Companies are essentially amoral (not the same as immoral!); it's a bit naive to claim that Apple has a moral obligation to pay taxes if they have a legal way to avoid it. You could even argue that they have a duty to their stakeholders (stockholders, employees and customers) to minimize the tax they pay, so they can increase share value, are able to pay higher wages (ha ha...), and lower prices.
The way to fix this is legislation, not a moral appeal. The problem I have with the current tax situation is that these loopholes only get profitable at a certain level because they are not cheap: your $500 and them some will be spent on lawyer and accountant fees if you go for the tax loophole. Large corporations end up paying next to no tax, while small companies pay the full bill. I looked into such a loophole a while ago for a company reporting a yearly profit of around $120k, and the tax benefit did outweigh the costs...but only because this company could make a convincing case for "paying" their holding company for a license on intellectual property. Companies who provide simple goods or services have far fewer options... if my corporate tax ended up at.044% of profits, I'd be a happy man.
Why do some people get so emotional over Bitcoin? Is it bitterness over the fact that they dismissed it as a "stupid idea" back when they could have mined 1600 BTC in a couple of weeks on their laptop?
BTW I don't own and never owned more than a couple of them either.
Few free market proponents claim that the free market fixes everything. They do claim that in many cases, running certain risks is preferable (cheaper, more effective, or less oppressive) to having regulation that would (attempt to) mitigate those risks.
In this case, they could claim that the risk of having your BTC stolen can be mitigated sufficiently by individuals, by not having too many BTC in any exchange, and by looking into an exchange's reputation. Whether or not that's a reasonable risk to run instead of BTC and exchanges being subject to regulation is another matter... in the end, even free market proponents might come to the conclusion that some regulation is needed.
A lot of people were none too pleased by the acquisition of Nest by Google. Companies like Nest who are in the business of making shiny thermostats and selling those to us, can be trusted to some degree having no interest in our data for anything other than quality control purposes. Even so, I would prefer to have a choice to not have the device phone home, or the option to run my own server in case I am worried about the level of security at that company... or in case the company gets bought by the likes of Google who are reknowned for raping our privacy six ways from Sunday for marketing purposes.
There are plenty of good reasons to connect appliances to the Internet, or at least to a local home automation controller.
- HVAC? Hell yes. Having heating and AC automated and remotely controllable adds comfort (turning the heating on before we arrive home), convenience (no need to manage schedules, remote control from anywhere in the home), and saves money (by turning off heating automatically in unoccupied rooms).
- The toaster? Maybe not. I did connect a few other appliances like the fryer, which I don't want to remain on when we leave or go to bed.
- Locks... none in my home are connected, but I've heard from many owners of vacation rental properties that remotely operated locks can be a godsend.
- Washing machines & dryers? Not yet... but soon these devices will be able to negotiate with the grid to turn on at a time determined by the power company, in exchange for a lower rate. The water heater in my old flat already did that over 20 years ago (it had a nice clunky bakelite control box sitting next to it).
None of this is life-changing stuff, and much of the technology is still in its infancy (especially when it comes to security!), but the benefits already outweigh the risks by far.
Better solutions than pay-to-win have come up in other MMOs. The dilemma is: how do you make sure that levelling up takes sufficiently long, without making it too easy for power gamers nor too hard for casual players. The simple answer is to consider both elapsed time and effort spent.
In Age of Conan, you start earning Offline Levelling points at a certain point, you get 1 every 4 days or so. You can use those to level up any character already over 30, 1 level per point. This ensures that you have at least some proficiency in playing the boosted character, and still allows grinders to level up the normal way, while making it feasible for casual players to have a few level 80 alts as well.
Even back in the days of Ultima Online, they introduced this at some point in the form of the guaranteed gain system. In UO, you'd gain skill for every action related to that skill. Make a sword, gain blacksmithing skill. After a certain level the gain would drop off to a point where you'd only have a certain probability of gaining a point. Close to the skill cap, you might have a 1 in 1000 or worse chance at a point. Even for regular players it might take 6 months or more of hard work to reach the cap. Being a grandmaster meant something... but was pretty much unattainable for casual players. So, the guaranteed gain system would always give you a skill point for the first sword you'd make in a certain time period. A few hours at lower levels up to multiple days close to the cap. You'd still take months to reach the cap but you wouldn't spent hours every day working at it, and power gamers could still grind to gain additional points during the "cool down" period.
Another suggestion: read "Manna" by Marshall Brain, a (free) short story that brings up Marx' old question about the ownership of the means to production, in a society that is pretty much completely robotized. Even if you disagree with his view on how such a future will play out, it'll make for some interesting discussion.
That's good reading for everyone, but for a more recent look ahead on how technology changes the world, I would recommend "The Circle" by Dave Eggers. Instead of a tyrannical government, the book predicts a runaway Google-like company. It's the kind of "tyranny of the public" we can expect if we continue to cheerfully sign away our privacy and the privacy of others to otherwise well-meaning companies.
Speaking of battery life, there's no mention of regenerative braking on this thing. That's not going to help much when cycling long-distance, but it will in cities where you'll be accelerating and stopping a lot.
The whole point is that they are in trouble after a sizable chunk of their BTC holdings got stolen, so it's not about what they have (purportedly worthless crypto "securities") but what they lack (cryptocurrency with a real value, which they now have to replace). After the theft, apparently they can no longer cover what they owe their account holders (both in $ and BTC).
In Mickey Mouse language: you hold $10 worth of my "x", where "x" could be dollars, BTC, tulip bulbs or gummy bears. Someone steals them, and now I want them back. regardless of what got stolen, you're now in trouble to the tune of $10.
They have: trapped dollars got converted to BTC and moved out, leading to BTC being more expensive on MtGox than anywhere else. Then BTC withdrawals from MtGox got blocked as well, and people started to convert trapped BTC to $ again (hoping dollars would be safer than BTC in case of problems with the company), leading to as much as a 500% gap in exchanges rates at MtGox and elsewhere.
The bankruptcy of MtGox would hardly lead to the demise of Bitcoin, at worst it will temporarily shake confidence in the cryptocurrency. Expect a drop, rebound and gradual increase in price.
Simple: they are because of the chance to score big, if what they create scores big with the demographic that's in demand. If you grab even just 10% or so of the current user base of SnapChat, perhaps FB will offer you a cool beeeellion $s for your company. Makes you wonder how smart it was of SnapChat to turn down these multibillion $ offers; things can only go downhill from here.
The absurd prices aren't for the apps (FB could build their own version of SnapChat in an overnight coding orgy), but for the user base. It's the 90s tech bubble and "eyeballs" all over again, with the difference that the users aren't just targets for advertisement this time, but also sources of valuable data (and numbers to keep the owners of overinflated public stock placated).
Oh, and meanwhile there's still plenty of serious tech development going on. Tech rarely makes the news though these days, unless it leads to a nice payday for the founders when Google, Apple or FB decide to step in.
Sounds like much we already knew or suspected. I'm more interested in why some people keep trying to show us what an awful character Assange is, instead of focussing on what he has done. Love him and Wikileaks or hate them; the latter seems a lot more relevant.
Whatsapp became popular due to the high cost of sending SMS messages, and the ease of use: it uses your phone number + contact list, so you don't have to build up your friends list again. Its popularity has also helped to bring prices down. Look at most of the new plans: many include unlimited SMS messages these days. And now that Whatsapp is part of an Evil Empire, it's pretty much painless to drop Whatsapp and go back to SMS or another messaging app, unless you're in a lot of groups.
That's actually a nice feature: if your friend doesn't have an iPhone, if they have the iMessage function turned off, or if their phone is off the Internet (being abroad with data roaming disable), the message will automatically be sent as an SMS. SMS and iMessage are the same app on iPhones; the phone chooses the cheaper iMessage alternative when available. It's too bad that Apple have not implemented iMessage on Android though.
The hate comes from MS being a dominant player, a position that often leads them to become complacent or makes them behave like the school bully. The latter is what that antitrust case was about, but we have more recent examples as well. Windows 8, for starters. They pushed through with their almost universally hated paradigm for a unified desktop / tablet experience. Then came Windows 8.1 which "brought back Start" in the sense that it really didn't; MS pretty much cheerfully flipped us all the bird on that one. "We know better, and you have no choice".
As a developer / designer, I hate MSs dominant position in the corporate world. Why? Sharepoint, that's why. I see good products and good developer/support teams being pushed out in favour of a "solution" that looks good on paper but is utter crap in practise, and rather expensive to run as well. The competent teams who used to support the products replaced by Sharepoint are being pushed out; in their place we get hordes upon hordes of so-called consultants. We have SP implementation consultants, IM consultants, Data consultants, ABCDE consultants; I have kind of lost track but I have yet to find someone remotely competent amongst them. Meanwhile the required server infrastructure is much larger, and our users have lost functionality compared to our old Wiki, forum and document management systems, some of which ran on software designed over 10 years ago. At this point we're solidly in the "throwing bad money after good" stage. It is almost (but not quite) as bad as SAP, and at least SAP does deliver on the backend and management layer.
So why hate MS for pushing out such a flawed product? I don't hate them for the product itself, but for the fact that it's almost impossible to make management see past the fact that it's "ohhhh Microsoft", past the fast-talking consultants, and the idea that it'll "integrate nicely".
The threat of terrorism is real. What I would expect from honest government (yeah, yeah...) is a statement that in this case our privacy does not outweigh the threat, and that they will put rules and oversight in place to ensure that collected data is only used to combat real terrorist threats. Whether or not the threat really does outweigh our right to privacy is beside the point; what worries me is that the limits of what the state can do with that data is a subject that doesn't even come up. On the contrary: the retention periods for collected data are ridiculously high, and there's always talk to use the data for other useful purposes like tracking down hardened criminals such as people with outstanding parking tickets, deadbeat dads, or shoplifters on the lam.
Personally, I don't think our government can be trusted with our private data. But if they have to be, then I'd like to see clear rules and boundaries. Where are they?
The added value of social media and search engines to advertisers is targeted advertising. Not because these ads result in big changes in purchasing habits of the viewers, but because they allow my product to be offered to people who are potentially interested in it, as opposed to whomever happens to be watching. That makes advertising affordable, especially for small businesses.
I couldn't afford an ad on national TV let alone something on an international medium. I might be able to afford one on local TV but it's unlikely to be cost effective for a niche product like mine. However advertising through Google has proven to be well worth the (small) price. These are new advertising euros that would otherwise not have been spent.
That was exactly the motivation behind the offer for SnapChat: billions of $ for a service that could be replicated with little effort on Facebook's existing platforms. It was not the service or the tech they were after, but the users, and specifically the younger crowd. Same motivation behind Google's offer. It's the "eyeballs" of the 90s all over again.
I should hope that there is a happy choice between crappy regulation and having no regulation at all. But if there isn't, you can be sure that as the options for traffic shaping improves, the likes of Comcast will at some point approach Google or Netflix with a request (demand) for payment for offering bandwidth-intensive services. And once those companies pay, you can be sure that all other similar services will be effectively broken unless they pay up as well. Having no regulation in the form of net neutrality will serve incumbent ISPs as well as incumbent content providers, and will raise the barrier to entry for newcomers on either market.
Your other scenario is crap regulation that will effectively break traffic shaping in any form, including the kind that allows ISPs to throttle high bandwidth services to ensure that other services remain usable. That is a a risk, but it seems far more favourable than not having net neutrality. ISPs have always complained about increasing demand for bandwidth, but so far they have managed to keep up just fine without traffic shaping. Except perhaps in areas where they didn't have to keep up, i.e. where one ISP has an effective monopoly.
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Companies are essentially amoral (not the same as immoral!); it's a bit naive to claim that Apple has a moral obligation to pay taxes if they have a legal way to avoid it. You could even argue that they have a duty to their stakeholders (stockholders, employees and customers) to minimize the tax they pay, so they can increase share value, are able to pay higher wages (ha ha...), and lower prices.
.044% of profits, I'd be a happy man.
The way to fix this is legislation, not a moral appeal. The problem I have with the current tax situation is that these loopholes only get profitable at a certain level because they are not cheap: your $500 and them some will be spent on lawyer and accountant fees if you go for the tax loophole. Large corporations end up paying next to no tax, while small companies pay the full bill. I looked into such a loophole a while ago for a company reporting a yearly profit of around $120k, and the tax benefit did outweigh the costs...but only because this company could make a convincing case for "paying" their holding company for a license on intellectual property. Companies who provide simple goods or services have far fewer options... if my corporate tax ended up at
Why do some people get so emotional over Bitcoin? Is it bitterness over the fact that they dismissed it as a "stupid idea" back when they could have mined 1600 BTC in a couple of weeks on their laptop?
BTW I don't own and never owned more than a couple of them either.
Few free market proponents claim that the free market fixes everything. They do claim that in many cases, running certain risks is preferable (cheaper, more effective, or less oppressive) to having regulation that would (attempt to) mitigate those risks.
In this case, they could claim that the risk of having your BTC stolen can be mitigated sufficiently by individuals, by not having too many BTC in any exchange, and by looking into an exchange's reputation. Whether or not that's a reasonable risk to run instead of BTC and exchanges being subject to regulation is another matter... in the end, even free market proponents might come to the conclusion that some regulation is needed.
A mechanical contraption, not a Turing machine, comparable to a slide rule or the bomb sights of that era.
A lot of people were none too pleased by the acquisition of Nest by Google. Companies like Nest who are in the business of making shiny thermostats and selling those to us, can be trusted to some degree having no interest in our data for anything other than quality control purposes. Even so, I would prefer to have a choice to not have the device phone home, or the option to run my own server in case I am worried about the level of security at that company... or in case the company gets bought by the likes of Google who are reknowned for raping our privacy six ways from Sunday for marketing purposes.
There are plenty of good reasons to connect appliances to the Internet, or at least to a local home automation controller.
- HVAC? Hell yes. Having heating and AC automated and remotely controllable adds comfort (turning the heating on before we arrive home), convenience (no need to manage schedules, remote control from anywhere in the home), and saves money (by turning off heating automatically in unoccupied rooms).
- The toaster? Maybe not. I did connect a few other appliances like the fryer, which I don't want to remain on when we leave or go to bed.
- Locks... none in my home are connected, but I've heard from many owners of vacation rental properties that remotely operated locks can be a godsend.
- Washing machines & dryers? Not yet... but soon these devices will be able to negotiate with the grid to turn on at a time determined by the power company, in exchange for a lower rate. The water heater in my old flat already did that over 20 years ago (it had a nice clunky bakelite control box sitting next to it).
None of this is life-changing stuff, and much of the technology is still in its infancy (especially when it comes to security!), but the benefits already outweigh the risks by far.
Better solutions than pay-to-win have come up in other MMOs. The dilemma is: how do you make sure that levelling up takes sufficiently long, without making it too easy for power gamers nor too hard for casual players. The simple answer is to consider both elapsed time and effort spent.
In Age of Conan, you start earning Offline Levelling points at a certain point, you get 1 every 4 days or so. You can use those to level up any character already over 30, 1 level per point. This ensures that you have at least some proficiency in playing the boosted character, and still allows grinders to level up the normal way, while making it feasible for casual players to have a few level 80 alts as well.
Even back in the days of Ultima Online, they introduced this at some point in the form of the guaranteed gain system. In UO, you'd gain skill for every action related to that skill. Make a sword, gain blacksmithing skill. After a certain level the gain would drop off to a point where you'd only have a certain probability of gaining a point. Close to the skill cap, you might have a 1 in 1000 or worse chance at a point. Even for regular players it might take 6 months or more of hard work to reach the cap. Being a grandmaster meant something... but was pretty much unattainable for casual players. So, the guaranteed gain system would always give you a skill point for the first sword you'd make in a certain time period. A few hours at lower levels up to multiple days close to the cap. You'd still take months to reach the cap but you wouldn't spent hours every day working at it, and power gamers could still grind to gain additional points during the "cool down" period.
Another suggestion: read "Manna" by Marshall Brain, a (free) short story that brings up Marx' old question about the ownership of the means to production, in a society that is pretty much completely robotized. Even if you disagree with his view on how such a future will play out, it'll make for some interesting discussion.
That's good reading for everyone, but for a more recent look ahead on how technology changes the world, I would recommend "The Circle" by Dave Eggers. Instead of a tyrannical government, the book predicts a runaway Google-like company. It's the kind of "tyranny of the public" we can expect if we continue to cheerfully sign away our privacy and the privacy of others to otherwise well-meaning companies.
Speaking of battery life, there's no mention of regenerative braking on this thing. That's not going to help much when cycling long-distance, but it will in cities where you'll be accelerating and stopping a lot.
The whole point is that they are in trouble after a sizable chunk of their BTC holdings got stolen, so it's not about what they have (purportedly worthless crypto "securities") but what they lack (cryptocurrency with a real value, which they now have to replace). After the theft, apparently they can no longer cover what they owe their account holders (both in $ and BTC).
In Mickey Mouse language: you hold $10 worth of my "x", where "x" could be dollars, BTC, tulip bulbs or gummy bears. Someone steals them, and now I want them back. regardless of what got stolen, you're now in trouble to the tune of $10.
They have: trapped dollars got converted to BTC and moved out, leading to BTC being more expensive on MtGox than anywhere else. Then BTC withdrawals from MtGox got blocked as well, and people started to convert trapped BTC to $ again (hoping dollars would be safer than BTC in case of problems with the company), leading to as much as a 500% gap in exchanges rates at MtGox and elsewhere.
The bankruptcy of MtGox would hardly lead to the demise of Bitcoin, at worst it will temporarily shake confidence in the cryptocurrency. Expect a drop, rebound and gradual increase in price.
Simple: they are because of the chance to score big, if what they create scores big with the demographic that's in demand. If you grab even just 10% or so of the current user base of SnapChat, perhaps FB will offer you a cool beeeellion $s for your company. Makes you wonder how smart it was of SnapChat to turn down these multibillion $ offers; things can only go downhill from here.
The absurd prices aren't for the apps (FB could build their own version of SnapChat in an overnight coding orgy), but for the user base. It's the 90s tech bubble and "eyeballs" all over again, with the difference that the users aren't just targets for advertisement this time, but also sources of valuable data (and numbers to keep the owners of overinflated public stock placated).
Oh, and meanwhile there's still plenty of serious tech development going on. Tech rarely makes the news though these days, unless it leads to a nice payday for the founders when Google, Apple or FB decide to step in.
Sounds like much we already knew or suspected. I'm more interested in why some people keep trying to show us what an awful character Assange is, instead of focussing on what he has done. Love him and Wikileaks or hate them; the latter seems a lot more relevant.
Whatsapp became popular due to the high cost of sending SMS messages, and the ease of use: it uses your phone number + contact list, so you don't have to build up your friends list again. Its popularity has also helped to bring prices down. Look at most of the new plans: many include unlimited SMS messages these days. And now that Whatsapp is part of an Evil Empire, it's pretty much painless to drop Whatsapp and go back to SMS or another messaging app, unless you're in a lot of groups.
Whatsapp only recently started charging the $1/year, and only for new users.
You're right about FB not buying Whatsapp for its revenue or even for the app or the underlying technology. They were after the "eyeballs".
That's actually a nice feature: if your friend doesn't have an iPhone, if they have the iMessage function turned off, or if their phone is off the Internet (being abroad with data roaming disable), the message will automatically be sent as an SMS. SMS and iMessage are the same app on iPhones; the phone chooses the cheaper iMessage alternative when available. It's too bad that Apple have not implemented iMessage on Android though.
The hate comes from MS being a dominant player, a position that often leads them to become complacent or makes them behave like the school bully. The latter is what that antitrust case was about, but we have more recent examples as well. Windows 8, for starters. They pushed through with their almost universally hated paradigm for a unified desktop / tablet experience. Then came Windows 8.1 which "brought back Start" in the sense that it really didn't; MS pretty much cheerfully flipped us all the bird on that one. "We know better, and you have no choice".
As a developer / designer, I hate MSs dominant position in the corporate world. Why? Sharepoint, that's why. I see good products and good developer/support teams being pushed out in favour of a "solution" that looks good on paper but is utter crap in practise, and rather expensive to run as well. The competent teams who used to support the products replaced by Sharepoint are being pushed out; in their place we get hordes upon hordes of so-called consultants. We have SP implementation consultants, IM consultants, Data consultants, ABCDE consultants; I have kind of lost track but I have yet to find someone remotely competent amongst them. Meanwhile the required server infrastructure is much larger, and our users have lost functionality compared to our old Wiki, forum and document management systems, some of which ran on software designed over 10 years ago. At this point we're solidly in the "throwing bad money after good" stage. It is almost (but not quite) as bad as SAP, and at least SAP does deliver on the backend and management layer.
So why hate MS for pushing out such a flawed product? I don't hate them for the product itself, but for the fact that it's almost impossible to make management see past the fact that it's "ohhhh Microsoft", past the fast-talking consultants, and the idea that it'll "integrate nicely".
The threat of terrorism is real. What I would expect from honest government (yeah, yeah...) is a statement that in this case our privacy does not outweigh the threat, and that they will put rules and oversight in place to ensure that collected data is only used to combat real terrorist threats. Whether or not the threat really does outweigh our right to privacy is beside the point; what worries me is that the limits of what the state can do with that data is a subject that doesn't even come up. On the contrary: the retention periods for collected data are ridiculously high, and there's always talk to use the data for other useful purposes like tracking down hardened criminals such as people with outstanding parking tickets, deadbeat dads, or shoplifters on the lam.
Personally, I don't think our government can be trusted with our private data. But if they have to be, then I'd like to see clear rules and boundaries. Where are they?
The added value of social media and search engines to advertisers is targeted advertising. Not because these ads result in big changes in purchasing habits of the viewers, but because they allow my product to be offered to people who are potentially interested in it, as opposed to whomever happens to be watching. That makes advertising affordable, especially for small businesses.
I couldn't afford an ad on national TV let alone something on an international medium. I might be able to afford one on local TV but it's unlikely to be cost effective for a niche product like mine. However advertising through Google has proven to be well worth the (small) price. These are new advertising euros that would otherwise not have been spent.
That was exactly the motivation behind the offer for SnapChat: billions of $ for a service that could be replicated with little effort on Facebook's existing platforms. It was not the service or the tech they were after, but the users, and specifically the younger crowd. Same motivation behind Google's offer. It's the "eyeballs" of the 90s all over again.
Wow... it sounds like it's the non Glass-wearing crowd who are the ones in need of a little lesson in public behaviour.
I should hope that there is a happy choice between crappy regulation and having no regulation at all. But if there isn't, you can be sure that as the options for traffic shaping improves, the likes of Comcast will at some point approach Google or Netflix with a request (demand) for payment for offering bandwidth-intensive services. And once those companies pay, you can be sure that all other similar services will be effectively broken unless they pay up as well. Having no regulation in the form of net neutrality will serve incumbent ISPs as well as incumbent content providers, and will raise the barrier to entry for newcomers on either market.
Your other scenario is crap regulation that will effectively break traffic shaping in any form, including the kind that allows ISPs to throttle high bandwidth services to ensure that other services remain usable. That is a a risk, but it seems far more favourable than not having net neutrality. ISPs have always complained about increasing demand for bandwidth, but so far they have managed to keep up just fine without traffic shaping. Except perhaps in areas where they didn't have to keep up, i.e. where one ISP has an effective monopoly.