Apple made a list of similarities and then claimed if that list of similarities didn't exist it wouldn't have sued. How convenient it must be to create an argument that amounts to "if reality were different we wouldn't have had to sue". As multiple others have pointed out you (and Apple) are only considering half the facts and coming to a biased conclusion. We call that confirmation bias where the facts that match your predetermined conclusion are given more weight than evidence which doesn't support that conclusion.
To be fair, IBM used to be bad (and is still bad in some ways) it was actually government intervention in the form of a massive antitrust lawsuit that reformed the company. It's a real shame that George Bush used his power to sabotage the antitrust case against Microsoft, if they had been hit hard with the full weight of the law the company might have actually been forced to learn to get along with others better. Instead his interference reinforced a culture of trying to get away with whatever you can because Microsoft is too big to fail.
Sometimes "a more nuanced opinion" is really "idiots who can't accept reality". The issue is that the Samsung phone looks too much like the iPhone according to Apple. It's not a strawman argument to repeat what Apple has actually claimed. Yes, there's some additional parts to, but it's basically it's black, rectangular with square corners. Every other part of the claim is equally stupid. The reason the Samsung phone looks too much like the iPhone is that they're both constrained by the same design limitations and there are a limited number of ways to solve the problems. Smart phones with touch screens are going to be rectangular, with few buttons and most of the space dedicated to the screen or they're going to be terrible.
In this case the "more nuanced opinion" is an apologist trying to invent a rational where it isn't Apple trying to establish a legal monopoly on smart phones. The alternatives suggested by Apple are ridiculous at best.
I tend to use the world "plausible". Given what the viewer has been told about the universe the story is set in, everything should be plausible. That's one of my problems with the Star Wars prequels, the amount of "small universe" going on is just too implausible. Really? Darth Vader built C3P0? That's really implausible.
The reason you can't is definitely tied to the eternal copyright regime pushed by the RIAA and MPAA. They have literally stolen from the people of the world to enrich themselves, and we may never know the true value of everything they've stolen.
Actually, my satellite receivers have that capability as well. Sometimes they call it a "favorites list" but you can program about 4 different lists with channels you want so you could even make a sports list and movies list so you only see the channels for what you're currently looking for. I use it to cut out all the channels I'm not subscribed to or won't ever watch.
I seem to remember there being a similar option on my cable box last time I had one, but I could be misremembering.
The real problem that these companies are trying to work on is simple:
"I'm not getting a [big enough] cut of the revenues from TV"
That's the fundamental problem they're all trying to solve. That's not to say that there aren't problems with TV, but I think the problems are probably too bound into the TV ecosystem to be fixed and I don't think anyone is interested in fixing the real problems because it wouldn't be profitable to fix them.
Yes, and you know what's really wrong with it? Evil corporations pay people to promote their stupid and wrong (but profitable) ideas.
The paranoid accusations are an unpleasant side effect of unethical (often corporate) behaviour. Much of it goes back to Microsoft which pretty brought astroturfing and FUD online. Back in the day they had Microsoft employees pretending to be ordinary users who couldn't get OS/2 to work right. Back then no one expected a major corporation like Microsoft to be so underhanded and corrupt. Now whenever I see a post that posts something stupid and positive about Microsoft I have to wonder if the poster is stupid, paid by Microsoft (or one of their PR firms) or both.
The poor in America are rich compared to the rest of the world.
Not so much. Sure, being poor in America is better than being poor in Somalia, however, America's poor tend to be some of the worst off in any other developed nations. Comparing apples to apples doesn't create such a bright shiny picture. For instance, there are medical charities that only operate in undeveloped countries and the United States. I saw some of the thousands of people who showed up for the charity's free clinics interviewed on TV. Many of them said they had full time jobs, but couldn't afford to get simple medical problems treated. For example, there were people there who couldn't afford glasses for their kids and one guy who had been waiting two years to get a root canal done.
The onus isn't on the company to pay you more, the onus is make yourself more valuable.
That's interesting and truthy, but I'm not sure how true it actually is. Making yourself more valuable is always a good idea, however, it doesn't mean you'll be rewarded for doing so and that approach will tend to benefit the people who are already most valuable because they will have the most time to invest in making themselves more valuable. If you're working 2 full time minimum wage jobs to make ends meet, there's not going to be a lot of time left over for "self-improvement".
Actually I think the overtime law is just to prevent employers from hiring 1 employee to do the jobs of 2 employees. After all, it's cheaper to hire 1 person and force them to work 80 a week than it is to hire 2 and have each work 40 hours a week. Your situation was an unintended consequence of the law and you're employers parsimonious nature.
I'm ambivalent on the "required to join the union" rules. On the one hand, it is a restriction, on the other hand, the union demands would also benefit non-union employee. And of course, in the bad old days employers with unions could try and require that employees not join the union, or pay people a to not join the union, or any number of other moves designed to weaken the union to the point where all the union employees could be fired in a mass layoff.
Unions are like everything else, they have good and bad sides. In the big picture, they balance out the power of employers. The fact that unions exist forces employers to treat employees at least a little bit better, if solely for the fear of having a union form in their own business.
I believe he was making a Walmart joke. Walmart has actually organized seminars for their employees to assist them in applying for food stamps and other government benefits for the very poor. You know, instead of paying them a wage where they wouldn't need food stamps.
I think it should be accepted as a fundamental issue that you should either be charged for speed or usage but not both. It's double-dipping to force people to pay for speed and then charge them for volume as well. Without volume, speed is meaningless. Without speed, volume is meaningless.
Paying for one should automatically include the other and as Hatta wrote, it's actually better if we pay for speed rather than volume.
Penn and Teller have some large ideological blind spots. Penn was on Real Time a few weeks ago, he claimed public libraries were a travesty because his money was being taken away at gun point. What I found before I stopped watching Bullshit was they often didn't try hard to look at the other side of an issue. That wasn't too big of a flaw when the other side was actually complete nonsense, but when they started doing political issues, I found it made them look very clueless and biased. They still had occasional good points, but I found the obvious failures in analysis to be too aggravating to continue watching.
Actually, as far as I understood the law, you could provide "health care" services to people even if you're not a doctor, provided you make it clear you're not a doctor. Of course as soon as something goes wrong, you'd probably get sued, and since you're not a doctor and don't have medical malpractice insurance, you're not likely to continue providing health care after that point.
It's interesting that you mention that doctors haven't existed for most of humanity. I'm reminded of a description of the hospital in Discworld: "It's a good one, some of the patients don't die". That's a pretty apt summary of medicine before doctors. I mean, Steve Jobs just died because he tried "alternative medicine" and tried to treat cancer with diet and exercise. If he'd had the traditional doctors take care of his pancreatic cancer with surgery six months earlier he'd probably (90% chance) still be alive.
There are situations where this is necessary, but they are infrequent. In contrast, I heard a story recently about FDR meeting with some union leaders. They had a very list of revolutionary ideas that they wanted fixed in law, including such outlandish ideas as a 40 hour work week and a two day weekend. FDR read their manifesto and told them he agreed with practically everything they wanted, but he wouldn't do a thing about it. He look at them calmly and told them "Make me do it" and so they did.
I don't know if the story is true or not, but the lesson is that if you want lasting change, you need popular support for the change. If you go against what the people want in big, important ways even if it's the right thing to do, then the people will replace you with the first person who promises to undo all your good works and you've accomplished nothing.
Even worse for many companies like Apple you have to actually sell the stock to realize any benefits from it, because Apple doesn't pay dividends. So unless you have a lot of money, you can only be a temporary owner and hope that you can stay an owner until other people want to be an owner more than you do.
How about if people crying about "there are no jobs for me" would either make new products or services people want or improve themselves to be more useful to employers? But nooo, now they're crying how no one is giving money for what they think they want to do.
Actually, the people Google sent be interviewed for the one article did just that, but unlike you, they recognize that asking a 50 year old guy who's been working in Furniture manufacturing to learn computers so he can get a new job is pretty futile. Most companies won't hire him because he's too old with too little experience.
It becomes an interesting question of what percentile of people do we allow to become permanently unemployed. Is it the bottom 10%? 20%? And what do we do with the least useful people? Do we give them enough money to survive or do we do as the Libertarians suggest and let them die from the crime of not being useful enough?
The point of the article is that the U.S. would need more Apples than it could possibly sustain to fix it's employment problems. The U.S. needs to have some manufacturing jobs because there a lot of people who are more suited to that work than to other jobs. This might seem like a problem of not adapting, but it's just a problem of numbers. Why would anyone want to hire someone from the bottom 50% of applicants for any job? The way to deal with this is to have a robust and diversified field of employers. The U.S. has failed to protect most of it's manufacturing industry from MBA idiocy that considers a hiring a Chinese company to do work inherently superior to employing Americans.
Of course, there's always the question of whether I should believe what you say about your beliefs. I'm reminded of a discussion I had with a friend who smoked, I told him one of the reasons I didn't like smoking was because smokers tend to leave cigarette butts everywhere. He swore up and down to me that most smokers don't throw their butts on the ground and that he never, ever did so. He then threw his cigarette butt on the ground, crushed it with boot heel and began walking off before what he'd just done began to sink in. He, then tried to explain to me why that was a special case and he didn't normally do that. His beliefs about himself trumped reality when the two were put in conflict.
It's not usually expressed explicitly, you have to dig around to find it, but it is fundamental to the belief in a "personal God" that has a specific plan for individuals. God can't be planning your life unless he places significant restrictions on what everyone else can choose to do.
That's an interesting claim, but it doesn't seem to hold water. Sulfur emissions are predominantly from power plants (73%), and the U.S. hasn't exported power plants to China. You could argue that exporting industry to China has effectively exported power plants to China, but as far as I understand the number of power plants in America has not fallen by 33%, thus actual reductions have been achieved and the sorry state of China's sulfur emissions are the result of China not taking any such measures. And the most likely consequence of not having done anything about acid rain in the U.S. would be more environmental degradation in the U.S. with no major impact on China's situation. Environmental regulations aren't a real reason for exporting industry to China.
It's quite probably that MBAs specifically and Business training in general are the reason for excessive offshoring. Business studies are teaching managers to maximize ROA, return on assets. There are two ways to increase that ratio, maximizing returns and minimizing assets. Offshoring and outsourcing are easy ways to reduce the assets side of the equation and to artificially meet ROA targets. Of course, the end result is you end with a company which is good for nothing but it's brand name, but MBAs are notorious for being short-term thinkers. The inescapable consequences of their management decisions are for the suckers who haven't already jumped ship to a better paying job at another company.
I think the problem is that there is a nearly infinite number of "in betweens" most of which don't get fossilized and every time we find one "in between", certain people demand two more.
The interesting thing I've found is that people who believe God has a purpose for their life, tend to believe that they and the people they know are the only people who have free will. I had a friend tell me that when someone was struck by a car and killed that it was "God's will that they die". My question was if it's "God's will" then doesn't that mean that the person driving the car doesn't have free will? I mean he or she could have braked, could have chosen to stay home, could have chosen a different route. If it's all part of a plan that means the person driving the car was forced to kill by God. Why not just give the accident victim a heart attack or stroke? The answer was that she really didn't think that people she didn't know had free will. In effect, it was too painful or too scary to try and understand a world that wasn't custom tailored to her.
Interestingly, it worked for acid rain... But you are correct, in that an escalating (over time) tax on carbon emissions would be more effective than a trading scheme.
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As other people pointed out that's false.
Apple made a list of similarities and then claimed if that list of similarities didn't exist it wouldn't have sued. How convenient it must be to create an argument that amounts to "if reality were different we wouldn't have had to sue". As multiple others have pointed out you (and Apple) are only considering half the facts and coming to a biased conclusion. We call that confirmation bias where the facts that match your predetermined conclusion are given more weight than evidence which doesn't support that conclusion.
To be fair, IBM used to be bad (and is still bad in some ways) it was actually government intervention in the form of a massive antitrust lawsuit that reformed the company. It's a real shame that George Bush used his power to sabotage the antitrust case against Microsoft, if they had been hit hard with the full weight of the law the company might have actually been forced to learn to get along with others better. Instead his interference reinforced a culture of trying to get away with whatever you can because Microsoft is too big to fail.
Sometimes "a more nuanced opinion" is really "idiots who can't accept reality". The issue is that the Samsung phone looks too much like the iPhone according to Apple. It's not a strawman argument to repeat what Apple has actually claimed. Yes, there's some additional parts to, but it's basically it's black, rectangular with square corners. Every other part of the claim is equally stupid. The reason the Samsung phone looks too much like the iPhone is that they're both constrained by the same design limitations and there are a limited number of ways to solve the problems. Smart phones with touch screens are going to be rectangular, with few buttons and most of the space dedicated to the screen or they're going to be terrible.
In this case the "more nuanced opinion" is an apologist trying to invent a rational where it isn't Apple trying to establish a legal monopoly on smart phones. The alternatives suggested by Apple are ridiculous at best.
I tend to use the world "plausible". Given what the viewer has been told about the universe the story is set in, everything should be plausible. That's one of my problems with the Star Wars prequels, the amount of "small universe" going on is just too implausible. Really? Darth Vader built C3P0? That's really implausible.
The reason you can't is definitely tied to the eternal copyright regime pushed by the RIAA and MPAA. They have literally stolen from the people of the world to enrich themselves, and we may never know the true value of everything they've stolen.
Actually, my satellite receivers have that capability as well. Sometimes they call it a "favorites list" but you can program about 4 different lists with channels you want so you could even make a sports list and movies list so you only see the channels for what you're currently looking for. I use it to cut out all the channels I'm not subscribed to or won't ever watch.
I seem to remember there being a similar option on my cable box last time I had one, but I could be misremembering.
The real problem that these companies are trying to work on is simple:
"I'm not getting a [big enough] cut of the revenues from TV"
That's the fundamental problem they're all trying to solve. That's not to say that there aren't problems with TV, but I think the problems are probably too bound into the TV ecosystem to be fixed and I don't think anyone is interested in fixing the real problems because it wouldn't be profitable to fix them.
Yes, and you know what's really wrong with it? Evil corporations pay people to promote their stupid and wrong (but profitable) ideas.
The paranoid accusations are an unpleasant side effect of unethical (often corporate) behaviour. Much of it goes back to Microsoft which pretty brought astroturfing and FUD online. Back in the day they had Microsoft employees pretending to be ordinary users who couldn't get OS/2 to work right. Back then no one expected a major corporation like Microsoft to be so underhanded and corrupt. Now whenever I see a post that posts something stupid and positive about Microsoft I have to wonder if the poster is stupid, paid by Microsoft (or one of their PR firms) or both.
The poor in America are rich compared to the rest of the world.
Not so much. Sure, being poor in America is better than being poor in Somalia, however, America's poor tend to be some of the worst off in any other developed nations. Comparing apples to apples doesn't create such a bright shiny picture. For instance, there are medical charities that only operate in undeveloped countries and the United States. I saw some of the thousands of people who showed up for the charity's free clinics interviewed on TV. Many of them said they had full time jobs, but couldn't afford to get simple medical problems treated. For example, there were people there who couldn't afford glasses for their kids and one guy who had been waiting two years to get a root canal done.
The onus isn't on the company to pay you more, the onus is make yourself more valuable.
That's interesting and truthy, but I'm not sure how true it actually is. Making yourself more valuable is always a good idea, however, it doesn't mean you'll be rewarded for doing so and that approach will tend to benefit the people who are already most valuable because they will have the most time to invest in making themselves more valuable. If you're working 2 full time minimum wage jobs to make ends meet, there's not going to be a lot of time left over for "self-improvement".
Actually I think the overtime law is just to prevent employers from hiring 1 employee to do the jobs of 2 employees. After all, it's cheaper to hire 1 person and force them to work 80 a week than it is to hire 2 and have each work 40 hours a week. Your situation was an unintended consequence of the law and you're employers parsimonious nature.
I'm ambivalent on the "required to join the union" rules. On the one hand, it is a restriction, on the other hand, the union demands would also benefit non-union employee. And of course, in the bad old days employers with unions could try and require that employees not join the union, or pay people a to not join the union, or any number of other moves designed to weaken the union to the point where all the union employees could be fired in a mass layoff.
Unions are like everything else, they have good and bad sides. In the big picture, they balance out the power of employers. The fact that unions exist forces employers to treat employees at least a little bit better, if solely for the fear of having a union form in their own business.
I believe he was making a Walmart joke. Walmart has actually organized seminars for their employees to assist them in applying for food stamps and other government benefits for the very poor. You know, instead of paying them a wage where they wouldn't need food stamps.
I think it should be accepted as a fundamental issue that you should either be charged for speed or usage but not both. It's double-dipping to force people to pay for speed and then charge them for volume as well. Without volume, speed is meaningless. Without speed, volume is meaningless.
Paying for one should automatically include the other and as Hatta wrote, it's actually better if we pay for speed rather than volume.
Penn and Teller have some large ideological blind spots. Penn was on Real Time a few weeks ago, he claimed public libraries were a travesty because his money was being taken away at gun point. What I found before I stopped watching Bullshit was they often didn't try hard to look at the other side of an issue. That wasn't too big of a flaw when the other side was actually complete nonsense, but when they started doing political issues, I found it made them look very clueless and biased. They still had occasional good points, but I found the obvious failures in analysis to be too aggravating to continue watching.
I don't remember where I originally read that but here's one.
Actually, as far as I understood the law, you could provide "health care" services to people even if you're not a doctor, provided you make it clear you're not a doctor. Of course as soon as something goes wrong, you'd probably get sued, and since you're not a doctor and don't have medical malpractice insurance, you're not likely to continue providing health care after that point.
It's interesting that you mention that doctors haven't existed for most of humanity. I'm reminded of a description of the hospital in Discworld: "It's a good one, some of the patients don't die". That's a pretty apt summary of medicine before doctors. I mean, Steve Jobs just died because he tried "alternative medicine" and tried to treat cancer with diet and exercise. If he'd had the traditional doctors take care of his pancreatic cancer with surgery six months earlier he'd probably (90% chance) still be alive.
There are situations where this is necessary, but they are infrequent. In contrast, I heard a story recently about FDR meeting with some union leaders. They had a very list of revolutionary ideas that they wanted fixed in law, including such outlandish ideas as a 40 hour work week and a two day weekend. FDR read their manifesto and told them he agreed with practically everything they wanted, but he wouldn't do a thing about it. He look at them calmly and told them "Make me do it" and so they did.
I don't know if the story is true or not, but the lesson is that if you want lasting change, you need popular support for the change. If you go against what the people want in big, important ways even if it's the right thing to do, then the people will replace you with the first person who promises to undo all your good works and you've accomplished nothing.
Even worse for many companies like Apple you have to actually sell the stock to realize any benefits from it, because Apple doesn't pay dividends. So unless you have a lot of money, you can only be a temporary owner and hope that you can stay an owner until other people want to be an owner more than you do.
How about if people crying about "there are no jobs for me" would either make new products or services people want or improve themselves to be more useful to employers? But nooo, now they're crying how no one is giving money for what they think they want to do.
Actually, the people Google sent be interviewed for the one article did just that, but unlike you, they recognize that asking a 50 year old guy who's been working in Furniture manufacturing to learn computers so he can get a new job is pretty futile. Most companies won't hire him because he's too old with too little experience.
It becomes an interesting question of what percentile of people do we allow to become permanently unemployed. Is it the bottom 10%? 20%? And what do we do with the least useful people? Do we give them enough money to survive or do we do as the Libertarians suggest and let them die from the crime of not being useful enough?
The point of the article is that the U.S. would need more Apples than it could possibly sustain to fix it's employment problems. The U.S. needs to have some manufacturing jobs because there a lot of people who are more suited to that work than to other jobs. This might seem like a problem of not adapting, but it's just a problem of numbers. Why would anyone want to hire someone from the bottom 50% of applicants for any job? The way to deal with this is to have a robust and diversified field of employers. The U.S. has failed to protect most of it's manufacturing industry from MBA idiocy that considers a hiring a Chinese company to do work inherently superior to employing Americans.
Of course, there's always the question of whether I should believe what you say about your beliefs. I'm reminded of a discussion I had with a friend who smoked, I told him one of the reasons I didn't like smoking was because smokers tend to leave cigarette butts everywhere. He swore up and down to me that most smokers don't throw their butts on the ground and that he never, ever did so. He then threw his cigarette butt on the ground, crushed it with boot heel and began walking off before what he'd just done began to sink in. He, then tried to explain to me why that was a special case and he didn't normally do that. His beliefs about himself trumped reality when the two were put in conflict.
It's not usually expressed explicitly, you have to dig around to find it, but it is fundamental to the belief in a "personal God" that has a specific plan for individuals. God can't be planning your life unless he places significant restrictions on what everyone else can choose to do.
That's an interesting claim, but it doesn't seem to hold water. Sulfur emissions are predominantly from power plants (73%), and the U.S. hasn't exported power plants to China. You could argue that exporting industry to China has effectively exported power plants to China, but as far as I understand the number of power plants in America has not fallen by 33%, thus actual reductions have been achieved and the sorry state of China's sulfur emissions are the result of China not taking any such measures. And the most likely consequence of not having done anything about acid rain in the U.S. would be more environmental degradation in the U.S. with no major impact on China's situation. Environmental regulations aren't a real reason for exporting industry to China.
It's quite probably that MBAs specifically and Business training in general are the reason for excessive offshoring. Business studies are teaching managers to maximize ROA, return on assets. There are two ways to increase that ratio, maximizing returns and minimizing assets. Offshoring and outsourcing are easy ways to reduce the assets side of the equation and to artificially meet ROA targets. Of course, the end result is you end with a company which is good for nothing but it's brand name, but MBAs are notorious for being short-term thinkers. The inescapable consequences of their management decisions are for the suckers who haven't already jumped ship to a better paying job at another company.
I think the problem is that there is a nearly infinite number of "in betweens" most of which don't get fossilized and every time we find one "in between", certain people demand two more.
The interesting thing I've found is that people who believe God has a purpose for their life, tend to believe that they and the people they know are the only people who have free will. I had a friend tell me that when someone was struck by a car and killed that it was "God's will that they die". My question was if it's "God's will" then doesn't that mean that the person driving the car doesn't have free will? I mean he or she could have braked, could have chosen to stay home, could have chosen a different route. If it's all part of a plan that means the person driving the car was forced to kill by God. Why not just give the accident victim a heart attack or stroke? The answer was that she really didn't think that people she didn't know had free will. In effect, it was too painful or too scary to try and understand a world that wasn't custom tailored to her.
Interestingly, it worked for acid rain... But you are correct, in that an escalating (over time) tax on carbon emissions would be more effective than a trading scheme.