Officially, the Venezuelan government pegs the Bolivar to the USD at 6.3Bs per USD and theoretically all other foreign currency exchange rates flow from that peg. For the vast majority, however, this is effectively a one way exchange - the government will happily give you 6.3Bs for one USD but you need to be well connected to get 1 USD (or an equivalent amount of other hard currency) for 6.3Bs. The state run stores selling at 1/5th the price fall into the category of "well connected".
For everyone who is not well connected, they need to acquire foreign currency on the black market where 1 USD (or an equivalent amount of other foreign currency - like 0.8 Euros or 90 Yen) costs 60Bs. This makes imported goods 10x more expensive for anyone who does not have access to the official exchange rate.
This is a fairly common tactic of governments that have horribly mismanaged their economy and want to paper over the collapse of their currency. It doesn't actually work, but it does make for some spectacular political theater as reality sets in.
Except they had to pay out in bitcoins, not dollars. If Bitcoins increased their value against the dollar, it made the 8% per week even more implausible.
Since there are no actual investments with legitimate earnings yields that are nominally denominated in bitcoin (or at least not enough to matter), any sort of banking scheme that offers interest denominated in bitcoin is either a scam or a pure short-play (bc to $, wait for price to drop, buy more bc). Welcome to full reserve banking, where the only legitimate banking charges you to hold your money.
I bought a house in Willow Glen last September for $550K - the schools in this area are fine (great, even) and so is the neighborhood. If you're focused on a perfect house in Cupertino or Shallow Alto, yeah, its gonna be pricey, but there are plenty of perfectly fine areas in San Jose and Santa Clara with older, smaller homes that sell in the $500-$600K range, which should be easily affordable on a $200K salary (or lower, even). Heck, our mortgage+taxes are less than we were paying in rent on a downtown SJ condo and that's before taking into account tax benefits...
A "checking account" in the US is a demand deposit account that the depositor can write checks against and virtually always comes with an ATM/debit card as well. It never costs money to deposit money to this account, but if you do not maintain a minimum balance (usually $500 or $1000), there may be a nominal monthly fee.
The vast majority of people in the US and probably 99.9% of the slashdot crowd get paid via direct deposit via the ACH (automated clearing house). The exceptions tend to be people who work in cash businesses (bartenders earning tips, handyman types, etc.) and people who do not or cannot have a checking account. Generally speaking, those who cannot have a checking account are either illegal immigrants or people who have either committed bank fraud or have absolutely dismal credit. Those who do not (but can) have checking accounts are either very young and haven't gotten around to it or are dodging tax liens, alimony, or other court judgments and are trying to hide their money from authorities.
In the absence of a deposit account, most employers used to issue paper checks which would then be cashed by shady operators for scandalously high fees (in part due to the prevalence of fraud, because remember - they are dealing with the subset of people who cannot get a bank account, a large percentage of which is due to fraud issues). These cards are actually probably lower fee than the previous status quo and allow things like online transactions that most of the employees who receive these would have been hard-pressed to do without a bank account.
For many people in low-wage, low-skill work, particularly if they are young or have gotten themselves into severe financial trouble, these cards are probably not a bad option. If its the only option, though, that can certainly be a problem, but that seems to be fairly limited (the article mentions a single McDonalds franchise owner who is actually forcing these cards) and for 90%+ of US workers, this is a complete non-issue.
No, the alternative is what existed before HFT - If Jim wants to sell an apple, and Bob wants to buy an apple, Jim must sell it to someone with a seat on the exchange who will extract 12.5 cents per share on each side of the trade.
HFT effectively put the traditional market-makers out of business by providing liquidity at fractional pennies per share rather than taking 1/8th of a point per share on each end, but people bitch about how unfair it is because microseconds or something.
Besides, JTAG and such will continue to render inoperable phones operable
If you put a fuse on the die in the some important place (voltage regulator, memory controller, CPU) or even on package in the bonding with a way to allow the CPU to blow the fuse, you can render the device completely inoperable short of the thief replacing the SoC (which is unlikely to be worthwhile)
Property taxes are still low in California - I pay less property tax on my recently purchased house in San Jose than my parents do in Erie, PA despite having an assessment that is 3x higher.
I haven't had the Grange Hermitage, but I have had a couple of bottles of the 1996 Penfolds 707, and even in 2010 it still tasted really young. I suspect the Grange may just need to be cellared for a *really* long time.
I've probably spent about a total of 9 months in Germany over the last 10 years. Their beers are boring. I'll take a Russian River or Dogfishhead (or Green Flash or Bruery or heck, even Sierra Nevada) any day over pretty much any German beer.
I prefer to be able to set my own schedule, work from home when that is a reasonable choice and otherwise be marginally attached via email 24/7 to keep up on things. I like spending 25-30 hours/week in the office, I suspect a union would really fuck that up.
What does an HTML image tag have to do with computer science or being a good software engineer?
Heck, I've been working as a professional software developer in the semiconductor industry for 13 years, can sling C, Matlab and various assembly languages all day long, and think I have a pretty good theoretical grounding, but I'm not terribly familiar with HTML or Java or PHP or whatever the cool kids are using these days (now get off my lawn). I mean, good for them and all, but it seems like a rather hokey standard to judge students by.
Bonds don't work that way! You buy a bond with a coupon schedule, you get paid on that schedule and then, at the end of the term, you receive the principle back.
Where on earth do people get these bizarre ideas about "demanding payment"?
If the Chinese elect not to roll those bonds over, the renimbi peg to the dollar falls apart, their currency skyrockets and their trade flows reverse. A country's capital account MUST equal the opposite of their current account - this is the economic equivalent of the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Any country running a trade surplus with the US is more or less forced to buy dollar-denominated assets (stocks, bonds, etc.) in exact proportion to their net trade flows - what the heck else are they going to do with those dollars?
Not only are non-compete agreements unenforceable in California, attempting to enforce one can lead to significant civil penalties. A former colleague of mine moved to California from Texas and when his ex-company attempted to enforce the non-compete, they tried to sue in Texas but a federal court sitting in diversity awarded the case to California where it was summarily dismissed and he counter-sued for for a good chunk of change (over $80K, IIRC) and won,
Consider that these tech companies are little more than hi-tech plantations (it applies to most companies, but tech in this case) and their workers sharecroppers.
Not that I'm defending the actions of the companies involved here, but the median engineer at the companies named has a total compensation package worth something north of $150K/year that includes plenty of stock, which is an indirect form of profit sharing.
Are we really going to whine about how oppressed people in the top 3% of earners are?
You can still usefully transmit information below the noise floor - the shannon theorem is C = B*log2(S/N + 1). That +1 is very important when transmitting on extremely noisy channels.
Transceiver design for that sort of channel is... challenging, but certainly possible.
Google's marketable shares are entirely class B and possess fewer than half the voting rights. Apple could buy all they want and still not control google.
Google class A shares are held entirely by insiders who I doubt would be willing to sell.
Others just want a PHONE, something they can make and recieve calls on and don't want a camera, internet, text, or anything else.
In 3 or 4 years (or possibly sooner), that will simply not be an option for the same reason you can't easily buy a dedicated word processor or standard definition TV any more: the fixed overhead of distribution, marketing, warehousing, etc. the more capable product is the same as the less capable product and will completely swamp any differences in manufacturing costs as component costs drop.
Even if a basic phone costs $2 to manufacture and the low-end smart phone costs $20, it doesn't mean much if the rest of the supply chain costs $75, particularly if the low-end smart phone can drive down its costs further through volume advantage.
You could get 8Mbps on the isochronous channel if you were the only isochronous device on the bus, plus, IIRC, 256Kbps on the bulk channel in both directions and a teensy little bit more on the interrupt channel if you were being creative/dangerous. If there were no isochronous devices on the bus, I think you could get something like 8.5Mbps on the bulk channel.
Of course, it's been over a decade since I've worked on a USB device, so I could be wrong. Except about the isochronous channel - coming up with a way to shove 8192Kbps of ATM traffic through an 8Mbps USB 1.0 isochronous link required some epic hacking that I will never forget:)
Since Ballmer took over, he has quadrupled the net profit of an already large and mature company (~$5.5B to $23.5B) and returned over $175B in dividends to shareholders. Question his strategies all you want (and there is certainly room for criticism), but objectively speaking, he has done very well.
They're either selling the hardware at cost or taking a loss at $99.
I'm not sure why you believe that... a Nexus 7 reportedly costs $152 to make and they are throwing away four of the most expensive parts (screen, touch controller battery, camera) as well as a few other minor components (gyro, gps, speaker, various sensors). It wouldn't surprise me if the controller costs more to make than the console, actually.
Slashdot Mirror
Officially, the Venezuelan government pegs the Bolivar to the USD at 6.3Bs per USD and theoretically all other foreign currency exchange rates flow from that peg. For the vast majority, however, this is effectively a one way exchange - the government will happily give you 6.3Bs for one USD but you need to be well connected to get 1 USD (or an equivalent amount of other hard currency) for 6.3Bs. The state run stores selling at 1/5th the price fall into the category of "well connected".
For everyone who is not well connected, they need to acquire foreign currency on the black market where 1 USD (or an equivalent amount of other foreign currency - like 0.8 Euros or 90 Yen) costs 60Bs. This makes imported goods 10x more expensive for anyone who does not have access to the official exchange rate.
This is a fairly common tactic of governments that have horribly mismanaged their economy and want to paper over the collapse of their currency. It doesn't actually work, but it does make for some spectacular political theater as reality sets in.
Except they had to pay out in bitcoins, not dollars. If Bitcoins increased their value against the dollar, it made the 8% per week even more implausible.
Since there are no actual investments with legitimate earnings yields that are nominally denominated in bitcoin (or at least not enough to matter), any sort of banking scheme that offers interest denominated in bitcoin is either a scam or a pure short-play (bc to $, wait for price to drop, buy more bc). Welcome to full reserve banking, where the only legitimate banking charges you to hold your money.
I bought a house in Willow Glen last September for $550K - the schools in this area are fine (great, even) and so is the neighborhood. If you're focused on a perfect house in Cupertino or Shallow Alto, yeah, its gonna be pricey, but there are plenty of perfectly fine areas in San Jose and Santa Clara with older, smaller homes that sell in the $500-$600K range, which should be easily affordable on a $200K salary (or lower, even). Heck, our mortgage+taxes are less than we were paying in rent on a downtown SJ condo and that's before taking into account tax benefits...
A "checking account" in the US is a demand deposit account that the depositor can write checks against and virtually always comes with an ATM/debit card as well. It never costs money to deposit money to this account, but if you do not maintain a minimum balance (usually $500 or $1000), there may be a nominal monthly fee.
The vast majority of people in the US and probably 99.9% of the slashdot crowd get paid via direct deposit via the ACH (automated clearing house). The exceptions tend to be people who work in cash businesses (bartenders earning tips, handyman types, etc.) and people who do not or cannot have a checking account. Generally speaking, those who cannot have a checking account are either illegal immigrants or people who have either committed bank fraud or have absolutely dismal credit. Those who do not (but can) have checking accounts are either very young and haven't gotten around to it or are dodging tax liens, alimony, or other court judgments and are trying to hide their money from authorities.
In the absence of a deposit account, most employers used to issue paper checks which would then be cashed by shady operators for scandalously high fees (in part due to the prevalence of fraud, because remember - they are dealing with the subset of people who cannot get a bank account, a large percentage of which is due to fraud issues). These cards are actually probably lower fee than the previous status quo and allow things like online transactions that most of the employees who receive these would have been hard-pressed to do without a bank account.
For many people in low-wage, low-skill work, particularly if they are young or have gotten themselves into severe financial trouble, these cards are probably not a bad option. If its the only option, though, that can certainly be a problem, but that seems to be fairly limited (the article mentions a single McDonalds franchise owner who is actually forcing these cards) and for 90%+ of US workers, this is a complete non-issue.
No, the alternative is what existed before HFT - If Jim wants to sell an apple, and Bob wants to buy an apple, Jim must sell it to someone with a seat on the exchange who will extract 12.5 cents per share on each side of the trade.
HFT effectively put the traditional market-makers out of business by providing liquidity at fractional pennies per share rather than taking 1/8th of a point per share on each end, but people bitch about how unfair it is because microseconds or something.
Besides, JTAG and such will continue to render inoperable phones operable
If you put a fuse on the die in the some important place (voltage regulator, memory controller, CPU) or even on package in the bonding with a way to allow the CPU to blow the fuse, you can render the device completely inoperable short of the thief replacing the SoC (which is unlikely to be worthwhile)
Property taxes are still low in California - I pay less property tax on my recently purchased house in San Jose than my parents do in Erie, PA despite having an assessment that is 3x higher.
I haven't had the Grange Hermitage, but I have had a couple of bottles of the 1996 Penfolds 707, and even in 2010 it still tasted really young. I suspect the Grange may just need to be cellared for a *really* long time.
I've probably spent about a total of 9 months in Germany over the last 10 years. Their beers are boring. I'll take a Russian River or Dogfishhead (or Green Flash or Bruery or heck, even Sierra Nevada) any day over pretty much any German beer.
I prefer to be able to set my own schedule, work from home when that is a reasonable choice and otherwise be marginally attached via email 24/7 to keep up on things. I like spending 25-30 hours/week in the office, I suspect a union would really fuck that up.
What does an HTML image tag have to do with computer science or being a good software engineer?
Heck, I've been working as a professional software developer in the semiconductor industry for 13 years, can sling C, Matlab and various assembly languages all day long, and think I have a pretty good theoretical grounding, but I'm not terribly familiar with HTML or Java or PHP or whatever the cool kids are using these days (now get off my lawn). I mean, good for them and all, but it seems like a rather hokey standard to judge students by.
[citation needed]
Culture is an emergent phenomena, not something that can be dictated from above.
China will demand payment very soon
Bonds don't work that way! You buy a bond with a coupon schedule, you get paid on that schedule and then, at the end of the term, you receive the principle back.
Where on earth do people get these bizarre ideas about "demanding payment"?
If the Chinese elect not to roll those bonds over, the renimbi peg to the dollar falls apart, their currency skyrockets and their trade flows reverse. A country's capital account MUST equal the opposite of their current account - this is the economic equivalent of the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Any country running a trade surplus with the US is more or less forced to buy dollar-denominated assets (stocks, bonds, etc.) in exact proportion to their net trade flows - what the heck else are they going to do with those dollars?
Given that the Renimbi is formally pegged to the dollar by the PBoC, how would that change anything?
If the Chinese were to float their currency, their trade balance would reverse in a hurry, which is something that they definitely don't want.
Not only are non-compete agreements unenforceable in California, attempting to enforce one can lead to significant civil penalties. A former colleague of mine moved to California from Texas and when his ex-company attempted to enforce the non-compete, they tried to sue in Texas but a federal court sitting in diversity awarded the case to California where it was summarily dismissed and he counter-sued for for a good chunk of change (over $80K, IIRC) and won,
Consider that these tech companies are little more than hi-tech plantations (it applies to most companies, but tech in this case) and their workers sharecroppers.
Not that I'm defending the actions of the companies involved here, but the median engineer at the companies named has a total compensation package worth something north of $150K/year that includes plenty of stock, which is an indirect form of profit sharing.
Are we really going to whine about how oppressed people in the top 3% of earners are?
You can still usefully transmit information below the noise floor - the shannon theorem is C = B*log2(S/N + 1). That +1 is very important when transmitting on extremely noisy channels.
Transceiver design for that sort of channel is... challenging, but certainly possible.
Google's marketable shares are entirely class B and possess fewer than half the voting rights. Apple could buy all they want and still not control google.
Google class A shares are held entirely by insiders who I doubt would be willing to sell.
You can carry a netbook in your pocket and connect to the internet anywhere there is a 3G signal?
Others just want a PHONE, something they can make and recieve calls on and don't want a camera, internet, text, or anything else.
In 3 or 4 years (or possibly sooner), that will simply not be an option for the same reason you can't easily buy a dedicated word processor or standard definition TV any more: the fixed overhead of distribution, marketing, warehousing, etc. the more capable product is the same as the less capable product and will completely swamp any differences in manufacturing costs as component costs drop.
Even if a basic phone costs $2 to manufacture and the low-end smart phone costs $20, it doesn't mean much if the rest of the supply chain costs $75, particularly if the low-end smart phone can drive down its costs further through volume advantage.
NOBODY in the USA gets ANY KIND of bonus anymore, unless you're a C-level executive at a big company
That is completely untrue.
You could get 8Mbps on the isochronous channel if you were the only isochronous device on the bus, plus, IIRC, 256Kbps on the bulk channel in both directions and a teensy little bit more on the interrupt channel if you were being creative/dangerous. If there were no isochronous devices on the bus, I think you could get something like 8.5Mbps on the bulk channel.
Of course, it's been over a decade since I've worked on a USB device, so I could be wrong. Except about the isochronous channel - coming up with a way to shove 8192Kbps of ATM traffic through an 8Mbps USB 1.0 isochronous link required some epic hacking that I will never forget :)
Since Ballmer took over, he has quadrupled the net profit of an already large and mature company (~$5.5B to $23.5B) and returned over $175B in dividends to shareholders. Question his strategies all you want (and there is certainly room for criticism), but objectively speaking, he has done very well.
They're either selling the hardware at cost or taking a loss at $99.
I'm not sure why you believe that... a Nexus 7 reportedly costs $152 to make and they are throwing away four of the most expensive parts (screen, touch controller battery, camera) as well as a few other minor components (gyro, gps, speaker, various sensors). It wouldn't surprise me if the controller costs more to make than the console, actually.