You could be right, but I don't get this whole 'everything bad is because of money laundering' argument. I have no doubt money laundering is widespread, but has it become any more widespread now compared to the days when drug dealers were hiding suitcases of cash around the place? The world did not fall apart then, as it will apparently do now if we don't crack down on all these money launderers.
The thing that has changed over the last couple of decades is that people are working/living internationally. It is not at all uncommon these days for a rich american to buy a holiday apartment in Paris or London, or a rich hong kong person to buy a flat in NYC as a 'safe place' for some of their savings - and so leave it empty. Or for a bunch of chinese speculators to buy a whole block of flats in London on credit and leave them empty so they can benefit from rampant price increases. It is really just a product of globalisation and low interest rates. But that is not money laundering. Even chinese people evading capital controls in China and buying in the west is not money laundering (of the drug dealer kind). If they have made the money from a legitimate business trade, then since when did the west care about enforcing domestic CCP capital control laws?
It has become ridiculously hard to deal with even smallish (10's thousand) sums of money internationally these days. I run an international business and have to regularly justify to my bank what I'm doing. Every time I deal with a professional or financial service I have to prove where my funds have come from. The whole system seems to be based on guity until you can prove innocence (they could easily spend 10 mins googling my business and figure out it is legitimate). I find it hard to believe this is not more about the govt putting in place future capital controls and wanting to track everything I do rather than a sudden moral panic causing govts to crack down on evil launderers.
The same argument goes with the move to cashless. In my view this will just enable them to continue their monetary policy games once we get to the point where real interest rates are negative 3% or more.
Just what I need. Additional reasons for the person behind me who does not understand that only a gentle press is needed for a touch screen to be tap-tap-tapping the back of my seat.
No, sorry, that is always a kid. For some inexplicable reason, once you strap the little one into that seat they have some sort of primal urge to start kicking the seat in front for the next couple hours.
As an engineer this stuff makes me a bit concerned. I don't really see any reason why China is not going to take the bulk of the engineering jobs from western countries over the next ten years in the same way they took all the manufacturing jobs. I work a lot with Chinese suppliers. Over the last 10 years there has been a real shift. Sure you can still get your 'classic chinese experience' in Shenzhen, where you rock on up, expect to beat every supplier into the ground with cheap prices, then struggle with quality issues for the next 12 months. But if you go there and pay reasonable prices for stuff, then you get great service, great quality and good support. This part of the market seems to be growing rapidly over there.
The chinese understand quality as well as most western people. It is just that many companies only go to china for cost reasons, so the chinese attempt to meet those cost expectations by cutting corners. This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. If you go to the cheapest car repair shop you should expect that it is more likely they will try to rip you off.
The trouble is that the Chinese have all the supply chain at the moment and this gives them a foot in the door of western companies. I know of a number of companies here in the UK where manufacturing was moved to china, and the chinese contractor offered to do the mech design on the company's next product for free. They did a good job and soon enough management was downsizing the engineering department and shipping that work offshore.
They can do good mech engineering now, and electronics design, so why does anyone believe they won't be able to do software as well? I think it is just a matter of time.
The problem for western countries is that their governments still believe they have some sort of inherent superiority; that just because they are 'developed' they will always be rich. So rather than taking china head on by investing in modern manufacturing and STEMS they invest in financial innovations that will apparently make us all rich despite producing no real value. It is a dangerous game, and in my opinion, at some point all this financial innovation will be show to be the fraud that it is, and the west will quickly discover that a bunch of engineers (or construction grunts for that matter) in a room is much more useful that a stadium full of lawyers when the real world infrastructure that supports western standards of living has fallen apart.
Realistically the best hope for the west is that China gets taken over by lawyers and bean counters as well. What a sad state of affairs.
I wonder why. Speaking as someone who keeps getting turned down for embedded dev jobs despite having PIC and arduino programming experience along with my 20+ years of system level C,C++ and x86 assembler programming, I suspect its the usual case of a company wanting high grade skills but only wanting to pay low grade wages.
FYI, if you are applying for a serious embedded dev job NEVER say you have Arduino experience. To an embedded dev an Ardiuno is a hobbyist kit stuck on top of an Atmel AVR (which itself is a very dated chip now). My advice would be to get an STM32 dev kit and learn how to build a program for the platform and run a few peripherals (without the libraries). An embedded dev who hasn't dipped into the world of ARM Cortex by now is looking pretty dated these days, which is fine if you have huge amounts of experience in a particular platform and want to do contract work maintaining a legacy PIC or Atmel project, but they won't hire an Arduino person for that sort of work.
The engineers that make the most money for their firms are the ones that find simple solutions to complex problems.
The lawyers who bill the most money for their firms are the ones that find complex solutions to simple problems.
In a business environment where profit is the driving motive, these two professions have wildly diverging motivations. If you don't believe me, just look at the mess that is patent law.
No but what they will do is make it a crime to use robust encryption schemes. If you are caught using one then you go to prison for a long time on the basis of possession (regardless of whether you are actually involved in anything else illegal). Of course, criminals won't care, since they are already doing illegal stuff, but regular folk will basically have to make all their data discoverable to the authorities on demand. Similarly anyone in a position of authority, or with large amounts of wealth will be able to apply for an permit to use stronger encryption. As for data breaches, well, these seem to occur every few months at the moment, but unless it is panama paper stuff, very few seem to care (and even then...).
This is the middle class' biggest weakness - they have enough invested in the 'system' that you can use the threat of loss of participation in the system to make them conform to silly rules. Unfortunately we have only had a middle class for about 60 years now out of thousands of years of recorded civilisation, and I'm not entirely convinced it has the political will to sustain itself in the face of oligarchic leadership that seems intent on bringing back feudalism.
Agree with your statements. Netflix is currently in the friendly 'acquire users at all cost' phase of its business cycle. This means you get lots of content for cheap with few annoying restrictions and rules. Make no mistake though, once user acquisition tops out, they will rapidly transition to the 'milk the suckers' phase. I would expect streams to be linked to IP, adverts unless you pay more, shows being moved to premium pay per view content. In the later phases you'll basically have a regular cable channel that costs a fortune but is the only way to get the one or two advert saturated shows that you actually want to watch.
Some would call this creative desctruction. Personally it seems more like a rube goldberg machine form of the broken window fallacy.
You think businesses need 'cloud' for everything? Or to rewrite their ERP systems every 5 years? The question is not whether blockchain is useful, the question is whether all the shiny suit wearing mono-rail salespersons can convince a business to give them money for their blockchain systems or consultancy work.
None of us were told there was a programming exercise
Do you really need to be told this? Were you expecting to be hired as a programmer without demonstrating that you can program?
I imagine it wasn't so much the test, but the bulk 'we don't want to waste our time, but are happy to waste yours' nature of the interview process. It can be a lot more effort for a candidate to come to an interview (time off current job, dry cleaning, transport costs) then for the company to allocate a few staff to the interview room for an hour, and it is a pretty good indicator that the company is happy to mess you about if they expect you to put the effort in to turn up, but won't even give you a one on one interview.
I would always expect a one on one interview unless they told me before hand as a matter of courtesy.
They tried to do this in New Zealand, with a few businesses adding surcharges for using a credit card (when laws were changed to stop credit card companies from preventing this in contracts) and basically the card companies ran media campaigns portraying the businesses as greedy. It worked really well, and the businesses had to backtrack.
The reality is that the payment card industry is pure genius. They offer endless freebies to card holders, which makes card holders think these companies are their best friends, and then make the customers pay for it all through payment charges. But when a retailer tries to pass these fees on to the customer, the customer gets annoyed because they want all their 'free' stuff by being able to pay with the card, rather than having to use cash. It sort of relies on a level of collective stupidity that is probably impossible to eradicate from society.
Don't get it. I can read all day. I subscribe to two major papers. Why pay Apple ?
This isn't about you. It is about Apple desperately trying to find a way to plug the iPhone profit gap. Sales for smartphones will continue to decline across all markets as the industry has simply matured and reached market saturation. For Apple that is a really serious problem, because wall street bankers demand ever increasing profits, and making a reliable multi-billion dollar bottom line year on year is not important to them (they have already capitalised that and pocketed their fees).
If Tim Cook and his board cannot continue to deliver next big thing profits, then the bankers will stuff the board with people who will push for short term profit seeking, and we will see Apple stripped of its biggest asset (loyal customers). This is generally how companies die once they lose a strong leader who can keep the wolfs at bay (with promises of even bigger profits if they don't raid the larder today). It happens every day in the private equity world. Welcome to vulture capitalism.
You know what is going to be cool in five years time? Bokeh free photos. You'll be amazed by them! Using advanced AI processing and machine learning, your phone will be able to expand the depth of field of the camera to remove that annoying blurring that occurs around objects further away. Now everything in your photos will be crisp, clear and in perfect focus - just the way they appear in real life. 2 years later when Apple releases the technology, they will term it Liquid Definition Retina Photos. It is going to be amazing.
It's not that complicated. Apple certainly knows precisely how much profit it is making, and there is a corporate tax rates levied on profits... So the amount they owe is a percentage of the profit made selling hardware and services in each country.
You're oversimplifying it again. This is the perennial problem with the issue.
Your system would attribute 100% of the value add from sales in France to the French tax authorities. Firstly, why is that fair (France did not pay for the infrastructure that supports the workers in California). Secondly, what if Apple just goes back to what everyone did 20-30 years ago, and has a local french distributor who buys from them, adds 30% and sells it on to customers? Should France send a bill for a share of Apple's US profits to the company in the 1 infinite loop? Why would they pay? France can't ban their products or add huge tariffs as they are part of the WTO, and if the company is not directly operating in France they have no force of law to extract taxation. Also, now that you've changed the entire basis for international trade, what do other companies do? What if the US decides to retaliate and sends a bill to French companies for the share of profits that the US thinks was earnt in the US? Perhaps the US adds a cut of global profits based on how many US patents the French company has and the imputed return?
This is the problem. Your idea sounds great but ignores all the details. It's like saying 'jail the bankers' and after a year of chanting that everyone goes home because nobody knew who was meant to do the jailing, what illegal thing had been done, or even what a 'banker' was exactly.
The issue of coming up with a fair profit attribution system (not impossible, but not as simple as you are making out) is still there, along with having to get mutiple countries with competiting issues to agree to a system (unless you think starting a trade war will get you what you want). Most countries can barely agree among themselves.
> Companies themselves can only invest their profits (which ultimately is good for the economy) or distribute them to shareholders
No, they can also hoard cash.
O2 does it in the Czech republic, Apple does it in the US.
Or they can use it to inflate their value by buying back stock. Not really sure that counts as investment.
Even if they hoard cash, the shareholders will want it eventually, or they will use it for investment (see Apple). Hoarding cash does have issues, but avoiding tax directly is not one of them.
Buying back shares is again just an exploitation of tax loopholes which (in most countries) means that capital gains are taxed less than dividend income. It is why you always see CEOs taking $1 salaries. While they are doing press releases about how noble they are, the reality is that if the company is simultanously running a continous options issue/buyback program, they are just shifting their income to the back door where it is taxed less, and they can benefit from being able to move the shares into different entities (trusts, offshore companies) etc for even more tax savings (particularly things like inheritance tax).
Again, how do you education the average person in the street on what is going on, when the CEO can get the company to throw a million dollars (that is 100% tax deductible) at a PR company to trumpet how noble they are for working for $1?
Since this is slashdot, where the average IQ is meant to be a little higher, I'll have a go at explaining this issue. While I completely agree that having these companies not pay taxes in the local countries that they operate in is a bad thing, I think that the way everyone is trying to make this equivalent to someone's personal tax situation (and, let's be fair, most people get their employers to calculate, file and pay their taxes, so don't even need to understand the tax code) is not useful. We saw this sort of shallow argument during the whole occupy movement, where everyone knew what the banks were doing was bad, but they couldn't articulate exactly what it was that was wrong and how it could be fixed. The end result is the occupy movement fizzed out and nothing much changed.
The fundamental issue here is that Apple owns the complete value chain (apart from a small cost of manufacturing that goes to China). Most people would agree that some of that value should be taxable in the country of purchase. But most would also agree that rest of the value should be taxable in the USA (where Apple is based). The question then is, how much should be attributable to each country? To further complicate matters we tax profits, not value, otherwise a high volume low margin product would be disproportionately taxed vs a high margin low volume product. To calculate profits you need to attribute costs. So after you've decided what value add should be taxable, how do you apportion Apple's operating costs to each country? Then you've got intangible assets such as the money spent on R&D for a product.
At the moment the answer to these questions is 'its complicated'. But 'fortunately' for all these multinationals there are giant loopholes in various EU country's tax laws that allow them to avoid that question by reducing in country profits to zero. So guess, what, that is what they all do.
The solution then is two fold, and not entirely simple. Firstly, the EU needs to shutdown the loopholes that countries like Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and the UK have that are really only there to give those countries a competitive advantage over other EU countries. So far that is taking a very long time (so who's fault then is that?). Secondly, there needs to be some sort of agreement on how much of Apple's profits are attributable to each country in which it operates. This is no easy thing to do, and may not even be possible as the best way to do this would be to reach some sort of agreement with the IRS to have it share tax take. But the US itself has a bunch of tax loopholes that allow these countries to avoid US taxes, so you would first have to get those shutdown (again, why is that taking so long...) and then get the IRS to agree to a profit sharing deal (good luck with that). The whole thing is a huge beauacratic mess, and frankly, Apple and its ilk are simply making the most of rules as they stand.
I'm not really sure what the solution is. Personally I think the best approach is to go after the ultimate recipients of the profits (the shareholders) and ensure they cannot avoid income taxes as easily as they are currently able to do. Companies themselves can only invest their profits (which ultimately is good for the economy) or distribute them to shareholders, so going after the shareholders (who it is much easier to lock down to a jurisdiction) seems like the better approach, but that would require voters to educate themselves on the loopholes that get introduced to benefit the 0.1%, and given the current state of western democracies I seriously doubt the ability to deal with these issues.
Imagine all (or a lot of) the people... earning enough money to cover their needs and then spending time advancing free projects. A lot of rubbish would be produced, but occasionally we'd get something as good as Wikipedia.
(a) if this idealised scenario is your argument for UBI, then you're just setting it up to fail. Most people will do nothing useful with their time. The real question is why that is neccessarily a problem if the alternative is having them do made-up-jobs.
(b) UBI is an interesting idea, but in my view not neccessary at this point. What needs to happen is for the middle class to be able to recapture the benefits of productivity growth in the economy - something that stopped happening 30 years ago. The real crux of the issue is why, despite being in the electroral majority, the middle class continues to vote in policies that reduce taxes for wealthy people and corporations, and enable unproductive rentseeking behaviour by the financial industry. Until we understand this problem better and how it can be solved, I assure you that if you campaign hard enough you'll get your UBI, but it will be engineered in a way that simply means further upwards mobility of wealth into the hands of the 1% (just like how increasing home prices have reduced aggregate middle class home ownership, yet most people in the middle class still want them to go up).
It's possible, but on the other hand someone who is prepared to search out hard references is pretty valuable. There are plenty of subject experts who will type out the information they know, or amend an incorrect point, but can't really be bothered to go and find a proper reference for their edits. Having someone who will go through and do that helps make the system more robust.
I am very wary of what you are saying though. I contribute on stack exchange on engineering questions relevant to my expertise, and I've found it is really common for the SE god contributors to turn up at an extremely specialist question, bash out an waffly answer with errors, get up voted by their buddies, and before you know it the answer is accepted. Meanwhile I might write out a detailed answer and it gets buried in the system as the question is to obscure to get much further attention. It has made me very suspicous of many of the answers on that site. I think that either way it is healthly to approach these sources as starting points, and not become too dogmatic about something based on a crowd sourced article.
Yeah, I don't know who Boeing had in charge of PR for this story, but they need to find someone new. With these sorts of 'news' stories (advertisements), no reporter goes out and writes a story. What happens is that Boeing writes the story and issues a press release. The various media outlets will then take the press release, get some automated script or the intern to mangle a few names and all the units of measure, and then stick it on their website for a couple of hours. Someone must have messed up the original press release so someone in the pipeline slapped a 'you won't believe what happens next' headline on the story. This is why good PR people charge a lot of money.
For a comparison see the press release Airbus did a few years back on the A350 wing bend test. In this test they do ultimately bend the wing until it snaps (to check their simulations of this point), but someone at Airbus media relations realised that this would not be a very good story to send out (new A350 wing snaps like twig) so they changed it to saying 'this is why you don't have to ever worry about a wing snapping'. They then showed pictures of an extremely bend (but not broken) wing with a whole media release explaining why this demonstrates how safe the aircraft is. Good move by someone.
Well that may be true and all, but first let’s dispel with this fiction that Barack Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing. He knows exactly what he’s doing. He’s trying to change this country. He wants America to become like the rest of the world...
I have a friend who works in oncology (he is a surgeon). He basically said that immunotherapy is incredible, and within 5 years he believes that those with enough money will be treated for many types of cancer by customised immunotherapy. They will go in every two weeks and a team will adjust the therapy based on the cancer's response until the cancer is gone. Add to this the work being done on early detection, and cancer could soon become nothing more than a strain on your bank account.
Everyone else will continue to get cut, burn and poison. Having said that, this is how the economy has always progressed, and in 20 years when patents have run out and the treatments have become more mature, we can all look forward to this sort of thing.
I used to work in this end of the medical devices field (non-invasive therapy equipment stuff) and it is not going to be the boon Apple seems to think it will be. The reason for this is that there is only so much you can do by non-invasively measuring temperature, pressure and electrical signals from a patient. For example, we have known how to do ECG for a really long time now. It is not expensive. If there was a general benefit to performing periodic ECGs of the population en-mass this could have easily been done by now. The reality is that there is not that much benefit, so even the best healthcare systems in the world don't bother doing it.
Again, with fall detection alarms. There are plenty of these products around and they have been a thing for at least 20-30 years. I had a friend who started a company doing this back in the late 90s. The reality is that those who need them already have one, and in many cases it will have been paid for by the government or their insurance. I doubt those who cannot afford one will be able to fork out for an Apple Watch instead. For myself, I would also rather trust a dedicated system (these things had to have failsafe circuitry in the base station and backup power etc) than a consumer electronics device that needs to be recharged each night. Sure, as an extra its great, but it isn't going to shake up the industry.
The other problem with these products is that there is no real 'market' for them. Basically the industry is a whole series of kickbacks between physicians, insurers and manufacturers in an attempt to get your product 'recommended' to the customer. Almost none of these customers pay for the things out of pocket, and almost all will choose based on what their physician says is best. Hence the whole industry is about networking and kickbacks. I doubt Apple will take the time to deal with all this, and unless they can replace doctors as the patient's point of contact, they aren't going to be able to sweep through the industry and clear out the graft.
That's what you do when you're poor with finances and desperate: Steal from those who are better at managing their resources, and then pretend to be righteous about it.
That's an extremely shortsighted view of the world. Firstly, almost every person would accept the need for some kinds of public goods. We probably shouldn't privatise the military. Nor things like safety regulation and the court system. And if we need some things as public goods, then we need to raise taxes to pay for them. How we do this in an equitable way is most certainly open for debate. Which brings us to the second point: Whether you believe in some kind of natural justice or divine order of things, at some point if inequality gets too big in a democracy it is completely logical, and arguably inevitable, that the majority will vote to redistribute things. You can say this is stealing and unfair, but life is unfair (even for the rich). Many of the aristocracy during the French revolution probably found the whole situation extremely unfair.
So you either get rid of democracy, or you accept that there will be a redistributive force in the economy, probably through richer people paying more taxes. You can't have it both ways. Human nature does not allow it.
The problem with internet companies, is that our present tax system which did this redistribution in a generally agreed upon way, was not built to deal with their globalised, capital-light operating model. Most tax systems were designed for the pre-globalization industrial era of 30 years ago, when you couldn't just move money across borders with a few clicks, and any real business had huge tangible capital (factories, workers) which made it pretty hard to argue your centre of operations were on a tropical island.
The trouble is that fixing these quite legal loopholes (and you can't blame these companies for using them) requires cross border consensus, and many times the country benefiting (e.g. tax haven) isn't interested in do that. This is why individual countries are resorting to rather brutal 'revenue' taxes. You can't hide your revenue in a country, so it is impossible to escape the tax. In the end this is probably the best solution. The biggest problem with it is that a revenue tax, like VAT, is actually very regressive (the poor pay proportionately more of their income for it) so it may ultimately not be enough to calm everyone down.
But this is not a new wealth redistribution system. It is just a re-enforcement of the existing one. And trying to pretend we can have such a system without a negative feedback mechanism for inequality is magic unicorn stuff.
How is this a news story? It needs to be put through the hype distortion machine first:
In breaking news, the Russians have HACKED a robotics conference to plant FAKE robots. At a time when western nations faces the grave threat of EXTINCTION by the rise of machines, this sort of DECEPTION could only mean we have entered a dangerous new period of RUSSIAN artificial INTELLIGENCE operations.
Apple is going in the wrong direction. They should be reducing the price and pushing market share, while pivoting the company towards offering more services. This is where the future is. Google has been steadily working towards this, and even Microsoft has gotten the message. In another 5-10 years phones will be dirt cheap (maybe even free) and the funding model will be through the services you use on it (though you might be paying though ad services, or indirectly e.g. uber). This is just pretty obvious.
I think they are really going to stuff themselves with this current strategy. By the time they realise they have a problem, their market will be too small and exclusive, and those users will quickly disappear as the centre of mass in the industry shifts away.
The company appears to be stuck with the last set of 'commandments' brought down from the mountain by Jobs. Only he could change those commandments (which he did regularly) so they are now stuck on autopilot.
The interesting thing is that this is not going to be because of the whole 'green' thing. Sure for some people that is important, and it is a nice add on, but if people really cared about that they would buy city cars instead of trucks or luxury sedans.
No, the reason this is going to happen is because they are better products. I live in a central city area, and after 5 years being carless am looking at buying a second hand car for work. I fix my own cars, but don't have the time to do that anymore. It is extremely annoying having to deal with timing belt changes (thankfully not so common now), potentially expensive emission control problems, changing spark plugs, water pumps, flushing coolant, engine oil every 6 months. As they get older (~100km for many modern cars) you have a whole bunch of gotchas that will empty your pocket. On one model of Nissan/Renault (would never buy) a friend had the direct injectors fail. They basically had to strip the head to fix it, and it was half the value of the car to fix. That's just incredible. Gas cars also have incredibly complicated transmissions and these can cause problems.
With an electric car you don't have to do any of these issues. You just charge and go. You don't even need to change the brake pads these days. And depending on your housing situation, not having to go to a petrol station and having a fully filled car every morning is a positive not a negative.
The other thing is that the cost of these things is going to keep going down. I see another trend on the horizon which will be battery replacements. I expect that once there are enough old electric cars with poor batteries, someone will start making replacement packs enmass. These will be cheap (as batteries have gotten cheaper) or have better capacity. So you can probably keep the same car for much longer and just keep changing the tyres and upgrading the pack as required.
Outside those with the money to burn, most people just want a car that is reliable and cheap to maintain. Electric cars will do that for them, and for that reason alone nobody will want to touch a thousands-of-things-can-go-wrong gas car once the cost becomes competitive.
Slashdot Mirror
You could be right, but I don't get this whole 'everything bad is because of money laundering' argument. I have no doubt money laundering is widespread, but has it become any more widespread now compared to the days when drug dealers were hiding suitcases of cash around the place? The world did not fall apart then, as it will apparently do now if we don't crack down on all these money launderers.
The thing that has changed over the last couple of decades is that people are working/living internationally. It is not at all uncommon these days for a rich american to buy a holiday apartment in Paris or London, or a rich hong kong person to buy a flat in NYC as a 'safe place' for some of their savings - and so leave it empty. Or for a bunch of chinese speculators to buy a whole block of flats in London on credit and leave them empty so they can benefit from rampant price increases. It is really just a product of globalisation and low interest rates. But that is not money laundering. Even chinese people evading capital controls in China and buying in the west is not money laundering (of the drug dealer kind). If they have made the money from a legitimate business trade, then since when did the west care about enforcing domestic CCP capital control laws?
It has become ridiculously hard to deal with even smallish (10's thousand) sums of money internationally these days. I run an international business and have to regularly justify to my bank what I'm doing. Every time I deal with a professional or financial service I have to prove where my funds have come from. The whole system seems to be based on guity until you can prove innocence (they could easily spend 10 mins googling my business and figure out it is legitimate). I find it hard to believe this is not more about the govt putting in place future capital controls and wanting to track everything I do rather than a sudden moral panic causing govts to crack down on evil launderers.
The same argument goes with the move to cashless. In my view this will just enable them to continue their monetary policy games once we get to the point where real interest rates are negative 3% or more.
Just what I need. Additional reasons for the person behind me who does not understand that only a gentle press is needed for a touch screen to be tap-tap-tapping the back of my seat.
No, sorry, that is always a kid. For some inexplicable reason, once you strap the little one into that seat they have some sort of primal urge to start kicking the seat in front for the next couple hours.
As an engineer this stuff makes me a bit concerned. I don't really see any reason why China is not going to take the bulk of the engineering jobs from western countries over the next ten years in the same way they took all the manufacturing jobs. I work a lot with Chinese suppliers. Over the last 10 years there has been a real shift. Sure you can still get your 'classic chinese experience' in Shenzhen, where you rock on up, expect to beat every supplier into the ground with cheap prices, then struggle with quality issues for the next 12 months. But if you go there and pay reasonable prices for stuff, then you get great service, great quality and good support. This part of the market seems to be growing rapidly over there.
The chinese understand quality as well as most western people. It is just that many companies only go to china for cost reasons, so the chinese attempt to meet those cost expectations by cutting corners. This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. If you go to the cheapest car repair shop you should expect that it is more likely they will try to rip you off.
The trouble is that the Chinese have all the supply chain at the moment and this gives them a foot in the door of western companies. I know of a number of companies here in the UK where manufacturing was moved to china, and the chinese contractor offered to do the mech design on the company's next product for free. They did a good job and soon enough management was downsizing the engineering department and shipping that work offshore.
They can do good mech engineering now, and electronics design, so why does anyone believe they won't be able to do software as well? I think it is just a matter of time.
The problem for western countries is that their governments still believe they have some sort of inherent superiority; that just because they are 'developed' they will always be rich. So rather than taking china head on by investing in modern manufacturing and STEMS they invest in financial innovations that will apparently make us all rich despite producing no real value. It is a dangerous game, and in my opinion, at some point all this financial innovation will be show to be the fraud that it is, and the west will quickly discover that a bunch of engineers (or construction grunts for that matter) in a room is much more useful that a stadium full of lawyers when the real world infrastructure that supports western standards of living has fallen apart.
Realistically the best hope for the west is that China gets taken over by lawyers and bean counters as well. What a sad state of affairs.
I wonder why. Speaking as someone who keeps getting turned down for embedded dev jobs despite having PIC and arduino programming experience along with my 20+ years of system level C,C++ and x86 assembler programming, I suspect its the usual case of a company wanting high grade skills but only wanting to pay low grade wages.
FYI, if you are applying for a serious embedded dev job NEVER say you have Arduino experience. To an embedded dev an Ardiuno is a hobbyist kit stuck on top of an Atmel AVR (which itself is a very dated chip now). My advice would be to get an STM32 dev kit and learn how to build a program for the platform and run a few peripherals (without the libraries). An embedded dev who hasn't dipped into the world of ARM Cortex by now is looking pretty dated these days, which is fine if you have huge amounts of experience in a particular platform and want to do contract work maintaining a legacy PIC or Atmel project, but they won't hire an Arduino person for that sort of work.
The engineers that make the most money for their firms are the ones that find simple solutions to complex problems.
The lawyers who bill the most money for their firms are the ones that find complex solutions to simple problems.
In a business environment where profit is the driving motive, these two professions have wildly diverging motivations. If you don't believe me, just look at the mess that is patent law.
No but what they will do is make it a crime to use robust encryption schemes. If you are caught using one then you go to prison for a long time on the basis of possession (regardless of whether you are actually involved in anything else illegal). Of course, criminals won't care, since they are already doing illegal stuff, but regular folk will basically have to make all their data discoverable to the authorities on demand. Similarly anyone in a position of authority, or with large amounts of wealth will be able to apply for an permit to use stronger encryption. As for data breaches, well, these seem to occur every few months at the moment, but unless it is panama paper stuff, very few seem to care (and even then...).
This is the middle class' biggest weakness - they have enough invested in the 'system' that you can use the threat of loss of participation in the system to make them conform to silly rules. Unfortunately we have only had a middle class for about 60 years now out of thousands of years of recorded civilisation, and I'm not entirely convinced it has the political will to sustain itself in the face of oligarchic leadership that seems intent on bringing back feudalism.
Agree with your statements. Netflix is currently in the friendly 'acquire users at all cost' phase of its business cycle. This means you get lots of content for cheap with few annoying restrictions and rules. Make no mistake though, once user acquisition tops out, they will rapidly transition to the 'milk the suckers' phase. I would expect streams to be linked to IP, adverts unless you pay more, shows being moved to premium pay per view content. In the later phases you'll basically have a regular cable channel that costs a fortune but is the only way to get the one or two advert saturated shows that you actually want to watch.
Some would call this creative desctruction. Personally it seems more like a rube goldberg machine form of the broken window fallacy.
You think businesses need 'cloud' for everything? Or to rewrite their ERP systems every 5 years? The question is not whether blockchain is useful, the question is whether all the shiny suit wearing mono-rail salespersons can convince a business to give them money for their blockchain systems or consultancy work.
None of us were told there was a programming exercise
Do you really need to be told this? Were you expecting to be hired as a programmer without demonstrating that you can program?
I imagine it wasn't so much the test, but the bulk 'we don't want to waste our time, but are happy to waste yours' nature of the interview process. It can be a lot more effort for a candidate to come to an interview (time off current job, dry cleaning, transport costs) then for the company to allocate a few staff to the interview room for an hour, and it is a pretty good indicator that the company is happy to mess you about if they expect you to put the effort in to turn up, but won't even give you a one on one interview.
I would always expect a one on one interview unless they told me before hand as a matter of courtesy.
They tried to do this in New Zealand, with a few businesses adding surcharges for using a credit card (when laws were changed to stop credit card companies from preventing this in contracts) and basically the card companies ran media campaigns portraying the businesses as greedy. It worked really well, and the businesses had to backtrack.
The reality is that the payment card industry is pure genius. They offer endless freebies to card holders, which makes card holders think these companies are their best friends, and then make the customers pay for it all through payment charges. But when a retailer tries to pass these fees on to the customer, the customer gets annoyed because they want all their 'free' stuff by being able to pay with the card, rather than having to use cash. It sort of relies on a level of collective stupidity that is probably impossible to eradicate from society.
Don't get it. I can read all day. I subscribe to two major papers. Why pay Apple ?
This isn't about you. It is about Apple desperately trying to find a way to plug the iPhone profit gap. Sales for smartphones will continue to decline across all markets as the industry has simply matured and reached market saturation. For Apple that is a really serious problem, because wall street bankers demand ever increasing profits, and making a reliable multi-billion dollar bottom line year on year is not important to them (they have already capitalised that and pocketed their fees).
If Tim Cook and his board cannot continue to deliver next big thing profits, then the bankers will stuff the board with people who will push for short term profit seeking, and we will see Apple stripped of its biggest asset (loyal customers). This is generally how companies die once they lose a strong leader who can keep the wolfs at bay (with promises of even bigger profits if they don't raid the larder today). It happens every day in the private equity world. Welcome to vulture capitalism.
You know what is going to be cool in five years time? Bokeh free photos. You'll be amazed by them! Using advanced AI processing and machine learning, your phone will be able to expand the depth of field of the camera to remove that annoying blurring that occurs around objects further away. Now everything in your photos will be crisp, clear and in perfect focus - just the way they appear in real life. 2 years later when Apple releases the technology, they will term it Liquid Definition Retina Photos. It is going to be amazing.
It's not that complicated. Apple certainly knows precisely how much profit it is making, and there is a corporate tax rates levied on profits... So the amount they owe is a percentage of the profit made selling hardware and services in each country.
You're oversimplifying it again. This is the perennial problem with the issue.
Your system would attribute 100% of the value add from sales in France to the French tax authorities. Firstly, why is that fair (France did not pay for the infrastructure that supports the workers in California). Secondly, what if Apple just goes back to what everyone did 20-30 years ago, and has a local french distributor who buys from them, adds 30% and sells it on to customers? Should France send a bill for a share of Apple's US profits to the company in the 1 infinite loop? Why would they pay? France can't ban their products or add huge tariffs as they are part of the WTO, and if the company is not directly operating in France they have no force of law to extract taxation. Also, now that you've changed the entire basis for international trade, what do other companies do? What if the US decides to retaliate and sends a bill to French companies for the share of profits that the US thinks was earnt in the US? Perhaps the US adds a cut of global profits based on how many US patents the French company has and the imputed return?
This is the problem. Your idea sounds great but ignores all the details. It's like saying 'jail the bankers' and after a year of chanting that everyone goes home because nobody knew who was meant to do the jailing, what illegal thing had been done, or even what a 'banker' was exactly.
The issue of coming up with a fair profit attribution system (not impossible, but not as simple as you are making out) is still there, along with having to get mutiple countries with competiting issues to agree to a system (unless you think starting a trade war will get you what you want). Most countries can barely agree among themselves.
> Companies themselves can only invest their profits (which ultimately is good for the economy) or distribute them to shareholders
No, they can also hoard cash. O2 does it in the Czech republic, Apple does it in the US. Or they can use it to inflate their value by buying back stock. Not really sure that counts as investment.
Even if they hoard cash, the shareholders will want it eventually, or they will use it for investment (see Apple). Hoarding cash does have issues, but avoiding tax directly is not one of them.
Buying back shares is again just an exploitation of tax loopholes which (in most countries) means that capital gains are taxed less than dividend income. It is why you always see CEOs taking $1 salaries. While they are doing press releases about how noble they are, the reality is that if the company is simultanously running a continous options issue/buyback program, they are just shifting their income to the back door where it is taxed less, and they can benefit from being able to move the shares into different entities (trusts, offshore companies) etc for even more tax savings (particularly things like inheritance tax).
Again, how do you education the average person in the street on what is going on, when the CEO can get the company to throw a million dollars (that is 100% tax deductible) at a PR company to trumpet how noble they are for working for $1?
Since this is slashdot, where the average IQ is meant to be a little higher, I'll have a go at explaining this issue. While I completely agree that having these companies not pay taxes in the local countries that they operate in is a bad thing, I think that the way everyone is trying to make this equivalent to someone's personal tax situation (and, let's be fair, most people get their employers to calculate, file and pay their taxes, so don't even need to understand the tax code) is not useful. We saw this sort of shallow argument during the whole occupy movement, where everyone knew what the banks were doing was bad, but they couldn't articulate exactly what it was that was wrong and how it could be fixed. The end result is the occupy movement fizzed out and nothing much changed.
The fundamental issue here is that Apple owns the complete value chain (apart from a small cost of manufacturing that goes to China). Most people would agree that some of that value should be taxable in the country of purchase. But most would also agree that rest of the value should be taxable in the USA (where Apple is based). The question then is, how much should be attributable to each country? To further complicate matters we tax profits, not value, otherwise a high volume low margin product would be disproportionately taxed vs a high margin low volume product. To calculate profits you need to attribute costs. So after you've decided what value add should be taxable, how do you apportion Apple's operating costs to each country? Then you've got intangible assets such as the money spent on R&D for a product.
At the moment the answer to these questions is 'its complicated'. But 'fortunately' for all these multinationals there are giant loopholes in various EU country's tax laws that allow them to avoid that question by reducing in country profits to zero. So guess, what, that is what they all do.
The solution then is two fold, and not entirely simple. Firstly, the EU needs to shutdown the loopholes that countries like Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and the UK have that are really only there to give those countries a competitive advantage over other EU countries. So far that is taking a very long time (so who's fault then is that?). Secondly, there needs to be some sort of agreement on how much of Apple's profits are attributable to each country in which it operates. This is no easy thing to do, and may not even be possible as the best way to do this would be to reach some sort of agreement with the IRS to have it share tax take. But the US itself has a bunch of tax loopholes that allow these countries to avoid US taxes, so you would first have to get those shutdown (again, why is that taking so long...) and then get the IRS to agree to a profit sharing deal (good luck with that). The whole thing is a huge beauacratic mess, and frankly, Apple and its ilk are simply making the most of rules as they stand.
I'm not really sure what the solution is. Personally I think the best approach is to go after the ultimate recipients of the profits (the shareholders) and ensure they cannot avoid income taxes as easily as they are currently able to do. Companies themselves can only invest their profits (which ultimately is good for the economy) or distribute them to shareholders, so going after the shareholders (who it is much easier to lock down to a jurisdiction) seems like the better approach, but that would require voters to educate themselves on the loopholes that get introduced to benefit the 0.1%, and given the current state of western democracies I seriously doubt the ability to deal with these issues.
Imagine all (or a lot of) the people... earning enough money to cover their needs and then spending time advancing free projects. A lot of rubbish would be produced, but occasionally we'd get something as good as Wikipedia.
(a) if this idealised scenario is your argument for UBI, then you're just setting it up to fail. Most people will do nothing useful with their time. The real question is why that is neccessarily a problem if the alternative is having them do made-up-jobs.
(b) UBI is an interesting idea, but in my view not neccessary at this point. What needs to happen is for the middle class to be able to recapture the benefits of productivity growth in the economy - something that stopped happening 30 years ago. The real crux of the issue is why, despite being in the electroral majority, the middle class continues to vote in policies that reduce taxes for wealthy people and corporations, and enable unproductive rentseeking behaviour by the financial industry. Until we understand this problem better and how it can be solved, I assure you that if you campaign hard enough you'll get your UBI, but it will be engineered in a way that simply means further upwards mobility of wealth into the hands of the 1% (just like how increasing home prices have reduced aggregate middle class home ownership, yet most people in the middle class still want them to go up).
It's possible, but on the other hand someone who is prepared to search out hard references is pretty valuable. There are plenty of subject experts who will type out the information they know, or amend an incorrect point, but can't really be bothered to go and find a proper reference for their edits. Having someone who will go through and do that helps make the system more robust.
I am very wary of what you are saying though. I contribute on stack exchange on engineering questions relevant to my expertise, and I've found it is really common for the SE god contributors to turn up at an extremely specialist question, bash out an waffly answer with errors, get up voted by their buddies, and before you know it the answer is accepted. Meanwhile I might write out a detailed answer and it gets buried in the system as the question is to obscure to get much further attention. It has made me very suspicous of many of the answers on that site. I think that either way it is healthly to approach these sources as starting points, and not become too dogmatic about something based on a crowd sourced article.
Yeah, I don't know who Boeing had in charge of PR for this story, but they need to find someone new. With these sorts of 'news' stories (advertisements), no reporter goes out and writes a story. What happens is that Boeing writes the story and issues a press release. The various media outlets will then take the press release, get some automated script or the intern to mangle a few names and all the units of measure, and then stick it on their website for a couple of hours. Someone must have messed up the original press release so someone in the pipeline slapped a 'you won't believe what happens next' headline on the story. This is why good PR people charge a lot of money.
For a comparison see the press release Airbus did a few years back on the A350 wing bend test. In this test they do ultimately bend the wing until it snaps (to check their simulations of this point), but someone at Airbus media relations realised that this would not be a very good story to send out (new A350 wing snaps like twig) so they changed it to saying 'this is why you don't have to ever worry about a wing snapping'. They then showed pictures of an extremely bend (but not broken) wing with a whole media release explaining why this demonstrates how safe the aircraft is. Good move by someone.
Well that may be true and all, but first let’s dispel with this fiction that Barack Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing. He knows exactly what he’s doing. He’s trying to change this country. He wants America to become like the rest of the world...
I have a friend who works in oncology (he is a surgeon). He basically said that immunotherapy is incredible, and within 5 years he believes that those with enough money will be treated for many types of cancer by customised immunotherapy. They will go in every two weeks and a team will adjust the therapy based on the cancer's response until the cancer is gone. Add to this the work being done on early detection, and cancer could soon become nothing more than a strain on your bank account.
Everyone else will continue to get cut, burn and poison. Having said that, this is how the economy has always progressed, and in 20 years when patents have run out and the treatments have become more mature, we can all look forward to this sort of thing.
Certainly an exciting time to be alive.
I used to work in this end of the medical devices field (non-invasive therapy equipment stuff) and it is not going to be the boon Apple seems to think it will be. The reason for this is that there is only so much you can do by non-invasively measuring temperature, pressure and electrical signals from a patient. For example, we have known how to do ECG for a really long time now. It is not expensive. If there was a general benefit to performing periodic ECGs of the population en-mass this could have easily been done by now. The reality is that there is not that much benefit, so even the best healthcare systems in the world don't bother doing it.
Again, with fall detection alarms. There are plenty of these products around and they have been a thing for at least 20-30 years. I had a friend who started a company doing this back in the late 90s. The reality is that those who need them already have one, and in many cases it will have been paid for by the government or their insurance. I doubt those who cannot afford one will be able to fork out for an Apple Watch instead. For myself, I would also rather trust a dedicated system (these things had to have failsafe circuitry in the base station and backup power etc) than a consumer electronics device that needs to be recharged each night. Sure, as an extra its great, but it isn't going to shake up the industry.
The other problem with these products is that there is no real 'market' for them. Basically the industry is a whole series of kickbacks between physicians, insurers and manufacturers in an attempt to get your product 'recommended' to the customer. Almost none of these customers pay for the things out of pocket, and almost all will choose based on what their physician says is best. Hence the whole industry is about networking and kickbacks. I doubt Apple will take the time to deal with all this, and unless they can replace doctors as the patient's point of contact, they aren't going to be able to sweep through the industry and clear out the graft.
That's what you do when you're poor with finances and desperate: Steal from those who are better at managing their resources, and then pretend to be righteous about it.
That's an extremely shortsighted view of the world. Firstly, almost every person would accept the need for some kinds of public goods. We probably shouldn't privatise the military. Nor things like safety regulation and the court system. And if we need some things as public goods, then we need to raise taxes to pay for them. How we do this in an equitable way is most certainly open for debate. Which brings us to the second point: Whether you believe in some kind of natural justice or divine order of things, at some point if inequality gets too big in a democracy it is completely logical, and arguably inevitable, that the majority will vote to redistribute things. You can say this is stealing and unfair, but life is unfair (even for the rich). Many of the aristocracy during the French revolution probably found the whole situation extremely unfair.
So you either get rid of democracy, or you accept that there will be a redistributive force in the economy, probably through richer people paying more taxes. You can't have it both ways. Human nature does not allow it.
The problem with internet companies, is that our present tax system which did this redistribution in a generally agreed upon way, was not built to deal with their globalised, capital-light operating model. Most tax systems were designed for the pre-globalization industrial era of 30 years ago, when you couldn't just move money across borders with a few clicks, and any real business had huge tangible capital (factories, workers) which made it pretty hard to argue your centre of operations were on a tropical island.
The trouble is that fixing these quite legal loopholes (and you can't blame these companies for using them) requires cross border consensus, and many times the country benefiting (e.g. tax haven) isn't interested in do that. This is why individual countries are resorting to rather brutal 'revenue' taxes. You can't hide your revenue in a country, so it is impossible to escape the tax. In the end this is probably the best solution. The biggest problem with it is that a revenue tax, like VAT, is actually very regressive (the poor pay proportionately more of their income for it) so it may ultimately not be enough to calm everyone down.
But this is not a new wealth redistribution system. It is just a re-enforcement of the existing one. And trying to pretend we can have such a system without a negative feedback mechanism for inequality is magic unicorn stuff.
How is this a news story? It needs to be put through the hype distortion machine first:
In breaking news, the Russians have HACKED a robotics conference to plant FAKE robots. At a time when western nations faces the grave threat of EXTINCTION by the rise of machines, this sort of DECEPTION could only mean we have entered a dangerous new period of RUSSIAN artificial INTELLIGENCE operations.
There, fixed.
Apple is going in the wrong direction. They should be reducing the price and pushing market share, while pivoting the company towards offering more services. This is where the future is. Google has been steadily working towards this, and even Microsoft has gotten the message. In another 5-10 years phones will be dirt cheap (maybe even free) and the funding model will be through the services you use on it (though you might be paying though ad services, or indirectly e.g. uber). This is just pretty obvious.
I think they are really going to stuff themselves with this current strategy. By the time they realise they have a problem, their market will be too small and exclusive, and those users will quickly disappear as the centre of mass in the industry shifts away.
The company appears to be stuck with the last set of 'commandments' brought down from the mountain by Jobs. Only he could change those commandments (which he did regularly) so they are now stuck on autopilot.
The interesting thing is that this is not going to be because of the whole 'green' thing. Sure for some people that is important, and it is a nice add on, but if people really cared about that they would buy city cars instead of trucks or luxury sedans.
No, the reason this is going to happen is because they are better products. I live in a central city area, and after 5 years being carless am looking at buying a second hand car for work. I fix my own cars, but don't have the time to do that anymore. It is extremely annoying having to deal with timing belt changes (thankfully not so common now), potentially expensive emission control problems, changing spark plugs, water pumps, flushing coolant, engine oil every 6 months. As they get older (~100km for many modern cars) you have a whole bunch of gotchas that will empty your pocket. On one model of Nissan/Renault (would never buy) a friend had the direct injectors fail. They basically had to strip the head to fix it, and it was half the value of the car to fix. That's just incredible. Gas cars also have incredibly complicated transmissions and these can cause problems.
With an electric car you don't have to do any of these issues. You just charge and go. You don't even need to change the brake pads these days. And depending on your housing situation, not having to go to a petrol station and having a fully filled car every morning is a positive not a negative.
The other thing is that the cost of these things is going to keep going down. I see another trend on the horizon which will be battery replacements. I expect that once there are enough old electric cars with poor batteries, someone will start making replacement packs enmass. These will be cheap (as batteries have gotten cheaper) or have better capacity. So you can probably keep the same car for much longer and just keep changing the tyres and upgrading the pack as required.
Outside those with the money to burn, most people just want a car that is reliable and cheap to maintain. Electric cars will do that for them, and for that reason alone nobody will want to touch a thousands-of-things-can-go-wrong gas car once the cost becomes competitive.