Yes, it would be more economical, but it would also be less defensible and the problem with the PRC is that it hosts a malignent governing philosophy that is a world menace. If they can get a moon base with launch capability they can heft guided rocks into any world capital and force capitulation.
I doubt either the Russian military or the US military is going to let that scenario go unexplored or unanswered.
Once the DoD runs its first military exercise against a power with a moonbase (with military manufacturing on that base) I suspect we're going to get a moonbase zipping up our priority list very quickly. Since the only way to reasonably fund that is through the profits from space manufacturing (satellite launch) this gets NASA along for the ride with the Commerce department in tow.
Actually, 1kg of iron mined and made into satellite parts on the moon plus the difference in processing costs (to earth creation is equal in value to 1 kg of iron similarly processed on earth *plus* the value of the propulsion system cost differential to loft it into space. If you can live on the moon cheaply enough, things get rather valuable there simply because they are easier to loft into outer space.
Even if the manufacturing costs are higher, the military position (uphill on the gravity well compared to earth) could only be beaten by orbital systems backed up by asteroid and orbital mining/manufacturing.
You are woefully uneducated about economics. Price signals are the only system yet discovered to ensure that we have a working economy that is sustainable. You are echoing a million failed reformers but at least they had the excuse that their ideas had not been tried. the bloody results of trying to seriously run economies without meaningful price signals (economics via caring or planning, or rationing) are well documented and at this point in human knowledge what you are proposing goes beyond niave, it is monstrously evil.
Social Security and the rest of the welfare apparatus is an intergenerational tax on our future. You may find palming off the cost of our benefits on to our children to be acceptable but I don't. The costs rise and rise while benefits are stagnant or shrink. There is a breaking point and we are fast reaching it in SS, healthcare, and a host of other leftist bribes to the electorate of a few generations ago. We'll either give these opiates up or lose our freedom. To some extent we already have.
In countries that were not blessed with a long period of economic freedom, socialist utopias fail quicker. There may be a lot of ruin in a nation, but eventually the nation does fall, no matter how rich it was in the past.
Back to climate, chaotic systems (of which the climate is one) are not perfectly predictable because they are heavily initial condition dependent. They can, however, be relatively stable which climate obviously is. The problem of global warming isn't whether we effect climate, an individual exhalation does that, it is rather whether our effects are enough to knock us out of our current main pattern into a new one and whether or not that new pattern would be better than the current one. It is *those* questions that are not well resolved.
But the global warming movement is predicated on the position that we *do* understand the system. If the inputs that humans make are not going to affect world climate, why would we ever lower production when we have people dying for the lack of production?
From your comments on equal distribution it's clear that you haven't studied the real, practical, and very destructive effects of government monkeying around with distribution systems. Traditional food exporters tend to become food importers when markets are destroyed and replaced by 'equal distribution' via government. The effects are pretty much the same across all sectors. Private control of the means of production and distribution systems via contract, not ration coupon, lead to abundance. The problem is where governments steal so much that the people have no money and that is something that doesn't get solved by abolishing the free market.
This isn't to say that no environmental regulations are warranted. Until we, as a society, figure out how to make a functioning market in pollution rights, regulation is the best route for now but CO2 as a pollutant? Come off it. If we were to deploy machines to remove 100% of the CO2 from the atmosphere, we would have huge plant kills downwind of the facilities.
The easy pollution gains have largely been made. In the 1st world, we're spending more and more to get incrementally less gain. That's not a very good use of resources.
As for the business cycle, the free market maybe gets production levels right 60% of the time. But government led alternative systems get it right maybe 20% of the time. So should we sacrifice the not so good for the truly pathetic? Why would we ever do that?
Trees are just one example of a carbon sink. Kyoto doesn't recognize any of them. The US considered carbon sinks as part of a comprehensive strategy to control CO2 levels, the EU wanted to keep the blinders on and just look at emissions. So Kyoto breaks down. The broader US approach would allow more scope for inventive solutions like planting trees, cleaning CO2 out of the atmosphere to create pollution credits that could be sold (creating a clean air industry while they're at it), and leaving an open framework for the inventiveness of humanity to come up with new solutions the politicians hadn't even dreamed of.
The problem is that the system is naturally shifting in a direction we don't know. We can't even measure the damn thing right (see the differential between satellite and ground station temp readings, one shows no warming the other does), and you propose that somebody building a factory is supposed to prove that they don't have a bad impact on the environment? This is a bad joke.
To carry your example to a more realistic level, do you put a colostomy bag on infants and toddlers or do you put diapers on them and when the inevitable accidents accumulate, you rent a carpet cleaner twice a year? The easy mitigation steps have generally been taken in the first world (3rd world industry not covered by Kyoto is a different matter). Kyoto is as unrealistic and dangerous as those colostomy bags.
Kyoto doesn't make proper provision for carbon sinks. That's just foolish.
Another possibility is to divide the plate (The Americas provide a real world example). As another person in this thread mentioned, the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of Panama differ by 8 inches.
I would suggest you look up the Simpson effect which says that greenhouse effect increases in temperatures can cause increased snowfall in polar regions. So would the increased polar snow mitigate, entirely cancel, or exceed the snow melt caused by the increased temps? Nobody seems to have run the numbers properly yet.
One of the unresolved questions is whether the effect of increased evaporation due to global warming outweighs the rise due to the reduced glacier areas.
The real answer is that noboy knows for sure how all of this is going to play out which is why the apocalyptics are so desperate to close debate and get some kind of phony consensus accepted via browbeating any real scientific dissent.
Science shouldn't work that way and any true scientist should be worried about efforts to shut down discussion and twist data.
As with all global climate effects, sea level is not a simple homogenous model. Here's a scholarly article that explains some of the variables. Things are not as settled as they appear in the greenpeace fundraising letters.
The Canadians didn't have Great Plains Indians burning huge tracts of forests on a regular basis to extend the range of the buffalo over a good quarter of the country (well, maybe a bit in the south of Canada). To the extent that the US increases actual forest land over what was there, I think it's quite fair to get carbon sink credits.
If some bright fellow invented a general CO2 collector that could be planted on floating platforms in the middle of the oceans and suck up more than all the manmade CO2 that was being pumped out, the Kyoto treaty would *still* require a CO2 emission restriction regimin even though it would be totally useless.
Yeah, I'd say that's fundamentally and fatally flawed.
Will Rogers said something like this - It isn't what we don't know that gets us in trouble, it's what we know that just isn't so.
As far as I know, sea levels are rising in some areas and falling in others. Also, the global warmin zealots have been caught bending the facts to fit their theories. The problem was so bad at the IPCC that one of the scientists working on the main report (which no policy maker reads) actually wrote on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal that the policymakers summary (which lawmakers, journalists, and interested laymen do read) simply made stuff up about the main report.
How much of what you know, just isn't so?
BTW: few on the pro-global warming side made any courageous stands for the truth and the document was not pulled. Until the global-warming advocates give a damn about truth and true science rather than hype and fundraising letters, why should we believe a word of what they say?
One reason to outsource programming jobs is that it does a hell of a lot more to better their country than foreign aid does and it certainly is going to provide more good will and a reduction in the number of people who want to kill us while raising the number of people pressuring their government to stand with us the next time some pissant nihilists with a death wish decide to make a 'statement' written in the blood of thousands US citizens.
So start your own firm, run it your own way, hire the best talent (who will be fighting to get into your haven instead of working for 'shitty working conditions') and you will find your company's work ethic imitated by all the MBA clueless as the next hot management style.
Oh, you don't want to do that? Well, 'shitty working conditions' it is for you!
Both the US and USSR (Now Russia) have sophisticated systems that keep nuclear missiles from being launched by accident or merely go off in their silos. When Pakistan and India get their nuclear weapons to an equivalent level of engineering safety, the equivalence argument *might* be worth having.
The american legal system would be calm down a lot by the simple adoption of a rule, the loser in a lawsuit generally (with limited exceptions) pays the lawyer fees of the winner.
All of a sudden, medical care gets about 50% cheaper (unless you have a doctor in the household, you have no idea how much defensive medicine inflates costs), people stop using lawsuits as revenge tactics and political weapons, and the contingency fee crapshoot goes out of fashion. Even with this insane system, we've got the #1 economy in the world (and extending our lead), if we had a decent loser pays rule, nobody would even come close.
It's not quite as bad as you make it out. Each ATA drive has its own controller which will perk up the speed nicely thank you very much.
The Dell 1650 has room for 3 drives max, with a max size of 73Gb each. If you're in a linux shop, it'll be a bit less expensive but if you add cost of Microsoft's OS + equivalent server apps the Dell is many thousands of dollars over the Apple price.
Apple's offering unlimited client licenses on this baby with an interface that will make it easy to integrate into a windows shop. You can have 0.48T on this baby and it can sport two Gigabyte ethernet links. If you're just serving 1000 users email (not a problem for a unit of this capability) you are saving many thousands of $US in CAL costs.
CC:Mail, the current mail platform, is not Y2K compliant (I'm a former CC:Mail admin), it is not supported, and they are likely not providing any further patches of this dead platform. Everybody was supposed to make the switch to notes before Y2K. The SAA didn't. Macintosh has a CC:Mail client so the macs are likely just as secure/insecure as the rest of the users.
Microsoft Exchange, the SAA proposed new mail server, has a native Macintosh client though many Exchange administrators don't know about it since it is hidden on a separate HFS partition. Put the client disk on a mac and the mac client shows up (I've also managed Exchange Servers).
Jaguar is supposed to come out with a native mail client with excellent Exchange compatibility. In other words, there are likely two viable clients going to be around RSN.
As far as security track records go, XP has what track record? How about 2000? Mac OS X is pretty much equal or superior in actual tract records to both of them.
Stability track records are similar. An Apples to pears argument isn't fair. MS's code base has been significantly redone and I haven't seen a whole lot of stability testing demonstrating either Apple or MS being superior here. Assuming instead of testing is just another way to not earn your paycheck.
As for visibility, I would say that this is not the SAA's business. It's the Senators business as they get a budget for all sorts of things, desks, chairs, computers, etc. and if they want to make things look good, that's their choice, not the SAA's.
As for cost effectiveness, Senate offices don't buy $500 scrape the bottom of the barrel laptops. They buy IBM's, Compaqs or Dells with which Apple is pretty price competitive, sometimes a bit higher, sometimes a bit lower.
I've worked in offices where administrators had a platform agenda, sabotaging other platforms, hardware and software, in favor of what they wanted. Occassionally, it can lead to a disaster where a sabotaged system is abandoned and they simply don't replace it.
communism has always relied heavily on the useage of past economic seed corn in order to finance a temporary increase of current consumer consumption. This is very important in the period where armed opposition exists to the regime. Nicaraugua never got past that phase so you are somewhat correct that it is atypical.
Eventually the seed corn runs out, capital is used up and there is little new capital assigned to replace it. The long downhill slide of communism commences in all its customary brutality.
I would submit that the USSR success at creating a new soviet man was not, perhaps to this day still is not, understood in the mainstream West. Sure, there were some perceptive people who understood communist reality but they were largely voices in the wilderness, stifled by the paid communist hacks and their allies, the anti-anti-communists.
The commanding heights of Western society were filled with Walter Duranty types who distorted and denied the fundamental evil of communism, never giving up an opportunity to excuse and ignore the horrors that were occuring.
When a society emerges from communism, there is generally an immediate drop in living standards because the seed corn economic cycle needs to be primed and those resources are not available for present consumption. As the effects of communism fade and society is rebuilt in a sustainable fashion economic resources become more and more available to respond to present needs without robbing the next generation of any hope for even maintaining the economic level. On the contrary, it is the children who most benefit because they are placed on the economic up escalator that capitalism provides.
I won't argue that communism is slavery but it does seem to me that a little fairness is in order. Any professor arguing for a new variant of slavery would be drummed out of academia *if he was lucky*. The advocates of communism, unfortunately, are still with us and semi-respectable.
I would like to hear about the slave history of the ROC (Taiwan), S. Korea, etc. before I accept your blanket statement that capitalist countries have never existed without slavery. There are a whole bunch of very new capitalist countries whose slaveholding, if it is documented at all, occured long before capitalism grew up there.
The problem isn't the $40B, it's the $1B/month added to it that risks turning MSFT into a mutual fund. A dividend of $0.50 a quarter would be quite nice and they would *still* accumulate cash.
If nothing is done, approximately 7 years from now, MS will be generating an equivalent amount of cash from financial instruments and from operations. If Mac OS X and/or Linux takes off, it could be sooner. Shareholders bought MSFT, the technology stock, not MSFT the financial company.
Actually, they generate a billion in cash excess to operating income every month.
In other words, if they don't buy anybody, they add $12 billion in cash every year.
at the 9% of interest I remember they actually said they get, $40B ends up to $300M per month. For a billion in interest each month, they would have to more than treble their cash hoard to about $133B. With nothing else changing this will occur in 2012 (i.e. they continue to have $1B in excess cash over operations each month). I believe that at that point they become a mutual fund as they are earning as much from money management as they do from operations.
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Yes, it would be more economical, but it would also be less defensible and the problem with the PRC is that it hosts a malignent governing philosophy that is a world menace. If they can get a moon base with launch capability they can heft guided rocks into any world capital and force capitulation.
I doubt either the Russian military or the US military is going to let that scenario go unexplored or unanswered.
Once the DoD runs its first military exercise against a power with a moonbase (with military manufacturing on that base) I suspect we're going to get a moonbase zipping up our priority list very quickly. Since the only way to reasonably fund that is through the profits from space manufacturing (satellite launch) this gets NASA along for the ride with the Commerce department in tow.
Alert your congressman!
Actually, 1kg of iron mined and made into satellite parts on the moon plus the difference in processing costs (to earth creation is equal in value to 1 kg of iron similarly processed on earth *plus* the value of the propulsion system cost differential to loft it into space. If you can live on the moon cheaply enough, things get rather valuable there simply because they are easier to loft into outer space.
Even if the manufacturing costs are higher, the military position (uphill on the gravity well compared to earth) could only be beaten by orbital systems backed up by asteroid and orbital mining/manufacturing.
You are woefully uneducated about economics. Price signals are the only system yet discovered to ensure that we have a working economy that is sustainable. You are echoing a million failed reformers but at least they had the excuse that their ideas had not been tried. the bloody results of trying to seriously run economies without meaningful price signals (economics via caring or planning, or rationing) are well documented and at this point in human knowledge what you are proposing goes beyond niave, it is monstrously evil.
Social Security and the rest of the welfare apparatus is an intergenerational tax on our future. You may find palming off the cost of our benefits on to our children to be acceptable but I don't. The costs rise and rise while benefits are stagnant or shrink. There is a breaking point and we are fast reaching it in SS, healthcare, and a host of other leftist bribes to the electorate of a few generations ago. We'll either give these opiates up or lose our freedom. To some extent we already have.
In countries that were not blessed with a long period of economic freedom, socialist utopias fail quicker. There may be a lot of ruin in a nation, but eventually the nation does fall, no matter how rich it was in the past.
Back to climate, chaotic systems (of which the climate is one) are not perfectly predictable because they are heavily initial condition dependent. They can, however, be relatively stable which climate obviously is. The problem of global warming isn't whether we effect climate, an individual exhalation does that, it is rather whether our effects are enough to knock us out of our current main pattern into a new one and whether or not that new pattern would be better than the current one. It is *those* questions that are not well resolved.
But the global warming movement is predicated on the position that we *do* understand the system. If the inputs that humans make are not going to affect world climate, why would we ever lower production when we have people dying for the lack of production?
From your comments on equal distribution it's clear that you haven't studied the real, practical, and very destructive effects of government monkeying around with distribution systems. Traditional food exporters tend to become food importers when markets are destroyed and replaced by 'equal distribution' via government. The effects are pretty much the same across all sectors. Private control of the means of production and distribution systems via contract, not ration coupon, lead to abundance. The problem is where governments steal so much that the people have no money and that is something that doesn't get solved by abolishing the free market.
This isn't to say that no environmental regulations are warranted. Until we, as a society, figure out how to make a functioning market in pollution rights, regulation is the best route for now but CO2 as a pollutant? Come off it. If we were to deploy machines to remove 100% of the CO2 from the atmosphere, we would have huge plant kills downwind of the facilities.
The easy pollution gains have largely been made. In the 1st world, we're spending more and more to get incrementally less gain. That's not a very good use of resources.
As for the business cycle, the free market maybe gets production levels right 60% of the time. But government led alternative systems get it right maybe 20% of the time. So should we sacrifice the not so good for the truly pathetic? Why would we ever do that?
Trees are just one example of a carbon sink. Kyoto doesn't recognize any of them. The US considered carbon sinks as part of a comprehensive strategy to control CO2 levels, the EU wanted to keep the blinders on and just look at emissions. So Kyoto breaks down. The broader US approach would allow more scope for inventive solutions like planting trees, cleaning CO2 out of the atmosphere to create pollution credits that could be sold (creating a clean air industry while they're at it), and leaving an open framework for the inventiveness of humanity to come up with new solutions the politicians hadn't even dreamed of.
The EU was not amused. Screw the EU.
The problem is that the system is naturally shifting in a direction we don't know. We can't even measure the damn thing right (see the differential between satellite and ground station temp readings, one shows no warming the other does), and you propose that somebody building a factory is supposed to prove that they don't have a bad impact on the environment? This is a bad joke.
To carry your example to a more realistic level, do you put a colostomy bag on infants and toddlers or do you put diapers on them and when the inevitable accidents accumulate, you rent a carpet cleaner twice a year? The easy mitigation steps have generally been taken in the first world (3rd world industry not covered by Kyoto is a different matter). Kyoto is as unrealistic and dangerous as those colostomy bags.
Kyoto doesn't make proper provision for carbon sinks. That's just foolish.
Another possibility is to divide the plate (The Americas provide a real world example). As another person in this thread mentioned, the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of Panama differ by 8 inches.
h tm
I would suggest you look up the Simpson effect which says that greenhouse effect increases in temperatures can cause increased snowfall in polar regions. So would the increased polar snow mitigate, entirely cancel, or exceed the snow melt caused by the increased temps? Nobody seems to have run the numbers properly yet.
Here's a decent article.
http://www.co2andclimate.org/Articles/2000/sea.
One of the unresolved questions is whether the effect of increased evaporation due to global warming outweighs the rise due to the reduced glacier areas.
h tm
http://www.co2andclimate.org/Articles/2000/sea.
The real answer is that noboy knows for sure how all of this is going to play out which is why the apocalyptics are so desperate to close debate and get some kind of phony consensus accepted via browbeating any real scientific dissent.
Science shouldn't work that way and any true scientist should be worried about efforts to shut down discussion and twist data.
As with all global climate effects, sea level is not a simple homogenous model. Here's a scholarly article that explains some of the variables. Things are not as settled as they appear in the greenpeace fundraising letters.
h tm
http://www.co2andclimate.org/Articles/2000/sea.
The Canadians didn't have Great Plains Indians burning huge tracts of forests on a regular basis to extend the range of the buffalo over a good quarter of the country (well, maybe a bit in the south of Canada). To the extent that the US increases actual forest land over what was there, I think it's quite fair to get carbon sink credits.
If some bright fellow invented a general CO2 collector that could be planted on floating platforms in the middle of the oceans and suck up more than all the manmade CO2 that was being pumped out, the Kyoto treaty would *still* require a CO2 emission restriction regimin even though it would be totally useless.
Yeah, I'd say that's fundamentally and fatally flawed.
Will Rogers said something like this - It isn't what we don't know that gets us in trouble, it's what we know that just isn't so.
As far as I know, sea levels are rising in some areas and falling in others. Also, the global warmin zealots have been caught bending the facts to fit their theories. The problem was so bad at the IPCC that one of the scientists working on the main report (which no policy maker reads) actually wrote on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal that the policymakers summary (which lawmakers, journalists, and interested laymen do read) simply made stuff up about the main report.
How much of what you know, just isn't so?
BTW: few on the pro-global warming side made any courageous stands for the truth and the document was not pulled. Until the global-warming advocates give a damn about truth and true science rather than hype and fundraising letters, why should we believe a word of what they say?
One reason to outsource programming jobs is that it does a hell of a lot more to better their country than foreign aid does and it certainly is going to provide more good will and a reduction in the number of people who want to kill us while raising the number of people pressuring their government to stand with us the next time some pissant nihilists with a death wish decide to make a 'statement' written in the blood of thousands US citizens.
So start your own firm, run it your own way, hire the best talent (who will be fighting to get into your haven instead of working for 'shitty working conditions') and you will find your company's work ethic imitated by all the MBA clueless as the next hot management style.
Oh, you don't want to do that? Well, 'shitty working conditions' it is for you!
Both the US and USSR (Now Russia) have sophisticated systems that keep nuclear missiles from being launched by accident or merely go off in their silos. When Pakistan and India get their nuclear weapons to an equivalent level of engineering safety, the equivalence argument *might* be worth having.
Until then....
The american legal system would be calm down a lot by the simple adoption of a rule, the loser in a lawsuit generally (with limited exceptions) pays the lawyer fees of the winner.
All of a sudden, medical care gets about 50% cheaper (unless you have a doctor in the household, you have no idea how much defensive medicine inflates costs), people stop using lawsuits as revenge tactics and political weapons, and the contingency fee crapshoot goes out of fashion. Even with this insane system, we've got the #1 economy in the world (and extending our lead), if we had a decent loser pays rule, nobody would even come close.
Well, I guess you could run Yellow Dog Linux if you wanted to...
But why?
It's not quite as bad as you make it out. Each ATA drive has its own controller which will perk up the speed nicely thank you very much.
The Dell 1650 has room for 3 drives max, with a max size of 73Gb each. If you're in a linux shop, it'll be a bit less expensive but if you add cost of Microsoft's OS + equivalent server apps the Dell is many thousands of dollars over the Apple price.
Apple's offering unlimited client licenses on this baby with an interface that will make it easy to integrate into a windows shop. You can have 0.48T on this baby and it can sport two Gigabyte ethernet links. If you're just serving 1000 users email (not a problem for a unit of this capability) you are saving many thousands of $US in CAL costs.
What, Rush Limbaugh being a big mac head doesn't sway you the other way?
By all means, let's be fair.
CC:Mail, the current mail platform, is not Y2K compliant (I'm a former CC:Mail admin), it is not supported, and they are likely not providing any further patches of this dead platform. Everybody was supposed to make the switch to notes before Y2K. The SAA didn't. Macintosh has a CC:Mail client so the macs are likely just as secure/insecure as the rest of the users.
Microsoft Exchange, the SAA proposed new mail server, has a native Macintosh client though many Exchange administrators don't know about it since it is hidden on a separate HFS partition. Put the client disk on a mac and the mac client shows up (I've also managed Exchange Servers).
Jaguar is supposed to come out with a native mail client with excellent Exchange compatibility. In other words, there are likely two viable clients going to be around RSN.
As far as security track records go, XP has what track record? How about 2000? Mac OS X is pretty much equal or superior in actual tract records to both of them.
Stability track records are similar. An Apples to pears argument isn't fair. MS's code base has been significantly redone and I haven't seen a whole lot of stability testing demonstrating either Apple or MS being superior here. Assuming instead of testing is just another way to not earn your paycheck.
As for visibility, I would say that this is not the SAA's business. It's the Senators business as they get a budget for all sorts of things, desks, chairs, computers, etc. and if they want to make things look good, that's their choice, not the SAA's.
As for cost effectiveness, Senate offices don't buy $500 scrape the bottom of the barrel laptops. They buy IBM's, Compaqs or Dells with which Apple is pretty price competitive, sometimes a bit higher, sometimes a bit lower.
I've worked in offices where administrators had a platform agenda, sabotaging other platforms, hardware and software, in favor of what they wanted. Occassionally, it can lead to a disaster where a sabotaged system is abandoned and they simply don't replace it.
This is no way to spend the taxpayer's money.
communism has always relied heavily on the useage of past economic seed corn in order to finance a temporary increase of current consumer consumption. This is very important in the period where armed opposition exists to the regime. Nicaraugua never got past that phase so you are somewhat correct that it is atypical.
Eventually the seed corn runs out, capital is used up and there is little new capital assigned to replace it. The long downhill slide of communism commences in all its customary brutality.
I would submit that the USSR success at creating a new soviet man was not, perhaps to this day still is not, understood in the mainstream West. Sure, there were some perceptive people who understood communist reality but they were largely voices in the wilderness, stifled by the paid communist hacks and their allies, the anti-anti-communists.
The commanding heights of Western society were filled with Walter Duranty types who distorted and denied the fundamental evil of communism, never giving up an opportunity to excuse and ignore the horrors that were occuring.
When a society emerges from communism, there is generally an immediate drop in living standards because the seed corn economic cycle needs to be primed and those resources are not available for present consumption. As the effects of communism fade and society is rebuilt in a sustainable fashion economic resources become more and more available to respond to present needs without robbing the next generation of any hope for even maintaining the economic level. On the contrary, it is the children who most benefit because they are placed on the economic up escalator that capitalism provides.
DB
I won't argue that communism is slavery but it does seem to me that a little fairness is in order. Any professor arguing for a new variant of slavery would be drummed out of academia *if he was lucky*. The advocates of communism, unfortunately, are still with us and semi-respectable.
I would like to hear about the slave history of the ROC (Taiwan), S. Korea, etc. before I accept your blanket statement that capitalist countries have never existed without slavery. There are a whole bunch of very new capitalist countries whose slaveholding, if it is documented at all, occured long before capitalism grew up there.
The problem isn't the $40B, it's the $1B /month added to it that risks turning MSFT into a mutual fund. A dividend of $0.50 a quarter would be quite nice and they would *still* accumulate cash.
If nothing is done, approximately 7 years from now, MS will be generating an equivalent amount of cash from financial instruments and from operations. If Mac OS X and/or Linux takes off, it could be sooner. Shareholders bought MSFT, the technology stock, not MSFT the financial company.
Actually, they generate a billion in cash excess to operating income every month.
In other words, if they don't buy anybody, they add $12 billion in cash every year.
at the 9% of interest I remember they actually said they get, $40B ends up to $300M per month. For a billion in interest each month, they would have to more than treble their cash hoard to about $133B. With nothing else changing this will occur in 2012 (i.e. they continue to have $1B in excess cash over operations each month). I believe that at that point they become a mutual fund as they are earning as much from money management as they do from operations.
DB