The money is being put to work exactly as you say - by investing into assets in the countries it is located in. Much of it is probably making it back to the USA as well through lending schemes facilitated by investment banks - Apple 'invests' a billion in bonds issued by Goldman Sachs' EU branch, and Goldman Sachs' USA branch buys up the latest billion dollar corporate bond issue from Apple. Note that the money isn't being repatriated so US tax is not triggered. GS has been around for 148 years, so the loan never needs to be paid back in anyone's lifetime.
What the investment bank then does with the money is up to them, but it won't sit in bank accounts (though with investment banks, it could end up in unmarked suitcases...). This is indeed where they get their funding for schemes such as cornering the global coffee market, or the GS Aluminium market rigging. In all seriousness though, a lot will just go into buying mortgages, or personal loans. Essentially, the investment bank lends money to a local finance company, which lends it to a local consumer who uses it to buy an Apple product, the profits of which then go to Apple, who lend it to the local investment bank, who lends it to a local finance company....
The problem with all this is that much of these investments is private unsecured debt, or mortgages, which are really not much different these days. There are simply not enough productive investments around, such as new plant and machinery, or viable startups, so the money just goes into funding consumer debt instead. This is why we have huge debt bubbles everywhere right now, and why you can basically correlate private debt growth with GDP and recessions (see the work of Steve Keen - he is a nutcase on a lot of things, but on this he is correct).
There is really no solution while wealth is becoming increasingly concentrated (meaning that consumer demand is only sustained through ever growing private debt) and private banks are largely unconstrained in their ability to create debt.
This really just demonstrates the stupidity of our current economic system, where money, which is a made-up human construct meant to facilitate the trade in real goods and services, has become more important than said real goods and services. We have a 'market' that pays our best and brightest far more to come up with these pointless number shuffling schemes than to become a doctor, scientist or teacher. We then wonder why, despite all the GDP we have supposedly magiced up in the last decade, many of our doctors, scientists and teachers can no longer afford basic shelter and services for them and their families.
At a government level, we have treasuries slashing public sector spending to provide corporate tax breaks because politicians seem to believe that they can save for the care worker jobs that will be required by the ageing boomers in the future, by putting the young out of work today. Again, all driven by this belief that money is more important than the underlying economy it is meant to facilitate.
And to add to the complete disconnected stupidity, we have central banks busy abusing the monetary system by printing trillions of dollars in an attempt to stop all this warped cash hoarding by the rich from deflating the real economy.
It is really sad, and it is all going to come to a head at some point. Unfortunately I don't think anyone has a clear idea of how to fix it, and there is a great risk that we lurch too far to either the left or right, as has been the pattern throughout history.
The fundamental problem Apple has is that Samsung has the key display technology that Apple needs to do much more innovation with its hardware. LCD panels are a dead end for mobile devices, if thinness and efficiency is the goal. Apple needs to get away from LCD, but to do so right now requires becoming dependent on Samsung again.
This is why we had the whole Tim Cook spin about OLED having terrible colors a few years back. Apple needed to down play the tech that it didn't have. In the end though, it looks like Apple is going to throw the kitchen sink at getting micro LED going, which looks like a technology that could easily surpass OLED in a lot of areas. If they can pull that off before their entire product line becomes dependent on Samsung AMOLED, then they'll be good to go for another 5 years.
In the end though we must keep in mind that all OLED or AMOLED is going to ultimately allow is thinner devices. You could imagine that the next big step will be semi-flexible displays so that we can avoid another bend-gate situations as devices get even thinner. It's cool to see how far the tech is going, but since almost everyone I see puts their thin new iPhone into a big bumper case, it does all feel pretty pointless.
"Chris just wasn't the right fit for Tesla, and we've decided to make a change,"
He may have technically quit, but it kinda sounds like he didn't have a lot of choice in the matter. I also find it quite interesting that they talk about 'fit'. I doubt he is a high level asshole, given that post Jobs' Apple is not known for HR scandals, and in my experience personal issues have to be devastatingly bad before a company will let go of someone who knows their stuff. So maybe he didn't know his stuff (which bodes poorly for the Apple car), or he got off side with Musk (which bodes poorly for Tesla).
Anyway, I hope he negotiated one hell of a golden handshake. I don't imagine the Apple car project will be excited about having him back.
I had no problem letting Windows 7 update itself automatically until Microsoft started incessantly nagging me about changing to Windows 10, and news of their telemetry patches came out. Oh, and the whole installing patches for 5-10 mins while you're trying to shut your computer down (always seemed to be before I needed to go somewhere) was pretty dumb as well.
Microsoft took security updates and started abusing them for their own nefarious purposes. This, combined with their propensity to produce rubbish software, has created a dangerous situation for customers, and just goes to demonstrate that Microsoft has not moved on from producing extremely poor products in more than 30 years.
Hopefully a few more Nokia style implosions and we can see the end of this company.
Of course the company is worth $1 billion dollars. If Andy Rubin sneezed, and three top hedge fund managers agreed that his snot could potentially cure cancer, they would be able to sell shares in his snot for $1 billion dollars. When interest rates are being supported at nominally negative rates by a central banking system beholden to the rich, the only investment that is a bad one is an investment so grounded in reality that it cannot be blown into a giant bubble.
Money is becoming worthless to those who have it, and unobtainable to those who don't. It's a different sort of monetary system failure from Weimer/Zimbabwe, and the high inflation of the 1980s, but it is probably going to end in a big mess none the less.
It just seems a massive strategic oversight that this isn't going to be ready until December. Most of the world will probably be waiting till this time next year to get their hands on the units. Any hype they hoped to generated with the announcement will have been long forgotten by December, and the delay will give Google/Amazon plenty of time to develop a game plan to disrupt their launch. I mean, what is the point of keeping it secret if you're going to make everyone wait 7 months before they can get it?
I remember Jobs once pointed out that one of the most important sentences Apple included in their keynotes was 'ships now'. He was right. Since the whole airpod delays I thought they would have got this stuff under control.
...are these people going to stop pretending it's about talent?
It's not. It's about cheap, compliant, captive labor.
Disagree? YOU explain why these so-fucking-smart people need to be trained for six months by the locals they are replacing.
This might be the case in the USA, but in the UK the non-EU skilled migrant system is pretty tough to get through. It costs an employer a lot of money so it would be hard to see how anyone could save money doing this, especially with the EU labour pool readily accessible (for now).
I also find it quite sad that immigration has become all about some sort of global-economic-struggle. I came to the UK from NZ simply because I wanted to travel and experience new things. Frankly, since sterling crashed after the GFC my income in NZ would be higher than here (and my house would certainly be much nicer), so I'm certainly not hear for the economics. Many more British citizens go back the other way to enjoy a quieter pace of life and for me each country offers a very different experience and I think it is great that brits want to go enjoy living in NZ.
I don't deny that immigration can be used to suppress local wages, but for many young people it is fundamentally just part of experiencing all that the world has to offer. Life is short. Who would want to hole up in their backyard until they die?
I like the idea of these scramjet planes, but I struggle to see how they are going to be economical vs the sort of thing Musk/Bezos are planning with reusability (I understand this is for significantly smaller payloads). In the end, is it really that big a deal having to carry oxidiser for the first stage with you? As Musk keeps arguing, the fuel costs are not a big issue with rocket launches, and the size of your rocket isn't such an issue if you can reuse it enough times.
In contrast, the main problem I see with these scramjets is that the atmospheric conditions required to allow scramjet operation (speed and density) also produce massive heating and drag on the airframe. Presumably you must carry extra fuel to pay for the ability to collect oxidiser, and it would be interesting to see just how much of an improvement in fuelling costs these designs can achieve in the best case.
For spaceplanes to really come into their own I would have thought a single stage to orbit system would really be required. Reaction Engines seems to think this is possible, but I doubt it is coming anytime in the next decade. Still, great to see progress being made on new concepts.
Except that this time around there is nowhere to go.
Except that is what people said last time, and the time before that.
And the time before that, and the time before... oh wait, there was no time before that because the industrial revolution is barely 200 years old.
The times we are living in are unprecedented in terms of technological and societal change when compared against the entire recorded history of humanity - and the history we can infer from before that. Making claims that things will just work out because they did a few times before is really ignorant. It's not much different from me wading into a discussion among nuclear physicist and telling them all that a fusion power station is never going to be practical because it hasn't turned out to be practical after all the previous predictions over the last 60 years.
Once you are beholden to a government for something, they own your ass. You will do what they want. But you probably won't realize it until it's way too late.
Yeah, as opposed to being beholden to a bunch of oligarchs who own all the wealth and much of the political system, and let me have a job, piece of their private land to live on, and access to all the copyrighted/patented knowledge they control because they are all such generous people.
Brexit seems more and more like a positive thing for each day that passes. By the time May is done Australia will be sending its delinquents over there instead.
They probably will at this rate. As a NZer who's country has a free trade deal with Australia and China, I can attest to how little such agreements prevent you from being screwed over by the bigger country/better negotiator. Britain is going to get a nasty wake up call when it wonders off to the nations of the world to do deals and ends up tangled up in a mess of agreements that give them far less freedom than they get in the EU.
Some examples: NZ has, for the last thirty years, been trying to get its apples in to Australia. It has a trade deal that should allow this, and it has gone to the WTO (that will apparently give Britain great default access to everywhere once it leaves the single market) repeatedly to try to prevent Australia halting the imports. It has not worked, because Australia keeps coming up with new reasons why the apples cannot be imported on trumped up biosecurity grounds. Good luck. In addition to this, NZ has been trying to break into the Australian aviation market for about the same amount of time. They finally managed it many years ago by buying out Ansett Australia, which was promptly grounded by the Australian Civil Aviation regulator a month later on the grounds of 'safety'. The result was that Air New Zealand had to be renationalised by the NZ government and withdrew from Australia with its tail between its legs. More recently, just months after a new agreement had been reached by the two governments on creating a pathway to citizenship for NZers currently stuck in an immigration no-mans land (due to continual erosion of the free movement provisions that were previously agreed) the Australian government announced new changes that put a whole new bunch of kiwis into a new no mans land. Basically they gave with one hand while pulling the rug with the other.
With China things were not so bad, with the exception that the Chinese put a provision in the agreement that prevented NZ from discriminating against investors from there. This has hamstrung the NZ govts ability to prevent Chinese flooding their money into our tiny country, as it would have to renegotiate parts of the Australian agreement to do this.
This is the sort of great stuff Britain has to look forward too. Already the stage is being set for them to be screwed by both NZ and Australia, which are attempting to position themselves as the UK's allies in their brave new word (even offering to send trade negotiators to help the UK), while lobbying the EU to replace existing UK meat and dairy imports with their own.
If the UK expects to do trade with anyone, then it will quickly realise that doing trade deals always requires flogging off some sovereignty as well.
How dare there be a punishment for doing something illegal
There was a punishment. 2 year losing your liberty for depriving a multi-billion dollar mega corp of some extra profit on a good that has no cost of production seems more than fair. 10 years is just ridiculous.
Laws need to be proportional otherwise you have a police state, where everyone lives in fear of making one mistake and ending up in the gulag for the rest of their lives. People are not robots. They make mistakes and wrong choices. Punishment should be aimed at rehabilitation not ejecting them from society. That is what a confident, prosperous and mature society would do.
For Qualcomm and Imagination, I would think that their contracts with Apple were pretty iron-clad. Apple didn't become one of the biggest companies on the planet by signing deals that wasn't in their favour. Potential for abuse by Apple when the contracts were drawn up aside, I would think that the contracts are pretty solid and Apple knows exactly what it's rights are and has protected itself.
This means that the only recourse for (former) suppliers is to go after Apple, primarily in the court of public opinion, to see if there's a chance for a settlement to avoid Apple's public reputation being damaged. Although after Jobs, I don't see how it could get any worse on that front.
Um, this is the company that ended up with its most important parts supplier becoming its biggest competitor. They are still trying to detach themselves from Samsung, and despite having $1/4 trillion in the bank cannot get hold of the best displays in the industry.
Given that Mr Cook was in charge of all this supply chain stuff before being anointed by Jobs, why would you assume their other supply arrangements were put together any better?
...to offer to bring back a tiny, tiny fraction of the vast sum they've avoided paying a cent in taxes on so they can get some good PR and hope we ignore the rest of the money they've stolen from the US public. (And make no mistake, tax evasion is just another form of theft, with the victim being society.)
I'm no fan of our current global tax system and the wealth distortions it has created. But going around trying to label companies/people legally minimising their tax 'thieves' is not much different from the RIAA moral police style anti-piracy campaigns. It's childish, and discredits serious arguments.
Firstly, almost every western country's tax system is based on self declaration. We don't have tax inspectors hovering over every transaction you make, with the big eye in the sky then sending you a bill at the end of the year. You go about your business, and at the end of the year, you report to the government what tax you think you owe. In the vast majority of cases, the government does not challenge your assessment. It is an honesty based system (albeit with stiff penalties if you abuse it) and it tends to work pretty well. By claiming that all these billions or dollars are being stolen, you are insinuating that the integrity of the system has broken down. This is dangerous, because the next step then is to crack down on these phantom tax cheats, by doing things like banning cash, and having your bank account data fed directly to the IRS. Obviously this would have no impact on what Apple and Google etc are doing, because the IRS already knows what they are doing. All you have done is given the government a populous excuse to invade our lives further.
Secondly, company tax is nowhere near as big a moral issue as you think it is. Fiduciary duty means that a company is limited in its ability to live it up on income like an individual can (and perks like staff parties, corporate jets, are generally deductible anyway, so company tax is irrelevant). Net profits must ultimately be either distributed to shareholders or re-invested in productive activities. Saving them just delays this, but unless you save them forever, the company must ultimately 'consume' the profits by distribution to shareholders or investment.
If it re-invests the profits, then almost always it can claim the tax back over time through depreciation. In other words, it might earn $10000 of profit, pay $2000 of tax, spend the resulting $8000 to buy a machine, but over the next five years claim back $2000/5 in tax credits due to the depreciation of the capital asset. Ultimately the taxman gets no tax on the profits, but the company has to lend the taxman the tax for five years. For small and medium sized businesses trying to grow off cashflow, this is really stupid. If the machine they wanted cost $10000, then they would have to borrow $2000 to lend onward to the taxman for five years. Indeed, many small businesses have to do just this, which is why most countries have generous capital allowances to prevent such pointless cashflow disruption.
Alternately, if it distributes the profits to shareholders, the shareholders pay tax on the dividends against their individual income. You might notice a potential issue with this - distributed profits get taxed twice. A company could make the $10000 of profit, pay $2000 of tax, and then pays $8000 to a shareholder. The shareholder might then pay $2500 of tax on that, resulting in a net dividend of $5500 arriving in the shareholder's account. Of the $10000 the company made from a profit on selling widgets, barely half gets to the owners. People in partnerships (as opposed to limited companies) don't have this problem, which puts companies at a big disadvantage (even if you think such a punitive effective tax rate is okay). This is why almost every country has various tax credit systems or lower dividend tax rates to prevent this issue.
Now where I agree with you there is a problem is in the loopholes that develop when you start tryin
The bigger question is why we have to move around so much. Why does ever journey in modern suburban life require driving? I live in a city, and can walk to restaurants, walk to work, walk to the supermarket. I accept this is not for everyone, but suburban life sits at the other end, where getting a pint of milk requires driving. Add in congestion and parking issues and it is like a real-life rube-goldberg machine for living.
Stop this obsession with single use planning zones, and the need for humans to turn up in person everywhere and much of these problems can be fixed. It's not like we fixed the time it takes to deliver mail by having a fleet of hypersonic aircraft that can deliver letters anywhere in the world in less than an hour. We just used different technological solutions instead and got far better results. Similarly, the solution to traffic congestion is to stop this ridiculous need for the inhabitants of a city to shuffle back and forth between two areas everyday. The original argument for single use planning was that it would improve quality of life. It evidently does not, because the highest real estate prices now are for quality housing in dense urban areas where people can walk around their local communities.
I once worked at a company where the embedded software team was based around one guy who was the ultimate control freak. They needed to speed up software development, so upper management kept giving him more people for his team. He refused to let them write any software, so his team just kept growing because upper management thought the problem was still capacity. One guy I knew well did a masters degree while sitting two desks from his boss. I talked to him about this (when he wasn't busy working on his thesis), and he said he asked his boss every day if he had any work for him to do, and his boss always said he would get back to him. He was on a good salary too, and I think the company helped pay for his course, and gave him study days to attend lectures.
You're right on the surface of it. But with a frequency in the 60GHz range and beamforming, we could get that number up to.004 watts.:)
You jest but you're actually right. ~10mW would start being useful, and the patent application doesn't say anything about phones. This would, if it were ever practical/economical, be a potential candidate for low powered sensors such as those used in home automation or wearable (medical) technologies. There have been a number of RF energy harvesting scams on kickstarter/indiegogo precisely because there is demand for low power wireless sensors that don't require their batteries to be replaced every year.
I find this interesting. I did an EE degree, but only did two papers on software, and to be honest, they were pretty basic. I had taught myself programming before hand but was much more interested in hardware and circuits rather than software. However, as my career progressed, I basically just became a full time software developer. For some reason, having an EE degree is considered the same (or for some people better, if you have software experience) than a CS degree, because supposedly I know how computers work at a gate level.
In the end I use almost nothing that I learnt in my EE degree to do software development, and certainly none of the really hard math/sig pro stuff, and I can't see why someone who has gone through all the self taught/on the job training I did to learn programming wouldn't be able to do what I do now. Of course there is causality - if you can finish an EE degree you can probably do anything technical if you put your mind to it, but it does seem a bit pointless spending all that money and effort to get a piece of paper.
That being said- save hard, don't pamper yourself with eating out and starbucks and you can still retire years earlier.
That's funny, because I have just spent the last few years learning how not to do that. I worked really hard (graduated at a young age), and just saved for about 10 years. I paid down debt and put my money into what I thought were safe investments, and pretty much did nothing fun for that time. I barely ate out, I had one beer a month on average, I had a $1500 car that I kept going by spending weekends fixing it.
However, the one thing I didn't do was buy a house. So in that time, I saw people who took out what I thought were irresponsible mortgage becoming stupidly wealthy, while drawing down their newfound equity and living life to the full. Meanwhile the purchasing value of my savings has become a joke, rents and expenses went up (regardless of what the govt says inflation is) and I basically just try not to think about all the opportunity cost of squirrelling money for so many years.
I keep enough to live off for about 2 years now, and just try to work my way through a list of life experiences. Part of me still really wants to save, but I beat that part back by reflecting on how much of life I missed out on because I was apparently 'doing all the right things'.
Until the housing bubble sorts itself out, I think saving is a waste of time. You will lose it all anyway when govt needs to bail out all the people who took on too much debt (which is the other side of your savings). Until then, the best 'savings' a millennial can make right now is keeping their career in good order and skills sharp. It will get really tough when the next recession hits, but if you didn't have any money to lose, and can do something useful, history suggests you'll be able to muddle through to better times.
So what is the alternative though? Middle men who evaluate prospective investments and allocate your savings accordingly? That is basically how the financial world outside crowdfunding works, and the result has been that central banks have to keep bailing out the bad investments to the point where almost every asset class is detached from any fundamental valuation, and people are paying governments to borrow money from them.
I actually think we are closer to a working system in crowdfunding. Yes there are a huge number of scams and failures, but these quite obviously exist in almost every other investment market. Just look at how things like LIBOR were rigged to understand that an official regulated system is no protection against the same sort of people who might try to take you for a ride on kickstarter. The difference on crowdfunding sites is that it is relatively easy for someone who has done a bit of research into a business to figure out whether the idea is a scam (for example, using basic science). The other thing about these sites is that nobody is crying for the people who lose money on these things. This is how it should be. People waste money all the time. The main problem is when they waste money and then the taxpayer runs to the rescue to bail them out. That crowdfunding still has the notion of buyer-be-ware about it seems quite healthy.
I imagine as these things develop (and move towards micro-equity sites) a whole industry of third-party auditors will spring up who will be able to validate basic information about a business - such as whether the idea has plausibility issues, that the owners are who they say they are, and that the funds are being spent as stated. There are already a lot of these things in place, and I get a sense that many of the people losing money on these scams are actually not that bothered about it, and see it more as throwing a few dollars at a bunch of ideas to see what sticks. This is not necessarily unhealthy if people can handle the losses.
Slashdot Mirror
The money is being put to work exactly as you say - by investing into assets in the countries it is located in. Much of it is probably making it back to the USA as well through lending schemes facilitated by investment banks - Apple 'invests' a billion in bonds issued by Goldman Sachs' EU branch, and Goldman Sachs' USA branch buys up the latest billion dollar corporate bond issue from Apple. Note that the money isn't being repatriated so US tax is not triggered. GS has been around for 148 years, so the loan never needs to be paid back in anyone's lifetime.
What the investment bank then does with the money is up to them, but it won't sit in bank accounts (though with investment banks, it could end up in unmarked suitcases...). This is indeed where they get their funding for schemes such as cornering the global coffee market, or the GS Aluminium market rigging. In all seriousness though, a lot will just go into buying mortgages, or personal loans. Essentially, the investment bank lends money to a local finance company, which lends it to a local consumer who uses it to buy an Apple product, the profits of which then go to Apple, who lend it to the local investment bank, who lends it to a local finance company....
The problem with all this is that much of these investments is private unsecured debt, or mortgages, which are really not much different these days. There are simply not enough productive investments around, such as new plant and machinery, or viable startups, so the money just goes into funding consumer debt instead. This is why we have huge debt bubbles everywhere right now, and why you can basically correlate private debt growth with GDP and recessions (see the work of Steve Keen - he is a nutcase on a lot of things, but on this he is correct).
There is really no solution while wealth is becoming increasingly concentrated (meaning that consumer demand is only sustained through ever growing private debt) and private banks are largely unconstrained in their ability to create debt.
This really just demonstrates the stupidity of our current economic system, where money, which is a made-up human construct meant to facilitate the trade in real goods and services, has become more important than said real goods and services. We have a 'market' that pays our best and brightest far more to come up with these pointless number shuffling schemes than to become a doctor, scientist or teacher. We then wonder why, despite all the GDP we have supposedly magiced up in the last decade, many of our doctors, scientists and teachers can no longer afford basic shelter and services for them and their families.
At a government level, we have treasuries slashing public sector spending to provide corporate tax breaks because politicians seem to believe that they can save for the care worker jobs that will be required by the ageing boomers in the future, by putting the young out of work today. Again, all driven by this belief that money is more important than the underlying economy it is meant to facilitate.
And to add to the complete disconnected stupidity, we have central banks busy abusing the monetary system by printing trillions of dollars in an attempt to stop all this warped cash hoarding by the rich from deflating the real economy.
It is really sad, and it is all going to come to a head at some point. Unfortunately I don't think anyone has a clear idea of how to fix it, and there is a great risk that we lurch too far to either the left or right, as has been the pattern throughout history.
The fundamental problem Apple has is that Samsung has the key display technology that Apple needs to do much more innovation with its hardware. LCD panels are a dead end for mobile devices, if thinness and efficiency is the goal. Apple needs to get away from LCD, but to do so right now requires becoming dependent on Samsung again.
This is why we had the whole Tim Cook spin about OLED having terrible colors a few years back. Apple needed to down play the tech that it didn't have. In the end though, it looks like Apple is going to throw the kitchen sink at getting micro LED going, which looks like a technology that could easily surpass OLED in a lot of areas. If they can pull that off before their entire product line becomes dependent on Samsung AMOLED, then they'll be good to go for another 5 years.
In the end though we must keep in mind that all OLED or AMOLED is going to ultimately allow is thinner devices. You could imagine that the next big step will be semi-flexible displays so that we can avoid another bend-gate situations as devices get even thinner. It's cool to see how far the tech is going, but since almost everyone I see puts their thin new iPhone into a big bumper case, it does all feel pretty pointless.
"Chris just wasn't the right fit for Tesla, and we've decided to make a change,"
He may have technically quit, but it kinda sounds like he didn't have a lot of choice in the matter. I also find it quite interesting that they talk about 'fit'. I doubt he is a high level asshole, given that post Jobs' Apple is not known for HR scandals, and in my experience personal issues have to be devastatingly bad before a company will let go of someone who knows their stuff. So maybe he didn't know his stuff (which bodes poorly for the Apple car), or he got off side with Musk (which bodes poorly for Tesla).
Anyway, I hope he negotiated one hell of a golden handshake. I don't imagine the Apple car project will be excited about having him back.
Yet you still choose to support them and run their operating system, which you admit is an extremely poor product. Come on...
Right, because solidworks and powerpcb run on OSX do they?
FYI, I run windows in parallels now, so you can calm down.
I had no problem letting Windows 7 update itself automatically until Microsoft started incessantly nagging me about changing to Windows 10, and news of their telemetry patches came out. Oh, and the whole installing patches for 5-10 mins while you're trying to shut your computer down (always seemed to be before I needed to go somewhere) was pretty dumb as well.
Microsoft took security updates and started abusing them for their own nefarious purposes. This, combined with their propensity to produce rubbish software, has created a dangerous situation for customers, and just goes to demonstrate that Microsoft has not moved on from producing extremely poor products in more than 30 years.
Hopefully a few more Nokia style implosions and we can see the end of this company.
Of course the company is worth $1 billion dollars. If Andy Rubin sneezed, and three top hedge fund managers agreed that his snot could potentially cure cancer, they would be able to sell shares in his snot for $1 billion dollars. When interest rates are being supported at nominally negative rates by a central banking system beholden to the rich, the only investment that is a bad one is an investment so grounded in reality that it cannot be blown into a giant bubble.
Money is becoming worthless to those who have it, and unobtainable to those who don't. It's a different sort of monetary system failure from Weimer/Zimbabwe, and the high inflation of the 1980s, but it is probably going to end in a big mess none the less.
It just seems a massive strategic oversight that this isn't going to be ready until December. Most of the world will probably be waiting till this time next year to get their hands on the units. Any hype they hoped to generated with the announcement will have been long forgotten by December, and the delay will give Google/Amazon plenty of time to develop a game plan to disrupt their launch. I mean, what is the point of keeping it secret if you're going to make everyone wait 7 months before they can get it?
I remember Jobs once pointed out that one of the most important sentences Apple included in their keynotes was 'ships now'. He was right. Since the whole airpod delays I thought they would have got this stuff under control.
...are these people going to stop pretending it's about talent?
It's not. It's about cheap, compliant, captive labor.
Disagree? YOU explain why these so-fucking-smart people need to be trained for six months by the locals they are replacing.
This might be the case in the USA, but in the UK the non-EU skilled migrant system is pretty tough to get through. It costs an employer a lot of money so it would be hard to see how anyone could save money doing this, especially with the EU labour pool readily accessible (for now).
I also find it quite sad that immigration has become all about some sort of global-economic-struggle. I came to the UK from NZ simply because I wanted to travel and experience new things. Frankly, since sterling crashed after the GFC my income in NZ would be higher than here (and my house would certainly be much nicer), so I'm certainly not hear for the economics. Many more British citizens go back the other way to enjoy a quieter pace of life and for me each country offers a very different experience and I think it is great that brits want to go enjoy living in NZ.
I don't deny that immigration can be used to suppress local wages, but for many young people it is fundamentally just part of experiencing all that the world has to offer. Life is short. Who would want to hole up in their backyard until they die?
I like the idea of these scramjet planes, but I struggle to see how they are going to be economical vs the sort of thing Musk/Bezos are planning with reusability (I understand this is for significantly smaller payloads). In the end, is it really that big a deal having to carry oxidiser for the first stage with you? As Musk keeps arguing, the fuel costs are not a big issue with rocket launches, and the size of your rocket isn't such an issue if you can reuse it enough times.
In contrast, the main problem I see with these scramjets is that the atmospheric conditions required to allow scramjet operation (speed and density) also produce massive heating and drag on the airframe. Presumably you must carry extra fuel to pay for the ability to collect oxidiser, and it would be interesting to see just how much of an improvement in fuelling costs these designs can achieve in the best case.
For spaceplanes to really come into their own I would have thought a single stage to orbit system would really be required. Reaction Engines seems to think this is possible, but I doubt it is coming anytime in the next decade. Still, great to see progress being made on new concepts.
This is straight out of the corporate lawyer playbook on dispute 'resolution':
Repeat every 3-5 years, or as your client will allow, until golden pension pot achieved.
They have this now in F1, but it hasn't made it to road vehicles yet. It is coming though, unless electric gets there first.
Except that this time around there is nowhere to go.
Except that is what people said last time, and the time before that.
And the time before that, and the time before... oh wait, there was no time before that because the industrial revolution is barely 200 years old.
The times we are living in are unprecedented in terms of technological and societal change when compared against the entire recorded history of humanity - and the history we can infer from before that. Making claims that things will just work out because they did a few times before is really ignorant. It's not much different from me wading into a discussion among nuclear physicist and telling them all that a fusion power station is never going to be practical because it hasn't turned out to be practical after all the previous predictions over the last 60 years.
If lawyers are so bad how come so many people want to be one?
David E. Kelley.
Once you are beholden to a government for something, they own your ass. You will do what they want. But you probably won't realize it until it's way too late.
Yeah, as opposed to being beholden to a bunch of oligarchs who own all the wealth and much of the political system, and let me have a job, piece of their private land to live on, and access to all the copyrighted/patented knowledge they control because they are all such generous people.
Brexit seems more and more like a positive thing for each day that passes. By the time May is done Australia will be sending its delinquents over there instead.
They probably will at this rate. As a NZer who's country has a free trade deal with Australia and China, I can attest to how little such agreements prevent you from being screwed over by the bigger country/better negotiator. Britain is going to get a nasty wake up call when it wonders off to the nations of the world to do deals and ends up tangled up in a mess of agreements that give them far less freedom than they get in the EU.
Some examples: NZ has, for the last thirty years, been trying to get its apples in to Australia. It has a trade deal that should allow this, and it has gone to the WTO (that will apparently give Britain great default access to everywhere once it leaves the single market) repeatedly to try to prevent Australia halting the imports. It has not worked, because Australia keeps coming up with new reasons why the apples cannot be imported on trumped up biosecurity grounds. Good luck. In addition to this, NZ has been trying to break into the Australian aviation market for about the same amount of time. They finally managed it many years ago by buying out Ansett Australia, which was promptly grounded by the Australian Civil Aviation regulator a month later on the grounds of 'safety'. The result was that Air New Zealand had to be renationalised by the NZ government and withdrew from Australia with its tail between its legs. More recently, just months after a new agreement had been reached by the two governments on creating a pathway to citizenship for NZers currently stuck in an immigration no-mans land (due to continual erosion of the free movement provisions that were previously agreed) the Australian government announced new changes that put a whole new bunch of kiwis into a new no mans land. Basically they gave with one hand while pulling the rug with the other.
With China things were not so bad, with the exception that the Chinese put a provision in the agreement that prevented NZ from discriminating against investors from there. This has hamstrung the NZ govts ability to prevent Chinese flooding their money into our tiny country, as it would have to renegotiate parts of the Australian agreement to do this.
This is the sort of great stuff Britain has to look forward too. Already the stage is being set for them to be screwed by both NZ and Australia, which are attempting to position themselves as the UK's allies in their brave new word (even offering to send trade negotiators to help the UK), while lobbying the EU to replace existing UK meat and dairy imports with their own.
If the UK expects to do trade with anyone, then it will quickly realise that doing trade deals always requires flogging off some sovereignty as well.
How dare there be a punishment for doing something illegal
There was a punishment. 2 year losing your liberty for depriving a multi-billion dollar mega corp of some extra profit on a good that has no cost of production seems more than fair. 10 years is just ridiculous.
Laws need to be proportional otherwise you have a police state, where everyone lives in fear of making one mistake and ending up in the gulag for the rest of their lives. People are not robots. They make mistakes and wrong choices. Punishment should be aimed at rehabilitation not ejecting them from society. That is what a confident, prosperous and mature society would do.
For Qualcomm and Imagination, I would think that their contracts with Apple were pretty iron-clad. Apple didn't become one of the biggest companies on the planet by signing deals that wasn't in their favour. Potential for abuse by Apple when the contracts were drawn up aside, I would think that the contracts are pretty solid and Apple knows exactly what it's rights are and has protected itself.
This means that the only recourse for (former) suppliers is to go after Apple, primarily in the court of public opinion, to see if there's a chance for a settlement to avoid Apple's public reputation being damaged. Although after Jobs, I don't see how it could get any worse on that front.
Um, this is the company that ended up with its most important parts supplier becoming its biggest competitor. They are still trying to detach themselves from Samsung, and despite having $1/4 trillion in the bank cannot get hold of the best displays in the industry.
Given that Mr Cook was in charge of all this supply chain stuff before being anointed by Jobs, why would you assume their other supply arrangements were put together any better?
...to offer to bring back a tiny, tiny fraction of the vast sum they've avoided paying a cent in taxes on so they can get some good PR and hope we ignore the rest of the money they've stolen from the US public. (And make no mistake, tax evasion is just another form of theft, with the victim being society.)
I'm no fan of our current global tax system and the wealth distortions it has created. But going around trying to label companies/people legally minimising their tax 'thieves' is not much different from the RIAA moral police style anti-piracy campaigns. It's childish, and discredits serious arguments.
Firstly, almost every western country's tax system is based on self declaration. We don't have tax inspectors hovering over every transaction you make, with the big eye in the sky then sending you a bill at the end of the year. You go about your business, and at the end of the year, you report to the government what tax you think you owe. In the vast majority of cases, the government does not challenge your assessment. It is an honesty based system (albeit with stiff penalties if you abuse it) and it tends to work pretty well. By claiming that all these billions or dollars are being stolen, you are insinuating that the integrity of the system has broken down. This is dangerous, because the next step then is to crack down on these phantom tax cheats, by doing things like banning cash, and having your bank account data fed directly to the IRS. Obviously this would have no impact on what Apple and Google etc are doing, because the IRS already knows what they are doing. All you have done is given the government a populous excuse to invade our lives further.
Secondly, company tax is nowhere near as big a moral issue as you think it is. Fiduciary duty means that a company is limited in its ability to live it up on income like an individual can (and perks like staff parties, corporate jets, are generally deductible anyway, so company tax is irrelevant). Net profits must ultimately be either distributed to shareholders or re-invested in productive activities. Saving them just delays this, but unless you save them forever, the company must ultimately 'consume' the profits by distribution to shareholders or investment.
If it re-invests the profits, then almost always it can claim the tax back over time through depreciation. In other words, it might earn $10000 of profit, pay $2000 of tax, spend the resulting $8000 to buy a machine, but over the next five years claim back $2000/5 in tax credits due to the depreciation of the capital asset. Ultimately the taxman gets no tax on the profits, but the company has to lend the taxman the tax for five years. For small and medium sized businesses trying to grow off cashflow, this is really stupid. If the machine they wanted cost $10000, then they would have to borrow $2000 to lend onward to the taxman for five years. Indeed, many small businesses have to do just this, which is why most countries have generous capital allowances to prevent such pointless cashflow disruption.
Alternately, if it distributes the profits to shareholders, the shareholders pay tax on the dividends against their individual income. You might notice a potential issue with this - distributed profits get taxed twice. A company could make the $10000 of profit, pay $2000 of tax, and then pays $8000 to a shareholder. The shareholder might then pay $2500 of tax on that, resulting in a net dividend of $5500 arriving in the shareholder's account. Of the $10000 the company made from a profit on selling widgets, barely half gets to the owners. People in partnerships (as opposed to limited companies) don't have this problem, which puts companies at a big disadvantage (even if you think such a punitive effective tax rate is okay). This is why almost every country has various tax credit systems or lower dividend tax rates to prevent this issue.
Now where I agree with you there is a problem is in the loopholes that develop when you start tryin
The bigger question is why we have to move around so much. Why does ever journey in modern suburban life require driving? I live in a city, and can walk to restaurants, walk to work, walk to the supermarket. I accept this is not for everyone, but suburban life sits at the other end, where getting a pint of milk requires driving. Add in congestion and parking issues and it is like a real-life rube-goldberg machine for living.
Stop this obsession with single use planning zones, and the need for humans to turn up in person everywhere and much of these problems can be fixed. It's not like we fixed the time it takes to deliver mail by having a fleet of hypersonic aircraft that can deliver letters anywhere in the world in less than an hour. We just used different technological solutions instead and got far better results. Similarly, the solution to traffic congestion is to stop this ridiculous need for the inhabitants of a city to shuffle back and forth between two areas everyday. The original argument for single use planning was that it would improve quality of life. It evidently does not, because the highest real estate prices now are for quality housing in dense urban areas where people can walk around their local communities.
I once worked at a company where the embedded software team was based around one guy who was the ultimate control freak. They needed to speed up software development, so upper management kept giving him more people for his team. He refused to let them write any software, so his team just kept growing because upper management thought the problem was still capacity. One guy I knew well did a masters degree while sitting two desks from his boss. I talked to him about this (when he wasn't busy working on his thesis), and he said he asked his boss every day if he had any work for him to do, and his boss always said he would get back to him. He was on a good salary too, and I think the company helped pay for his course, and gave him study days to attend lectures.
You're right on the surface of it. But with a frequency in the 60GHz range and beamforming, we could get that number up to .004 watts. :)
You jest but you're actually right. ~10mW would start being useful, and the patent application doesn't say anything about phones. This would, if it were ever practical/economical, be a potential candidate for low powered sensors such as those used in home automation or wearable (medical) technologies. There have been a number of RF energy harvesting scams on kickstarter/indiegogo precisely because there is demand for low power wireless sensors that don't require their batteries to be replaced every year.
I find this interesting. I did an EE degree, but only did two papers on software, and to be honest, they were pretty basic. I had taught myself programming before hand but was much more interested in hardware and circuits rather than software. However, as my career progressed, I basically just became a full time software developer. For some reason, having an EE degree is considered the same (or for some people better, if you have software experience) than a CS degree, because supposedly I know how computers work at a gate level.
In the end I use almost nothing that I learnt in my EE degree to do software development, and certainly none of the really hard math/sig pro stuff, and I can't see why someone who has gone through all the self taught/on the job training I did to learn programming wouldn't be able to do what I do now. Of course there is causality - if you can finish an EE degree you can probably do anything technical if you put your mind to it, but it does seem a bit pointless spending all that money and effort to get a piece of paper.
That being said- save hard, don't pamper yourself with eating out and starbucks and you can still retire years earlier.
That's funny, because I have just spent the last few years learning how not to do that. I worked really hard (graduated at a young age), and just saved for about 10 years. I paid down debt and put my money into what I thought were safe investments, and pretty much did nothing fun for that time. I barely ate out, I had one beer a month on average, I had a $1500 car that I kept going by spending weekends fixing it.
However, the one thing I didn't do was buy a house. So in that time, I saw people who took out what I thought were irresponsible mortgage becoming stupidly wealthy, while drawing down their newfound equity and living life to the full. Meanwhile the purchasing value of my savings has become a joke, rents and expenses went up (regardless of what the govt says inflation is) and I basically just try not to think about all the opportunity cost of squirrelling money for so many years.
I keep enough to live off for about 2 years now, and just try to work my way through a list of life experiences. Part of me still really wants to save, but I beat that part back by reflecting on how much of life I missed out on because I was apparently 'doing all the right things'.
Until the housing bubble sorts itself out, I think saving is a waste of time. You will lose it all anyway when govt needs to bail out all the people who took on too much debt (which is the other side of your savings). Until then, the best 'savings' a millennial can make right now is keeping their career in good order and skills sharp. It will get really tough when the next recession hits, but if you didn't have any money to lose, and can do something useful, history suggests you'll be able to muddle through to better times.
So what is the alternative though? Middle men who evaluate prospective investments and allocate your savings accordingly? That is basically how the financial world outside crowdfunding works, and the result has been that central banks have to keep bailing out the bad investments to the point where almost every asset class is detached from any fundamental valuation, and people are paying governments to borrow money from them.
I actually think we are closer to a working system in crowdfunding. Yes there are a huge number of scams and failures, but these quite obviously exist in almost every other investment market. Just look at how things like LIBOR were rigged to understand that an official regulated system is no protection against the same sort of people who might try to take you for a ride on kickstarter. The difference on crowdfunding sites is that it is relatively easy for someone who has done a bit of research into a business to figure out whether the idea is a scam (for example, using basic science). The other thing about these sites is that nobody is crying for the people who lose money on these things. This is how it should be. People waste money all the time. The main problem is when they waste money and then the taxpayer runs to the rescue to bail them out. That crowdfunding still has the notion of buyer-be-ware about it seems quite healthy.
I imagine as these things develop (and move towards micro-equity sites) a whole industry of third-party auditors will spring up who will be able to validate basic information about a business - such as whether the idea has plausibility issues, that the owners are who they say they are, and that the funds are being spent as stated. There are already a lot of these things in place, and I get a sense that many of the people losing money on these scams are actually not that bothered about it, and see it more as throwing a few dollars at a bunch of ideas to see what sticks. This is not necessarily unhealthy if people can handle the losses.