Washington tried this after a big cig tax hike, too many people from Spokane were going over to Post Falls to buy cigs, so the highway patrol put up a blockade and started doing customs style checks for cigs. That lasted all of about two days (some city attorney probably pointed out the Commerce clause. Was pretty funny.
I'm curious are wages generally lower in Vancouver than Portland for the same job given the obvious tax arbitrage situation? Or is housing cheper just across the border in Oregon? Vancouver was always one of my favorite places in Western Washington.
It's pretty common along the Washington(8+% sales tax) Oregon (no sales tax) border too. Incidentally if you live in a state that doesn't have a sales tax you are exempt from other state's sales taxes (probably true about all states, but they might come after you for the use tax if you live in a state with a salels tax). You were supposed to report the items purchased and pay the sales tax on them (mail order too). Companies are only required to collect if they have a physical presense in the state.
There is a town back home with a 35 mph speed limit on their main street. Turns out if you go 35 you don't catch the lights (and there are about 15), but if you go 38 you will hit every single one.
I'm color blind. The yellow light looks orange to me, of course the green one looks white, but that's a whole other story. The red light does in fact look red.
They actually have about $60 billion now (always had some equity investments (in things like Comcast that usually aren't considered cash). Also, AOL's loss doesn't mean that $99 billion in cash walked out the door. It's a fairly complex juncture between accounting values and market values. When TimeWarner bought AOL (I realize it actually worked the other way around, but the accounting treatment was to have the legal entity TimeWarner, but the legal entitiy AOL) they issued stock for the assets of AOL. However the value of the stock issued was significantly higher than the value of the assets of AOL (AOL had some servers, customer lists, buildings etc but nothing near the market capitalization of the company) in total they probably paid around $150 billion in market value for a business that owned $10 billion in hard assets. In the accounting world things are generally valued at their historic cost. But you have to have a balance sheet balance, so an asset is created in mergers that is called Goodwill, it used to be known as Blue Sky, since that was what you were buying. In reality you are buying things that don't have an easy to quantify value, the intellectual property, management expertise, human capital, and other things such as that that make a busines run.
What happened when AOL took the huge loss was them recognising that they paid much too high a price for AOL and reducing the value of the "asset" they created on that purchase. At the same time they took some smaller but similar expenses on other poor investments. However since they paid with stock the deal was largely a recognition that the stock price three years prior was much too high. No real harm or foul. Yes poor manangment can kill a company look at EDS, AurthorAnderson, Enron, or WorldCom for examples of that, but it's terribly hard to have cash expenses that large.
If you take Larry at his word, Oracle has been runing their corporate database on a Linux Cluster for the better part of a year. Oh and they picked it because of performance, not cost. I'd say that Larry's pimping of Linux has done more to improve the imression than anything any company has done besides perhaps IBM. Knowing that Oracle runs it gives a ton of confidence to IT buyers.
I'd be surprised if they were making gross margin on the US systems at any time. I think they will try to cut price to breakeven or a small loss over this cycle and the next while they try to establish a strong competitive position in the entertainment market. Their plan was to collect a Windows like royalty on every TV/entertainment center sold. Figure at launch they cost somewhere in the $350-$400 range (depending mostly on assembly costs, they pay Flextronics or Celestica to build them) and their cost has fallen in the range of 1% per week since then at least through last fall price declines may have moderated since then. After you subtract marketing costs they haven't and won't make a dime on this generation of the X-Box, they break it out in their SEC filings the X-Box division (includes the PC accessories and PC game software has lost several billion over the past two years.
He is saying that USD 150 is about EUR 120 or about GBP 80, those are close I haven't check rates in a few days, and did the math in my head. Even with the VAT (US prices are generally quoted pre tax those are still significantly less than I think the retail price in Europe (Last time I saw the price it was closer to EUR 180 or 200 (and GBP 99). If it weren't for region coding you would benefit from ordering an X-Box (or likely a Playstation from the US).
I think they were selling a few hundred k units a month in the US. So doubling a weeks sales (in a fairly slow season is probably an extra 50-100k units. The numbers are occasionally availble from NPD's fun world survey.
Hey I voted for candiate dubbed the smurf around the office, and I'd vote for him again if he ran for governer, anyone is better than the socialist Schweser, or either of the Republican candiates.
The idea is that they are given (or sold, it makes no difference to the outcome just the relative incomes of the industry) to all the potential pollutors in the industry. Lets say there are 3 power plants in a vally and each emits 1 kg of SO2 per Megawatt. The citizens of the town decide that they are tired of SO2 pollution, and are willing to pay extra for reduced emissions (currently they draw 1,000 MW. The easiest choice is to limit output per company to 75 kg. This works well, but does not provide any incentive to further reduce emissions. The efficiencies of the market appear when one company can spend $100 extra on coal to reduce their production of SO2 to 50 kg/MW they cut theirs to well below the minimum and sell their rights to emit to a producer that might have more difficultly using the new coal, or could not affort the widget. You take advantage of the differences in cost of cleaning the pollution (letting the innovative companies clean up more and profit from it) while less innovative companies clean up less, rather than force efficient producers to pay the average cost of clean up. The permits take the decisionmaking (beyond an acceptible level of total emmissions) out of the hands of governments and let producers who are able to clean more effectivly clean more emisssions and producers less able to clean clean less. It works very well on highly mobile pollutants where 1 kg removed in one location affects most other locations.
If you sold a license to pollute at the cost of clean up, you have to know in advance the cost of clean up, missing in either direction is bad. This way you say we want this much and no more and the comapnies decide who should clean and who should pay for the right to pollute.
Sorry, Morgan bought 25,000 contracts, Cantor only bought 5,000. Both bought them for the purpose of reselling them for a profit so they will be looking to deal.
AFAIK these are traded on the futures exchanges, check the CME, CBOT, NY mercatile before you decide they aren't tradeable. There was a story about a group of school kids who raised money for a sulfer emisssion permit, that was then kept by the school reducing emissions at their onset. The EPA says that anyone can buy NOx and SO2 permits including members of the general public, and they list several suspiciously non power company sounding names in the winners list (I'm pretty sure Bates College Environmental Economics doesn't operate a small coal fired plant).
If you offer Cantor a reasonable return on their investment, I'm sure they would sell them to you (you do the math on how much they paid. Their contact number is listed on the broker page (and they bought 25,000 units). Enron (don't worry they sold the trading business to UBS) will likely have to short them (and then buy from Morgan or Cantor).
True trading is no more a gamble than any other business negotiation. Quick traders attempt to find patterns in very large trades and exploit those patterns. As an example, say a pension fund wants to buy 1,000,000 shares of Microsoft. That 25 million is going to move the market for a short time, if a trader recognises the games that a brokerage firm uses in their attempt to minimize the costs of that investment they can exploit that information to make money. It's not supposed to be just speculation. It could also look for pricing differences between assets that have value tied to each other (say S&P index funds and S&P futures) and wait for enough people to notice to reduce the difference.
Another thing is that most people who are making seven figs burn out at thirty, die at 40, or risked their net worth through their twenties. I'd suggest that everyone read the millionare next door, it describes a study that found that most millionares had very simple lifestyles, including buying used cars (or trucks) and Penny's suits. My income tax bill (state and fed) was equal to about 18 months of rent for me, of course I sort of skimp on rent.
The Wall St. Journal had an article about EDS' failure on the NMCI contract, it was a similar deal, the Navy hired EDS to modernize it's infastructure. The whole thing turned into a quagmire and as EDS was new to this business bid the contract at a very low assumed margin (CSC is an old boy to government contracts and knows how to accomodate for issues that arise) and has nearly bankrupted the company over their failure. The anecdotes include warehouses filled with computers that were bought but not installed by EDS and managers who would not go chat with the manager at the next base to fix a problem. It's a pretty insightful look at how government contracting works.
I'm left handed and have always used my mouse on the right because it's too much of a pain to swap it around everywhere I go (and change the mouse buttons). Oddly enough the only person I know who uses a left hand style mouse is right handed (she likes to be able to use both mouse and numberpad.
Read an interesting book (Puzzle Palace) in college it described an interaction back in the 70s when the NSA was not allowed to be used on domestic criminal prosecutions. So the FBI got the help of some cryptanalysts on their lunch break to solve a particularly tricky drycleaning cryptogram (the mobster in question signaled his associates with the articles he brought in to be dry cleaned) they cracked it during the soup.
Re:Beware Emissions Inspection
on
Hack Your Ride
·
· Score: 1
You know what the good reason is because a Detroit needed them while Honda's didn't and they cost about a grand (at the time). Obviously we couldn't requre the local auto industry to be saddled with an extra $1000 cost when Japan was eating their lunch, so the rule was made that all cars must have a catalytic converter (not that all cars must meet a certain level of emissions) Honda was selling a CVCC that would meet California emmissons (prior to and stricter than federal emissions) with no exhaust equipment.
Re:Buffering....
on
Real Problems
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I think real's compression was one of the first to do a decent job with about 8k on voice data. It's got about 50% of the market for converence calls which usually stream at 6 or 8 kbps. Not sure if a streaming mp3 at 8kbps would have sounded as good in 1998. Either that or Real went in and compared file sizes with an 8kbps rm file and a 64kbps mp3.
AFAIK The fishkill production lines are working at 90nm (on 300 mm wafers) and they are testing 65 nm with the plan of upgrading to 65 nm in the 2006 timeframe.
Oddly enough in all those quarters but three SUN was generating cash, there's more to a company than just profits, you know. Some expenses are not based in cash.
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Washington tried this after a big cig tax hike, too many people from Spokane were going over to Post Falls to buy cigs, so the highway patrol put up a blockade and started doing customs style checks for cigs. That lasted all of about two days (some city attorney probably pointed out the Commerce clause. Was pretty funny.
I'm curious are wages generally lower in Vancouver than Portland for the same job given the obvious tax arbitrage situation? Or is housing cheper just across the border in Oregon? Vancouver was always one of my favorite places in Western Washington.
It's pretty common along the Washington(8+% sales tax) Oregon (no sales tax) border too. Incidentally if you live in a state that doesn't have a sales tax you are exempt from other state's sales taxes (probably true about all states, but they might come after you for the use tax if you live in a state with a salels tax). You were supposed to report the items purchased and pay the sales tax on them (mail order too). Companies are only required to collect if they have a physical presense in the state.
There is a town back home with a 35 mph speed limit on their main street. Turns out if you go 35 you don't catch the lights (and there are about 15), but if you go 38 you will hit every single one.
I'm color blind. The yellow light looks orange to me, of course the green one looks white, but that's a whole other story. The red light does in fact look red.
They actually have about $60 billion now (always had some equity investments (in things like Comcast that usually aren't considered cash). Also, AOL's loss doesn't mean that $99 billion in cash walked out the door. It's a fairly complex juncture between accounting values and market values. When TimeWarner bought AOL (I realize it actually worked the other way around, but the accounting treatment was to have the legal entity TimeWarner, but the legal entitiy AOL) they issued stock for the assets of AOL. However the value of the stock issued was significantly higher than the value of the assets of AOL (AOL had some servers, customer lists, buildings etc but nothing near the market capitalization of the company) in total they probably paid around $150 billion in market value for a business that owned $10 billion in hard assets. In the accounting world things are generally valued at their historic cost. But you have to have a balance sheet balance, so an asset is created in mergers that is called Goodwill, it used to be known as Blue Sky, since that was what you were buying. In reality you are buying things that don't have an easy to quantify value, the intellectual property, management expertise, human capital, and other things such as that that make a busines run. What happened when AOL took the huge loss was them recognising that they paid much too high a price for AOL and reducing the value of the "asset" they created on that purchase. At the same time they took some smaller but similar expenses on other poor investments. However since they paid with stock the deal was largely a recognition that the stock price three years prior was much too high. No real harm or foul. Yes poor manangment can kill a company look at EDS, AurthorAnderson, Enron, or WorldCom for examples of that, but it's terribly hard to have cash expenses that large.
If you take Larry at his word, Oracle has been runing their corporate database on a Linux Cluster for the better part of a year. Oh and they picked it because of performance, not cost. I'd say that Larry's pimping of Linux has done more to improve the imression than anything any company has done besides perhaps IBM. Knowing that Oracle runs it gives a ton of confidence to IT buyers.
I'd be surprised if they were making gross margin on the US systems at any time. I think they will try to cut price to breakeven or a small loss over this cycle and the next while they try to establish a strong competitive position in the entertainment market. Their plan was to collect a Windows like royalty on every TV/entertainment center sold. Figure at launch they cost somewhere in the $350-$400 range (depending mostly on assembly costs, they pay Flextronics or Celestica to build them) and their cost has fallen in the range of 1% per week since then at least through last fall price declines may have moderated since then. After you subtract marketing costs they haven't and won't make a dime on this generation of the X-Box, they break it out in their SEC filings the X-Box division (includes the PC accessories and PC game software has lost several billion over the past two years.
He is saying that USD 150 is about EUR 120 or about GBP 80, those are close I haven't check rates in a few days, and did the math in my head. Even with the VAT (US prices are generally quoted pre tax those are still significantly less than I think the retail price in Europe (Last time I saw the price it was closer to EUR 180 or 200 (and GBP 99). If it weren't for region coding you would benefit from ordering an X-Box (or likely a Playstation from the US).
I think they were selling a few hundred k units a month in the US. So doubling a weeks sales (in a fairly slow season is probably an extra 50-100k units. The numbers are occasionally availble from NPD's fun world survey.
Hey I voted for candiate dubbed the smurf around the office, and I'd vote for him again if he ran for governer, anyone is better than the socialist Schweser, or either of the Republican candiates.
The idea is that they are given (or sold, it makes no difference to the outcome just the relative incomes of the industry) to all the potential pollutors in the industry. Lets say there are 3 power plants in a vally and each emits 1 kg of SO2 per Megawatt. The citizens of the town decide that they are tired of SO2 pollution, and are willing to pay extra for reduced emissions (currently they draw 1,000 MW. The easiest choice is to limit output per company to 75 kg. This works well, but does not provide any incentive to further reduce emissions.
The efficiencies of the market appear when one company can spend $100 extra on coal to reduce their production of SO2 to 50 kg/MW they cut theirs to well below the minimum and sell their rights to emit to a producer that might have more difficultly using the new coal, or could not affort the widget. You take advantage of the differences in cost of cleaning the pollution (letting the innovative companies clean up more and profit from it) while less innovative companies clean up less, rather than force efficient producers to pay the average cost of clean up. The permits take the decisionmaking (beyond an acceptible level of total emmissions) out of the hands of governments and let producers who are able to clean more effectivly clean more emisssions and producers less able to clean clean less. It works very well on highly mobile pollutants where 1 kg removed in one location affects most other locations.
If you sold a license to pollute at the cost of clean up, you have to know in advance the cost of clean up, missing in either direction is bad. This way you say we want this much and no more and the comapnies decide who should clean and who should pay for the right to pollute.
Sorry, Morgan bought 25,000 contracts, Cantor only bought 5,000. Both bought them for the purpose of reselling them for a profit so they will be looking to deal.
AFAIK these are traded on the futures exchanges, check the CME, CBOT, NY mercatile before you decide they aren't tradeable. There was a story about a group of school kids who raised money for a sulfer emisssion permit, that was then kept by the school reducing emissions at their onset. The EPA says that anyone can buy NOx and SO2 permits including members of the general public, and they list several suspiciously non power company sounding names in the winners list (I'm pretty sure Bates College Environmental Economics doesn't operate a small coal fired plant).
If you offer Cantor a reasonable return on their investment, I'm sure they would sell them to you (you do the math on how much they paid. Their contact number is listed on the broker page (and they bought 25,000 units). Enron (don't worry they sold the trading business to UBS) will likely have to short them (and then buy from Morgan or Cantor).
True trading is no more a gamble than any other business negotiation. Quick traders attempt to find patterns in very large trades and exploit those patterns. As an example, say a pension fund wants to buy 1,000,000 shares of Microsoft. That 25 million is going to move the market for a short time, if a trader recognises the games that a brokerage firm uses in their attempt to minimize the costs of that investment they can exploit that information to make money. It's not supposed to be just speculation. It could also look for pricing differences between assets that have value tied to each other (say S&P index funds and S&P futures) and wait for enough people to notice to reduce the difference.
Another thing is that most people who are making seven figs burn out at thirty, die at 40, or risked their net worth through their twenties. I'd suggest that everyone read the millionare next door, it describes a study that found that most millionares had very simple lifestyles, including buying used cars (or trucks) and Penny's suits. My income tax bill (state and fed) was equal to about 18 months of rent for me, of course I sort of skimp on rent.
The Wall St. Journal had an article about EDS' failure on the NMCI contract, it was a similar deal, the Navy hired EDS to modernize it's infastructure. The whole thing turned into a quagmire and as EDS was new to this business bid the contract at a very low assumed margin (CSC is an old boy to government contracts and knows how to accomodate for issues that arise) and has nearly bankrupted the company over their failure. The anecdotes include warehouses filled with computers that were bought but not installed by EDS and managers who would not go chat with the manager at the next base to fix a problem. It's a pretty insightful look at how government contracting works.
That's why we will never have a flat tax (of the nature of Forbes' postcard 1040). Too many people are employed in preparing tax returns.
Perhaps if you had told him you wanted to waive those options he would have understood you. The silent i makes a big differnce in pronunciation.
I'm left handed and have always used my mouse on the right because it's too much of a pain to swap it around everywhere I go (and change the mouse buttons). Oddly enough the only person I know who uses a left hand style mouse is right handed (she likes to be able to use both mouse and numberpad.
Read an interesting book (Puzzle Palace) in college it described an interaction back in the 70s when the NSA was not allowed to be used on domestic criminal prosecutions. So the FBI got the help of some cryptanalysts on their lunch break to solve a particularly tricky drycleaning cryptogram (the mobster in question signaled his associates with the articles he brought in to be dry cleaned) they cracked it during the soup.
You know what the good reason is because a Detroit needed them while Honda's didn't and they cost about a grand (at the time). Obviously we couldn't requre the local auto industry to be saddled with an extra $1000 cost when Japan was eating their lunch, so the rule was made that all cars must have a catalytic converter (not that all cars must meet a certain level of emissions) Honda was selling a CVCC that would meet California emmissons (prior to and stricter than federal emissions) with no exhaust equipment.
I think real's compression was one of the first to do a decent job with about 8k on voice data. It's got about 50% of the market for converence calls which usually stream at 6 or 8 kbps. Not sure if a streaming mp3 at 8kbps would have sounded as good in 1998. Either that or Real went in and compared file sizes with an 8kbps rm file and a 64kbps mp3.
AFAIK The fishkill production lines are working at 90nm (on 300 mm wafers) and they are testing 65 nm with the plan of upgrading to 65 nm in the 2006 timeframe.
Oddly enough in all those quarters but three SUN was generating cash, there's more to a company than just profits, you know. Some expenses are not based in cash.