If they've found a way to desalinate water with much less energy, practically, that's huge.
TFA isn't wholly explicit but it actually talks about "efficiency" rather than "faster" as per the submission:
According to researchers at MIT, graphene could also increase the efficicency of desalination by two or three orders of magnitude [...] while you can remove the salt from the water, the current methods of doing so are laborious and expensive. Graphene stands to change all that by essentially serving as the world’s most awesomely efficient filter. If you can increase the efficiency of desalination by two or three orders of magnitude (that is to say, make it 100 to 1,000 times more efficient) desalination suddenly becomes way more attractive as a way to obtain drinking water.
Though following TFA's source link to Water Online we come back to "2-3 orders of magnitude faster" and then reference to energy and cost:
In a new study, two materials scientists from MIT have shown in simulations that nanoporous graphene can filter salt from water at a rate that is 2-3 orders of magnitude faster than today’s best commercial desalination technology, reverse osmosis (RO). The researchers predict that graphene’s superior water permeability could lead to desalination techniques that require less energy and use smaller modules than RO technology, at a cost that will depend on future improvements in graphene fabrication methods.
To me that implies subby read that source article, which is a rather better article, leading me to suspect "anonymous reader" subby is from http://www.geekosystem.com/ It does kind of bug me a little when websites find someone else's story, don't contribute anything then go around plugging it like it's their scoop.
And BTW that Water Online source itself is lifted verbatim (stated as being with permission) from Phys.org.
Yes, in common-law countries people are generally free to contract, and as such are free to trade on whatever "currency", barter or whatever that they like. If a contract says pay 1,000 bitcoins then 1,000 bitcoins it is.
But anonymous currency is still being outlawed - in the context that is. There's still paper money, but it's not digital. You can transfer "money", commodities or bearer-bonds digitally and yeah the "currency" itself is anonymous but the means of transfer is not. It's the means of transfer where anonymity is being outlawed.
The method and reasoning behind the outlawing is partially direct, such as money-laundering regulations requiring identity documentation to set up an account and a paper trail of transactions. The second is less direct: the legal requirements in respect of accountability. The law here may focus on obligations of the entity processing the transfer, but it nonetheless requires a audit trail that can also be used to track transferor and transferee.
Even just in practice it would be very difficult to have an anonymous form of electronic transfer of anything of value. There's always going to be some problem in practice that requires the papertrail. Maybe the transferor or transferee disputes amounts paid/received, maybe the entity processing the transfer does a reconciliation and finds the amount they've received doesn't equal the amount they've paid. The only way to resolve these problems is if there's an audit trail to follow - and really, a trail good enough to stand up in court because someone's going to have to prove a transaction to someone at some point.
It's not about averages or the norm, but the high end - Ivy League.
English-speaking and being one of the main places to do business are advantages. There's also the quality of life and democracy.
Probably some intent to stay too. If they can get into top-end universities on merit and afford to pay for it, far as I'm concerned they're welcome. Not only do we score one fine mind for free, China loses one.
Er, go have a look how much an office PC costs then go look how much a Mac is.
And that's despite Apple using mainly off the shelf components and thus benefiting from the highly competitive hardware market that exists for Windows PCs.
If MS goes closes the hardware it's pretty much game over for anyone who doesn't get a contract with MS or Apple, and the competitive hardware market disappears.
It's unclear whether this would be a net win or lose for MS. On the one hand the hardware industry becomes generally less competitive, but on the other hand the relative scale economics of MS becomes much more substantial. They get to realise their advantage over competitors. One thing's for sure though, the consumer is going to lose. Badly.
There's already a duopoly on the software, which while significant is still just a fraction of the overall cost of a PC, of which the remainder of the cost is the highly competitive hardware. Now we'd have a duopoly over the entire PC.
also get rid of unpiad and college only internships (paid or unpaid) We need to get rid of the idea of pay to work / work for free and pay full price for Credits.
Hmm. I work in an accounting practice, we occasionally get "interns" of two kinds.
Firstly, people who are in the break between high school and university, or who are considering a career change. The folks are mainly looking to see what it's like. There's also an element of being able to put study into some context and have an edge in future interviews. Employers feel like they're taking a gamble on someone who has no idea what the work is like, or what they're getting into, so it's a significant advantage. They are what I consider an internship is supposed to be about.
These folks are usually in for about a month and it's unpaid. It does feel like a tough month of hard work for them, because it's all new and we give them a taste of a range of things. The firm's pretty good about that actually; at the time it's daunting for the intern but it is exactly what they were hoping for and need.
What they're not doing though is producing anything of value. Sure they'll complete things, like a bank reconciliation, but they'll take maybe a day to do it. As the senior it'd take me about an hour to do the same thing myself, and I'll have spent at least that hour showing them what to do and then another hour checking it and bringing it up to standard for the file. Yes, per unit of productivity, interms end up a hell of a lot more expensive than seniors. It looks like work, feels like work, but it isn't contributing anything. What they're doing is basically a college exercise, just in a practical setting and without having to pay for the one-to-one tuition. It would actually be more efficient for the firm to treat it more explicitly like that i.e. give them photocopies and put what they do in the trash while I do the real work for the file, but it's important to convey the sense that they're contributing to the file, to a real-world thing that has importance, ramifications, standards, is part of a larger project... After all they didn't come here to do an exercise out of a textbook.
Unpaid interns are very expensive in my time. They get a very good return for their time investment. That's probably why all the interns I've seen have either been kids of clients, or someone making a career change who would be an obvious asset if they do decide the work is for them and join the firm. To be fair, that's probably also the reason the interns are getting such good value, I have heard of other firms who basically sit them down and make them do the photocopying or churn through bank recs non-stop, so they are producing value and overall saving time/cost of paid staff whilst getting very little of value from it.
The second kind were university students in the summer break. We've not done these for a few years now. They're paid not that much less than the juniors and for their 4-6 weeks they'll basically be new juniors. In other words horribly inefficient. Unlike juniors though, they go back to uni well before they become productive enough to return the training investment. It's basically a write off for the firm just on the prospect that maybe they'll come back after graduation, maybe if they go into industry they'll maybe put our name down when their employer tenders for a new accountant. I suspect the partners also used to think they were kind of getting some temps in during the busy season, but have cottoned on to the reality that they're a time-sink with a net burden on staff when things are already insanely busy. Maybe if they were unpaid and thus had a zero chargeout rate they might just about be worth it, but I doubt it and the partners do not consider that to be acceptable behaviour.
There's one thing that makes me certain in my assessment above. When we do get an intern, if we're in the off-season folks who aren't busy are interested in the interns, it's fun being tutor. But if busy, all the seniors and
Actually not that terrible an idea. Tax the owner instead.
I don't know about the parent, but generally there seems to be a belief that companies should be taxed. Why? A company is not a person. It's a proxy. A legal mechanism. Companies do not "enjoy" profits, their owners do. Companies do not "enjoy" anything.
Increase taxes on dividends (and withhold at source). Tax resource usage e.g. road tax or fuel tax, rates for local services.
How would it affect tax avoidance and evasion? It eliminates a huge swathe of opportunities and shifts the onus for avoiding taxes onto the individual - it's one thing for a company to set up a tax base in Ireland, it's another to have to move there yourself (which you could do right now anyway). It also costs more to set up avoidance schemes - instead of one company paying accountants, lawyers and other costs to operate some scheme to avoid tax, you now have it's 100,000 shareholders each having to do it. Each personally being responsible for it. Corporations lobbying for lower corporation tax becomes obsolete.
There is a socio-economic issue in that by taxing distributions of profit, the money can be left to accumulate in the business. It'll get taxed eventually sure, but - think compound interest. They'll be making returns on $100 of pre-tax profit whereas a sole trade businessman reinvesting profits would be investing $80 (or whatever) of after-tax profit. The effect on compounding returns can be quite substantial. This certainly is a big downside, but we seem to be complaining that corporations are barely paying tax, so we're saying the problem already exists. There's a big upside too - companies have more money to invest. No, not the $20 of tax deferred - they have the $100.
This is because RIM is 'corporate' orientated, so its a natural for Microsoft. Nokia, is consumer oriented ( Apple's territory )
Yeah but the "corporates" are moving to Apple because everyone wants an iPhone.
A business phone needs to be able to make calls and receive email. Provided those boxes are ticked, all that matters is how much of a perk staff see it as - how much of a consumer product it is. There may well be other corporate advantages to a Blackberry, but the execs want to be able to make calls, get email and have an iPhone. Staff want to be able to make calls, have an iPhone and put up with getting email.
The only reason I know of people buying Blackberry is their BBM instant messenger i.e. free text messages to other Blackberries. Well okay, some big corporates go there for security but that's looking pretty shaky.
You can't investigate objectively because the people involved were in your organisation?
By definition, no.
In principle, no.
In practice, no.
It doesn't even matter if in your mind you were "objective". A characteristic of information is not merely how true it actually is, but how reliable it is known to be.
Agents preparing information have to be able to demonstrate objectivity, independence and integrity to their principal else they cannot produce reliable information.
No... One group is saying one thing and another group is saying another. There's no reason to be "sure" which or indeed if either if them is accurate.
The comptroller claims to have documentary evidence and makes quite specific assertions based on them. This generally is a trait of someone who firmly believes they are being truthful, partly because statements of fact are easily debunked if not. NYC responds to this with wishy-washy comments and not statements of fact. The notion that the Comptroller was "misreading provisions of the contract" merely raises the notion that the contract provisions are ridiculous, like allowing $196/h for clerical work.
There's nothing to prove either way, but the Comptroller does offer greater credibility at this point.
Don't resent people with MBAs; they perform an important role in understanding business -- especially finance and accounting.
As an accountant I can confirm "MBAs" don't know shit about finance and accounting.
MBAs were created because people highly skilled in one thing eventually get promoted into upper management, which requires a whole new bunch of skills and knowledge which they've never needed to learn before because it was never relevant before. It's a very broad, but very short course where the intention is to teach just about enough for them to get the gist when someone competent in a particular field (e.g. the senior accountant or head of marketing) is talking about things in the board meeting. This means they get taught at a very high (i.e. strategic) level and not fundamental basics.
The problem is that the arrogant ones then think they've got the super-smarts and try to "get creative" with something when they have no grasp of the fundamental concept. Seriously, some of these guys think they have a much better idea about specialist areas after a couple of weeks on an MBA course than guys who have a decade of higher+ learning and decades of direct experience.
What you want an MBA for is the newly-promoted director of engineering who's been an engineer all his life, knows everything about engineering and just needs a crash-course on the crap the other guys are talking about in the board meetings.
No, you can't compare poverty in sub-Saharan Africa to poverty in the worst of Detroit's slums, but it's poverty nonetheless.
Absolute vs. relative poverty.
Generally when we consider the 3rd world we're talking about absolute poverty - a line below which we feel no human should have to live.
Generally when people in the first (and to a slightly lesser extent, second) world talk about our own countries we're talking about relative poverty - a position so far from our social norm that we feel no fellow citizen should have to live in.
This isn't only a "looking out for your own" type thing, it reflects how our mind works. You'll find plenty folk in sub-Saharan Africa who are in poverty even relative to the slums in Detroit but they may well be happier with their lot if they are well-off relative to those around them. Move the same guy into Detroit, even if making more money and able to afford more things than back home he is likely to feel worse than before.
You can only eliminate poverty through BOTH a general increase in wealth AND an even(ish) distribution of it. Capitalism has a fundamental failure because it does a decent job at building total wealth, then fails because it doesn't distribute it. Vice-versa for socialism.
Per person, the USA is the worst country in the world for air pollution, whereas China and India are among the best. Even if you ignore population and compare absolutely, the USA produces 5x the pollution of India and roughly equivalent to the pollution of China.
While the metric has some validity, it's only part of a complex picture.
Consider, for example, that USA consumes rather a lot of goods that cause pollution when being made in China. Depending on the specific issue/point you are trying to consider, you may have to attribute to the USA some pollution generated in producing those goods. The amount to be attributed would be the standard (i.e. normal) amount of pollution generated from such production, while China should take the credit or blame for being more or less efficient than the standard.
After all, it seems rather unfair to start complaining to China about all the pollution the USA is exporting there?
Of course there are other issues where the above approach isn't appropriate.
Also, I'm not quite sure what to make of the "carbon dioxide from energy use only" caveat, leaves me rather sceptical that the figures are fudged. I'm prone to giving the OECD some credit though so more suspicious that figures generated for some specific purpose are being shoe-horned into something else that they were never intended to be relevant for.
If a company floats and the share price at the end of the day remains at about the launch price, it's successful.
If they'd charged less (resulting in large gains on the day) then the company would not have raised the funds it should have and existing shareholders would not have received a fair price for their holdings. A bunch of speculators making huge returns on day one is *not* a successful IPO.
If they had charged more (resulting in falls on the day) then they may have had problems shifting stock, possible discounting (causes problems) and be stuck with shareholders already annoyed about having lost money.
Ironically perhaps, in relatively-socialist (relatively) Europe the EU has to approve any significant "state aid"
The primary reasoning given is it distorts competition between companies (thus ultimately harming the consumer), but also recognised in the criteria - and what most often causes us to hear about it - is distorting competition between member states.
If a company relocates from A to B just because state aid is offered, there's a clear implication that the combined benefit gained by country B + company is less than the loss to country A. The company has to be compensated for losing some kind of natural advantage present in country A, so it must be inefficient.
That's not to say state aid is necessarily bad. If it was a new company that wouldn't otherwise exist, it's actually pretty easy to make a good case for state funding. Maybe harder in US with the lower taxes, but here in UK, say 75% of the loan was going onto payroll for new jobs, well ~25% of that rolls straight back to the government in payroll taxes so they make ~19% hidden return right off the bat. More than half the money left in employees pockets will be spent on goods attracting VAT at 20% so there's another hidden return of ~6%. Oh and they avoided paying unemployment and some benefits, lets assume that would have cost them around 10% of the company's payroll so further hidden return of ~7%. Before you even start thinking about the jobs for suppliers the government gets back something like a third of their money just through taxes. If two other state-aid projects merely make enough other money to repay the loans and nothing more, a third project can completely fail and still government breaks even. If a project not only repays it's loans but keeps going for several years, the return can be astronomical - total payroll taxes make corporation tax receipts (even when completely fair, fully paid with no dodging) look like chump change.
But of course, if it's a relocation, all those returns being generated by the new state are being lost by the old state - they're merely displaced. Also, if these "new" jobs result in a different company being unable to compete and go under, again the apparent gains are merely displacement.
This is BEFORE we start thinking about whether it's fair that companies receive taxpayers' money, or whether it's fair that one company receives this advantage whilst another does not.
No... The probability of death may be roughly one in one, but that's because such wording provides a context whereby there is no time constraint unless one is stated.
"Risk of death" on the other hand implies a context where time is not a constraint but a factor. Lower risk implies it is less likely to happen sooner.
Maybe that's just my professional background that leads me to think of the distinction, rather than a general truth, though it's also standard in personal health analysis and reporting so the context would be implied here anyway.
I'm curious, if you're outsourcing development what is it that the business actually does?
I mean fundamentally. What is it your company offers your market? What value does it add, if someone else is doing the work? Why wouldn't customers cut out you, the middleman? How does it control everything that matters - supply lines, production, IP, quality, direction, and so on?
An organisation is just that - an organisation. It doesn't fundamentally matter what's in-house and what's out, as long as it's organised i.e. controlled. However, it is dramatically more difficult when it's outsourced.
Consider say Apple. It outsources production but retains everything else internally. What it has outsourced can be very heavily controlled because it's all extremely highly specified and those specifications are of a nature well suited to contracts.
Buying listed shares isn't about fast growth for the majority of investors (which are institutional investors such as pensions and insurance).
Investing into listed shares is about the portfolio, not individual shareholdings. The objective for the portfolio is the specified combination of risk & return. People tend to say it's about maximising return for a given level of risk, but that's not really true because what they tend to actually be looking for is, say, coming out 10 years later with something approximating an 8% annual return - which is a lot more like minimising risk for a given level of return.
What a large part of it turns into, it isn't about the risk & reward associated with a specific shareholding. It's about what happens when you combine it into the entire portfolio. Exposure in a specific sector, and then betas. FB has some attraction even if it's just to hedge against your big Google holding.
If you're looking to sink a significant chunk into few companies for a big return, main markets generally aren't the way to go. You're going against players with vast amounts of money and resources. Consider instead looking at alternative investment markets where fledgling companies first go for some public cash. Much higher risk but also much more reward, and it helps that there's fewer other buyers - partly because the really big boys, the pensions etc, are often forbidden from investing.
The only thing surprising about these numbers is he's proved what I'll describe as a decent offer to it's target market.
It's right to note the savings that can be made if you buy in cash from Amazon, but he is wrong to use it for the direct comparison and the fact that there is a price difference between Amazon and retail proves it. There is a reason some people are willing to pay more to buy from a physical store, maybe it's comfort with the warranty, maybe they don't like the mail man, but I doubt there's anybody in the US who is not familiar with Amazon yet still some people pay more to buy retail, ergo there is value there.
Using his figures, the pay-now price is $419.97 so with $99 deposit it's a loan of $320.97 repaid over 2 years so the APR is 11.25%*. I wouldn't go for that but then I'm not the target market for this deal. Compare to alternative finance options available so easily and for such small amounts, that's a decent rate. A comparison-site lookup shows a really good credit card rate being 12.9% (UK here, YMMV), unless you have a stellar credit rating. Even then, the more realistic comparison given the nature of this is to store credit, where you start talking about 29.9% being a good rate (oh boy does it get worse).
The termination fees aren't punitive either, at a quick glance they appear to effect a full repayment of the principal and interest to-date. This equates with the most favourable of the other finance options, generally it's either that or also pay the interest due for the remainder of the period plus an "administration" fee.
That's not to suggest I encourage taking credit for non-essentials, but the salient point is that this deal appears to be at least as good as the alternatives for those who are going to do something similar anyway.
* Strictly-speaking it's probably slightly higher since the second-year Gold subscription would be purchased a year after initial purchase, so that part is only a one-year loan.
You highlight my point. Tax is charged on profit, not sales.
The same applies to you. You might not notice it since employers generally pay all an employee's business expenses. However if you were required to (say) purchase a laptop for work use out of your own funds, that'd be a tax deduction.
If parents want to restrict access to pornography, well that's their choice and I'm not going to argue against own-choice even if I'm tempted to suggest it may be misguided.
So I'd support an opt-in model, albeit wary about the implementation - specifically control and monitoring over what is blocked - but in principle, sure. If parents are the ones wanting something, they can tick the box when signing up or accessing the account. A solution made available for anyone with the problem.
So why an opt-out model? Are they insinuating that parents who want to block pornography are too stupid or lazy to tick the box?
Nope. Parents may be on side for this but mostly the opt in vs. out isn't important to them. The reason the opt-out is being pushed is because the "Christian" Tories' problem is about other people accessing pornography.
I think people here don't seem to understand the Australian tax system.
As an accountant, it's clear to me that people generally, but especially technology websites, do not understand any tax system. In the case of the latter I'm fairly sure it's wilful ignorance since there's a habit of neatly avoiding very obvious things that require mere common-sense to trigger realisation that they're spouting bullshit.
It's equivalent to those media articles on hacking, with the picture of some hooded terrorist stealingz your megahurtz. There is activity to be concerned about, but anyone with the slightest bit of knowledge -- or simply combining common-sense and critical thought -- can just glance at it and find themselves shaking their head as they hold it in their hands, unable and frankly unwilling to decide on which is worse: that the media is so intentionally misleading or genuinely so incompetent.
Slashdot Mirror
If they've found a way to desalinate water with much less energy, practically, that's huge.
TFA isn't wholly explicit but it actually talks about "efficiency" rather than "faster" as per the submission:
According to researchers at MIT, graphene could also increase the efficicency of desalination by two or three orders of magnitude [...] while you can remove the salt from the water, the current methods of doing so are laborious and expensive. Graphene stands to change all that by essentially serving as the world’s most awesomely efficient filter. If you can increase the efficiency of desalination by two or three orders of magnitude (that is to say, make it 100 to 1,000 times more efficient) desalination suddenly becomes way more attractive as a way to obtain drinking water.
Though following TFA's source link to Water Online we come back to "2-3 orders of magnitude faster" and then reference to energy and cost:
In a new study, two materials scientists from MIT have shown in simulations that nanoporous graphene can filter salt from water at a rate that is 2-3 orders of magnitude faster than today’s best commercial desalination technology, reverse osmosis (RO). The researchers predict that graphene’s superior water permeability could lead to desalination techniques that require less energy and use smaller modules than RO technology, at a cost that will depend on future improvements in graphene fabrication methods.
To me that implies subby read that source article, which is a rather better article, leading me to suspect "anonymous reader" subby is from http://www.geekosystem.com/ It does kind of bug me a little when websites find someone else's story, don't contribute anything then go around plugging it like it's their scoop.
And BTW that Water Online source itself is lifted verbatim (stated as being with permission) from Phys.org.
Yes, in common-law countries people are generally free to contract, and as such are free to trade on whatever "currency", barter or whatever that they like. If a contract says pay 1,000 bitcoins then 1,000 bitcoins it is.
But anonymous currency is still being outlawed - in the context that is. There's still paper money, but it's not digital. You can transfer "money", commodities or bearer-bonds digitally and yeah the "currency" itself is anonymous but the means of transfer is not. It's the means of transfer where anonymity is being outlawed.
The method and reasoning behind the outlawing is partially direct, such as money-laundering regulations requiring identity documentation to set up an account and a paper trail of transactions. The second is less direct: the legal requirements in respect of accountability. The law here may focus on obligations of the entity processing the transfer, but it nonetheless requires a audit trail that can also be used to track transferor and transferee.
Even just in practice it would be very difficult to have an anonymous form of electronic transfer of anything of value. There's always going to be some problem in practice that requires the papertrail. Maybe the transferor or transferee disputes amounts paid/received, maybe the entity processing the transfer does a reconciliation and finds the amount they've received doesn't equal the amount they've paid. The only way to resolve these problems is if there's an audit trail to follow - and really, a trail good enough to stand up in court because someone's going to have to prove a transaction to someone at some point.
It's not about averages or the norm, but the high end - Ivy League.
English-speaking and being one of the main places to do business are advantages. There's also the quality of life and democracy.
Probably some intent to stay too. If they can get into top-end universities on merit and afford to pay for it, far as I'm concerned they're welcome. Not only do we score one fine mind for free, China loses one.
It would be an incredibly bad idea. I have a hard time imagining this.
Me neither, I was responding to the notion implied by the summary.
That's good news for the customers,
Er, go have a look how much an office PC costs then go look how much a Mac is.
And that's despite Apple using mainly off the shelf components and thus benefiting from the highly competitive hardware market that exists for Windows PCs.
If MS goes closes the hardware it's pretty much game over for anyone who doesn't get a contract with MS or Apple, and the competitive hardware market disappears.
It's unclear whether this would be a net win or lose for MS. On the one hand the hardware industry becomes generally less competitive, but on the other hand the relative scale economics of MS becomes much more substantial. They get to realise their advantage over competitors. One thing's for sure though, the consumer is going to lose. Badly.
There's already a duopoly on the software, which while significant is still just a fraction of the overall cost of a PC, of which the remainder of the cost is the highly competitive hardware. Now we'd have a duopoly over the entire PC.
also get rid of unpiad and college only internships (paid or unpaid) We need to get rid of the idea of pay to work / work for free and pay full price for Credits.
Hmm. I work in an accounting practice, we occasionally get "interns" of two kinds.
Firstly, people who are in the break between high school and university, or who are considering a career change. The folks are mainly looking to see what it's like. There's also an element of being able to put study into some context and have an edge in future interviews. Employers feel like they're taking a gamble on someone who has no idea what the work is like, or what they're getting into, so it's a significant advantage. They are what I consider an internship is supposed to be about.
These folks are usually in for about a month and it's unpaid. It does feel like a tough month of hard work for them, because it's all new and we give them a taste of a range of things. The firm's pretty good about that actually; at the time it's daunting for the intern but it is exactly what they were hoping for and need.
What they're not doing though is producing anything of value. Sure they'll complete things, like a bank reconciliation, but they'll take maybe a day to do it. As the senior it'd take me about an hour to do the same thing myself, and I'll have spent at least that hour showing them what to do and then another hour checking it and bringing it up to standard for the file. Yes, per unit of productivity, interms end up a hell of a lot more expensive than seniors. It looks like work, feels like work, but it isn't contributing anything. What they're doing is basically a college exercise, just in a practical setting and without having to pay for the one-to-one tuition. It would actually be more efficient for the firm to treat it more explicitly like that i.e. give them photocopies and put what they do in the trash while I do the real work for the file, but it's important to convey the sense that they're contributing to the file, to a real-world thing that has importance, ramifications, standards, is part of a larger project... After all they didn't come here to do an exercise out of a textbook.
Unpaid interns are very expensive in my time. They get a very good return for their time investment. That's probably why all the interns I've seen have either been kids of clients, or someone making a career change who would be an obvious asset if they do decide the work is for them and join the firm. To be fair, that's probably also the reason the interns are getting such good value, I have heard of other firms who basically sit them down and make them do the photocopying or churn through bank recs non-stop, so they are producing value and overall saving time/cost of paid staff whilst getting very little of value from it.
The second kind were university students in the summer break. We've not done these for a few years now. They're paid not that much less than the juniors and for their 4-6 weeks they'll basically be new juniors. In other words horribly inefficient. Unlike juniors though, they go back to uni well before they become productive enough to return the training investment. It's basically a write off for the firm just on the prospect that maybe they'll come back after graduation, maybe if they go into industry they'll maybe put our name down when their employer tenders for a new accountant. I suspect the partners also used to think they were kind of getting some temps in during the busy season, but have cottoned on to the reality that they're a time-sink with a net burden on staff when things are already insanely busy. Maybe if they were unpaid and thus had a zero chargeout rate they might just about be worth it, but I doubt it and the partners do not consider that to be acceptable behaviour.
There's one thing that makes me certain in my assessment above. When we do get an intern, if we're in the off-season folks who aren't busy are interested in the interns, it's fun being tutor. But if busy, all the seniors and
Strange thing about people. Treat them like prisoners and they behave like criminals.
Corporations are going to end up tax-exempt
Actually not that terrible an idea. Tax the owner instead.
I don't know about the parent, but generally there seems to be a belief that companies should be taxed. Why? A company is not a person. It's a proxy. A legal mechanism. Companies do not "enjoy" profits, their owners do. Companies do not "enjoy" anything.
Increase taxes on dividends (and withhold at source). Tax resource usage e.g. road tax or fuel tax, rates for local services.
How would it affect tax avoidance and evasion? It eliminates a huge swathe of opportunities and shifts the onus for avoiding taxes onto the individual - it's one thing for a company to set up a tax base in Ireland, it's another to have to move there yourself (which you could do right now anyway). It also costs more to set up avoidance schemes - instead of one company paying accountants, lawyers and other costs to operate some scheme to avoid tax, you now have it's 100,000 shareholders each having to do it. Each personally being responsible for it. Corporations lobbying for lower corporation tax becomes obsolete.
There is a socio-economic issue in that by taxing distributions of profit, the money can be left to accumulate in the business. It'll get taxed eventually sure, but - think compound interest. They'll be making returns on $100 of pre-tax profit whereas a sole trade businessman reinvesting profits would be investing $80 (or whatever) of after-tax profit. The effect on compounding returns can be quite substantial. This certainly is a big downside, but we seem to be complaining that corporations are barely paying tax, so we're saying the problem already exists. There's a big upside too - companies have more money to invest. No, not the $20 of tax deferred - they have the $100.
Claiming the benefit will be "future potential" is doing this. The future is always tomorrow.
(image taken from here, which probably isn't original source)
This is because RIM is 'corporate' orientated, so its a natural for Microsoft. Nokia, is consumer oriented ( Apple's territory )
Yeah but the "corporates" are moving to Apple because everyone wants an iPhone.
A business phone needs to be able to make calls and receive email. Provided those boxes are ticked, all that matters is how much of a perk staff see it as - how much of a consumer product it is. There may well be other corporate advantages to a Blackberry, but the execs want to be able to make calls, get email and have an iPhone. Staff want to be able to make calls, have an iPhone and put up with getting email.
The only reason I know of people buying Blackberry is their BBM instant messenger i.e. free text messages to other Blackberries. Well okay, some big corporates go there for security but that's looking pretty shaky.
Most fortunate. I could hardly blame aliens concluding on a retaliatory strike after an onslaught of Jersey Shore.
You can't investigate objectively because the people involved were in your organisation?
By definition, no.
In principle, no.
In practice, no.
It doesn't even matter if in your mind you were "objective". A characteristic of information is not merely how true it actually is, but how reliable it is known to be.
Agents preparing information have to be able to demonstrate objectivity, independence and integrity to their principal else they cannot produce reliable information.
No... One group is saying one thing and another group is saying another. There's no reason to be "sure" which or indeed if either if them is accurate.
The comptroller claims to have documentary evidence and makes quite specific assertions based on them. This generally is a trait of someone who firmly believes they are being truthful, partly because statements of fact are easily debunked if not. NYC responds to this with wishy-washy comments and not statements of fact. The notion that the Comptroller was "misreading provisions of the contract" merely raises the notion that the contract provisions are ridiculous, like allowing $196/h for clerical work.
There's nothing to prove either way, but the Comptroller does offer greater credibility at this point.
Don't resent people with MBAs; they perform an important role in understanding business -- especially finance and accounting.
As an accountant I can confirm "MBAs" don't know shit about finance and accounting.
MBAs were created because people highly skilled in one thing eventually get promoted into upper management, which requires a whole new bunch of skills and knowledge which they've never needed to learn before because it was never relevant before. It's a very broad, but very short course where the intention is to teach just about enough for them to get the gist when someone competent in a particular field (e.g. the senior accountant or head of marketing) is talking about things in the board meeting. This means they get taught at a very high (i.e. strategic) level and not fundamental basics.
The problem is that the arrogant ones then think they've got the super-smarts and try to "get creative" with something when they have no grasp of the fundamental concept. Seriously, some of these guys think they have a much better idea about specialist areas after a couple of weeks on an MBA course than guys who have a decade of higher+ learning and decades of direct experience.
What you want an MBA for is the newly-promoted director of engineering who's been an engineer all his life, knows everything about engineering and just needs a crash-course on the crap the other guys are talking about in the board meetings.
No, you can't compare poverty in sub-Saharan Africa to poverty in the worst of Detroit's slums, but it's poverty nonetheless.
Absolute vs. relative poverty.
Generally when we consider the 3rd world we're talking about absolute poverty - a line below which we feel no human should have to live.
Generally when people in the first (and to a slightly lesser extent, second) world talk about our own countries we're talking about relative poverty - a position so far from our social norm that we feel no fellow citizen should have to live in.
This isn't only a "looking out for your own" type thing, it reflects how our mind works. You'll find plenty folk in sub-Saharan Africa who are in poverty even relative to the slums in Detroit but they may well be happier with their lot if they are well-off relative to those around them. Move the same guy into Detroit, even if making more money and able to afford more things than back home he is likely to feel worse than before.
You can only eliminate poverty through BOTH a general increase in wealth AND an even(ish) distribution of it. Capitalism has a fundamental failure because it does a decent job at building total wealth, then fails because it doesn't distribute it. Vice-versa for socialism.
Per person, the USA is the worst country in the world for air pollution, whereas China and India are among the best. Even if you ignore population and compare absolutely, the USA produces 5x the pollution of India and roughly equivalent to the pollution of China.
While the metric has some validity, it's only part of a complex picture.
Consider, for example, that USA consumes rather a lot of goods that cause pollution when being made in China. Depending on the specific issue/point you are trying to consider, you may have to attribute to the USA some pollution generated in producing those goods. The amount to be attributed would be the standard (i.e. normal) amount of pollution generated from such production, while China should take the credit or blame for being more or less efficient than the standard.
After all, it seems rather unfair to start complaining to China about all the pollution the USA is exporting there?
Of course there are other issues where the above approach isn't appropriate.
Also, I'm not quite sure what to make of the "carbon dioxide from energy use only" caveat, leaves me rather sceptical that the figures are fudged. I'm prone to giving the OECD some credit though so more suspicious that figures generated for some specific purpose are being shoe-horned into something else that they were never intended to be relevant for.
If a company floats and the share price at the end of the day remains at about the launch price, it's successful.
If they'd charged less (resulting in large gains on the day) then the company would not have raised the funds it should have and existing shareholders would not have received a fair price for their holdings. A bunch of speculators making huge returns on day one is *not* a successful IPO.
If they had charged more (resulting in falls on the day) then they may have had problems shifting stock, possible discounting (causes problems) and be stuck with shareholders already annoyed about having lost money.
They nailed it.
Ironically perhaps, in relatively-socialist (relatively) Europe the EU has to approve any significant "state aid"
The primary reasoning given is it distorts competition between companies (thus ultimately harming the consumer), but also recognised in the criteria - and what most often causes us to hear about it - is distorting competition between member states.
If a company relocates from A to B just because state aid is offered, there's a clear implication that the combined benefit gained by country B + company is less than the loss to country A. The company has to be compensated for losing some kind of natural advantage present in country A, so it must be inefficient.
That's not to say state aid is necessarily bad. If it was a new company that wouldn't otherwise exist, it's actually pretty easy to make a good case for state funding. Maybe harder in US with the lower taxes, but here in UK, say 75% of the loan was going onto payroll for new jobs, well ~25% of that rolls straight back to the government in payroll taxes so they make ~19% hidden return right off the bat. More than half the money left in employees pockets will be spent on goods attracting VAT at 20% so there's another hidden return of ~6%. Oh and they avoided paying unemployment and some benefits, lets assume that would have cost them around 10% of the company's payroll so further hidden return of ~7%. Before you even start thinking about the jobs for suppliers the government gets back something like a third of their money just through taxes. If two other state-aid projects merely make enough other money to repay the loans and nothing more, a third project can completely fail and still government breaks even. If a project not only repays it's loans but keeps going for several years, the return can be astronomical - total payroll taxes make corporation tax receipts (even when completely fair, fully paid with no dodging) look like chump change.
But of course, if it's a relocation, all those returns being generated by the new state are being lost by the old state - they're merely displaced. Also, if these "new" jobs result in a different company being unable to compete and go under, again the apparent gains are merely displacement.
This is BEFORE we start thinking about whether it's fair that companies receive taxpayers' money, or whether it's fair that one company receives this advantage whilst another does not.
... was roughly one in one. Guess I was wrong.
No... The probability of death may be roughly one in one, but that's because such wording provides a context whereby there is no time constraint unless one is stated.
"Risk of death" on the other hand implies a context where time is not a constraint but a factor. Lower risk implies it is less likely to happen sooner.
Maybe that's just my professional background that leads me to think of the distinction, rather than a general truth, though it's also standard in personal health analysis and reporting so the context would be implied here anyway.
I'm curious, if you're outsourcing development what is it that the business actually does?
I mean fundamentally. What is it your company offers your market? What value does it add, if someone else is doing the work? Why wouldn't customers cut out you, the middleman? How does it control everything that matters - supply lines, production, IP, quality, direction, and so on?
An organisation is just that - an organisation. It doesn't fundamentally matter what's in-house and what's out, as long as it's organised i.e. controlled. However, it is dramatically more difficult when it's outsourced.
Consider say Apple. It outsources production but retains everything else internally. What it has outsourced can be very heavily controlled because it's all extremely highly specified and those specifications are of a nature well suited to contracts.
Buying listed shares isn't about fast growth for the majority of investors (which are institutional investors such as pensions and insurance).
Investing into listed shares is about the portfolio, not individual shareholdings. The objective for the portfolio is the specified combination of risk & return. People tend to say it's about maximising return for a given level of risk, but that's not really true because what they tend to actually be looking for is, say, coming out 10 years later with something approximating an 8% annual return - which is a lot more like minimising risk for a given level of return.
What a large part of it turns into, it isn't about the risk & reward associated with a specific shareholding. It's about what happens when you combine it into the entire portfolio. Exposure in a specific sector, and then betas. FB has some attraction even if it's just to hedge against your big Google holding.
If you're looking to sink a significant chunk into few companies for a big return, main markets generally aren't the way to go. You're going against players with vast amounts of money and resources. Consider instead looking at alternative investment markets where fledgling companies first go for some public cash. Much higher risk but also much more reward, and it helps that there's fewer other buyers - partly because the really big boys, the pensions etc, are often forbidden from investing.
The only thing surprising about these numbers is he's proved what I'll describe as a decent offer to it's target market.
It's right to note the savings that can be made if you buy in cash from Amazon, but he is wrong to use it for the direct comparison and the fact that there is a price difference between Amazon and retail proves it. There is a reason some people are willing to pay more to buy from a physical store, maybe it's comfort with the warranty, maybe they don't like the mail man, but I doubt there's anybody in the US who is not familiar with Amazon yet still some people pay more to buy retail, ergo there is value there.
Using his figures, the pay-now price is $419.97 so with $99 deposit it's a loan of $320.97 repaid over 2 years so the APR is 11.25%*. I wouldn't go for that but then I'm not the target market for this deal. Compare to alternative finance options available so easily and for such small amounts, that's a decent rate. A comparison-site lookup shows a really good credit card rate being 12.9% (UK here, YMMV), unless you have a stellar credit rating. Even then, the more realistic comparison given the nature of this is to store credit, where you start talking about 29.9% being a good rate (oh boy does it get worse).
The termination fees aren't punitive either, at a quick glance they appear to effect a full repayment of the principal and interest to-date. This equates with the most favourable of the other finance options, generally it's either that or also pay the interest due for the remainder of the period plus an "administration" fee.
That's not to suggest I encourage taking credit for non-essentials, but the salient point is that this deal appears to be at least as good as the alternatives for those who are going to do something similar anyway.
* Strictly-speaking it's probably slightly higher since the second-year Gold subscription would be purchased a year after initial purchase, so that part is only a one-year loan.
You highlight my point. Tax is charged on profit, not sales.
The same applies to you. You might not notice it since employers generally pay all an employee's business expenses. However if you were required to (say) purchase a laptop for work use out of your own funds, that'd be a tax deduction.
If parents want to restrict access to pornography, well that's their choice and I'm not going to argue against own-choice even if I'm tempted to suggest it may be misguided.
So I'd support an opt-in model, albeit wary about the implementation - specifically control and monitoring over what is blocked - but in principle, sure. If parents are the ones wanting something, they can tick the box when signing up or accessing the account. A solution made available for anyone with the problem.
So why an opt-out model? Are they insinuating that parents who want to block pornography are too stupid or lazy to tick the box?
Nope. Parents may be on side for this but mostly the opt in vs. out isn't important to them. The reason the opt-out is being pushed is because the "Christian" Tories' problem is about other people accessing pornography.
I think people here don't seem to understand the Australian tax system.
As an accountant, it's clear to me that people generally, but especially technology websites, do not understand any tax system. In the case of the latter I'm fairly sure it's wilful ignorance since there's a habit of neatly avoiding very obvious things that require mere common-sense to trigger realisation that they're spouting bullshit.
It's equivalent to those media articles on hacking, with the picture of some hooded terrorist stealingz your megahurtz. There is activity to be concerned about, but anyone with the slightest bit of knowledge -- or simply combining common-sense and critical thought -- can just glance at it and find themselves shaking their head as they hold it in their hands, unable and frankly unwilling to decide on which is worse: that the media is so intentionally misleading or genuinely so incompetent.