Corporation tax is charged against profit, not revenue.
You are correct but the American (and some international) press frequently uses the word "revenue" when they mean "profit". This probably isn't helped by some opposing accounting standards confusing the use of the word "income", by which some mean revenue and others mean net income i.e. profit.
Your final paragraph is wrong. I'm not sure whether you've contradicted your first paragraph by mixing up revenue and profit. Anyway, not all companies have preference shares, and those that do they tend to be more like loans that are convertible into ordinary (real/normal) shares based on some criteria. Common tool for private equity firms to provide flexibility in their exit strategy. Preference share "dividends" might be treated as dividends i,e. a distribution of profit if they are structured to be like shares, or may be charged to profit and loss as an interest cost if they are structured to be more like loans.
R&D, again not every company needs to invest in R&D. Furthermore the accounting standards are a bit difficult/detailed in this area so some R&D can be capitalised onto the balance sheet as an asset while some is immediately written off to the profit and loss as an expense. It's quite common for a company to be making millions and billions in profits precisely because they do invest in R&D.
Looking at the currency conversion chart over the last 5 years (note axis doesn't start at 0) you can see that MS is getting less dollar or Euro for each £1 GBP in income. The chart appears to show an initially fairly steady exchange giving, for every £1, around abouts $2 or €1.30, which has since dropped to around $1.60 (down 25%) or €1.20 (down 8%).
Now look at the second chart on that link. We can see that over the 10 year period the 8% drop in the amount of Euros being obtained for £1 GBP does look like a sustained currency difference. MS presumably has some European division, probably the one in low-tax Ireland, looking at their figures and sure enough UK sales are looking down over the long term due to currency fluctuations.
Do I buy that? Nope. MS is a US company and all financial reporting that matters is in USD. I'd bet even all internal reporting that matters is in USD, so I doubt this is some internal bureaucracy mishap. Looking at both charts combined, i.e. 2002 - 2012, the pound has been up for a while but now back around where it was. Keep going back if you like, the interactive chart is here. $1.60 for a £1 looks to be about the typical value.
Price rises are justified by unfavourable exchange rate movements. Prices increase in UK because of Stirling:Euro, prices rise in Europe because of Euro:dollar. It's always one way. They're never justifying a price cut on the back of favourable movements. I'm not just cynical about MS specifically, it's quarterly reporting. Gains are considered favourably for the quarter but then basically considered in the bank and there's a new baseline for next quarter. They're never really considered temporary, soon as it falls back it's a problem that needs addressed.
While I'm here I'll note the low value of the pound is largely an intentional effort by the government to entice foreign investment.
I should also note that what TFA should really have done is taken the actual pricing faced by customers in each area and made the comparison. It's possible the UK price was discounted all along (very surprising and against the norm if so however). For whatever reason, they didn't, and I don't have that info to provide it myself.
If it was surgery, you'd probably pick the surgeon with 20 years experience over the one with a couple of years experience to operate on you.
If is was a builder you were employing, you'd probably prefer the one with 20 years experience over the younger one to build your house.
And whatever Zuckerberg says can probably be ignored, because you just know he's the type that, when he's getting on a bit, will be saying that age and experience are what counts.
In both those examples a person with 20 years experience typically has a managerial role. The builder would be at least a foreman. A surgeon with 20 years experience would be a consultant, probably spending a fraction of his time in theatre and even there doing the trickiest bit and supervising his staff on the rest. His cost gets spread over his staff. To the project, it's worth paying a person twice as much if he can uplift the value of work done by a team of 10 by 20%.
Additionally, in both those examples the cost of the individual is relatively small compared to the value of the project. Construction might be 1/3 land cost, 1/3 materials and 1/3 labour. Increasing even the total labour costs by 30% only increases the total project cost by 10%. With software, the labour cost must be what, >80%? With the surgeon example, his cost is pretty small relative to the value of his work as far as the customer is concerned and competition is very limited.
Shale gas and oil is still fossil fuel, and we are still threatened by climate changes due to the increase of greenhouse gases, aren't we? Or is the Sun going to dim and save us all?
Hmm, I was under the impression that that gas plants are the least-bad of the fossil-fuel burners and good for offsetting the weaknesses of "green" approaches?
That is (er, or so I thought), it responds to demand spikes quickly, the fuel stores reasonably well, output efficiency and economic efficiency aren't as impacted by output level. In other words, you run your base load as much as possible on your green stuff while gas smooths everything over and boosts output during peak hours.
Without wanting to reduce it's importance, eliminating greenhouse gas emissions isn't the goal, we need to reduce them to the sustainable level or at least slow the rate of change. Slowing the rate of change doesn't just buy more time, change itself is much more easily managed when it happens slowly.
Also, again without meaning to reduce it's importance, climate change is one of the three major issues. Resources being finite is a second and energy security is a third.
Needed to figure out what exactly was bogus about this since there shouldn't be anything too wrong about someone recommending stocks that fail even with a "robot".
The Securities and Exchange Commission said the stocks "picked" were actually firms that paid the twins hefty fees
I assume it's because there's a difference between just being bad stocks and being bribed into recommending stocks.
This is a good question, though I think you missed the answer (for the UK side of things anyway) from TFA:
In November, Newcastle Crown Court ordered Alexander Hunter to pay back nearly $1m after he admitted providing unregulated financial advice. He was given a suspended 12-month prison sentence.
In the UK the first mechanism to protect the public from investment-related fraud (which this blatantly is) is that if you give financial advice you have to be signed up to the Financial Services Authority. That is rigorously enforced and isn't trivial to accomplish so right off the bat they've got a very solid case against basically all the fraudsters except those that probably could make a decent living being bona fide. That's what these twins have been caught by.
To protect against the registered guys, well signing up to the FSA subjects you to rules and by-laws (laws that only apply to specific people) which require specific things and hold you to a much higher standard than is generally applied of the public - as you can see here, the industry is heavily regulated. I don't know much on the details of the FSA rules, but at first glance these twins seem to fail more than half of the fundamental principles.
On top of that, these guys probably could have been caught under the Fraud Act 2006 (though Wikipedia has a decent summary) since a) they made specific factual claims about their products which they knew were not true and b) as you point out they were bribed into recommending stocks - being paid to do so would actually be OK if only they'd disclosed it.
Although punishment under the Fraud Act is more severe, and at first glance appears most appropriate given these guys were clearly intentionally defrauding their customers, it still hard to win in court whereas getting them for not being FSA regulated is easy.
Incidentally, some of these rules cross borders in both directions - someone based overseas marketing their dodgy dealings in the UK can still be subject to UK laws, while a UK firm can be subject to UK laws while operating overseas (even if they do it via a third party based there).
I gather the US has a very-broadly similar set of tools via the SEC.
The content industries consider themselves a service industry or a product industry when it suits them. They want to sell it as a product and control it as if a service - you may have paid them but they still see it as "their" game.
Maybe someone is going to argue the same can be said of consumers, there's usually plenty of people bemoaning gamers' sense of entitlement for "their" game. But that's a pretty naive argument when the industry is pushing a "product" but then not applying the standards that are expected of a product. This goes well beyond first sale doctrine: substantially bug-free, complete, wholly owned and (in the UK at least) most retailers will refund any product without even asking for a reason.
It is also worth noting the success and general approval of the likes of Steam and MMO*'s, where gaming is sold as a service.
Consumers generally seem pretty happy when gaming is either a product or a service. As it stands, the industry tries to give them the worst of both.
Refreshing post. While most of the comments on this topic have simply lashed out with the usual bleat about "MBAs" (even samzenpus couldn't resist putting something snide into the submission), PHB CEO's and various other acronym, someone finally picked up that the article is talking about strategy.
If this thread were any indication, it would validate the claims made in the article. Few comments indicate an understanding of what strategy is.
For most businesses, IT is support. There's very little opportunity to contribute to strategy. The expertise is technical and objectives are internal. Strategy is about vision and is primarily concerned with external forces. When the market or supply chain changes, what's IT's read on that? How are we going to respond to take advantage of the new opportunities, and minimise the downside risk? There's unlikely to be much to respond with since the department does not regularly interact with customers or suppliers.
The question is why the presumption that IT should be strategic? Why the anger when someone says it's not? It doesn't equate to saying IT isn't important. IT often is utterly critical, but that doesn't mean it's strategic.
Page last updated at 12:02 GMT, Sunday, 7 February 2010
And the data is November 2009 vs February 2010. A 3 - 4 month gap, from more than 2 years ago.
Perhaps the results were relevant at the time, but today they tell us nothing about the current perceptions are or in which direction they're heading. Frankly, such a huge shift in such a short time makes it tempting to conclude it's yet more evidence that polls are a load of shit, though there's plenty of reasons for thinking that.
Anyway, the topic is irrelevant. What matters is a) what is happening? and b) can we do anything about it? I don't follow why all these "climate change is man made" arguments seem to come across like the important thing is blame is being applied. There's this hole fucking debate about whether climate change was caused by man in the past, when all that matters is what man can do in the future to reduce the risks.
Pretty much the entire western world has a spending problem, not a revenue problem.
It's a deficit problem.
The objective of government isn't to be by-the-numbers economically advantageous. They have to achieve the many objectives mandated by their public, which mostly conflict - especially with the economic ones. Few things that a government does should be subjected to a NPV calculation to assure that the nation will run a net profit on it. Much of the purposes of government is specifically anti-economic and that's why you need a government to do it.
It isn't even as simple as meeting their objectives only in so far as their revenue allows them to afford it, obviously because spending and revenue interact, but also because revenue itself interacts with their objectives. Taxation itself is a mechanism to redistribute wealth. Taxation itself reduces the quality of life of the taxpayer. Arguably taxation revenue should be increased right up until the point where the government ceases to be able to provide more net utility than the individual can acquire for himself - although this has to be balanced with the objective that the individual has choice, and of course the government provides "public benefit" while the individual wants benefit to him personally. If we were to pretend that this is quantifiable, at what ratio do we say that X public-benefit is better than Y personal-benefit?
Government is about balancing the conflicting requirements of their citizens and as such is always about balancing both spending and revenue. You can only isolate spending as the problem when you can demonstrate that significant expenditure is either against the best interest's of it's people (which allows for what the people want, even if they're "wrong" - extremely subjective and even then rather difficult to estimate given most Western countries tend to have political parties divided between the high-spenders and the low-taxers) or that it is being expended significantly below a reasonable level of efficiency (again quite difficult to estimate given the objective is itself uneconomic).
[Footnote: I've gone with the usual bastardisation of economics above, which implies that economics is all about some kind of financial statement or the numbers. Economics is actually much more about value, utility and so on, with the financial statements/numbers merely often being the best-available measuring tool. ]
Is it self defence if I am breaking into someone's else home, they grab a knife and "attack" me and I shoot them as I fear for my life? Clearly no. The homeowner has the right to defend themselves from the instigator.
You don't specify whether the burglar is being violent with the homeowner.
If the burglar surrenders or is running away at the time, what is the homeowner defending?
Well, what's your alternative? Two of the most most strongly allied nations sharing basic intel on mutual threats and trusting each other to vet passengers? That's crazy talk.
Because import taxes and CE dictate different definitions of finished product.
This might imply your questions of competence should be directed to them instead, but bear in mind the respective organisations have quite different objectives and anyway the term is clearly a subjective one. It's not justifiable to burden one with the requirements of the other just so that the definition is consistent.
The thing that leads you back to questioning their competence may be that if they knew what they were doing they probably would have done it even if not required. It's common practice to do it just because it makes it a lot easier for anyone down the line who is turning it into a product that does require CE. Open a complex consumer product (your PC, for example) and you'll find CE stickers on about everything in there.
But it's a classic victim of it's own success. Basically all their strategy and decisions assumed a niche/enthusiast type product and their resulting actions may well have been perfectly appropriate had that been the case.
Nah. They probably just charge more in the EU to cover the extra year of warranty.
Doesn't work like that. Products are sold based on what the customers are willing to pay, not based on the underlying cost of the product. So unless the extra year of warranty significantly changes what customers are willing to pay, the prices will stay the same.
You're probably both mostly right, or so says economics.
True, consumers dictate how many they will buy at what prices (the demand curve). The producer does however get to dictate how many they are willing to make at what prices (the supply curve), a decision which is significantly influenced by the underlying cost of the product. We usually end up at a point where both agree (the point where the demand and supply curves intersect).
But we forget about the retailer in the middle. They might take the hit. Or maybe some will take a hit and some will win out. Some retailers already provide the 2 year warranty but take the hit on products >1 year old. I'm familiar with one such major retailer. It's a pretty big hit, and it's pretty annoying that some competitors don't do it but aren't being called out on it either.
I would not be the slightest bit surprised if the "consumer" association is solidly supported, maybe prompted by some retailers. It's probably a fair bet that the hit they're already taking is more than any increase in the price they pay to Apple, and at worst they'll have a level playing field with their retail competitors.
I'd guess probably half of people doing a task involving significant technical skills don't really know what they're doing.
Not to say that so many people aren't capable. It's more that for a significant chunk, once they reach that point then they're not so far off promotion. Then there's another chunk who specialise in something else entirely then found they need to do some programming or whatever as a tool for that.
The point of the low BAC limit is to reinforce the message that you don't drink and drive.
The 0.08 is really just a degree of tolerance.
I'm not advocating this position, this is just my impression from the various information I've come across on the topic.
Back in the day, people would go out, get pissed and drive home. It was just the done thing, a social norm. A friend might not let you if obviously very drunk, but driving in a state the vast majority of people now wouldn't even consider was just normal. Death rates were terrible then and the roads are a lot busier now.
So the position now is you do not go out, drink, and drive home. At all. The 0.08 is there only as a bit of leeway for situations where a small amount of alcohol may be incidental, for example a glass of wine with a meal.
The idea that you should only be punished for being unfit to drive is a totally reasonable and just one. The problem though, most people don't know when they're unfit to drive and the effects of alcohol on judgement and confidence do not help. Being unfit is also judgemental and difficult to police - particularly when someone's driving ability can be significantly impaired in ways that are otherwise subtle. What I suspect is most important however, is the message - the marketing, really - that drinking and driving is not at all accepted. A hard line, straightforward rule primarily aimed to combat a destructive social norm.
So instead of the truly just approach we have the one that works. Whether this is ideologically acceptable to you probably (I suspect, anyway) depends on your perspective on driving. It's probably unacceptable if you view driving on roads as your right, since rights should only be taken away by the authorities if the authorities have good and just reason to do so. The onus is on them to demonstrate exactly why you cannot exercise your right.
On the other hand, it is more likely to be acceptable if you view driving on roads as a privilege, as the onus there is on you complying with the rules set down by the ones granting you that privilege. All the authorities need to show then is that their rule - their restriction on the privileged you have been granted - is overall a good thing, something which the statistics do very well.
Personally I do veer towards this stance since I don't personally own the roads, other people have the same rights as me. It seems intuitively obvious that a very high duty of care comes along with commanding a ton or two of machinery at 70mph anywhere near other people.
It may be worth noting at this point that the US and UK's 0.08 BAC is the highest on this list of 230 countries' limits. There are 12 countries listed with no limit, but I don't recall the Congo or Ethiopia being held up as good examples of anything.
This is how it worked pre-internet: Joe Public discovers news, sends it to media company. Media company adds value in the form of investigation, write-up, trust and distribution. Consumer acquires news from media company. Alternately, Joe Public can skip the media company and distribute his news through gossip.
The internet has improved the gossip network to the point that as a distribution mechanism it is equal to what the media company has. It's fast, consumer can seek it rather than the gossip seeking the consumer, and there are far fewer layers of abstraction. In that sense, yes publishing has been "democratized" (really not the best word, but anyway) because distribution is no longer an expensive barrier to entry into publishing. News has been "democratized" because it's easy to get into publishing it.
But when someone (a media company or a blogger) writes an article their investigation, write-up and/or trust still has value. Writing an article is "doing work" of value. This is the product / is of artistic merit. The news element in the article may be free (in all senses of the word) but the article itself is not.
The C&D has nothing whatsoever to do with the website reporting on the same news as the media company. If you learn some news then write your own article, there's no C&D. The C&D is because the website is taking the media company's actual article: their actual work. This work undeniably has value because otherwise the offending site would not have any reason to copy it.
This is exactly the same as you being a skilled programmer, writing a program and someone else simply copying it and selling it. The fundamental functions that makes the program possible were always there in the C++ or whatever, the important bit, the thing that is worth something, is how you've written it. Or how about a textbook - is it OK to distribute scans of the pages because textbooks are about facts? What's the difference between a textbook about facts and a news article about facts?
Lets be clear, laws about copyright, intellectual property and so on are all about protecting people's right to be paid for work they have done. For manual labour and physical products it's easy for the person doing the work to control getting paid. For other kinds of work, for other kinds of output, the law describes and enforces the right to get paid using concepts like intellectual property.
As a parent of young children in a single-income household, honestly I see the next class division between those who can afford to feed their kids healthy foods and those who are too lazy or stupid to cook simple meals.
There, I fixed that for you.
True, but very harsh. Bringing up kids is tiring and few can afford to have one parent stay at home - parenting is itself a job and for most it is in addition to a paid one. On maybe 4 hours of broken sleep if you have a couple of young ones.
Also, cooking cheap healthy meals is one thing, meals that kids will eat is another. I'd actually say cost isn't all that much driving what kids are eating. They tend to like high energy, simple flavours and simple textures. As it happens, a lot of cheap, easy to cook "food" is just that. If price was what mattered folks would be going vegan.
Most kids will eat healthy, simple foods like yogurt, bananas, beans, eggs and so on. But getting a good mixed diet requires complex flavours and textures and that's not what kids are programmed for. FWIW, mushing it up and neutralising the complexity works well, for example mashed potatoes are as popular as fries, a kid who won't go near fresh fruit may well pester you for fruit smoothies.
Also, if there's one thing I've learned from having nephews: refined sugar is basically a drug.
Foxconn has done plenty of wrong - consulting with this(or any) PR agency only affirms it.
No it doesn't. All it indicates is that Foxconn perceives advantages from improving it's public relations. Anything else you wish to take from it is merely reaching from your personal subjectivity and preconceptions.
Maybe Foxconn has done wrong and seeks to spin the story to it's advantage. Maybe.
Or maybe it's done wrong and seeks to do right - PR firms don't only offer consulting for public communications, they can help guide genuine change within a company. Often "bad guy" companies have such a corporate culture because the board have a lack of expertise and influence on how and why to be a "good guy" company, a PR firm can fill in that gap. Any year one, nay, week one marketing student
Or, maybe the media have got it wrong and Foxconn seek to get the truth out there. Perhaps Foxconn are good guys and these reports are all lies. Well OK, probably not, but it's entirely plausable Foxconn's failings and their lack of response have at least been exaggerated in the media. When was the last time you read an article or watched a news report on something you have a very high level of knowledge about, and shook your head about how completely they'd got it wrong? Maybe I should re-phrase that: can you recall the last time they got it right?
I'm not trying to argue any of the above is the case, merely outline a few of the possibilities. Slashdot generally has a healthy respect for science on issues that clearly fit within the realm of science, but it would be easy to read the submissions and comments and conclude it's readership is totally incapable of applying any of it's lessons for any other topic.
I guess I can see the attraction of running powerpoint presentations from the iPad, but Office in general, is there a point?
Whether or not the iPad is indeed a terrible device for creating or inputting data into spreadsheets (etc), those aren't the only activities with said documents.
Sometimes you want to pull out the file just to read from it. Maybe you're giving a presentation with a chart and someone asks a detailed question. Anyway I think it's safe to assume input will be sufficient that you can at least go in and change a couple of key variables.
This is the kind of thing I suspect an iPad would be useful for in the corporate environment; something you can hold in one hand whilst standing, something convenient to pass around at meetings. Sometimes meetings are ad-hoc and for whatever reason setting up a projector is inconvenient, or maybe the client doesn't have one, or maybe there's a problem setting up the projector.
Slashdot Mirror
Corporation tax is charged against profit, not revenue.
You are correct but the American (and some international) press frequently uses the word "revenue" when they mean "profit". This probably isn't helped by some opposing accounting standards confusing the use of the word "income", by which some mean revenue and others mean net income i.e. profit.
Your final paragraph is wrong. I'm not sure whether you've contradicted your first paragraph by mixing up revenue and profit. Anyway, not all companies have preference shares, and those that do they tend to be more like loans that are convertible into ordinary (real/normal) shares based on some criteria. Common tool for private equity firms to provide flexibility in their exit strategy. Preference share "dividends" might be treated as dividends i,e. a distribution of profit if they are structured to be like shares, or may be charged to profit and loss as an interest cost if they are structured to be more like loans.
R&D, again not every company needs to invest in R&D. Furthermore the accounting standards are a bit difficult/detailed in this area so some R&D can be capitalised onto the balance sheet as an asset while some is immediately written off to the profit and loss as an expense. It's quite common for a company to be making millions and billions in profits precisely because they do invest in R&D.
Looking at the currency conversion chart over the last 5 years (note axis doesn't start at 0) you can see that MS is getting less dollar or Euro for each £1 GBP in income. The chart appears to show an initially fairly steady exchange giving, for every £1, around abouts $2 or €1.30, which has since dropped to around $1.60 (down 25%) or €1.20 (down 8%).
Now look at the second chart on that link. We can see that over the 10 year period the 8% drop in the amount of Euros being obtained for £1 GBP does look like a sustained currency difference. MS presumably has some European division, probably the one in low-tax Ireland, looking at their figures and sure enough UK sales are looking down over the long term due to currency fluctuations.
Do I buy that? Nope. MS is a US company and all financial reporting that matters is in USD. I'd bet even all internal reporting that matters is in USD, so I doubt this is some internal bureaucracy mishap. Looking at both charts combined, i.e. 2002 - 2012, the pound has been up for a while but now back around where it was. Keep going back if you like, the interactive chart is here. $1.60 for a £1 looks to be about the typical value.
Price rises are justified by unfavourable exchange rate movements. Prices increase in UK because of Stirling:Euro, prices rise in Europe because of Euro:dollar. It's always one way. They're never justifying a price cut on the back of favourable movements. I'm not just cynical about MS specifically, it's quarterly reporting. Gains are considered favourably for the quarter but then basically considered in the bank and there's a new baseline for next quarter. They're never really considered temporary, soon as it falls back it's a problem that needs addressed.
While I'm here I'll note the low value of the pound is largely an intentional effort by the government to entice foreign investment.
I should also note that what TFA should really have done is taken the actual pricing faced by customers in each area and made the comparison. It's possible the UK price was discounted all along (very surprising and against the norm if so however). For whatever reason, they didn't, and I don't have that info to provide it myself.
Strange, isn't it?
If it was surgery, you'd probably pick the surgeon with 20 years experience over the one with a couple of years experience to operate on you.
If is was a builder you were employing, you'd probably prefer the one with 20 years experience over the younger one to build your house.
And whatever Zuckerberg says can probably be ignored, because you just know he's the type that, when he's getting on a bit, will be saying that age and experience are what counts.
In both those examples a person with 20 years experience typically has a managerial role. The builder would be at least a foreman. A surgeon with 20 years experience would be a consultant, probably spending a fraction of his time in theatre and even there doing the trickiest bit and supervising his staff on the rest. His cost gets spread over his staff. To the project, it's worth paying a person twice as much if he can uplift the value of work done by a team of 10 by 20%.
Additionally, in both those examples the cost of the individual is relatively small compared to the value of the project. Construction might be 1/3 land cost, 1/3 materials and 1/3 labour. Increasing even the total labour costs by 30% only increases the total project cost by 10%. With software, the labour cost must be what, >80%? With the surgeon example, his cost is pretty small relative to the value of his work as far as the customer is concerned and competition is very limited.
Shale gas and oil is still fossil fuel, and we are still threatened by climate changes due to the increase of greenhouse gases, aren't we? Or is the Sun going to dim and save us all?
Hmm, I was under the impression that that gas plants are the least-bad of the fossil-fuel burners and good for offsetting the weaknesses of "green" approaches?
That is (er, or so I thought), it responds to demand spikes quickly, the fuel stores reasonably well, output efficiency and economic efficiency aren't as impacted by output level. In other words, you run your base load as much as possible on your green stuff while gas smooths everything over and boosts output during peak hours.
Without wanting to reduce it's importance, eliminating greenhouse gas emissions isn't the goal, we need to reduce them to the sustainable level or at least slow the rate of change. Slowing the rate of change doesn't just buy more time, change itself is much more easily managed when it happens slowly.
Also, again without meaning to reduce it's importance, climate change is one of the three major issues. Resources being finite is a second and energy security is a third.
Needed to figure out what exactly was bogus about this since there shouldn't be anything too wrong about someone recommending stocks that fail even with a "robot".
The Securities and Exchange Commission said the stocks "picked" were actually firms that paid the twins hefty fees
I assume it's because there's a difference between just being bad stocks and being bribed into recommending stocks.
This is a good question, though I think you missed the answer (for the UK side of things anyway) from TFA:
In November, Newcastle Crown Court ordered Alexander Hunter to pay back nearly $1m after he admitted providing unregulated financial advice. He was given a suspended 12-month prison sentence.
In the UK the first mechanism to protect the public from investment-related fraud (which this blatantly is) is that if you give financial advice you have to be signed up to the Financial Services Authority. That is rigorously enforced and isn't trivial to accomplish so right off the bat they've got a very solid case against basically all the fraudsters except those that probably could make a decent living being bona fide. That's what these twins have been caught by.
To protect against the registered guys, well signing up to the FSA subjects you to rules and by-laws (laws that only apply to specific people) which require specific things and hold you to a much higher standard than is generally applied of the public - as you can see here, the industry is heavily regulated. I don't know much on the details of the FSA rules, but at first glance these twins seem to fail more than half of the fundamental principles.
On top of that, these guys probably could have been caught under the Fraud Act 2006 (though Wikipedia has a decent summary) since a) they made specific factual claims about their products which they knew were not true and b) as you point out they were bribed into recommending stocks - being paid to do so would actually be OK if only they'd disclosed it.
Although punishment under the Fraud Act is more severe, and at first glance appears most appropriate given these guys were clearly intentionally defrauding their customers, it still hard to win in court whereas getting them for not being FSA regulated is easy.
Incidentally, some of these rules cross borders in both directions - someone based overseas marketing their dodgy dealings in the UK can still be subject to UK laws, while a UK firm can be subject to UK laws while operating overseas (even if they do it via a third party based there).
I gather the US has a very-broadly similar set of tools via the SEC.
The content industries consider themselves a service industry or a product industry when it suits them. They want to sell it as a product and control it as if a service - you may have paid them but they still see it as "their" game.
Maybe someone is going to argue the same can be said of consumers, there's usually plenty of people bemoaning gamers' sense of entitlement for "their" game. But that's a pretty naive argument when the industry is pushing a "product" but then not applying the standards that are expected of a product. This goes well beyond first sale doctrine: substantially bug-free, complete, wholly owned and (in the UK at least) most retailers will refund any product without even asking for a reason.
It is also worth noting the success and general approval of the likes of Steam and MMO*'s, where gaming is sold as a service.
Consumers generally seem pretty happy when gaming is either a product or a service. As it stands, the industry tries to give them the worst of both.
Refreshing post. While most of the comments on this topic have simply lashed out with the usual bleat about "MBAs" (even samzenpus couldn't resist putting something snide into the submission), PHB CEO's and various other acronym, someone finally picked up that the article is talking about strategy.
If this thread were any indication, it would validate the claims made in the article. Few comments indicate an understanding of what strategy is.
For most businesses, IT is support. There's very little opportunity to contribute to strategy. The expertise is technical and objectives are internal. Strategy is about vision and is primarily concerned with external forces. When the market or supply chain changes, what's IT's read on that? How are we going to respond to take advantage of the new opportunities, and minimise the downside risk? There's unlikely to be much to respond with since the department does not regularly interact with customers or suppliers.
The question is why the presumption that IT should be strategic? Why the anger when someone says it's not? It doesn't equate to saying IT isn't important. IT often is utterly critical, but that doesn't mean it's strategic.
Page last updated at 12:02 GMT, Sunday, 7 February 2010
And the data is November 2009 vs February 2010. A 3 - 4 month gap, from more than 2 years ago.
Perhaps the results were relevant at the time, but today they tell us nothing about the current perceptions are or in which direction they're heading. Frankly, such a huge shift in such a short time makes it tempting to conclude it's yet more evidence that polls are a load of shit, though there's plenty of reasons for thinking that.
Anyway, the topic is irrelevant. What matters is a) what is happening? and b) can we do anything about it? I don't follow why all these "climate change is man made" arguments seem to come across like the important thing is blame is being applied. There's this hole fucking debate about whether climate change was caused by man in the past, when all that matters is what man can do in the future to reduce the risks.
Pretty much the entire western world has a spending problem, not a revenue problem.
It's a deficit problem.
The objective of government isn't to be by-the-numbers economically advantageous. They have to achieve the many objectives mandated by their public, which mostly conflict - especially with the economic ones. Few things that a government does should be subjected to a NPV calculation to assure that the nation will run a net profit on it. Much of the purposes of government is specifically anti-economic and that's why you need a government to do it.
It isn't even as simple as meeting their objectives only in so far as their revenue allows them to afford it, obviously because spending and revenue interact, but also because revenue itself interacts with their objectives. Taxation itself is a mechanism to redistribute wealth. Taxation itself reduces the quality of life of the taxpayer. Arguably taxation revenue should be increased right up until the point where the government ceases to be able to provide more net utility than the individual can acquire for himself - although this has to be balanced with the objective that the individual has choice, and of course the government provides "public benefit" while the individual wants benefit to him personally. If we were to pretend that this is quantifiable, at what ratio do we say that X public-benefit is better than Y personal-benefit?
Government is about balancing the conflicting requirements of their citizens and as such is always about balancing both spending and revenue. You can only isolate spending as the problem when you can demonstrate that significant expenditure is either against the best interest's of it's people (which allows for what the people want, even if they're "wrong" - extremely subjective and even then rather difficult to estimate given most Western countries tend to have political parties divided between the high-spenders and the low-taxers) or that it is being expended significantly below a reasonable level of efficiency (again quite difficult to estimate given the objective is itself uneconomic).
[Footnote: I've gone with the usual bastardisation of economics above, which implies that economics is all about some kind of financial statement or the numbers. Economics is actually much more about value, utility and so on, with the financial statements/numbers merely often being the best-available measuring tool. ]
Is it self defence if I am breaking into someone's else home, they grab a knife and "attack" me and I shoot them as I fear for my life?
Clearly no. The homeowner has the right to defend themselves from the instigator.
You don't specify whether the burglar is being violent with the homeowner.
If the burglar surrenders or is running away at the time, what is the homeowner defending?
Well, what's your alternative? Two of the most most strongly allied nations sharing basic intel on mutual threats and trusting each other to vet passengers? That's crazy talk.
Because import taxes and CE dictate different definitions of finished product.
This might imply your questions of competence should be directed to them instead, but bear in mind the respective organisations have quite different objectives and anyway the term is clearly a subjective one. It's not justifiable to burden one with the requirements of the other just so that the definition is consistent.
The thing that leads you back to questioning their competence may be that if they knew what they were doing they probably would have done it even if not required. It's common practice to do it just because it makes it a lot easier for anyone down the line who is turning it into a product that does require CE. Open a complex consumer product (your PC, for example) and you'll find CE stickers on about everything in there.
But it's a classic victim of it's own success. Basically all their strategy and decisions assumed a niche/enthusiast type product and their resulting actions may well have been perfectly appropriate had that been the case.
Nah. They probably just charge more in the EU to cover the extra year of warranty.
Doesn't work like that. Products are sold based on what the customers are willing to pay, not based on the underlying cost of the product. So unless the extra year of warranty significantly changes what customers are willing to pay, the prices will stay the same.
You're probably both mostly right, or so says economics.
True, consumers dictate how many they will buy at what prices (the demand curve). The producer does however get to dictate how many they are willing to make at what prices (the supply curve), a decision which is significantly influenced by the underlying cost of the product. We usually end up at a point where both agree (the point where the demand and supply curves intersect).
But we forget about the retailer in the middle. They might take the hit. Or maybe some will take a hit and some will win out. Some retailers already provide the 2 year warranty but take the hit on products >1 year old. I'm familiar with one such major retailer. It's a pretty big hit, and it's pretty annoying that some competitors don't do it but aren't being called out on it either.
I would not be the slightest bit surprised if the "consumer" association is solidly supported, maybe prompted by some retailers. It's probably a fair bet that the hit they're already taking is more than any increase in the price they pay to Apple, and at worst they'll have a level playing field with their retail competitors.
The fundamental approach to digging appears to broadly resemble that of Brunel's ideas for digging the Thames Tunnel in the early-mid 1800's.
The clues are in "new government plans" and "Mirror.co.uk".
The first means someone somewhere has concocted some kind of proposal - a long distance from a proposal to Parliament, never mind obtaining assent.
The second means the source is unreliable and widely regarded as sensationalist.
It is not restricted to capitalist economies.
Or to economies. It's a people thing.
I'd guess probably half of people doing a task involving significant technical skills don't really know what they're doing.
Not to say that so many people aren't capable. It's more that for a significant chunk, once they reach that point then they're not so far off promotion. Then there's another chunk who specialise in something else entirely then found they need to do some programming or whatever as a tool for that.
The point of the low BAC limit is to reinforce the message that you don't drink and drive.
The 0.08 is really just a degree of tolerance.
I'm not advocating this position, this is just my impression from the various information I've come across on the topic.
Back in the day, people would go out, get pissed and drive home. It was just the done thing, a social norm. A friend might not let you if obviously very drunk, but driving in a state the vast majority of people now wouldn't even consider was just normal. Death rates were terrible then and the roads are a lot busier now.
So the position now is you do not go out, drink, and drive home. At all. The 0.08 is there only as a bit of leeway for situations where a small amount of alcohol may be incidental, for example a glass of wine with a meal.
The idea that you should only be punished for being unfit to drive is a totally reasonable and just one. The problem though, most people don't know when they're unfit to drive and the effects of alcohol on judgement and confidence do not help. Being unfit is also judgemental and difficult to police - particularly when someone's driving ability can be significantly impaired in ways that are otherwise subtle. What I suspect is most important however, is the message - the marketing, really - that drinking and driving is not at all accepted. A hard line, straightforward rule primarily aimed to combat a destructive social norm.
So instead of the truly just approach we have the one that works. Whether this is ideologically acceptable to you probably (I suspect, anyway) depends on your perspective on driving. It's probably unacceptable if you view driving on roads as your right, since rights should only be taken away by the authorities if the authorities have good and just reason to do so. The onus is on them to demonstrate exactly why you cannot exercise your right.
On the other hand, it is more likely to be acceptable if you view driving on roads as a privilege, as the onus there is on you complying with the rules set down by the ones granting you that privilege. All the authorities need to show then is that their rule - their restriction on the privileged you have been granted - is overall a good thing, something which the statistics do very well.
Personally I do veer towards this stance since I don't personally own the roads, other people have the same rights as me. It seems intuitively obvious that a very high duty of care comes along with commanding a ton or two of machinery at 70mph anywhere near other people.
It may be worth noting at this point that the US and UK's 0.08 BAC is the highest on this list of 230 countries' limits. There are 12 countries listed with no limit, but I don't recall the Congo or Ethiopia being held up as good examples of anything.
Discworld readers, yes it is Peel that Night Watch pays a heavy homage to.
Plain ol' people always discovered most news.
This is how it worked pre-internet: Joe Public discovers news, sends it to media company. Media company adds value in the form of investigation, write-up, trust and distribution. Consumer acquires news from media company. Alternately, Joe Public can skip the media company and distribute his news through gossip.
The internet has improved the gossip network to the point that as a distribution mechanism it is equal to what the media company has. It's fast, consumer can seek it rather than the gossip seeking the consumer, and there are far fewer layers of abstraction. In that sense, yes publishing has been "democratized" (really not the best word, but anyway) because distribution is no longer an expensive barrier to entry into publishing. News has been "democratized" because it's easy to get into publishing it.
But when someone (a media company or a blogger) writes an article their investigation, write-up and/or trust still has value. Writing an article is "doing work" of value. This is the product / is of artistic merit. The news element in the article may be free (in all senses of the word) but the article itself is not.
The C&D has nothing whatsoever to do with the website reporting on the same news as the media company. If you learn some news then write your own article, there's no C&D. The C&D is because the website is taking the media company's actual article: their actual work. This work undeniably has value because otherwise the offending site would not have any reason to copy it.
This is exactly the same as you being a skilled programmer, writing a program and someone else simply copying it and selling it. The fundamental functions that makes the program possible were always there in the C++ or whatever, the important bit, the thing that is worth something, is how you've written it. Or how about a textbook - is it OK to distribute scans of the pages because textbooks are about facts? What's the difference between a textbook about facts and a news article about facts?
Lets be clear, laws about copyright, intellectual property and so on are all about protecting people's right to be paid for work they have done. For manual labour and physical products it's easy for the person doing the work to control getting paid. For other kinds of work, for other kinds of output, the law describes and enforces the right to get paid using concepts like intellectual property.
cheers :)
So what are the significant changes? Other than the UI.
I did try Googling a few previews, they talked about the UI.
As a parent of young children in a single-income household, honestly I see the next class division between those who can afford to feed their kids healthy foods and those who are too lazy or stupid to cook simple meals.
There, I fixed that for you.
True, but very harsh. Bringing up kids is tiring and few can afford to have one parent stay at home - parenting is itself a job and for most it is in addition to a paid one. On maybe 4 hours of broken sleep if you have a couple of young ones.
Also, cooking cheap healthy meals is one thing, meals that kids will eat is another. I'd actually say cost isn't all that much driving what kids are eating. They tend to like high energy, simple flavours and simple textures. As it happens, a lot of cheap, easy to cook "food" is just that. If price was what mattered folks would be going vegan.
Most kids will eat healthy, simple foods like yogurt, bananas, beans, eggs and so on. But getting a good mixed diet requires complex flavours and textures and that's not what kids are programmed for. FWIW, mushing it up and neutralising the complexity works well, for example mashed potatoes are as popular as fries, a kid who won't go near fresh fruit may well pester you for fruit smoothies.
Also, if there's one thing I've learned from having nephews: refined sugar is basically a drug.
Foxconn has done plenty of wrong - consulting with this(or any) PR agency only affirms it.
No it doesn't. All it indicates is that Foxconn perceives advantages from improving it's public relations. Anything else you wish to take from it is merely reaching from your personal subjectivity and preconceptions.
Maybe Foxconn has done wrong and seeks to spin the story to it's advantage. Maybe.
Or maybe it's done wrong and seeks to do right - PR firms don't only offer consulting for public communications, they can help guide genuine change within a company. Often "bad guy" companies have such a corporate culture because the board have a lack of expertise and influence on how and why to be a "good guy" company, a PR firm can fill in that gap. Any year one, nay, week one marketing student
Or, maybe the media have got it wrong and Foxconn seek to get the truth out there. Perhaps Foxconn are good guys and these reports are all lies. Well OK, probably not, but it's entirely plausable Foxconn's failings and their lack of response have at least been exaggerated in the media. When was the last time you read an article or watched a news report on something you have a very high level of knowledge about, and shook your head about how completely they'd got it wrong? Maybe I should re-phrase that: can you recall the last time they got it right?
I'm not trying to argue any of the above is the case, merely outline a few of the possibilities. Slashdot generally has a healthy respect for science on issues that clearly fit within the realm of science, but it would be easy to read the submissions and comments and conclude it's readership is totally incapable of applying any of it's lessons for any other topic.
I guess I can see the attraction of running powerpoint presentations from the iPad, but Office in general, is there a point?
Whether or not the iPad is indeed a terrible device for creating or inputting data into spreadsheets (etc), those aren't the only activities with said documents.
Sometimes you want to pull out the file just to read from it. Maybe you're giving a presentation with a chart and someone asks a detailed question. Anyway I think it's safe to assume input will be sufficient that you can at least go in and change a couple of key variables.
This is the kind of thing I suspect an iPad would be useful for in the corporate environment; something you can hold in one hand whilst standing, something convenient to pass around at meetings. Sometimes meetings are ad-hoc and for whatever reason setting up a projector is inconvenient, or maybe the client doesn't have one, or maybe there's a problem setting up the projector.