Apple doesn't force you to buy the movies/tv shows from iTMS. You are free to buy them at any other marketplace and use them as you wish. They still have copy protection on them, but you won't have to rely on iTunes to play them. This is known before purchasing the content from iTMS. I have an apple based entertainment system (mini and ATV2) and have not had any problems with it playing any of my content. I also don't buy from iTMS. I don't see any of that situation as anti competitive from apple, rather any issues i have is from MPAA.
If I move from MS to Linux, I have lost all of my apps. If I move from MS to Apple I have lost all of my apps. If I move from Apple to Linux it is likely that some of the apps I use will work (right now all of them in fact). I see the MS world as having more lock in. Just because I can buy MS software from multiple vendors doesn't really make it any better.
Your analogy is flawed in that the outside salesmen in reality are charged for the part of the overhead that covers the infrastructure. What they are able to sidestep is the corporate bloat. I started a company years ago based on the business model that kept the multiple at or below 2. So if the employee makes $50/hr, the billing rate is $100/hr. The industry standard was closer to 3. Here's the kicker, we also had great benefits, so perhaps 40-50% of the multiple was fringe, the corporate bloat was kept to a minimum. We were very successful because we could pay people more, and charge clients less, while providing better services than our competitors (obviously we were able to cherry pick the talent). The current ruling is reinforcing the idea that the market (and by that I mean the end user level buyer) should have the ability to influence correction by choosing smaller and therefore cheaper companies. If you as a business man see an opportunity to start a lean company to compete with a big telco, it means that you can do it, you are charged for the base cost of infrastructure, but you can set up the business to stay lean by limiting what the purely executive "head" of the company can make. It encourages small companies to form business models that don't require growth for profitability, which is analogous to limiting greed.
I would argue that the success of the CEO is measured by the financial success of the company rather than the personal net worth for the CEO in question. You'll find plenty of wealthy CEOs whose companies went under leaving nothing for the employees and stockholders. Market cap might be a pretty good measure for financial success of a company.
Maybe I'm troll food, but your calculation there is with a payback immediately, i would guess a more reasonable payback would be 15 years, which puts the average annual cost per household at $800 dollars (just a WAG, I understand there's interest involved and such) which is pretty reasonable. This is also the first one, which usually means a substantial premium. So you get the jobs, and the power plant, and if the power plants lifetime is similar to that of a coal plant it would seem to be a really good first step. Better than funding intelligence agencies to build a repository of metaphors for instance.
If someone opens a card in your name, spends $500, and never uses the card again it will destroy your credit rating. I had it happen, and the company issuing the card stonewalled me when I tried to get it removed. I never opened the card, never saw a bill, and never got a letter telling me I was behind on a payment, yet the account info had my real address.
In my (somewhat limited) experience as a developer I would say there is a failure in general to have the requirements defined up front, all at once prior to beginning the design process. More often than not what happens is the initial requirements scope creeps along as the development progresses. This can make it difficult to have a design that is cohesive across the full set of requirements. The clients don't usually know enough about their own requirements to have them fully flushed out at the beginning, and as they see the incremental development versions are reminded of other things they would like to do. This leads to bad code almost necessarily as new requirements are added on top of the existing code base. This seems to happen in every single career field I have had, not just development. Management's solution in general is the "cargo cult" problem discussed by parent.
Spending less is the key. But the higher education loans don't really come out of the "cash flow" of taxes, rather it is a self sustaining program, and it is a good thing that bankruptcy will not discharge the loan. There was a huge sentiment recently that the government should forgive student loans (nullify them or something) so that the students who chose to get them would not have to pay them back . . . which is disgusting to me, and very much like large corporations dodging (legally) their tax obligations. I tried to explain to a few of my friends who were espousing the idea that the payments on their loans were enabling the next round of students to go to school. Yes, it is true that the cost of school could be reduced and that the regents and administrations of universities are getting greedier by the day, but in terms of a cash flow savings it is a small piece of the whole pie. The better place to cut spending would be in Defense . . . we could chop that budget in half immediately, and close a bunch of foreign bases. The state department (and intel) can keep up diplomatic relations. The military industrial complex is bleeding us dry and the budgets only go up. The states can't squeeze much more out of their tax bases and things like basic infrastructure, education, and health care suffer.
Marxism? Perhaps you are reading more into what I said than is there. Pro-tip: saying "anyone should be able to reduce their cost of living" is an absurdity. Perhaps there are quite a few in the middle class who have cable internet and a new car who could indeed reduce their cost of living. There are a lot of people whose cost of living is less than $8000 per year who may not be able to reduce it further. To those people what would vivian say? There are a lot of people in this country (the US) who do not have the means to save, and who are not spending on anything beyond what is necessary to live. Be clear: I am not saying that they do or do not deserve anything other than what they have. I am saying that to tell those people that they should be able to save some of their money would be an insult to them. But if you told me that I could reduce my expenses to afford more savings I would certainly agree.
I'm not bitter, and never accused you of being in an ivory tower. The poster I responded to claimed that "anyone should be able to reduce their cost of living". Do you want to defend that statement? I work with a lot of people who can't reduce their cost of living, are desperate to do whatever it takes to sustain themselves, and are still not able to do that. That you could is a testament to your own hard work, will, and perhaps a bit of luck or at least some good circumstances. Congratulations. It doesn't always work that way, and does not indicate any less effort on the part of those that are suffering.
You come across as an ignorant elitist bastard who would walk around telling poor people to pull themselves up by their boot straps. You should come out of your ivory tower more often.
So the servers are just trying to do the translation right . . . and no one is listening to your calls. Except of course the servers, and the people later on who are looking at the translation and also listening to the original perhaps to see if it was correct.
Oh and first post . . . or I was when I started. And of course I did not read the article.
"Physicists at Fermi Lab have found a 'suspicious bump' in that there data that could indicate they've found a new elementary particle or even a new force of nature."
Yup. I have an uncle that worked at a steel yard in Pittsburgh, he was unionized and so he got paid for his 8 hour shift. Thing is, there was no work for him to do, but the steel union was strong and good, so my uncle could not be laid off. He and his buddies had good times at work, not having to work and getting paid, loads of free time. I wonder what ever happened to that gig . . . I'm sure it's still going strong though.
Hollywood would beg to differ with your assessment regarding the viability of this practice. There are in fact many ways to structure corporations to accomplish this goal. The fact that it is fraudulent doesn't seem to get in the way, as a matter of fact the movie studios now have the cooperation of DHS (ICE) based on this type of accounting to prove that they are losing billions to copyright infringers.
All money that a corporation collects will eventually go somewhere
That part I agree with.
Either it will be spent on operating expenses or it will be paid out to investors
This sounds like something you hear in Accounting 101 (or 504 if you're in an MBA program). On the surface seems plausible enough, but in practice there are other options which prevent that money from being recirculated in the local or even national economy. More than likely it is simply bled out (with off shore bank accounts in tax haven countries).
There is no need to tax it while a corporation is sitting on it
Two thoughts: I would tend to agree if the previous point were somehow fixed. And, why should a corporation (given corporate personhood) be allowed to live tax free when I (given corporal personhood) can not?
You talk about your view of the political spectrum as if it is an absolute. But there are a few ways to describe it, and totalitarianism exists both from the extreme left (the orwellian extension of communism that the soviet union so aptly demonstrated) and from the extreme right (fascism is by definition totalitarian). Anarchy is orthogonal to that continuum (and the two totalitarian states are next to each other). Your description of the rule of law fits with what has been happening in the US for the past 200 years, and is largely without regard to political party (all political parties have moved to increase the number of laws and regulations on the books), and seems more to be a fact of government (government wants to get bigger and grab more power). Certainly in the modern USA both the republican and democratic parties can be seen as growing the size and scope of the government, both in step with corporate influence. This seems to be marching to totalitarianism from the right side of the political spectrum. There has been no social redistribution of wealth to the poor, merely a thin gauze of social welfare to keep those on the brink of nothing at that point, while the wealth collects more and more with the top 5% of the population.
Except for the money the corporation is paying taxes on is the money left over from what the employees paid taxes on. It's true that there is double taxation for a C corp paying dividends, but for GE to pay no tax on billions in profit is criminal.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple doesn't force you to buy the movies/tv shows from iTMS. You are free to buy them at any other marketplace and use them as you wish. They still have copy protection on them, but you won't have to rely on iTunes to play them. This is known before purchasing the content from iTMS. I have an apple based entertainment system (mini and ATV2) and have not had any problems with it playing any of my content. I also don't buy from iTMS. I don't see any of that situation as anti competitive from apple, rather any issues i have is from MPAA.
If I move from MS to Linux, I have lost all of my apps. If I move from MS to Apple I have lost all of my apps. If I move from Apple to Linux it is likely that some of the apps I use will work (right now all of them in fact). I see the MS world as having more lock in. Just because I can buy MS software from multiple vendors doesn't really make it any better.
So you think it should be legal to kill your own child if you feel their life won't be worth living?
Your analogy is flawed in that the outside salesmen in reality are charged for the part of the overhead that covers the infrastructure. What they are able to sidestep is the corporate bloat. I started a company years ago based on the business model that kept the multiple at or below 2. So if the employee makes $50/hr, the billing rate is $100/hr. The industry standard was closer to 3. Here's the kicker, we also had great benefits, so perhaps 40-50% of the multiple was fringe, the corporate bloat was kept to a minimum. We were very successful because we could pay people more, and charge clients less, while providing better services than our competitors (obviously we were able to cherry pick the talent). The current ruling is reinforcing the idea that the market (and by that I mean the end user level buyer) should have the ability to influence correction by choosing smaller and therefore cheaper companies. If you as a business man see an opportunity to start a lean company to compete with a big telco, it means that you can do it, you are charged for the base cost of infrastructure, but you can set up the business to stay lean by limiting what the purely executive "head" of the company can make. It encourages small companies to form business models that don't require growth for profitability, which is analogous to limiting greed.
I would argue that the success of the CEO is measured by the financial success of the company rather than the personal net worth for the CEO in question. You'll find plenty of wealthy CEOs whose companies went under leaving nothing for the employees and stockholders. Market cap might be a pretty good measure for financial success of a company.
Maybe I'm troll food, but your calculation there is with a payback immediately, i would guess a more reasonable payback would be 15 years, which puts the average annual cost per household at $800 dollars (just a WAG, I understand there's interest involved and such) which is pretty reasonable. This is also the first one, which usually means a substantial premium. So you get the jobs, and the power plant, and if the power plants lifetime is similar to that of a coal plant it would seem to be a really good first step. Better than funding intelligence agencies to build a repository of metaphors for instance.
. . . and intelligence agencies with way way too much time and money . . .
If someone opens a card in your name, spends $500, and never uses the card again it will destroy your credit rating. I had it happen, and the company issuing the card stonewalled me when I tried to get it removed. I never opened the card, never saw a bill, and never got a letter telling me I was behind on a payment, yet the account info had my real address.
In my (somewhat limited) experience as a developer I would say there is a failure in general to have the requirements defined up front, all at once prior to beginning the design process. More often than not what happens is the initial requirements scope creeps along as the development progresses. This can make it difficult to have a design that is cohesive across the full set of requirements. The clients don't usually know enough about their own requirements to have them fully flushed out at the beginning, and as they see the incremental development versions are reminded of other things they would like to do. This leads to bad code almost necessarily as new requirements are added on top of the existing code base. This seems to happen in every single career field I have had, not just development. Management's solution in general is the "cargo cult" problem discussed by parent.
Spending less is the key. But the higher education loans don't really come out of the "cash flow" of taxes, rather it is a self sustaining program, and it is a good thing that bankruptcy will not discharge the loan. There was a huge sentiment recently that the government should forgive student loans (nullify them or something) so that the students who chose to get them would not have to pay them back . . . which is disgusting to me, and very much like large corporations dodging (legally) their tax obligations. I tried to explain to a few of my friends who were espousing the idea that the payments on their loans were enabling the next round of students to go to school. Yes, it is true that the cost of school could be reduced and that the regents and administrations of universities are getting greedier by the day, but in terms of a cash flow savings it is a small piece of the whole pie. The better place to cut spending would be in Defense . . . we could chop that budget in half immediately, and close a bunch of foreign bases. The state department (and intel) can keep up diplomatic relations. The military industrial complex is bleeding us dry and the budgets only go up. The states can't squeeze much more out of their tax bases and things like basic infrastructure, education, and health care suffer.
If possible, make a U-Turn
*Car in lake
Marxism? Perhaps you are reading more into what I said than is there. Pro-tip: saying "anyone should be able to reduce their cost of living" is an absurdity. Perhaps there are quite a few in the middle class who have cable internet and a new car who could indeed reduce their cost of living. There are a lot of people whose cost of living is less than $8000 per year who may not be able to reduce it further. To those people what would vivian say? There are a lot of people in this country (the US) who do not have the means to save, and who are not spending on anything beyond what is necessary to live. Be clear: I am not saying that they do or do not deserve anything other than what they have. I am saying that to tell those people that they should be able to save some of their money would be an insult to them. But if you told me that I could reduce my expenses to afford more savings I would certainly agree.
I'm not bitter, and never accused you of being in an ivory tower. The poster I responded to claimed that "anyone should be able to reduce their cost of living". Do you want to defend that statement? I work with a lot of people who can't reduce their cost of living, are desperate to do whatever it takes to sustain themselves, and are still not able to do that. That you could is a testament to your own hard work, will, and perhaps a bit of luck or at least some good circumstances. Congratulations. It doesn't always work that way, and does not indicate any less effort on the part of those that are suffering.
You come across as an ignorant elitist bastard who would walk around telling poor people to pull themselves up by their boot straps. You should come out of your ivory tower more often.
So the servers are just trying to do the translation right . . . and no one is listening to your calls. Except of course the servers, and the people later on who are looking at the translation and also listening to the original perhaps to see if it was correct.
Oh and first post . . . or I was when I started. And of course I did not read the article.
You had fingers?!
"Physicists at Fermi Lab have found a 'suspicious bump' in that there data that could indicate they've found a new elementary particle or even a new force of nature."
Fixed
Yup. I have an uncle that worked at a steel yard in Pittsburgh, he was unionized and so he got paid for his 8 hour shift. Thing is, there was no work for him to do, but the steel union was strong and good, so my uncle could not be laid off. He and his buddies had good times at work, not having to work and getting paid, loads of free time. I wonder what ever happened to that gig . . . I'm sure it's still going strong though.
I thought we preferred preemptive retaliatory strikes . . .
Hollywood would beg to differ with your assessment regarding the viability of this practice. There are in fact many ways to structure corporations to accomplish this goal. The fact that it is fraudulent doesn't seem to get in the way, as a matter of fact the movie studios now have the cooperation of DHS (ICE) based on this type of accounting to prove that they are losing billions to copyright infringers.
All money that a corporation collects will eventually go somewhere
That part I agree with.
Either it will be spent on operating expenses or it will be paid out to investors
This sounds like something you hear in Accounting 101 (or 504 if you're in an MBA program). On the surface seems plausible enough, but in practice there are other options which prevent that money from being recirculated in the local or even national economy. More than likely it is simply bled out (with off shore bank accounts in tax haven countries).
There is no need to tax it while a corporation is sitting on it
Two thoughts: I would tend to agree if the previous point were somehow fixed. And, why should a corporation (given corporate personhood) be allowed to live tax free when I (given corporal personhood) can not?
You talk about your view of the political spectrum as if it is an absolute. But there are a few ways to describe it, and totalitarianism exists both from the extreme left (the orwellian extension of communism that the soviet union so aptly demonstrated) and from the extreme right (fascism is by definition totalitarian). Anarchy is orthogonal to that continuum (and the two totalitarian states are next to each other). Your description of the rule of law fits with what has been happening in the US for the past 200 years, and is largely without regard to political party (all political parties have moved to increase the number of laws and regulations on the books), and seems more to be a fact of government (government wants to get bigger and grab more power). Certainly in the modern USA both the republican and democratic parties can be seen as growing the size and scope of the government, both in step with corporate influence. This seems to be marching to totalitarianism from the right side of the political spectrum. There has been no social redistribution of wealth to the poor, merely a thin gauze of social welfare to keep those on the brink of nothing at that point, while the wealth collects more and more with the top 5% of the population.
Seems like you agree with parent then.
Except for the money the corporation is paying taxes on is the money left over from what the employees paid taxes on. It's true that there is double taxation for a C corp paying dividends, but for GE to pay no tax on billions in profit is criminal.
No, wireless is not a series of tubes. It's a series of catapults.
And LotR is just over 10 hours (theatrical versions), so, perhaps GP is right.