys income really one type of pay or another? Should they all be counted the same?
My kid is doing ok in school doesn't tell you how the other 999 are doing, (or the other 20 in the class or whatever), it doesn't tell you average performance of students, it doesn't give you any sensible expectation value for your child.
Really, even amongst your friends. How many schools are they exposed to, and how do you do even a sortal analysis based on that info? Kids may only ever go to one or two public schools, and if you have multiple kids they usually end up at the same places. So how do they even know how one school compares to another? Even if you could get a parent for every school in the area you still only have one data point. None of which is statistically significant, which makes the whole idea a poor plan overall - unless you have no other assessment mechanism, which you might not. It's still not appreciably better than random, but at least you gave yourself the illusion of control so feel better about it appearing to be random.
Learning from an early age that workplaces are diverse in competencies, both at the worker, and managerial levels is hugely important. You learn that in a classroom. Recognizing what diversity means is something you get in a classroom, and recognizing that some people just get screwed by 'the man' so to speak is something you learn in a classroom. Learning to deal with good and bad coworkers, learning to identify them, learning to communicate with all of them is enormously important.
There's also a lot to be said for being taught what everyone else is, so you know what everyone else is taught, and so wherever you go that mommy and daddy can't hand hold you gets a certain known quantity. You can, and should augment what a child learns, and picking the learning environment (school) they go to is enormously influential in how much they get out of it, and their own sanity, that's just like finding a good job. I'd work just about anywhere that was willing to increase my salary by a factor of 5, but if you want to offer me a 500 dollar, or even 5000 dollar a year bump over what I currently have, it has to come with a work environment I'd enjoy more than where I am. And where I am lets me post on/. whenever I want.
I'll give an example from when I was in university. The first years had an 'enrichment' programme of some sort, where they pulled about 50 students out of a science student body of about 2000. In second year we all merged back up again. In my programme (physics) about a third of the class had been from this enrichment. So we get to our first set of assignments and exams, and it turns out, the kids in 'enrichment' had no f'n clue how to do a lot of things the rest of us had been taught. It wasn't 'hard' it just wasn't taught to them, so they didn't know. And they didn't know they didn't know. And now the university was stuck trying to run our programme with a major portion of the class being unprepared for somethings and super well prepared for others (as we discovered later, they'd done a lot more set theory, and ODE's than we had in the regular programme). Which just hurt the education experience for everyone. That's homeschooling. It matters a lot in life that you have a similar background to everyone else, you can augment that on your own, but if kids in public school learn history of slavery as an exercise in human cruelty, whereas a homeschooled kid goes through the technicalities of dred vs scott, the kansas -nebraska act and abolition and the banning of the slave trade in the UK and how it impacted the US, you're getting a very different take on the same thing. And it's really important when communicating with other people to know what they know and try and frame things in a way they would understand. Which on/. is impossible, but in the real world you have to deal with people around you.
Both the US and Canada would be much better served with single federal coherent standards for what is to be covered in schools. That is enormously unpopular is some circles, and I see why. But those kids go to universities and colleges after they finish public education largely. It's hard enough managing students from all over the bloody world, but when we can't count on students from within canada (or within the US if you're there) to all have a reasonably consistent experience you're just wasting time and money getting them all on the same page. And it's a lot of time and a lot of money that could be spent on things that might be productive. Being homeschooled is like intentionally making everything else in life a little bit harder for yourself. If you're stuck in an isolated community, or if your school system largely teaches things which are 'not intended to be a factual statement' well then you may have to give up and homeschool. But that's a sad commentary on the state of education if it has come to that.
I may not have been clear, if so, I apologize. The average german factory worker is up around 44 USD/hour, the average US factory worker closer to 20. With different union and overtime rules, it works out to germans getting paid about 2x as much as their before tax pay.
Re:Such systems have been proposed before
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The Zuckerberg Tax
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· Score: 2, Insightful
There's nothing particularly wrong with taxing wealth rather than income theoretically.
Heck yes there is. It punishes people for saving and investing. It's only marginally less lousy than punishing people for making money in the first place. The correct avenue is to tax consumption.
Factually incorrect. You have no idea what rate you such taxes on wealth would be at, and neither do I, because we don't do it. It can neither reward nor punish unless you put numbers on it. And I'm making a purely theoretical argument, I haven't the time or inclination to try and figure out how to put numbers on it, because it would be a fairly difficult stats problem with a lot of assumptions we'd have to agree one (like what you want to the total income to be or the like), and I'm not sure Canada or the US keep track of all of the relevant statistics publicly, the UK probably does, but I don't know about anyone else. Consumption taxes (sales taxes for example) take higher percentages from people who can't save, and have to spend all of their money for their lifestyle. That's why income taxes are preferable. Rich people like consumption taxes because as a percentage of their income they spend less than poor people, who spend all of it, the net effect being that they are taxed at a lower rate. This is why consumption taxes are on average the least 'economically damaging' (to use the right wing babble), rich people keep more money and have more to spend, so on average it looks like people have more money at the end of the taxation. You've just reduced the consumption possible by the poor but whatever your tax rate is, and not appreciably changed the lifestyle of the rich.
In effect our current graduated income tax systems are taxes based on what wealth bracket you are in. How many tiers and how sliding you want the scale to be is a fairly technical discussion. It's basically a half step towards taxing wealth, based on the idea that if you're in the top quartile of income earners you're probably in the top something of wealth holders (and I don't know what the something is, I'd have to look it up, the top quartile of wage earners are not the top quartile of wealth holders though).
As with everything, what tax rates should be is a matter of degree. If the wealthiest 10% control 50% of the wealth you could tax their income at 50%, and the bottom 90% at 10% for example. Or you could tax the wealthiest 10% at 90%, and the bottom 90% at 10%. Those would have two very different outcomes, and one is a decidedly bad idea. The conservative talking point of 'everyone should pay something' does not actually get you a whole lot, since a lot of people don't have much to pay, so even if you tax them, you get very little money on the scale of things, and you just reduce their lifestyle.
Re:Such systems have been proposed before
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The Zuckerberg Tax
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· Score: 1
Judging the value of stock options is actually trivial. They're an option to buy at a price, if that price is different then the current share price then you are being handed free money. The fact that the option may not be until 5 years from now doesn't matter. To use the above example of a bag of seeds, the bag of seeds will be worth a hell of a lot more if it grows into something, and a hell of a lot less if it gets eaten by birds. But right now it is valued as seeds. Whatever its future value (or loss) is, you can tax or credit accordingly when the time comes.
Re:Such systems have been proposed before
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The Zuckerberg Tax
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Right, but seeds still have some value. So you tax at the value of the seeds. This doesn't seem like a difficult concept. If the seeds go up in value by the time you sell them, well, then then you tax the gains separately. But being handed a bag of seeds from your employer, even if you aren't are farmer, the seeds still have value.
The idea, as you relay, was to ditch options as a primary means of compensation for normal employees. If you want stock, get stock, but it's just like getting paid at the moment it is given to you, it just happens to be in stock. In other words: Pay cash.
Re:Such systems have been proposed before
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The Zuckerberg Tax
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· Score: 3, Insightful
In canada we have a system of taxing stock options based on when the option was granted. There are also capital gains separately, but the option is considered to have real value. It's like giving someone a car as compensation, the car is taxed at the value of the car when given, and if it goes up or down later that's a separate issue. If it has value now, it is a taxable benefit, whether that's a personal driver, personal use of a company car etc. So it can be taxed.
Usually this isn't a problem. Unless the stock nose dives before the end of the year, then you have to pay tax on something worth nothing, but that you have nothing to back it up with. It makes lots of people unhappy when these things do happen.
There's nothing particularly wrong with taxing wealth rather than income theoretically. That's certainly something governments could do. But in the west we don't, we tax income. It is managerially easier, because you don't have to deal with house prices rising or falling every year, assessing house prices, car prices etc. Judging the value of someone's assets is actually quite hard, especially if they don't have much, because then you have to really precisely measure stuff or you end up with a very uneven system that could unfairly screw people differently.
Well how else are they going to get money to pay for all of the things that will help them live better lives, like education and electrical power? We could have delayed the process indefinitely, but now that it's in motion there's nothing we can do about it. They are either slaves to making cheap stuff for a generation or slaves to the fields for generations. Take your pick.
You can't just magically pay them more than they're worth and have it work out well. As the west germans how well that's been working with east germany. A subsistence farmer working in a factory is basically worth what a robot is. If you build a robot the subsistence farmer stays a subsistence farmer, and his children stay subsistence farmers because there's no money for a school even if they wanted them to attend. If you use the profit you make from his labour (taken via taxes) to fund a massive school/infrastructure/health programme his children will live a life like ours. That's really all you can do. You can't magically create industries when there are none, and no people with the skill to work them. We've tried educating places before, but without a critical mass of domestic work they just leave.
That would be true if you were comparing the US to other civilized countries. It doesn't really work in somewhere like china. First of all you need to look at nominal GDP, not PPP. A chinese worker is equivalent to 1/6th of a US worker on PPP, is paid half of the 10k US figure. (The conversion between nominal and PPP for china is a factor of 2, for the US it is 1. ) The factor of 2 is entirely coincidental.
And those are averages. It's like saying the average worker in the US gets 50k a year. But remember Missouri is only 36k. There are parts of china that are doing very very well for themselves (and india as well), where you can get salaries and have jobs competitive with the US. Wealth distribution plays a big part of things. The chinese (like most 3rd world countries) have a handful of very rich, and a large swathe of very poor. And there's still a huge untapped supply of very poor who will keep some of those prices down (which was my point).
The 'base' salary at a foxconn factory in 2010 before all the suicides made the press was RMB 950/month, which is 140 USD. With overtime etc lots of employees were up at 2000 RMB. Which is about 280 USD a month. Which is what, 1.75/hour. That's about a 10th of what a factory worker in the US would get, not including overtime, and about half of what someone in germany would get. So my factor of 20 was 'excluding overtime' you want one employee for a month, in china it's 140 bucks, give or take, and in the US it's more like 3k. The US figure in the article you quoted is 26/hour, with 20%/year raises + yuan + lack of productivity they will get as caught up as they can be at some point.
Sure, if you want to design a solar panel, china is going to be comparable to the US. But if you want to manufacture stuff, and you're willing to not go with a premium supplier and employer like foxconn, you can get a lot cheaper than that. Which is the problem. It's like comparing the average CS salary in china to that of only Google, MS, Amazon and Facebook employees. You'd seriously skew the results, and foxconn is on the scale of things actually pretty good.
But as I said, and as the article you link says, they're driving prices up. Whether that cross over point is 2015, 2020, 2025 or whatever we're arguing precise numerical stats, not broad principles. As I said, there's a lost generation or two of chinese workers who will be simply unable to get good wages, with no education and no chance of getting a better one. And then suddenly this huge crop of people they've been educating for years and we've been educating will start to dominate the work force and the whole place will look a lot more like the rest of us. Which was the point of free trade, and good for everyone in the long run.
For italy and germany this process of convergence happened over relatively short time scale. The germans during the korean war and the italians during the 50's and 60's. But they had a degree of undervaluation due to being flattened in WW2, whereas china is actually building up from scratch.
The short answer is no to both. You couldn't actually manufacture most of the components for electronic equipment in the civilized world any more, because the whole supply chains are in china, and your price would skyrocket because the difference in labour costs is a factor of 20 or so. Sure, when you talk about foxconn assembly that's a small portion of the total cost of an iPhone, but if you talk about every component doing that, it would be a nightmare.
Second of all, the point of free trade is to drive costs up in other countries, that necessarily means they will have a competitive advantage for a while, but in the long run they will be a market. Does anyone think anyone making 50 cents an hour as a labourer in the 3rd world will ever buy a 500 dollar phone? Right, they can't. Ever. They're lucky to have clean drinking water. So if you ever want to sell them cars, computers, phones, airplanes or whatever they need to earn more money.
What will have to happen is that labourers in china will stop working for a pittance and start demanding a lot more money, that might mean mass strikes or it might mean an honest effort to pay people more money. That's a long process though. But, it's what happened in Japan, Italy, Taiwan, Korea, to a lesser extent Germany and a few 'eastern bloc' countries, and I'm only talking about since the end of WW2. The problem is that right now at least in china, if a million workers go on strike there are a million more to replace them, and no union protection for the ones on strike. Oh and because they went on strike no one else will give them jobs ever either.
You may think it's bad to work a 12 year old kid for 16 hours a day. but 30 years ago he would never have gone to school, and been working 16 hours a day on a farm from the time he was able to contribute, and he might have still starved. At least in the factory there is a chance of his lifestyle improving and he probably won't starve. That doesn't make it good, or right, but the sad reality is that progress requires people shift from the fields to factories, and it's up to them and their country to demand they get treated fairly. We can complain all we want to china, but they have us by the balls, and both parties know it. If we demand they do anything they don't like, they claw back on something we need (be it rare earths or just 'lose' export licences for things people want). And in general in china they have been working very hard at least in the last 30 years to educate their youth, and to get them prepared to be modern knowledge workers etc. They train more engineers than in the US, (about the same per capita), and most of the advanced degrees in anything useful in the 'west' are going to foreigners, probably about a third of which are chinese. There's probably a lost generation or two there, of people who are going to be exploited because they have no education, no skills and no way to get those things. But a huge portion of chinese kids growing up today will grow up into education and work very much like we have in the west, if not exactly like in the west because they're hiring western teachers to teach western curriculum's. Progress isn't perfect, and it would be nice to do better, but on the scale of things china is doing a half decent job. Which is sort of the same commentary in the article about apple. It could be better, but it could be worse too. And they're doing all of those things because we're paying them 4 dollars a day to make a tv, rather than paying them nothing as subsistence farmers, or worse, what we actually did to china, which was drugging them up on opium for most of a century.
The advantage of online dating is you can immediately cull from your search anyone you don't want. If you don't want someone with brown hair, or you absolutely must have someone who wears a monocle during sex I'm sure the internet will help you find that. If you can find someone who will meet your criteria that's great, if not it simply exacerbates the problem since your search parameters are unrealistic. Online will provide you an infinite stream of people of people who meet whatever random criteria. Not necessarily from the same site however.
But if you search for the wrong things, you get junk. If you are sufficiently self aware to know what you really actually want, and are willing to give up, and articulate enough to convey it, online can work exceptionally well. For most of us that isn't realistic though.
agreed, the last place I was had a 4 PS3 cluster going, which afaik is still running 4 years later. At this point it isn't a 'computing' project it's an astrophysics data project. But it's still crunching numbers.
The reason it is illegal is because the product is advertised to have these features, and more we'll add later. Removing a feature (especially in this case, a major one) is actually fairly serious.
Now I'm sure Sony knew exactly what percent of users ever actually used their other OS, and if they were using it for piracy. If they thought people were using it they wouldn't have removed it probably.
Unlikely, consoles will become dumb terminals to an onlive service eventually, or it will be a software layer you run on PC sure, but then you're into a whole different architecture. I'm not sure who you're talking about 'you guys' at? Yes I'm a graphics and AI programmer, but I don't run the industry. Having to build for 6 or 7 different targets is a bloody pain in the arse (and the windows version is really multiple platforms at at once). Where do I get 6 or 7 from? Even if it's a different game I want to reuse as much code as possible in each game, so I might be building on 4 consoles (PS3, Xbox2, Wii, Wii U) handhelds (PSP, PSP2, DS), and PC. But of course most shops aren't developing on all of those at once, and you will probably have dropped development for the Wii and PSP by now, but not necessarily both. If you wanted to make it into a PC it would have to *be* a PC, with all of the perils that come with that, and the article in general is about what would happen if you could upgrade consoles as we think of them today. Right now I have 900 mb of RAM being used, 688 by Opera and 212 by my media player because it's busy doing something to the TV show it just recorded. Steam is, for some reason using 90 MB of memory, I'm not really sure what it's doing that takes up that much space (it's not downloading anything). So wait, how much memory do I have to use again? Well this machine has 12 gigs of ram. So 10 gigs probably. I can count on that much on every PC right? Lol. I can't even count on 1 GB of ram on a PC. Sure, the OS can page stuff out, but now I have much trickier performance requirements. Do I show load screens all the time? How do I 'wait' for that memory to get there? These are all solvable (and solved problems), so I'm not saying it's impossible, it's just a lot less efficient. Easier to program for in some ways, but when I know precisely how much memory I have, how fast it is etc. I can do a lot more with it than just dumping some stuff in an unknown data structure in video memory that will hopefully optimize itself. Now you will always be able to make this argument. Specialized software to solve a specific set of problems, with clearly defined constraints and specific hardware can always be more efficiently used than a general purpose machine, that's sort of the point of specializing it. A sedan is never going to be a truck, no matter how much you do to increase it's carrying capacity. That doesn't mean specialization is great, it would be preferable if we could do all of our computing on one box, but well, it would be an expensive and difficult to manage box at the moment.
It really isn't as simple as you're making it out to be unfortunately. A good abstraction layer works because when you build for a particular console you know it will behave one way, another console another, and then the PC is a mess. The abstraction layer hides the implementation of those optimizations from other parts of the system, but they're still there. The PC has its advantages of course (a crapload of memory, sometimes extremely powerful CPU's and GPU's), but it's still a mess. It's exactly as you say, you write a driver and a universal driver that interfaces with abstraction through to the hardware. that's called directx and openGl basically (and the windows graphics subsystem). And they're very much less memory efficient compared to what you can get on crappier hardware on consoles assuming you write the code yourself well.
Jason Gregory (of Naughty Dog) actually has a book on "Game Engine Architecture" that covers a bit of this stuff. Sony has its own custom library rather than OpenGl for a reason. Specifically, for the PS3 libgcm http://www.ps3devwiki.com/files/documents/-%20SONY%20PS3%20SDK%20Documentation/graphics/libgcm-Overview_e.pdf and What sony calls "Edge" developed by their various tech groups. I'm not sure if there's something newer as well.
It's not just drivers, actually drivers isn't really a problem. Keeping them updated, that's really a separate probl
Actually, as the summary talks about, programming for PC's and for consoles is very very different in some aspects. You can do a lot of stuff with a console you just can't on a PC because you know precisely what resources you have, where they are, and how fast they will be. The PS3 actually has custom libraries from Sony/Naughty Dog that are similar but different from openGl precisely because OpenGl would be too slow for the PS3 if you can avoid it. If you started allowing different GPU's you'd have to move to something like directx. Which is a good concept for 200 or so different video card models, but it's not worth the efficiency loss if you'd only ever have say, 4. Directx (and openGl) manage a lot of the GPU memory system stuff for you. That's easy, but it can be very inefficient, which is why a video card with 1 gig of memory does about as well as a PS3 or 360 with shared 512. Now directx and opengl (and the GDI layer in general on windows) have to account for the arbitrary nature of what might also be in video memory at the time. Right now I have two web browsers, some office applications I left open, a game, and steam all doing stuff that might take up memory. That's actually a really tough problem to manage in general, which is why consoles can do some awesome stuff with less, because you know exactly how much memory you get. When you could lock down a full screen application in windows and boot everything else out it was easier (but not easier on users and had its own complications).
In short. Your point 1 is wrong. If it supports windows it has to support general program environments and random crap hanging out in the desktop. Windows is a productivity OS (despite what people may think) and you can use a stripped down version of the kernel, but the actual OS as sold does a lot of stuff you definitely would not want in a memory constrained environment, like layers of stuff on the desktop etc.
And yes, the idea with windows 8 is to have a unified environment to execute phone or desktop code. Same OS, different skin. Now if then get intel into a 3 way with nokia they will have one hell of a product on their hands.
The point was to be able to circumvent import rules on game consoles rather than computers. Officially it was something like "playstation computer entertainment system". Sony was saying 'look it even runs linux like a regular computer!'. That tack of course did not work.
The main users of linux on PS3's were research and development places that were buying PS3's, at a subsidized rate, but then never buying games. Which was just costing sony money.
Now, as a practical matter they shouldn't be allowed to remove the functionality from the device once sold. That's illegal, but they also shouldn't feel any obligation to offer further PS3's with linux support because as you say, it's a non market, and their "the PS3 is really a computer" didn't pan out.
Not that I would disagree with that notion for any republican country, but it's a pretty dim view of representative democracy to think that government is necessarily going to do bad things to you because it can. But even if you accept your premise you're into a world of few options on what to do about it, which isn't all that constructive either.
Either government can try and help ensure honest reliable delivery of critical services, or it can leave it alone. In one world view government is being bought by bad people to enable bad things, in another world view without government the bad people would just do bad things. And in a world where terrorists hold up in hotel and start murdering people and your government can't listen in on their conversations because those servers are so secure (and located out of your jurisdiction) you sometimes make less than ideal choices.
By definition any effort to stop, prevent, or punish criminal activity will in some way violate a degree of freedom that people otherwise might have. You can layer on caveats about 'due process' and all that, but the public isn't served by never being able to catch criminals or keep infrastructure running. We can agree (or disagree) on specific provisions of how they go about that, but they certainly can and should be doing things to ensure reliable critical infrastructure.
which doesn't mean ensuring other people aren't getting in isn't a good idea. Demanding AT&T prevent eveasdropping on other peoples phone calls, and then demanding they have a secret room where the NSA can monitor all traffic are two separate parts. One is good. One is bad. Naturally, when dealing with politicians you will always get some good, and some bad together.
That's pretty much how lots of other businesses work. Your product will have to meet some sort of standards board approved set of metrics, and then you advertise that when you sell it.
You shouldn't be able to buy electrical equipment that doesn't meet standards (I'm not 100% sure what those are in the US), and you shouldn't be able to install equipment that didn't meet those standards in a building. At least for legal compliance. The same applies to telecoms equipment, medical equipment etc. Regulatory compliance is just the cost of doing business.
Alternately, you could require insurance against breaches/damages something along those lines. In that situation insurance companies come up with the standards everyone needs to follow, they form a giant lobby and it becomes not much different than the government doing it. If you want insurance you meet these criteria, or you can't afford insurance.
The selling of aggregate user data is their biggest weakness. They've been able to get away with a lot of stuff to this point because they were small enough (or the amounts of money were small enough) regulators didn't notice or didn't care. They may run into a lot of hurdles from regulators in every country moving to demand privacy controls.
There are lots of other ways to make money, I was attempting to be illustrative, not a market analyst or facebook executive. If I worked there I'd be looking to cash out and GTFO asap. I'd be very wary of anything they do trying to make money suddenly drawing the ire of regulators and getting things like your employees arrested in despotic countries or your whole revenue stream shut down from sensible ones.
I was thinking 'total internet users' being counted multiple times. As facebook becomes more commercial I would expect to see more people with multiple accounts as well (professional and personal sort of thing).
A lot of people who taped taped religiously though. It meant people could watch a daytime only show while going to work. People from that age group are generally baffled by DVR's though, and any of the rest of the technology I take for granted.
Trying to explain to someone in their late 70's how to record with the 'push of a button' (ya right...) on one box, that they may or may not be able to access in another room on a different TV is not trivial. So I still see a lot of people with VCR's and stacks of fresh VHS tapes from a few years ago because they can't figure out modern technology. The analogue to digital conversion hurt these users a lot because a lot of VHS players won't behave the same way with their converters and they can't get their shows the way they want.
Any IPO is based on projected future revenue. I've said other places, facebook with 800 million users is running out of users that will generate much money, and it's hard to know how much money they can get per users. Sure, there are a couple of billion people in africa, india and china that don't have facebook, but selling seeds for pennies to them isn't really advertising revenue of much value. Then there's the very young and very old, who as a demographic won't ever have facebook pages. Lets say, for sake of argument they get up to 1 billion users, that would be half of total internet users, and some of those are going to be counted multiple times (phones, and computers and home and office for example). So they're getting 4 dollars per user right now, give or take (remember they did grow by a couple of hundred million users in the last year so it's hard to get an exact number). From a billion users there's not much more room 'up'. That's most of the youth of north america, the EU, south america, japan, australia, that sort of thing, and all the rich kids from the rest of the world. But they're valuing at 100 billion, which is say 100 dollars per person. That's a bit of a stretch from their current value *but* and it's a big but, what do they intend to do with the 5 billion dollars in cash they're asking for?
Think about what services they could integrate into facebook that could generate a crap load of revenue. VOIP chat, TV and movie rental that sort of thing, music streaming, search, they could just use their backend technology to help deliver a cloud type service to other companies that would generate revenue etc. Suddenly there are a whole lot of options for things that *could* generate money. Google only has about 1 billion users themselves (2 billion internet users total, google has 65% of the search market which might be that google users search more than non google users or something, their unique visitors per month peaked in may 2011 at just over 1 billion), and they are generating 38 billion dollars a year in total revenue. Now, admittedly, google is a different baby. If I'm looking for a plumber advertising plumbing services where I'm looking is a good idea. If I'm trying to find out where this years christmas party for my GF's family is, probably I'm a lot harder to target ads at.
So that's the point of an IPO, they need cash to grow the business, hopefully into things that will make money. Whether or not they can justify 100 billion dollars as a market cap is anyone's guess, but that's probably also priced based on the fact that there have been a lot of private sales of facebook shares since they waited so long to go public (in other words the typical fervor of future value is already priced in at that level). And even then, assuming they don't implode (which with their relatively healthy, i.e. profitable, balance sheet) they can still do well if the stock dives a bit. 4 billion dollars a year in revenue when your only revenue is sketchy ads and 'facebook points' (which mostly go to 3rd parties) seems like they have a lot of room to grow.
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I dunno, if I got paid 21 million a year, paid 6 million in taxes I could probably manage to find a way, it might be tough sure, but I could work really hard to find a way to sock away 7 or 8 million a year. If I'm doing my job well those will, on average make 10% a year, give or take, and sure, that will help after a few years, I might be penny pinching a bit to live on only 7 or 8 million for just me and the family, but I could probably manage for a 15 years or so, and by then, assuming I had 0% ROI for my investing I'd have legitimately saved around 90 million dollars. Actually once you get to that point, the 401 reinvesting in itself will be basically self sustaining and you'll be able to take home even more so I won't be living like a pauper on 7 or 8 million a year.
Mitt has been a reasonably well paid consultant since the 1970's, and his father was a chairman and CEO of american motors, so I'm guessing he did alright for himself on inheritance as well as being paid for the last 35 years as a management executive of various sorts.
Now with 5 kids, assuming they split the inheritance equally you'll want to make sure they're not left so little it's not worth the probate fees on. So you need to figure he probably wants to give each kid, a little something, 70 mill each maybe. It's not a lot, but it'll help them out in life, let them buy a small company to loot and run into the ground, or buy into a company doing alright for itself and collect some dividends to go with whatever you can earn with, only 3 kids with MBA's from harvard, one a doctor and the other (younger than I am actually) still following his father's footsteps at BYU you never know if they're going to make it. You worry about these things with your kids and want to make sure you leave them a little something, just in case.
First of all, because a rich person does use those services more. They access the legal system more, they have bigger homes, more threats to their security, especially if they're very rich or very public.
They also benefit more from the system. By a lot. It really is the overly technical stuff you tried to gloss over. Their workers benefit from better public eduction, which means they benefit from pubic education because they get a cut of everything their workers do. They benefit from public healthcare because it's money they don't need to spend. They benefit from better infrastructure because it gives their products more mobility, it lets them live in bigger houses farther from their places of business and still get there in a reasonable time. They have bigger properties, and more valuable ones, so when they get robbed it's a bigger deal and they cost police more to investigate those crimes. They benefit more from public insurance (old age security for example) because by collectivizing the risk they don't have to negotiate that with individual employees.
They also benefit, as i said, because the more poor people consume, the more stuff there is to sell them, and it's rich people who are selling them things (or paying the people who sell them things).
If you decrease taxes on the poor (which depending on where you are is actually very hard, right now we have a graduated system, so the poor pay little to no taxes already) you have to increase taxes on someone else to make up lost revenue. Much of the current deficit in the US is because people who lost their jobs moved from paying taxes to collecting unemployment, which is similar to being poor. They are now recipients of money from the government, not payers into it. The only way to make up for that missing money would be to tax the rich, or borrow from the rich. The US government has largely chosen the latter.
Even if you look at mitt romney's 15% tax rate discussed below by someone else. That's higher than someone making 35k a year, who would pay about 10% + FICA (which might put the two about even, I'm not sure if Romney pays fica or not, I'm not an american so these system is somewhat confusing to me, and well, I have my own system to worry about).
The system as you have it, is actually pretty good. One can quibble over numbers, and what should or should not be taxable, and that certainly as you say, pays a lot of lawyers. But in your 'flat tax' system, which would need to be somewhere around 20% to keep the fed humming along at its current rate, someone making less than 40K a year would actually end up with about 2000 dollars less buying power compared to their current 10.8% + 5.65% tax rate they pay (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_States). It's pretty much as you say, you start with a flat tax. Then you reduce taxes on the poor. Then you adjust the system to make sure you're always taking home more money the more you earn (the marginal tax system), then you look at who has the most income left over above poverty and you raise taxes on them to increase revenue. Now the US is looking at the fairly sophisticated problem, that the wealth gap is increasing (or the gini index is increase or the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, however you want to describe it). In that situation the US has mostly abandoned it's (admittedly fictional) claim to egalitarian ideals, and if you're born rich, you can stay rich, and if you're born poor it's really f'n hard to become rich. And there's no 'middle' class to aspire to progress into from the lower class. When you stated having this problem, along with the disconnect between revenue and outlays in spending you should have been looking at the rich (literally rich, like top 1% rich, or even top 0.1% rich) as having proportionately more income than they did 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago etc, and seeing that as a place you could tax more without negatively impacting their lives particularly. Of course how you tax more might be lawyers problem, is Mitt Romneys income really one type of pay or another? Should they all be counted the same?
Which is a very small sample size.
My kid is doing ok in school doesn't tell you how the other 999 are doing, (or the other 20 in the class or whatever), it doesn't tell you average performance of students, it doesn't give you any sensible expectation value for your child.
Really, even amongst your friends. How many schools are they exposed to, and how do you do even a sortal analysis based on that info? Kids may only ever go to one or two public schools, and if you have multiple kids they usually end up at the same places. So how do they even know how one school compares to another? Even if you could get a parent for every school in the area you still only have one data point. None of which is statistically significant, which makes the whole idea a poor plan overall - unless you have no other assessment mechanism, which you might not. It's still not appreciably better than random, but at least you gave yourself the illusion of control so feel better about it appearing to be random.
Learning from an early age that workplaces are diverse in competencies, both at the worker, and managerial levels is hugely important. You learn that in a classroom. Recognizing what diversity means is something you get in a classroom, and recognizing that some people just get screwed by 'the man' so to speak is something you learn in a classroom. Learning to deal with good and bad coworkers, learning to identify them, learning to communicate with all of them is enormously important.
There's also a lot to be said for being taught what everyone else is, so you know what everyone else is taught, and so wherever you go that mommy and daddy can't hand hold you gets a certain known quantity. You can, and should augment what a child learns, and picking the learning environment (school) they go to is enormously influential in how much they get out of it, and their own sanity, that's just like finding a good job. I'd work just about anywhere that was willing to increase my salary by a factor of 5, but if you want to offer me a 500 dollar, or even 5000 dollar a year bump over what I currently have, it has to come with a work environment I'd enjoy more than where I am. And where I am lets me post on /. whenever I want.
I'll give an example from when I was in university. The first years had an 'enrichment' programme of some sort, where they pulled about 50 students out of a science student body of about 2000. In second year we all merged back up again. In my programme (physics) about a third of the class had been from this enrichment. So we get to our first set of assignments and exams, and it turns out, the kids in 'enrichment' had no f'n clue how to do a lot of things the rest of us had been taught. It wasn't 'hard' it just wasn't taught to them, so they didn't know. And they didn't know they didn't know. And now the university was stuck trying to run our programme with a major portion of the class being unprepared for somethings and super well prepared for others (as we discovered later, they'd done a lot more set theory, and ODE's than we had in the regular programme). Which just hurt the education experience for everyone. That's homeschooling. It matters a lot in life that you have a similar background to everyone else, you can augment that on your own, but if kids in public school learn history of slavery as an exercise in human cruelty, whereas a homeschooled kid goes through the technicalities of dred vs scott, the kansas -nebraska act and abolition and the banning of the slave trade in the UK and how it impacted the US, you're getting a very different take on the same thing. And it's really important when communicating with other people to know what they know and try and frame things in a way they would understand. Which on /. is impossible, but in the real world you have to deal with people around you.
Both the US and Canada would be much better served with single federal coherent standards for what is to be covered in schools. That is enormously unpopular is some circles, and I see why. But those kids go to universities and colleges after they finish public education largely. It's hard enough managing students from all over the bloody world, but when we can't count on students from within canada (or within the US if you're there) to all have a reasonably consistent experience you're just wasting time and money getting them all on the same page. And it's a lot of time and a lot of money that could be spent on things that might be productive. Being homeschooled is like intentionally making everything else in life a little bit harder for yourself. If you're stuck in an isolated community, or if your school system largely teaches things which are 'not intended to be a factual statement' well then you may have to give up and homeschool. But that's a sad commentary on the state of education if it has come to that.
I may not have been clear, if so, I apologize. The average german factory worker is up around 44 USD/hour, the average US factory worker closer to 20. With different union and overtime rules, it works out to germans getting paid about 2x as much as their before tax pay.
There's nothing particularly wrong with taxing wealth rather than income theoretically.
Heck yes there is. It punishes people for saving and investing. It's only marginally less lousy than punishing people for making money in the first place. The correct avenue is to tax consumption.
Factually incorrect. You have no idea what rate you such taxes on wealth would be at, and neither do I, because we don't do it. It can neither reward nor punish unless you put numbers on it. And I'm making a purely theoretical argument, I haven't the time or inclination to try and figure out how to put numbers on it, because it would be a fairly difficult stats problem with a lot of assumptions we'd have to agree one (like what you want to the total income to be or the like), and I'm not sure Canada or the US keep track of all of the relevant statistics publicly, the UK probably does, but I don't know about anyone else. Consumption taxes (sales taxes for example) take higher percentages from people who can't save, and have to spend all of their money for their lifestyle. That's why income taxes are preferable. Rich people like consumption taxes because as a percentage of their income they spend less than poor people, who spend all of it, the net effect being that they are taxed at a lower rate. This is why consumption taxes are on average the least 'economically damaging' (to use the right wing babble), rich people keep more money and have more to spend, so on average it looks like people have more money at the end of the taxation. You've just reduced the consumption possible by the poor but whatever your tax rate is, and not appreciably changed the lifestyle of the rich.
In effect our current graduated income tax systems are taxes based on what wealth bracket you are in. How many tiers and how sliding you want the scale to be is a fairly technical discussion. It's basically a half step towards taxing wealth, based on the idea that if you're in the top quartile of income earners you're probably in the top something of wealth holders (and I don't know what the something is, I'd have to look it up, the top quartile of wage earners are not the top quartile of wealth holders though).
As with everything, what tax rates should be is a matter of degree. If the wealthiest 10% control 50% of the wealth you could tax their income at 50%, and the bottom 90% at 10% for example. Or you could tax the wealthiest 10% at 90%, and the bottom 90% at 10%. Those would have two very different outcomes, and one is a decidedly bad idea. The conservative talking point of 'everyone should pay something' does not actually get you a whole lot, since a lot of people don't have much to pay, so even if you tax them, you get very little money on the scale of things, and you just reduce their lifestyle.
Judging the value of stock options is actually trivial. They're an option to buy at a price, if that price is different then the current share price then you are being handed free money. The fact that the option may not be until 5 years from now doesn't matter. To use the above example of a bag of seeds, the bag of seeds will be worth a hell of a lot more if it grows into something, and a hell of a lot less if it gets eaten by birds. But right now it is valued as seeds. Whatever its future value (or loss) is, you can tax or credit accordingly when the time comes.
Right, but seeds still have some value. So you tax at the value of the seeds. This doesn't seem like a difficult concept. If the seeds go up in value by the time you sell them, well, then then you tax the gains separately. But being handed a bag of seeds from your employer, even if you aren't are farmer, the seeds still have value.
The idea, as you relay, was to ditch options as a primary means of compensation for normal employees. If you want stock, get stock, but it's just like getting paid at the moment it is given to you, it just happens to be in stock. In other words: Pay cash.
In canada we have a system of taxing stock options based on when the option was granted. There are also capital gains separately, but the option is considered to have real value. It's like giving someone a car as compensation, the car is taxed at the value of the car when given, and if it goes up or down later that's a separate issue. If it has value now, it is a taxable benefit, whether that's a personal driver, personal use of a company car etc. So it can be taxed.
Usually this isn't a problem. Unless the stock nose dives before the end of the year, then you have to pay tax on something worth nothing, but that you have nothing to back it up with. It makes lots of people unhappy when these things do happen.
There's nothing particularly wrong with taxing wealth rather than income theoretically. That's certainly something governments could do. But in the west we don't, we tax income. It is managerially easier, because you don't have to deal with house prices rising or falling every year, assessing house prices, car prices etc. Judging the value of someone's assets is actually quite hard, especially if they don't have much, because then you have to really precisely measure stuff or you end up with a very uneven system that could unfairly screw people differently.
Well how else are they going to get money to pay for all of the things that will help them live better lives, like education and electrical power? We could have delayed the process indefinitely, but now that it's in motion there's nothing we can do about it. They are either slaves to making cheap stuff for a generation or slaves to the fields for generations. Take your pick.
You can't just magically pay them more than they're worth and have it work out well. As the west germans how well that's been working with east germany. A subsistence farmer working in a factory is basically worth what a robot is. If you build a robot the subsistence farmer stays a subsistence farmer, and his children stay subsistence farmers because there's no money for a school even if they wanted them to attend. If you use the profit you make from his labour (taken via taxes) to fund a massive school/infrastructure/health programme his children will live a life like ours. That's really all you can do. You can't magically create industries when there are none, and no people with the skill to work them. We've tried educating places before, but without a critical mass of domestic work they just leave.
That would be true if you were comparing the US to other civilized countries. It doesn't really work in somewhere like china. First of all you need to look at nominal GDP, not PPP. A chinese worker is equivalent to 1/6th of a US worker on PPP, is paid half of the 10k US figure. (The conversion between nominal and PPP for china is a factor of 2, for the US it is 1. ) The factor of 2 is entirely coincidental.
And those are averages. It's like saying the average worker in the US gets 50k a year. But remember Missouri is only 36k. There are parts of china that are doing very very well for themselves (and india as well), where you can get salaries and have jobs competitive with the US. Wealth distribution plays a big part of things. The chinese (like most 3rd world countries) have a handful of very rich, and a large swathe of very poor. And there's still a huge untapped supply of very poor who will keep some of those prices down (which was my point).
The 'base' salary at a foxconn factory in 2010 before all the suicides made the press was RMB 950/month, which is 140 USD. With overtime etc lots of employees were up at 2000 RMB. Which is about 280 USD a month. Which is what, 1.75/hour. That's about a 10th of what a factory worker in the US would get, not including overtime, and about half of what someone in germany would get. So my factor of 20 was 'excluding overtime' you want one employee for a month, in china it's 140 bucks, give or take, and in the US it's more like 3k. The US figure in the article you quoted is 26/hour, with 20%/year raises + yuan + lack of productivity they will get as caught up as they can be at some point.
Sure, if you want to design a solar panel, china is going to be comparable to the US. But if you want to manufacture stuff, and you're willing to not go with a premium supplier and employer like foxconn, you can get a lot cheaper than that. Which is the problem. It's like comparing the average CS salary in china to that of only Google, MS, Amazon and Facebook employees. You'd seriously skew the results, and foxconn is on the scale of things actually pretty good.
But as I said, and as the article you link says, they're driving prices up. Whether that cross over point is 2015, 2020, 2025 or whatever we're arguing precise numerical stats, not broad principles. As I said, there's a lost generation or two of chinese workers who will be simply unable to get good wages, with no education and no chance of getting a better one. And then suddenly this huge crop of people they've been educating for years and we've been educating will start to dominate the work force and the whole place will look a lot more like the rest of us. Which was the point of free trade, and good for everyone in the long run.
For italy and germany this process of convergence happened over relatively short time scale. The germans during the korean war and the italians during the 50's and 60's. But they had a degree of undervaluation due to being flattened in WW2, whereas china is actually building up from scratch.
The short answer is no to both. You couldn't actually manufacture most of the components for electronic equipment in the civilized world any more, because the whole supply chains are in china, and your price would skyrocket because the difference in labour costs is a factor of 20 or so. Sure, when you talk about foxconn assembly that's a small portion of the total cost of an iPhone, but if you talk about every component doing that, it would be a nightmare.
Second of all, the point of free trade is to drive costs up in other countries, that necessarily means they will have a competitive advantage for a while, but in the long run they will be a market. Does anyone think anyone making 50 cents an hour as a labourer in the 3rd world will ever buy a 500 dollar phone? Right, they can't. Ever. They're lucky to have clean drinking water. So if you ever want to sell them cars, computers, phones, airplanes or whatever they need to earn more money.
What will have to happen is that labourers in china will stop working for a pittance and start demanding a lot more money, that might mean mass strikes or it might mean an honest effort to pay people more money. That's a long process though. But, it's what happened in Japan, Italy, Taiwan, Korea, to a lesser extent Germany and a few 'eastern bloc' countries, and I'm only talking about since the end of WW2. The problem is that right now at least in china, if a million workers go on strike there are a million more to replace them, and no union protection for the ones on strike. Oh and because they went on strike no one else will give them jobs ever either.
You may think it's bad to work a 12 year old kid for 16 hours a day. but 30 years ago he would never have gone to school, and been working 16 hours a day on a farm from the time he was able to contribute, and he might have still starved. At least in the factory there is a chance of his lifestyle improving and he probably won't starve. That doesn't make it good, or right, but the sad reality is that progress requires people shift from the fields to factories, and it's up to them and their country to demand they get treated fairly. We can complain all we want to china, but they have us by the balls, and both parties know it. If we demand they do anything they don't like, they claw back on something we need (be it rare earths or just 'lose' export licences for things people want). And in general in china they have been working very hard at least in the last 30 years to educate their youth, and to get them prepared to be modern knowledge workers etc. They train more engineers than in the US, (about the same per capita), and most of the advanced degrees in anything useful in the 'west' are going to foreigners, probably about a third of which are chinese. There's probably a lost generation or two there, of people who are going to be exploited because they have no education, no skills and no way to get those things. But a huge portion of chinese kids growing up today will grow up into education and work very much like we have in the west, if not exactly like in the west because they're hiring western teachers to teach western curriculum's. Progress isn't perfect, and it would be nice to do better, but on the scale of things china is doing a half decent job. Which is sort of the same commentary in the article about apple. It could be better, but it could be worse too. And they're doing all of those things because we're paying them 4 dollars a day to make a tv, rather than paying them nothing as subsistence farmers, or worse, what we actually did to china, which was drugging them up on opium for most of a century.
The advantage of online dating is you can immediately cull from your search anyone you don't want. If you don't want someone with brown hair, or you absolutely must have someone who wears a monocle during sex I'm sure the internet will help you find that. If you can find someone who will meet your criteria that's great, if not it simply exacerbates the problem since your search parameters are unrealistic. Online will provide you an infinite stream of people of people who meet whatever random criteria. Not necessarily from the same site however.
But if you search for the wrong things, you get junk. If you are sufficiently self aware to know what you really actually want, and are willing to give up, and articulate enough to convey it, online can work exceptionally well. For most of us that isn't realistic though.
agreed, the last place I was had a 4 PS3 cluster going, which afaik is still running 4 years later. At this point it isn't a 'computing' project it's an astrophysics data project. But it's still crunching numbers.
This.
The reason it is illegal is because the product is advertised to have these features, and more we'll add later. Removing a feature (especially in this case, a major one) is actually fairly serious.
Now I'm sure Sony knew exactly what percent of users ever actually used their other OS, and if they were using it for piracy. If they thought people were using it they wouldn't have removed it probably.
Unlikely, consoles will become dumb terminals to an onlive service eventually, or it will be a software layer you run on PC sure, but then you're into a whole different architecture. I'm not sure who you're talking about 'you guys' at? Yes I'm a graphics and AI programmer, but I don't run the industry. Having to build for 6 or 7 different targets is a bloody pain in the arse (and the windows version is really multiple platforms at at once). Where do I get 6 or 7 from? Even if it's a different game I want to reuse as much code as possible in each game, so I might be building on 4 consoles (PS3, Xbox2, Wii, Wii U) handhelds (PSP, PSP2, DS), and PC. But of course most shops aren't developing on all of those at once, and you will probably have dropped development for the Wii and PSP by now, but not necessarily both. If you wanted to make it into a PC it would have to *be* a PC, with all of the perils that come with that, and the article in general is about what would happen if you could upgrade consoles as we think of them today. Right now I have 900 mb of RAM being used, 688 by Opera and 212 by my media player because it's busy doing something to the TV show it just recorded. Steam is, for some reason using 90 MB of memory, I'm not really sure what it's doing that takes up that much space (it's not downloading anything). So wait, how much memory do I have to use again? Well this machine has 12 gigs of ram. So 10 gigs probably. I can count on that much on every PC right? Lol. I can't even count on 1 GB of ram on a PC. Sure, the OS can page stuff out, but now I have much trickier performance requirements. Do I show load screens all the time? How do I 'wait' for that memory to get there? These are all solvable (and solved problems), so I'm not saying it's impossible, it's just a lot less efficient. Easier to program for in some ways, but when I know precisely how much memory I have, how fast it is etc. I can do a lot more with it than just dumping some stuff in an unknown data structure in video memory that will hopefully optimize itself. Now you will always be able to make this argument. Specialized software to solve a specific set of problems, with clearly defined constraints and specific hardware can always be more efficiently used than a general purpose machine, that's sort of the point of specializing it. A sedan is never going to be a truck, no matter how much you do to increase it's carrying capacity. That doesn't mean specialization is great, it would be preferable if we could do all of our computing on one box, but well, it would be an expensive and difficult to manage box at the moment.
It really isn't as simple as you're making it out to be unfortunately. A good abstraction layer works because when you build for a particular console you know it will behave one way, another console another, and then the PC is a mess. The abstraction layer hides the implementation of those optimizations from other parts of the system, but they're still there. The PC has its advantages of course (a crapload of memory, sometimes extremely powerful CPU's and GPU's), but it's still a mess. It's exactly as you say, you write a driver and a universal driver that interfaces with abstraction through to the hardware. that's called directx and openGl basically (and the windows graphics subsystem). And they're very much less memory efficient compared to what you can get on crappier hardware on consoles assuming you write the code yourself well.
Jason Gregory (of Naughty Dog) actually has a book on "Game Engine Architecture" that covers a bit of this stuff. Sony has its own custom library rather than OpenGl for a reason. Specifically, for the PS3 libgcm http://www.ps3devwiki.com/files/documents/-%20SONY%20PS3%20SDK%20Documentation/graphics/libgcm-Overview_e.pdf and What sony calls "Edge" developed by their various tech groups. I'm not sure if there's something newer as well.
It's not just drivers, actually drivers isn't really a problem. Keeping them updated, that's really a separate probl
Actually, as the summary talks about, programming for PC's and for consoles is very very different in some aspects. You can do a lot of stuff with a console you just can't on a PC because you know precisely what resources you have, where they are, and how fast they will be. The PS3 actually has custom libraries from Sony/Naughty Dog that are similar but different from openGl precisely because OpenGl would be too slow for the PS3 if you can avoid it. If you started allowing different GPU's you'd have to move to something like directx. Which is a good concept for 200 or so different video card models, but it's not worth the efficiency loss if you'd only ever have say, 4. Directx (and openGl) manage a lot of the GPU memory system stuff for you. That's easy, but it can be very inefficient, which is why a video card with 1 gig of memory does about as well as a PS3 or 360 with shared 512. Now directx and opengl (and the GDI layer in general on windows) have to account for the arbitrary nature of what might also be in video memory at the time. Right now I have two web browsers, some office applications I left open, a game, and steam all doing stuff that might take up memory. That's actually a really tough problem to manage in general, which is why consoles can do some awesome stuff with less, because you know exactly how much memory you get. When you could lock down a full screen application in windows and boot everything else out it was easier (but not easier on users and had its own complications).
In short. Your point 1 is wrong. If it supports windows it has to support general program environments and random crap hanging out in the desktop. Windows is a productivity OS (despite what people may think) and you can use a stripped down version of the kernel, but the actual OS as sold does a lot of stuff you definitely would not want in a memory constrained environment, like layers of stuff on the desktop etc.
And yes, the idea with windows 8 is to have a unified environment to execute phone or desktop code. Same OS, different skin. Now if then get intel into a 3 way with nokia they will have one hell of a product on their hands.
The point was to be able to circumvent import rules on game consoles rather than computers. Officially it was something like "playstation computer entertainment system". Sony was saying 'look it even runs linux like a regular computer!'. That tack of course did not work.
The main users of linux on PS3's were research and development places that were buying PS3's, at a subsidized rate, but then never buying games. Which was just costing sony money.
Now, as a practical matter they shouldn't be allowed to remove the functionality from the device once sold. That's illegal, but they also shouldn't feel any obligation to offer further PS3's with linux support because as you say, it's a non market, and their "the PS3 is really a computer" didn't pan out.
Not that I would disagree with that notion for any republican country, but it's a pretty dim view of representative democracy to think that government is necessarily going to do bad things to you because it can. But even if you accept your premise you're into a world of few options on what to do about it, which isn't all that constructive either.
Either government can try and help ensure honest reliable delivery of critical services, or it can leave it alone. In one world view government is being bought by bad people to enable bad things, in another world view without government the bad people would just do bad things. And in a world where terrorists hold up in hotel and start murdering people and your government can't listen in on their conversations because those servers are so secure (and located out of your jurisdiction) you sometimes make less than ideal choices.
By definition any effort to stop, prevent, or punish criminal activity will in some way violate a degree of freedom that people otherwise might have. You can layer on caveats about 'due process' and all that, but the public isn't served by never being able to catch criminals or keep infrastructure running. We can agree (or disagree) on specific provisions of how they go about that, but they certainly can and should be doing things to ensure reliable critical infrastructure.
which doesn't mean ensuring other people aren't getting in isn't a good idea. Demanding AT&T prevent eveasdropping on other peoples phone calls, and then demanding they have a secret room where the NSA can monitor all traffic are two separate parts. One is good. One is bad. Naturally, when dealing with politicians you will always get some good, and some bad together.
That's pretty much how lots of other businesses work. Your product will have to meet some sort of standards board approved set of metrics, and then you advertise that when you sell it.
You shouldn't be able to buy electrical equipment that doesn't meet standards (I'm not 100% sure what those are in the US), and you shouldn't be able to install equipment that didn't meet those standards in a building. At least for legal compliance. The same applies to telecoms equipment, medical equipment etc. Regulatory compliance is just the cost of doing business.
Alternately, you could require insurance against breaches/damages something along those lines. In that situation insurance companies come up with the standards everyone needs to follow, they form a giant lobby and it becomes not much different than the government doing it. If you want insurance you meet these criteria, or you can't afford insurance.
The selling of aggregate user data is their biggest weakness. They've been able to get away with a lot of stuff to this point because they were small enough (or the amounts of money were small enough) regulators didn't notice or didn't care. They may run into a lot of hurdles from regulators in every country moving to demand privacy controls.
There are lots of other ways to make money, I was attempting to be illustrative, not a market analyst or facebook executive. If I worked there I'd be looking to cash out and GTFO asap. I'd be very wary of anything they do trying to make money suddenly drawing the ire of regulators and getting things like your employees arrested in despotic countries or your whole revenue stream shut down from sensible ones.
I was thinking 'total internet users' being counted multiple times. As facebook becomes more commercial I would expect to see more people with multiple accounts as well (professional and personal sort of thing).
A lot of people who taped taped religiously though. It meant people could watch a daytime only show while going to work. People from that age group are generally baffled by DVR's though, and any of the rest of the technology I take for granted.
Trying to explain to someone in their late 70's how to record with the 'push of a button' (ya right...) on one box, that they may or may not be able to access in another room on a different TV is not trivial. So I still see a lot of people with VCR's and stacks of fresh VHS tapes from a few years ago because they can't figure out modern technology. The analogue to digital conversion hurt these users a lot because a lot of VHS players won't behave the same way with their converters and they can't get their shows the way they want.
Only sort of though.
Any IPO is based on projected future revenue. I've said other places, facebook with 800 million users is running out of users that will generate much money, and it's hard to know how much money they can get per users. Sure, there are a couple of billion people in africa, india and china that don't have facebook, but selling seeds for pennies to them isn't really advertising revenue of much value. Then there's the very young and very old, who as a demographic won't ever have facebook pages. Lets say, for sake of argument they get up to 1 billion users, that would be half of total internet users, and some of those are going to be counted multiple times (phones, and computers and home and office for example). So they're getting 4 dollars per user right now, give or take (remember they did grow by a couple of hundred million users in the last year so it's hard to get an exact number). From a billion users there's not much more room 'up'. That's most of the youth of north america, the EU, south america, japan, australia, that sort of thing, and all the rich kids from the rest of the world. But they're valuing at 100 billion, which is say 100 dollars per person. That's a bit of a stretch from their current value *but* and it's a big but, what do they intend to do with the 5 billion dollars in cash they're asking for?
Think about what services they could integrate into facebook that could generate a crap load of revenue. VOIP chat, TV and movie rental that sort of thing, music streaming, search, they could just use their backend technology to help deliver a cloud type service to other companies that would generate revenue etc. Suddenly there are a whole lot of options for things that *could* generate money. Google only has about 1 billion users themselves (2 billion internet users total, google has 65% of the search market which might be that google users search more than non google users or something, their unique visitors per month peaked in may 2011 at just over 1 billion), and they are generating 38 billion dollars a year in total revenue. Now, admittedly, google is a different baby. If I'm looking for a plumber advertising plumbing services where I'm looking is a good idea. If I'm trying to find out where this years christmas party for my GF's family is, probably I'm a lot harder to target ads at.
So that's the point of an IPO, they need cash to grow the business, hopefully into things that will make money. Whether or not they can justify 100 billion dollars as a market cap is anyone's guess, but that's probably also priced based on the fact that there have been a lot of private sales of facebook shares since they waited so long to go public (in other words the typical fervor of future value is already priced in at that level). And even then, assuming they don't implode (which with their relatively healthy, i.e. profitable, balance sheet) they can still do well if the stock dives a bit. 4 billion dollars a year in revenue when your only revenue is sketchy ads and 'facebook points' (which mostly go to 3rd parties) seems like they have a lot of room to grow.