The baby boomers had those things, and lived under the assumption that each generation would be a little more well off than the last. Thus we were all told that if we worked just a little harder, we'd be more successful at the American dream.
The baby boomers voted to give themselves those things when they had retired. While they were working they only had to pay for a smaller number of older people who did not live as long past the retirement age as the boomers are going too. That is the main reason successive generations are screwed. Whether by student loan, higher property prices, higher rents, more taxes, higher 'pension pot' contributions, more immigration, the young worker of today is going to get the income squeezed out of them to pay for a lot of promises that were made by politicians who are no longer in power.
This will be huge for Apple because of the Chinese market (and their love of the number 8) and the 10th anniversary thing in the USA. Even if it is an iPhone 7 in a shinier case with 50% whacked onto the price, they will sell millions of the things.
I'm not expecting any real innovation though. Apple was always more marketing than tech, and it seems that part of the business has rather predictably eaten the engineering department in recent years.
This is quite an interesting development, but it also doesn't surprise me. The patent system in the USA has basically jumped the shark now. You can get patents on almost anything, no matter how obvious or ridiculous it might be, and the more money you can spend on an attorney who has no idea how anything works but can get a list of words past the USPTO, the more absurd the patents can be. The result is that the system is now stuffed full of rubbish patents that are either at risk of invalidation, contradictory, or so specific that they are trivial to walk around (but add to the body of 'prior art' that can be used to invalidate other patents). All you can really do with patents now is drag someone into court and waste a lot of money on litigation. Just look at the Apple/Samsung fiasco to see how this works from a company that put a lot of effort into protecting its big invention.
It seems like the Chinese are just playing the game as well and benefiting from their lower costs to do it much more effectively. Among those I know with engineering companies, almost everyone just patents as a defensive strategy to prevent patent trolls coming along and dragging them into court (the mutually assured destruction nature of aggressive patent litigation doesn't apply to these NPEs). In a way I welcome the break down of the system in this way. Eventually everything will be patented ten times, making it very hard for a troll to gain much traction against legitimate companies trying to do useful things.
Life is a sacrifice. And I appreciate and celebrate women for that sacrifice.
Life shouldn't be a sacrifice in this regard though. In some cultures, people still have the attitude that you work to support the stuff you want to do with your life - you know, like having a family, and doing things you enjoy. It is just that in western countries we have become massively defined by our jobs, and the hyper competitive economic system we have accepted as immutable means that a single income family can barely survive in a world dominated by double income couples.
If you told a family in the 1950s that they would have the world's knowledge in a device that fits inside their pocket, be able to fly to the other side of the world in 24 hours, be able to buy manufactured goods so cheaply that they will throw them away when they don't have enough space to store them, yet that a family on one income would struggle to provide basic food and shelter, they would think we are completely mad.
It is. I have a friend who works in electric vehicles in Germany. All the big players are moving on this now. Nobody argues about it being the future anymore, the discussion has moved on to how they smooth the transition into electric vehicles while best protecting their existing investments.
To a large extent, Elon has been responsible for bringing about this change in attitude so quickly. But look at your average car buyer. They don't care how many cylinders or fancy engine tech the thing has. Fiat put a humble panda in a new shell, almost doubled the price, and boom you have a top selling car (the 500). The problem for Tesla is that the novelty of electric will wear off rather quickly and people will go back to buying on the basis of cup holders and satnavs, and existing car companies have been excelling at doing those sorts of things for decades now.
I think what Tesla has achieved is fantastic, but I can't see how it wouldn't make sense for them to eventually flog of the coach building side of things to one of the bigger players, and focus on core components, which is the sort of supply chain model most of the automotive world uses anyway. It will still make a lot of money,
but the valuations are just a bit stupid at the moment.
I agree with you about the banks, but I do have a problem with how society dumps its problems on them like they were forced into it. The reality is that banks were simply the unethical middle men who gave everyone what they wanted. People wanted free money, so they voted for politicians who promised them this, then when the politicians couldn't deliver said free money, both the politicians and people turned a blind eye while the banking sector made a form of 'free' money magically appear.
This doesn't mean the banks shouldn't be punished and better controlled, but I just don't like the way people try to believe that the whole mess was caused by a bunch of evil bankers and all the regular folk that were boasting about all the money they were making from housing, or showing off the flash cars and electronics they were buying on credit, were innocent players. We all played a part to some extent (even those of us like myself who just chased big bank interest rates without looking into where my money was being lent), and until we accept that we need to make compromises in what we can expect in terms of easy money, the problem will not go away because we will ultimately keep turning back to the bankers.
Look, the harsh reality is that every western government in the world needs 20-40 year olds to pile into their nations. Why? Because for the last 30 years politicians and corporations have made a succession of unrealistic pension promises to the current crop of workers, and those workers didn't have enough babies to pay for those promises in the future.
Your retirement contributions now pay for current retirees - not your future retirement. That will be paid for by whoever is working at the point you retire. It is a ponzi scheme that only works if your population continues to grow at the rate you are making outrageous promises to win votes. Unfortunately, most western nations stopped growing from natural population increases decades ago.
This is why, despite widespread anger about immigrants in almost all western countries, governments will not do anything about it. Look at the UK. A major reason for the Brexit fiasco was a desire by many to slash immigration, and yet the government refuses to commit to reducing it after Brexit. The reason they won't commit, is because they have decided that people would rather whine about immigrants than have their pensions slashed.
Trump will have seen the projected pension cost figures now. Even he will be able to conclude that stuffing the country with workers who the USA didn't have to pay the costs of raising and educating, is a remarkably good deal for the country. All he has to do now is make the right noises so that it appears he is doing something about it, then ultimately do very little.
I also expect them to go turboprop on any actual design for efficiency. I'm not so sure about the landing at sea thing though. It's not a trivial thing to land 12 miles off shore. Most seaplanes of the era when these were popular had to land on inner harbours, or close to the lee of land masses, because a 2 ft wave when you are at landing speeds is not something easily dealt with by a lightweight airframe.
I'm sure they must have a wider strategy though, because it would seem rather pointless to try to start an airframe company from scratch to do this. It would be much easier to put their efforts into the autopilot/landing/safety/remote control software, and just go talk to Embraer or ATR about buying a ready-to-go airframe with the cockpit and life support systems stripped out.
You are sort-of right, but you are looking at the wrong 'tax'. The real benefit of cashless, is that central banks can drive interest rates negative in a deflationary environment.
Since around the 1990s, automation and competition from low labour centers basically destroyed the utility value of the working class. We still give them jobs (which are basically funded by welfare), but most of these are just a sop to our consciences so that we can enjoy our lattes and craft beer without having to stare at slum dwelling children.
The real horror for us, however, is that through the 2000s this same effect has extended well into the middle class. Some of us have quite obviously been directly affected, but these are not a majority yet so nobody cares about them. So why has the middle class not collapsed? The reason is because of the banking sector. What the banking sector has been doing since 2000s is engaging in a giant UBI process for anyone in the middle class who owned a house. Central banks have maintained broadly negative real interest rates (when you've adjusted for inflation) since then, which has ensure that anyone with access to credit (ie middle class home owners) can get connected to a perpetual money spiggot that supplements their falling income from their increasingly unnecessary jobs. This has sustained the middle class in most western countries.
Essentially the problem that occurred is that central banks let a fast bubble develop which blew open the nature of the ponzi scheme and those middle class homeowners freaked out. They then hit the zero lower bound on interest rates, and could not keep the bubble inflated. This is why they are desperate for inflation (just watch Mark Carney do nothing as UK inflation rockets) as this would force real interest rates negative, but demographics, automation and a continuing lack of confidence means that they cannot get the mild 3-4% inflation that would allow them to keep the debt ponzi scheme going.
Because of this, what they would really like to be able to do is drive nominal interest rates deeply negative. If they could do this they can get the debt bubble going again even under deflationary conditions. Just imagine how many people will rush out to buy a house for even more stupid prices if people started getting paid to have mortgages. The middle class economy would take off again as the homeowner UBI comes back on line (well, for anyone lucky enough to have gotten onto the housing bandwagon).
The biggest impediment to negative rates is cash. This is why the swiss national bank does not allow you to store francs in safety deposit boxes, and why many countries have introduced controls on cash (under the guises of preventing terrorism). Central banks want this as a tool for the next crash, and they are slowing setting things up to ensure this is possible.
If you have lots of money, then you'll know how to protect it (buy a house, basically). If you have lots of debt then the central banks have your back. If you have a moderate amount of savings, then you will be screwed. Indeed, watch Mark Carney's recent talk on the post crash recovery and he admits that the only people who have suffered since the crash are those who had savings but not assets, but he justifies letting this happen by saying they in the minority.
I thought this was a slashvertisments for whatever that 'fiver' company is, but after reading the summary, I still have no idea what that 'fiver' company is, or what the hell this story is about.
Jordan isn't on the ban list though? Are you sure it only applies to flights from those countries - the guardian was reporting that 13 are involved.
I doubt boris/may would have asked for anything in return. As you say they are desperate, and the UK has always been a bit of a lapdog for the USA anyway. They will just be hoping that showing obedience to the Don means they are rewarded with his favor when the UK is left floating in the atlantic without easy access to the 500+ million person market of rich westerners that it was previously able to trade freely with.
Personally, I'm more concerned that they must have a quite big hole in their security net that they cannot easily fix. I mean, there is security theater for sure, but things like the metal detectors and carry on scanners at least turn getting a weapon onto an aircraft into much more of a lottery with low odds of winning than a sure thing.
I wonder how long before they extend this to all flights, and whether they have any ability to restore things to the status quo. Because that is one hell of a inconvenience for those of us who still have to deal with the circus that is flying on account of work commitments.
Yes, it stipulated inventions, patents, manufacturing processes - those sorts of things. But it most certainly made clear it was a blanket coverage, not limited to products or industries the company was involved in.
Really? I guess it depends a lot on the country etc, but in NZ/Aus/UK I was under the impression that ownership of all employee generated IP, even outside work time and unrelated to company activities, was the default position. Having said that it is a while since I have signed an employment contract.
I don't think most politicians have the mental capacity to figure this out, but the people pushing the loans sure did.
In the UK the same sort of dynamic has occurred in the housing market. Basically, poor people could not afford rent, so governments offered them housing benefits so nobody would live on the street. This does not create any new houses (the housing shortage is a different problem) so all that happened is rents went up for everyone, creating an outcry for more housing benefit. This cycle kept repeating until a jobless person in central London with a family can basically out-bid a couple on the median wage when it comes to rents.
It is sort of comically bad now. The whole thing has become a giant salary harvesting scheme for landlords. A highly skilled person turns up in London, gets a well paid job, pays half or more of their salary to their landlord, and then half of their tax goes to their neighbours landlord.
In the end this is how financialisation works. Financialisation can, at best, facilitate the creation of new goods and services, but we were able to do this quite successfully in the 1970-90s with much smaller portions of the economy dedicated to finance (and without the computers). When you get a bigger financial sector than is required to facilitate the development of new products and services, the sector can only generate extra profit by transferring income from productive members of the economy to itself. This sort of dynamic is basically consuming most western nations now.
It is a bit strange. I suspect their alpha dog ways simply pissed of too many people, and that is coming back to bite them. Normally everyone who could damage a startup like this has share options, so even if they think the whole thing is a scam, they'll keep quiet until they cash out. This leaves very few people who have an interest in hacking away at the IPO potential. Having said that Uber has upset a lot of powerful industries, so I guess that is probably where the stories are coming from. There is also a growing annoyance among institution investors who, thanks to index tracking funds, typically end up holding the can when these IPOs tank.
If people are upset about all this, perhaps our elected representatives can change the laws?
The problem with this is that these companies have an army of lawyers trying to find holes in whatever laws are passed. They can find these holes faster than laws can be patched because governments have to tread carefully to make sure new laws do not accidentally penalize companies who are behaving themselves. The only way I can see governments defeating this is by giving themselves far more discretionary taxation power to target individual companies than they currently have and that can lead to abuse of that power if we are not careful.
Further to this, they need lawyers to draft the rules that they pass. Politicians are, at best, management oversight. The lawyers they draw on to do this are from the same pool that companies use to find loopholes. Sure, there are conflict of interest rules, but who is going to enforce them? More lawyers?
I think you're seriously overestimating the strategic thinking capabilities of the people behind Uber. They haven't, up until recently, had even an R&D interest in developing driverless cars, and there is little chance they can realistically compete with Tesla, Ford, Google, VW, etc, even if they could raise another couple of billion in cash to burn. The likelihood of them coming from behind and beating the others to a viable driverless car solution is zero.
Further, what exactly do they have that will maintain their market position? An app? How easy is it for Google to turn the 'book Uber' button in google maps into a 'book google car'? If anything, they have worse than nothing - they are beholden to the company that is well ahead of them in the technology they desperately need to have a viable business model.
What I think Uber has been for quite a while now (granted, I don't think this was the original plan) is a financial bubble milking machine. Unless the board is actually delusional, the only viable strategy behind them entering the driverless car development race was to keep the IPO price at stupid levels. And if it wasn't for the PR disasters coming out of Uber on an almost weekly basis now, they would have been obscenely successful in achieving this.
A significant portion of consumer sales still go through walk-in-retail channels, and with the phones they have the added issue that many people buy the phone as part of a contract. Apple doesn't want to become a mobile network operator all around the world, so they are going to have to partner with local dealers. I imagine this is even more of an issue in Russia where you probably need some local connections to keep things moving along.
As for the retail pricing control thing, that is rather interesting. I used to sell an electronics product through retailers. Every single retailer always bugged me about needing a bigger margin, but if I ever gave one to them, they would immediately started discounting so they could undercut their competitors. This would cause all the other retailers to get really annoyed and demand that I stop the rogue retailer from discounting (even though they know I'm not legally allowed too). In the end everyone just got totally screwed over by their own competition on margin, which allowed me to gradually raise prices and pocket more of the sale price myself. Apart from that last bit (my product decimated the competition, so I didn't really have that much pricing pressure myself), that is sort of how the retail marketplace is meant to work.
I must admit though, there were times when I would 'suggest' that a retailer shouldn't get carried away with long term discounting to avoid the constant harassment of other retailers. In the end most retailers are just sales people with low to medium levels of business acumen, and many of them cannot see the bigger picture of the system they are in. A big part of your job as the manufacturer is to manage perceptions so they feel happy and enthusiastic, and some times this involves playing a few games and managing the different egos as best you can. I would have thought at the level Apple operates though, they would be much more meticulous about not getting caught out in such an obvious way.
The other thing to note is that a good solution to the robot safety problem is to simply add more automation. Mixing humans and automation requires huge effort and cost at the interface. Even if it costs a lot more than the marginal cost of labour to eliminate the last pieces of manual work on a production line, the potential savings across the wider system could make it worth doing. This is likely to mean that even those prepared to work well below minimum wage will not be able to get jobs that can be automated. In effect, the externalised costs of labour will at some point exceed the cost of automation, reducing the demand for labour to zero at a price well above zero wages.
Of course one solution to this would be to abolish health and safety laws, which I imagine will be the next step. As Milton Friedman said, the biggest discriminator against the low paid is pesky things such as minimum wages law that prevent workers offering their labour at a price that clears the market. I'm sure there is an equilibrium point for the number of worker mutilations per hour that ensure full employment - we just have to let the market find it!
When I first read the story on the front page of basically every newspaper, my immediate thought was that it was a publicity stunt. Maybe it wasn't, but I know that I - and many of my friends - didn't care about the oscars this year until that story popped up. Whether this was 'fake news' or not, we are most definitely entering a strange new world, where information is more readily available than ever, but more unreliable than ever.
In a scenario where your bitcoin is inaccessible due to the massive long term loss of all our electrical infrastructure, I would suggest a pile of bullets would be a whole lot more valuable to you than some pieces of shiny yellow metal.
Freefont uses bubble sort for sorting edge contour lists during rasterization. It is extremely well suited to the problem, as most sequential scan lines do not require a sort, making the algorithm an easy-to-optimise order validator. Further, most situations where a sort is required occur in localised pairs (from edges crossing) making the algorithm very efficient.
I personally steer clear of 'smart' answers in interviews. The more experience you gain, the more you come to appreciate the limits of your knowledge.
I absolutely agree with you that income/wealth inequality is an indirect measure of any real problem. But I totally disagree with you that the west is not suffering from declining standard of living problems. Look at the inter-generational situation. There has been nearly 50% youth unemployment in many countries in Europe for over 8 years now. Incomes for many workers has stagnated or is falling. Job stability has gone. People are choosing to delay having families. Home ownership and capital accumulation are tanking, while debt burdens are increasing (indicating standard of living is unsustainable).
Unless you consider humans to be utility robots who, provided they are not dead and collect enough calories, are having an acceptable standard of life, then things are not getting better for everyone, and that is precisely the point of the inequality issue.
You are also absolutely right that we have a historically 'novel' problem. We have never been in a situation where we had so much technical capacity, yet completely lacked the political will to do anything with it. Take the housing market - we know how to build transport systems and new housing. Many other countries around the world, much poorer than the west, are able to do these things. We have the workers sitting idle who could do all this if we invested a bit in training them. Yet because of a belief that you can 'save' for output you might require in the future by putting someone out of work today (austerity), our leaders continue to insist that the problem is unsolvable and we just have to put up with cramming into whatever housing we were miraculously able to produce with basic hand tools and paper drawing from the end of the war to the late 1990s.
That is technically correct, but not really the right way to look at it. The driving issue was that the US had huge amounts of surplus industrial capacity after the war. They simply produced more stuff than most economists thought the population could consume (this may not have been true, but I guess nobody imagined how crazy consumerism was going to get). The government's options were to let many of the factories shut down and hope that new businesses would sprout up to absorb the unemployed workers, or engage in a rather sneaky trick that would kill two birds with one stone. This trick involved selling the Germans and Japanese US products on credit. This kept the US factories busy, while also supplying war torn countries with the capital goods they needed to accelerate their recovery. By making it appear as altruism, they could sell this to the US public, when the reality was they just wanted to keep idle hands busy out of fear of another Great Depression.
In a more rational world, surplus industry capacity should just mean that everyone can work less and enjoy a more prosperous life. However, capitalism does not seem able to produce this as a stable outcome, so for now Neo-Mercantilism persists.
Slashdot Mirror
The baby boomers had those things, and lived under the assumption that each generation would be a little more well off than the last. Thus we were all told that if we worked just a little harder, we'd be more successful at the American dream.
The baby boomers voted to give themselves those things when they had retired. While they were working they only had to pay for a smaller number of older people who did not live as long past the retirement age as the boomers are going too. That is the main reason successive generations are screwed. Whether by student loan, higher property prices, higher rents, more taxes, higher 'pension pot' contributions, more immigration, the young worker of today is going to get the income squeezed out of them to pay for a lot of promises that were made by politicians who are no longer in power.
This will be huge for Apple because of the Chinese market (and their love of the number 8) and the 10th anniversary thing in the USA. Even if it is an iPhone 7 in a shinier case with 50% whacked onto the price, they will sell millions of the things.
I'm not expecting any real innovation though. Apple was always more marketing than tech, and it seems that part of the business has rather predictably eaten the engineering department in recent years.
This is quite an interesting development, but it also doesn't surprise me. The patent system in the USA has basically jumped the shark now. You can get patents on almost anything, no matter how obvious or ridiculous it might be, and the more money you can spend on an attorney who has no idea how anything works but can get a list of words past the USPTO, the more absurd the patents can be. The result is that the system is now stuffed full of rubbish patents that are either at risk of invalidation, contradictory, or so specific that they are trivial to walk around (but add to the body of 'prior art' that can be used to invalidate other patents). All you can really do with patents now is drag someone into court and waste a lot of money on litigation. Just look at the Apple/Samsung fiasco to see how this works from a company that put a lot of effort into protecting its big invention.
It seems like the Chinese are just playing the game as well and benefiting from their lower costs to do it much more effectively. Among those I know with engineering companies, almost everyone just patents as a defensive strategy to prevent patent trolls coming along and dragging them into court (the mutually assured destruction nature of aggressive patent litigation doesn't apply to these NPEs). In a way I welcome the break down of the system in this way. Eventually everything will be patented ten times, making it very hard for a troll to gain much traction against legitimate companies trying to do useful things.
Life is a sacrifice. And I appreciate and celebrate women for that sacrifice.
Life shouldn't be a sacrifice in this regard though. In some cultures, people still have the attitude that you work to support the stuff you want to do with your life - you know, like having a family, and doing things you enjoy. It is just that in western countries we have become massively defined by our jobs, and the hyper competitive economic system we have accepted as immutable means that a single income family can barely survive in a world dominated by double income couples.
If you told a family in the 1950s that they would have the world's knowledge in a device that fits inside their pocket, be able to fly to the other side of the world in 24 hours, be able to buy manufactured goods so cheaply that they will throw them away when they don't have enough space to store them, yet that a family on one income would struggle to provide basic food and shelter, they would think we are completely mad.
It is. I have a friend who works in electric vehicles in Germany. All the big players are moving on this now. Nobody argues about it being the future anymore, the discussion has moved on to how they smooth the transition into electric vehicles while best protecting their existing investments.
To a large extent, Elon has been responsible for bringing about this change in attitude so quickly. But look at your average car buyer. They don't care how many cylinders or fancy engine tech the thing has. Fiat put a humble panda in a new shell, almost doubled the price, and boom you have a top selling car (the 500). The problem for Tesla is that the novelty of electric will wear off rather quickly and people will go back to buying on the basis of cup holders and satnavs, and existing car companies have been excelling at doing those sorts of things for decades now.
I think what Tesla has achieved is fantastic, but I can't see how it wouldn't make sense for them to eventually flog of the coach building side of things to one of the bigger players, and focus on core components, which is the sort of supply chain model most of the automotive world uses anyway. It will still make a lot of money, but the valuations are just a bit stupid at the moment.
I agree with you about the banks, but I do have a problem with how society dumps its problems on them like they were forced into it. The reality is that banks were simply the unethical middle men who gave everyone what they wanted. People wanted free money, so they voted for politicians who promised them this, then when the politicians couldn't deliver said free money, both the politicians and people turned a blind eye while the banking sector made a form of 'free' money magically appear.
This doesn't mean the banks shouldn't be punished and better controlled, but I just don't like the way people try to believe that the whole mess was caused by a bunch of evil bankers and all the regular folk that were boasting about all the money they were making from housing, or showing off the flash cars and electronics they were buying on credit, were innocent players. We all played a part to some extent (even those of us like myself who just chased big bank interest rates without looking into where my money was being lent), and until we accept that we need to make compromises in what we can expect in terms of easy money, the problem will not go away because we will ultimately keep turning back to the bankers.
Look, the harsh reality is that every western government in the world needs 20-40 year olds to pile into their nations. Why? Because for the last 30 years politicians and corporations have made a succession of unrealistic pension promises to the current crop of workers, and those workers didn't have enough babies to pay for those promises in the future.
Your retirement contributions now pay for current retirees - not your future retirement. That will be paid for by whoever is working at the point you retire. It is a ponzi scheme that only works if your population continues to grow at the rate you are making outrageous promises to win votes. Unfortunately, most western nations stopped growing from natural population increases decades ago.
This is why, despite widespread anger about immigrants in almost all western countries, governments will not do anything about it. Look at the UK. A major reason for the Brexit fiasco was a desire by many to slash immigration, and yet the government refuses to commit to reducing it after Brexit. The reason they won't commit, is because they have decided that people would rather whine about immigrants than have their pensions slashed.
Trump will have seen the projected pension cost figures now. Even he will be able to conclude that stuffing the country with workers who the USA didn't have to pay the costs of raising and educating, is a remarkably good deal for the country. All he has to do now is make the right noises so that it appears he is doing something about it, then ultimately do very little.
I also expect them to go turboprop on any actual design for efficiency. I'm not so sure about the landing at sea thing though. It's not a trivial thing to land 12 miles off shore. Most seaplanes of the era when these were popular had to land on inner harbours, or close to the lee of land masses, because a 2 ft wave when you are at landing speeds is not something easily dealt with by a lightweight airframe.
I'm sure they must have a wider strategy though, because it would seem rather pointless to try to start an airframe company from scratch to do this. It would be much easier to put their efforts into the autopilot/landing/safety/remote control software, and just go talk to Embraer or ATR about buying a ready-to-go airframe with the cockpit and life support systems stripped out.
You are sort-of right, but you are looking at the wrong 'tax'. The real benefit of cashless, is that central banks can drive interest rates negative in a deflationary environment.
Since around the 1990s, automation and competition from low labour centers basically destroyed the utility value of the working class. We still give them jobs (which are basically funded by welfare), but most of these are just a sop to our consciences so that we can enjoy our lattes and craft beer without having to stare at slum dwelling children.
The real horror for us, however, is that through the 2000s this same effect has extended well into the middle class. Some of us have quite obviously been directly affected, but these are not a majority yet so nobody cares about them. So why has the middle class not collapsed? The reason is because of the banking sector. What the banking sector has been doing since 2000s is engaging in a giant UBI process for anyone in the middle class who owned a house. Central banks have maintained broadly negative real interest rates (when you've adjusted for inflation) since then, which has ensure that anyone with access to credit (ie middle class home owners) can get connected to a perpetual money spiggot that supplements their falling income from their increasingly unnecessary jobs. This has sustained the middle class in most western countries.
Essentially the problem that occurred is that central banks let a fast bubble develop which blew open the nature of the ponzi scheme and those middle class homeowners freaked out. They then hit the zero lower bound on interest rates, and could not keep the bubble inflated. This is why they are desperate for inflation (just watch Mark Carney do nothing as UK inflation rockets) as this would force real interest rates negative, but demographics, automation and a continuing lack of confidence means that they cannot get the mild 3-4% inflation that would allow them to keep the debt ponzi scheme going.
Because of this, what they would really like to be able to do is drive nominal interest rates deeply negative. If they could do this they can get the debt bubble going again even under deflationary conditions. Just imagine how many people will rush out to buy a house for even more stupid prices if people started getting paid to have mortgages. The middle class economy would take off again as the homeowner UBI comes back on line (well, for anyone lucky enough to have gotten onto the housing bandwagon).
The biggest impediment to negative rates is cash. This is why the swiss national bank does not allow you to store francs in safety deposit boxes, and why many countries have introduced controls on cash (under the guises of preventing terrorism). Central banks want this as a tool for the next crash, and they are slowing setting things up to ensure this is possible.
If you have lots of money, then you'll know how to protect it (buy a house, basically). If you have lots of debt then the central banks have your back. If you have a moderate amount of savings, then you will be screwed. Indeed, watch Mark Carney's recent talk on the post crash recovery and he admits that the only people who have suffered since the crash are those who had savings but not assets, but he justifies letting this happen by saying they in the minority.
I thought this was a slashvertisments for whatever that 'fiver' company is, but after reading the summary, I still have no idea what that 'fiver' company is, or what the hell this story is about.
Jordan isn't on the ban list though? Are you sure it only applies to flights from those countries - the guardian was reporting that 13 are involved.
I doubt boris/may would have asked for anything in return. As you say they are desperate, and the UK has always been a bit of a lapdog for the USA anyway. They will just be hoping that showing obedience to the Don means they are rewarded with his favor when the UK is left floating in the atlantic without easy access to the 500+ million person market of rich westerners that it was previously able to trade freely with.
Personally, I'm more concerned that they must have a quite big hole in their security net that they cannot easily fix. I mean, there is security theater for sure, but things like the metal detectors and carry on scanners at least turn getting a weapon onto an aircraft into much more of a lottery with low odds of winning than a sure thing.
I wonder how long before they extend this to all flights, and whether they have any ability to restore things to the status quo. Because that is one hell of a inconvenience for those of us who still have to deal with the circus that is flying on account of work commitments.
Yes, it stipulated inventions, patents, manufacturing processes - those sorts of things. But it most certainly made clear it was a blanket coverage, not limited to products or industries the company was involved in.
Really? I guess it depends a lot on the country etc, but in NZ/Aus/UK I was under the impression that ownership of all employee generated IP, even outside work time and unrelated to company activities, was the default position. Having said that it is a while since I have signed an employment contract.
I don't think most politicians have the mental capacity to figure this out, but the people pushing the loans sure did.
In the UK the same sort of dynamic has occurred in the housing market. Basically, poor people could not afford rent, so governments offered them housing benefits so nobody would live on the street. This does not create any new houses (the housing shortage is a different problem) so all that happened is rents went up for everyone, creating an outcry for more housing benefit. This cycle kept repeating until a jobless person in central London with a family can basically out-bid a couple on the median wage when it comes to rents.
It is sort of comically bad now. The whole thing has become a giant salary harvesting scheme for landlords. A highly skilled person turns up in London, gets a well paid job, pays half or more of their salary to their landlord, and then half of their tax goes to their neighbours landlord.
In the end this is how financialisation works. Financialisation can, at best, facilitate the creation of new goods and services, but we were able to do this quite successfully in the 1970-90s with much smaller portions of the economy dedicated to finance (and without the computers). When you get a bigger financial sector than is required to facilitate the development of new products and services, the sector can only generate extra profit by transferring income from productive members of the economy to itself. This sort of dynamic is basically consuming most western nations now.
It is a bit strange. I suspect their alpha dog ways simply pissed of too many people, and that is coming back to bite them. Normally everyone who could damage a startup like this has share options, so even if they think the whole thing is a scam, they'll keep quiet until they cash out. This leaves very few people who have an interest in hacking away at the IPO potential. Having said that Uber has upset a lot of powerful industries, so I guess that is probably where the stories are coming from. There is also a growing annoyance among institution investors who, thanks to index tracking funds, typically end up holding the can when these IPOs tank.
If people are upset about all this, perhaps our elected representatives can change the laws?
The problem with this is that these companies have an army of lawyers trying to find holes in whatever laws are passed. They can find these holes faster than laws can be patched because governments have to tread carefully to make sure new laws do not accidentally penalize companies who are behaving themselves. The only way I can see governments defeating this is by giving themselves far more discretionary taxation power to target individual companies than they currently have and that can lead to abuse of that power if we are not careful.
Further to this, they need lawyers to draft the rules that they pass. Politicians are, at best, management oversight. The lawyers they draw on to do this are from the same pool that companies use to find loopholes. Sure, there are conflict of interest rules, but who is going to enforce them? More lawyers?
I think you're seriously overestimating the strategic thinking capabilities of the people behind Uber. They haven't, up until recently, had even an R&D interest in developing driverless cars, and there is little chance they can realistically compete with Tesla, Ford, Google, VW, etc, even if they could raise another couple of billion in cash to burn. The likelihood of them coming from behind and beating the others to a viable driverless car solution is zero.
Further, what exactly do they have that will maintain their market position? An app? How easy is it for Google to turn the 'book Uber' button in google maps into a 'book google car'? If anything, they have worse than nothing - they are beholden to the company that is well ahead of them in the technology they desperately need to have a viable business model.
What I think Uber has been for quite a while now (granted, I don't think this was the original plan) is a financial bubble milking machine. Unless the board is actually delusional, the only viable strategy behind them entering the driverless car development race was to keep the IPO price at stupid levels. And if it wasn't for the PR disasters coming out of Uber on an almost weekly basis now, they would have been obscenely successful in achieving this.
A significant portion of consumer sales still go through walk-in-retail channels, and with the phones they have the added issue that many people buy the phone as part of a contract. Apple doesn't want to become a mobile network operator all around the world, so they are going to have to partner with local dealers. I imagine this is even more of an issue in Russia where you probably need some local connections to keep things moving along.
As for the retail pricing control thing, that is rather interesting. I used to sell an electronics product through retailers. Every single retailer always bugged me about needing a bigger margin, but if I ever gave one to them, they would immediately started discounting so they could undercut their competitors. This would cause all the other retailers to get really annoyed and demand that I stop the rogue retailer from discounting (even though they know I'm not legally allowed too). In the end everyone just got totally screwed over by their own competition on margin, which allowed me to gradually raise prices and pocket more of the sale price myself. Apart from that last bit (my product decimated the competition, so I didn't really have that much pricing pressure myself), that is sort of how the retail marketplace is meant to work.
I must admit though, there were times when I would 'suggest' that a retailer shouldn't get carried away with long term discounting to avoid the constant harassment of other retailers. In the end most retailers are just sales people with low to medium levels of business acumen, and many of them cannot see the bigger picture of the system they are in. A big part of your job as the manufacturer is to manage perceptions so they feel happy and enthusiastic, and some times this involves playing a few games and managing the different egos as best you can. I would have thought at the level Apple operates though, they would be much more meticulous about not getting caught out in such an obvious way.
The other thing to note is that a good solution to the robot safety problem is to simply add more automation. Mixing humans and automation requires huge effort and cost at the interface. Even if it costs a lot more than the marginal cost of labour to eliminate the last pieces of manual work on a production line, the potential savings across the wider system could make it worth doing. This is likely to mean that even those prepared to work well below minimum wage will not be able to get jobs that can be automated. In effect, the externalised costs of labour will at some point exceed the cost of automation, reducing the demand for labour to zero at a price well above zero wages.
Of course one solution to this would be to abolish health and safety laws, which I imagine will be the next step. As Milton Friedman said, the biggest discriminator against the low paid is pesky things such as minimum wages law that prevent workers offering their labour at a price that clears the market. I'm sure there is an equilibrium point for the number of worker mutilations per hour that ensure full employment - we just have to let the market find it!
When I first read the story on the front page of basically every newspaper, my immediate thought was that it was a publicity stunt. Maybe it wasn't, but I know that I - and many of my friends - didn't care about the oscars this year until that story popped up. Whether this was 'fake news' or not, we are most definitely entering a strange new world, where information is more readily available than ever, but more unreliable than ever.
In a scenario where your bitcoin is inaccessible due to the massive long term loss of all our electrical infrastructure, I would suggest a pile of bullets would be a whole lot more valuable to you than some pieces of shiny yellow metal.
Freefont uses bubble sort for sorting edge contour lists during rasterization. It is extremely well suited to the problem, as most sequential scan lines do not require a sort, making the algorithm an easy-to-optimise order validator. Further, most situations where a sort is required occur in localised pairs (from edges crossing) making the algorithm very efficient.
I personally steer clear of 'smart' answers in interviews. The more experience you gain, the more you come to appreciate the limits of your knowledge.
This continues to improve in the west, too.
I absolutely agree with you that income/wealth inequality is an indirect measure of any real problem. But I totally disagree with you that the west is not suffering from declining standard of living problems. Look at the inter-generational situation. There has been nearly 50% youth unemployment in many countries in Europe for over 8 years now. Incomes for many workers has stagnated or is falling. Job stability has gone. People are choosing to delay having families. Home ownership and capital accumulation are tanking, while debt burdens are increasing (indicating standard of living is unsustainable).
Unless you consider humans to be utility robots who, provided they are not dead and collect enough calories, are having an acceptable standard of life, then things are not getting better for everyone, and that is precisely the point of the inequality issue.
You are also absolutely right that we have a historically 'novel' problem. We have never been in a situation where we had so much technical capacity, yet completely lacked the political will to do anything with it. Take the housing market - we know how to build transport systems and new housing. Many other countries around the world, much poorer than the west, are able to do these things. We have the workers sitting idle who could do all this if we invested a bit in training them. Yet because of a belief that you can 'save' for output you might require in the future by putting someone out of work today (austerity), our leaders continue to insist that the problem is unsolvable and we just have to put up with cramming into whatever housing we were miraculously able to produce with basic hand tools and paper drawing from the end of the war to the late 1990s.
That is technically correct, but not really the right way to look at it. The driving issue was that the US had huge amounts of surplus industrial capacity after the war. They simply produced more stuff than most economists thought the population could consume (this may not have been true, but I guess nobody imagined how crazy consumerism was going to get). The government's options were to let many of the factories shut down and hope that new businesses would sprout up to absorb the unemployed workers, or engage in a rather sneaky trick that would kill two birds with one stone. This trick involved selling the Germans and Japanese US products on credit. This kept the US factories busy, while also supplying war torn countries with the capital goods they needed to accelerate their recovery. By making it appear as altruism, they could sell this to the US public, when the reality was they just wanted to keep idle hands busy out of fear of another Great Depression.
In a more rational world, surplus industry capacity should just mean that everyone can work less and enjoy a more prosperous life. However, capitalism does not seem able to produce this as a stable outcome, so for now Neo-Mercantilism persists.