The problem is that once you get past the simplest of cases (single job the whole year, non-itemized deductions, no capital gains, and moderate income) then things get complicated and lawyers get involved way to quickly. You are probably going to correctly cover most people (so 80%+?), but any project without serious funding is going to have troubles quickly, and someone is going to get a call from the IRS, take that personally, and sue the project... which does not have the serious funding to pay for the lawyers it would need.
The IRS is in the right position to provide people with baseline guidance, and to create a system to handle the majority of people's needs, and be able to tell people (unfortunately I am one of them) when their taxes are going to be complicated enough to need non-simple forms. Unfortunately, there are companies (Intuit and H&R Block are two of the most egregious) who have made their business by putting themselves between taxpayers and the IRS, and live off the fees they can charge for extra services (e.g.: tax refund advances). They have been fighting hard (i.e.: paying tons of campaign donations) to make sure nothing threatens that revenues stream. Never mind that it would be more efficient for all other parties, they need to get their pound of flesh.
Apple is going through Goldman Sachs and MasterCard, so they will not have any effect on the transaction processing fees. If anything their focus on eliminating fees from the consumer side will probably wind up putting more pressure on the market to raise the transaction processing fees in order to maintain their profits.
Somewhere down the line I would love to see Apple getting into that part of the business to reduce those expenses, but for now they do not seem interested.
Actually, there are a number of different benefits to various players in credit cards: - Consumers get fraud protection on their purchases. If someone is trying to cheat you then filing a claim with your credit card company is a fast way of resolving it. And as it stands now you are usually in the better position (merchant usually has to prove you are wrong). - Consumers also get theft protection. In the case your wallet is stolen U.S. law limits your damages to $50 (waved my most credit card companies nowadays). That is not the case with any cash you have there. - Merchants like not having to deal with cash. It is a lot harder for workers to steal from credit card transactions, and there are a lot of headaches with sacks of cash. - Merchants love the disconnect that may people have between the pain of paying and buying. If you can just swipe many people don't connect that as much with the cost of things (this is obviously not a benefit for those consumers).
And there is not 0 cost to banks/creditcard vendors; they have to pay both for the systems involved, and for all the work of policing fraud/abuse and people who don't pay their bills. I am not going to argue that there is not good room for lowering the fees involved, but 0 is not the target.
On your second point you are somewhat wrong. Most (all?) of the credit card merchant agreements specifically forbid merchants from charging more for the use of a credit card. Any merchant found doing that loses their account (and ability to take credit cards). Whatever the advertised price is on the sticker must be the price charged to the card.
There is a loophole here: you can charge other methods (e.g.: cash) less than advertised price. But in most cases merchants like the lower amount of side-work (e.g.: carrying cash to the banks, who increasingly don't like handling cash themselves), and so encourage card used (though they like the lower fees and risks to them of debit cards).
Hiring someone is not collusion. And, from on objective standpoint she seems to have done everything required of her (making the records available), when it was required of her. She certainly should have done that earlier (e.g.: when she left office), but the actual laws were non-specific about that.
Yo mentioned Colin Powel, who absolutely broken both the spirit and letter of the law intentionally, and then don't mention that he has not been punished for this, nor that Clinton seems to have gone out of her way not to do that.
People are rightly asking that from a family that campaigned on someone not releasing records that they release their records. How can you really argue against that?
By that argument, all of the computer companies, and most of the phone companies do not make their products either. Almost all of them are assembled by contract companies, such as Foxcon or Pegatron. And then you can argue that they don't make things either because they are just assembling those items from components provided by an army of other companies.
All of that winds up with a useless argument. The reality is that Apple engineers the product, and is hyper-involved in directing the assembly and testing processes. Apple also is nearly solely responsible for the OS that goes on them, and has a huge hand in the firmware on the components as well. They often also own the machinery that is used in the manufacture and subsequent assembly of those components (to a level their competitors rarely are). For most modern definitions of "making" a product, Apple qualifies.
In "every case" are you including most of Europe? Most, if not everything I have seen pushed by the current Democratic Congressional Freshmen, or Presidential candidates are out-of-line with what you see in parts of Europe right now: single payer healthcare, living wages, etc... And it is pretty easy to argue that places like Germany or Sweden have not descended into Kleptocracies.
I never quite get this line of argument. In a "natural capitalist" society you would expect more desirable places to live to be more expensive, while less desirable places would be cheaper. And yet, people who claim to be capitalists somehow use California's expensive status as a sign that things are going wrong here...
1. Depending on exactly what time-frame you use (say within the last 20 years) you can make the argument that either Texas or California is doing better on GDP gains. 2. Texas has been doing better for a while on number of jobs added 3. California has been doing better on wages added (so less new jobs, but those jobs pay a lot more) 4. Texas's gains have largely been in gas/oil production (so will run out) where California's seem to be based on Film and IT, either of which could suddenly decide to flee the state (although there is no real sign of that).
So when you get down to brass tacks, there is no real evidence that one approach is generically better than the other.
So the school administration in this case were fools for having sited a school next to where a fertilizer plant would eventually decide to go? You seem to be missing the basic reason for laws: to make sure that your actions don't unduly (and this is where the rub is) affect others. Getting the balance is really tough... especially when people start spouting religion-like assertions like yours.
Cronyism is not socialism. Socialism is when the state controls the "means of production" (a.k.a. Capital), nominally for the betterment of all.
Cronyism is when individuals capture the power of the state to benefit themselves personally (and their associates... or cronies). Cronyism can me present in all forms of government that humans have yet tried. But the one most associated with it is Feudalism, where it is hard not to have it.
Being completely honest about this: yes health insurance costs did rise after the ACA. But the much more important point is that the rate of that rise was significantly lower than it had been before that, and even more significantly less than had been predicted before the ACA. That holds true even if you factor in the expected decline in health care expenditure due to the recession (people spend less on everything, including healthcare, so you have to handicap for that).
There are also a bunch of places where the ACA is clearly a win, financially, for consumers who were already paying for health insurance: - Ended the lifetime maximums that bankrupted almost anyone who had serious long-term problems (e.g. cancer that does not kill you quickly, or a car crash) - Got rid of the "junk" insurance plans that covered very little and had surprisingly low maximums - Put a limit on the percent of revenues insurance companies could take as profit/executive pay to 20% (that still seems ridiculously high to me)... and a lot of companies were far exceeding that, especially the ones sellin "junk" plans. - Pushed hospitals hard (through Medicare reimbursements) to work to control patient readmissions (where someone has to come right back in because the hospital screwed up). This was a surprisingly large source of costs.
So the simple answer as to whether the ACA saved money on the whole is clearly: Yes. However, people can be misleading by focusing on a simple rise in the costs.
The problem with this thinking is that many of the people in charge of these companies have been trained (by MBA programs) to believe that the "invisible hand of the market" will solve all of these problems, and they just need to concentrate on fulfilling their own greed (because "greed is good").
I have had a number of conversations with MBA graduates, and this way of thinking has been pounded into them in a way that more resembles a religion than a graduate course.
There are two problems with your argument: 1. Non-renwables often come with "external" costs, such as pollution that are not accounted for in their financial costs. Someone is paying those prices. 2. New technologies often take a lot of work to make practical, again someone needs to pay those prices to make them viable.
Since we (the U.S. here) have decided not to put taxes (e.g. cap-and-trade) in place to handle those externalities, and we have a history of subsidizing research and development, this is the way we have done it.
You are missing a bit of context here, and that is the reason Clinton put up a server in the first place: she wanted a single device (a Blackberry due to its advantages at the time) that could handle both her personal and non-classified emails on one device (the vast majority of her classified emails were only ever on properly secured devices). She asked the State Department to set that up for her, and they balked. A contractor was hired, and set-up a system that worked the way she wanted.
And you are wrong about one thing, there was no law at the time that prohibited this, only one that required that the emails be stored so that they were available for FOA requests. A similar request form congress (that was honoured) is what got this whole thing rolling.
"cause problems around the world"? That characterization seems enormously, and unhelpfully, opinionated. Regardless of whether you agree with the causes he supports, or not, simple fairness requires you to acknowledge that he is not just spending his money in an attempt to "cause problems".
If you disagree with him, please be honest about that disagreement. Don't assign intent that is clearly not there in an effort to demonize. That is just dishonest.
One significant correction: the Nazi party formed a coalition with the socialist party, and combined they ran on a 40 point socialist plan. Then, in a bloody purge called the Night of the Long Knives Hitler had that part of the coalition killed (at least 85 dead, many more arrested). They then abandoned the 40 point plan that they had run on, and started in earnest demonizing those we now remember as their enemies (Jews, homosexuals, socialists, gypsys, Poles).
And it would be remiss not to mention that the prime cause of Hitler's rise was the catastrophic conditions placed on Germany after World War One. Without the imposed hardships that that caused he would never have come to power.
I presume that this is DynamoDB that we are talking about, so a Document Store (the typical NoQSL type) rather than a Relational database. At the scale the Amazon is using Postgres is simply not going to compete without having a lot of extra custom logic on the top. And once you are doing that, most of the advantage of something like Postgres is lost and Document Stores (and their inherent scalability) start to be better solutions.
The (legitimate) problem they are trying to solve is that large companies have been playing games with where they recognize revenue and costs in order to make the balance low in high-tax areas, and high in low (or no) tax areas. Largely with no correspondence with where the work or sales actually take place. Two examples (which many other companies do in one form or another): 1. Apple sells a lot of hardware in Germany, but the hold a lot of licensing rights in a company chartered out of Ireland. The Irish subsidiary charges the German subsidiary (both wholly owned by Apple Inc.) whatever it decides to charge for the rights to sell Apple hardware. Suddenly all of the actual profits involved in sales in Germany suddenly actually happened in Ireland (despite no work for those sales having been done there). Additionally, Apple argued for a long time that the company in Ireland was not actually an Irish company (only chartered there), and negotiated a really low tax rate with the government there. Germany (and a number of other European companies) were not happy with this (reasonably). Note that this last part has been declared "illegal state aid", and Apple has had to pay a lot of back taxes to Ireland, but nothing to, say Germany where the sales were made.
2. Google sold a lot of AdWords advertisements to French customers (nee. French companies) using salespeople in France. Despite all of there correspondence being with Google France, when it came time to pay taxes on those sales, they were reported as sales from an Irish subsidiary of Google (one that does not employ those sales people). So the French subsidiary is now almost all cost, and no revenue.
This is how things have worked for a long time. News organizations during President Obama's terms did the same thing, attributing things to "the Obama Administration". Largely in cases such as this it is justified; a change like this is pretty obviously being driven by the political appointees, not the administrative (non-political... or "deep state" if you will) long-term employees.
Initially at least the Soviet Union deliberate stripped East Germany of most of their (non-destroyed) industry. They literally came in and shipped all of the heavy industrial equipment east. Partially it was to jump-start Soviet industries, and partially it was to ensure that “German would never rise again”, so a mirror of the thinking prevalent at the end of the First World War.
No Neural Nets are “trained” in the lab. Then you choose the best one for your deployment, and make it as efficient as possible. The th8ng you send out into the field is quite static. It no longer “learns”.
There actually are large parts of the Alps where there is basically no population. Ironically, there has been a lot of effort to make sure that there is basic cell service there, so that hikers who get lost (days from anything) can still be found in emergencies (which cost more than the cell infrastructure).
However, the U.S. (and even more so Canada) does still make Europe look very densely populated. A prime example is the state of Wyoming. It has about the same land area as the United Kingdom (253sq. km. vs. 242), but only 580k inhabitance vs. the U.K.'s 65.6 million. So roughly 100 times less.
I don't think that most of them are investments, they are toys. And just like kids, sometimes what people really want out of their toys is just to have them, not to play with them. I have heard of people buying two of some models at the same time, just so that one of them is always out of the shop (many are made for performance, not reliability).
My guess is that when you figure in maintenance and storage costs (many get stored at professional garages), that even ones that are kept in "mint" condition cost their owners far more than they eventually sell for. So they are not an investment by any stretch of the word.
You should be specific: they are ahead of the iPhone 7 on multicore tests. On single core tests the top of the Android lines (e.g. Samsung Galaxy S8 with a 1965 score) have been struggling to compete with the iPhone 6s (2302). And the newer iPhones have been racing away on those numbers: iPhone 7 is 3328 and iPhone 8 clocks in with 4195. Apple has been optimizing heavily for single core performance, as that is often what is important for most applications (followed up by energy efficiency... another place where Apple does very well).
You can argue what test should be the measure of "fastest", but for the one Apple has decided matters (and thus has thrown a lot of work at), they have a 2-year-and-growing lead.
Apple is able to offer longer warrantees, and they do: it is called AppleCare and evidently the customer in question declined to buy it. But warrantees (and more generally insurance) are always about the statistics. Apple has calculated that guaranteeing the phone for 3 years is going to add more to their costs, so they charge more (of course there is also more profit in there). If you are arguing that Apple (and presumably their competitors) should be required to have a longer warrantee, then they are going to have to raise prices.
There may be good side effects to that (manufactures building more durable goods), but let us not forget that those goods are going to come at a greater price.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that once you get past the simplest of cases (single job the whole year, non-itemized deductions, no capital gains, and moderate income) then things get complicated and lawyers get involved way to quickly. You are probably going to correctly cover most people (so 80%+?), but any project without serious funding is going to have troubles quickly, and someone is going to get a call from the IRS, take that personally, and sue the project... which does not have the serious funding to pay for the lawyers it would need.
The IRS is in the right position to provide people with baseline guidance, and to create a system to handle the majority of people's needs, and be able to tell people (unfortunately I am one of them) when their taxes are going to be complicated enough to need non-simple forms. Unfortunately, there are companies (Intuit and H&R Block are two of the most egregious) who have made their business by putting themselves between taxpayers and the IRS, and live off the fees they can charge for extra services (e.g.: tax refund advances). They have been fighting hard (i.e.: paying tons of campaign donations) to make sure nothing threatens that revenues stream. Never mind that it would be more efficient for all other parties, they need to get their pound of flesh.
Apple is going through Goldman Sachs and MasterCard, so they will not have any effect on the transaction processing fees. If anything their focus on eliminating fees from the consumer side will probably wind up putting more pressure on the market to raise the transaction processing fees in order to maintain their profits.
Somewhere down the line I would love to see Apple getting into that part of the business to reduce those expenses, but for now they do not seem interested.
Actually, there are a number of different benefits to various players in credit cards:
- Consumers get fraud protection on their purchases. If someone is trying to cheat you then filing a claim with your credit card company is a fast way of resolving it. And as it stands now you are usually in the better position (merchant usually has to prove you are wrong).
- Consumers also get theft protection. In the case your wallet is stolen U.S. law limits your damages to $50 (waved my most credit card companies nowadays). That is not the case with any cash you have there.
- Merchants like not having to deal with cash. It is a lot harder for workers to steal from credit card transactions, and there are a lot of headaches with sacks of cash.
- Merchants love the disconnect that may people have between the pain of paying and buying. If you can just swipe many people don't connect that as much with the cost of things (this is obviously not a benefit for those consumers).
And there is not 0 cost to banks/creditcard vendors; they have to pay both for the systems involved, and for all the work of policing fraud/abuse and people who don't pay their bills. I am not going to argue that there is not good room for lowering the fees involved, but 0 is not the target.
On your second point you are somewhat wrong. Most (all?) of the credit card merchant agreements specifically forbid merchants from charging more for the use of a credit card. Any merchant found doing that loses their account (and ability to take credit cards). Whatever the advertised price is on the sticker must be the price charged to the card.
There is a loophole here: you can charge other methods (e.g.: cash) less than advertised price. But in most cases merchants like the lower amount of side-work (e.g.: carrying cash to the banks, who increasingly don't like handling cash themselves), and so encourage card used (though they like the lower fees and risks to them of debit cards).
Hiring someone is not collusion. And, from on objective standpoint she seems to have done everything required of her (making the records available), when it was required of her. She certainly should have done that earlier (e.g.: when she left office), but the actual laws were non-specific about that.
Yo mentioned Colin Powel, who absolutely broken both the spirit and letter of the law intentionally, and then don't mention that he has not been punished for this, nor that Clinton seems to have gone out of her way not to do that.
People are rightly asking that from a family that campaigned on someone not releasing records that they release their records. How can you really argue against that?
By that argument, all of the computer companies, and most of the phone companies do not make their products either. Almost all of them are assembled by contract companies, such as Foxcon or Pegatron. And then you can argue that they don't make things either because they are just assembling those items from components provided by an army of other companies.
All of that winds up with a useless argument. The reality is that Apple engineers the product, and is hyper-involved in directing the assembly and testing processes. Apple also is nearly solely responsible for the OS that goes on them, and has a huge hand in the firmware on the components as well. They often also own the machinery that is used in the manufacture and subsequent assembly of those components (to a level their competitors rarely are). For most modern definitions of "making" a product, Apple qualifies.
In "every case" are you including most of Europe? Most, if not everything I have seen pushed by the current Democratic Congressional Freshmen, or Presidential candidates are out-of-line with what you see in parts of Europe right now: single payer healthcare, living wages, etc... And it is pretty easy to argue that places like Germany or Sweden have not descended into Kleptocracies.
I never quite get this line of argument. In a "natural capitalist" society you would expect more desirable places to live to be more expensive, while less desirable places would be cheaper. And yet, people who claim to be capitalists somehow use California's expensive status as a sign that things are going wrong here...
1. Depending on exactly what time-frame you use (say within the last 20 years) you can make the argument that either Texas or California is doing better on GDP gains.
2. Texas has been doing better for a while on number of jobs added
3. California has been doing better on wages added (so less new jobs, but those jobs pay a lot more)
4. Texas's gains have largely been in gas/oil production (so will run out) where California's seem to be based on Film and IT, either of which could suddenly decide to flee the state (although there is no real sign of that).
So when you get down to brass tacks, there is no real evidence that one approach is generically better than the other.
So the school administration in this case were fools for having sited a school next to where a fertilizer plant would eventually decide to go? You seem to be missing the basic reason for laws: to make sure that your actions don't unduly (and this is where the rub is) affect others. Getting the balance is really tough... especially when people start spouting religion-like assertions like yours.
Cronyism is not socialism. Socialism is when the state controls the "means of production" (a.k.a. Capital), nominally for the betterment of all.
Cronyism is when individuals capture the power of the state to benefit themselves personally (and their associates... or cronies). Cronyism can me present in all forms of government that humans have yet tried. But the one most associated with it is Feudalism, where it is hard not to have it.
Being completely honest about this: yes health insurance costs did rise after the ACA. But the much more important point is that the rate of that rise was significantly lower than it had been before that, and even more significantly less than had been predicted before the ACA. That holds true even if you factor in the expected decline in health care expenditure due to the recession (people spend less on everything, including healthcare, so you have to handicap for that).
There are also a bunch of places where the ACA is clearly a win, financially, for consumers who were already paying for health insurance:
- Ended the lifetime maximums that bankrupted almost anyone who had serious long-term problems (e.g. cancer that does not kill you quickly, or a car crash)
- Got rid of the "junk" insurance plans that covered very little and had surprisingly low maximums
- Put a limit on the percent of revenues insurance companies could take as profit/executive pay to 20% (that still seems ridiculously high to me)... and a lot of companies were far exceeding that, especially the ones sellin "junk" plans.
- Pushed hospitals hard (through Medicare reimbursements) to work to control patient readmissions (where someone has to come right back in because the hospital screwed up). This was a surprisingly large source of costs.
So the simple answer as to whether the ACA saved money on the whole is clearly: Yes. However, people can be misleading by focusing on a simple rise in the costs.
The problem with this thinking is that many of the people in charge of these companies have been trained (by MBA programs) to believe that the "invisible hand of the market" will solve all of these problems, and they just need to concentrate on fulfilling their own greed (because "greed is good").
I have had a number of conversations with MBA graduates, and this way of thinking has been pounded into them in a way that more resembles a religion than a graduate course.
There are two problems with your argument:
1. Non-renwables often come with "external" costs, such as pollution that are not accounted for in their financial costs. Someone is paying those prices.
2. New technologies often take a lot of work to make practical, again someone needs to pay those prices to make them viable.
Since we (the U.S. here) have decided not to put taxes (e.g. cap-and-trade) in place to handle those externalities, and we have a history of subsidizing research and development, this is the way we have done it.
You are missing a bit of context here, and that is the reason Clinton put up a server in the first place: she wanted a single device (a Blackberry due to its advantages at the time) that could handle both her personal and non-classified emails on one device (the vast majority of her classified emails were only ever on properly secured devices). She asked the State Department to set that up for her, and they balked. A contractor was hired, and set-up a system that worked the way she wanted.
And you are wrong about one thing, there was no law at the time that prohibited this, only one that required that the emails be stored so that they were available for FOA requests. A similar request form congress (that was honoured) is what got this whole thing rolling.
"cause problems around the world"? That characterization seems enormously, and unhelpfully, opinionated. Regardless of whether you agree with the causes he supports, or not, simple fairness requires you to acknowledge that he is not just spending his money in an attempt to "cause problems".
If you disagree with him, please be honest about that disagreement. Don't assign intent that is clearly not there in an effort to demonize. That is just dishonest.
One significant correction: the Nazi party formed a coalition with the socialist party, and combined they ran on a 40 point socialist plan. Then, in a bloody purge called the Night of the Long Knives Hitler had that part of the coalition killed (at least 85 dead, many more arrested). They then abandoned the 40 point plan that they had run on, and started in earnest demonizing those we now remember as their enemies (Jews, homosexuals, socialists, gypsys, Poles).
And it would be remiss not to mention that the prime cause of Hitler's rise was the catastrophic conditions placed on Germany after World War One. Without the imposed hardships that that caused he would never have come to power.
I presume that this is DynamoDB that we are talking about, so a Document Store (the typical NoQSL type) rather than a Relational database. At the scale the Amazon is using Postgres is simply not going to compete without having a lot of extra custom logic on the top. And once you are doing that, most of the advantage of something like Postgres is lost and Document Stores (and their inherent scalability) start to be better solutions.
The (legitimate) problem they are trying to solve is that large companies have been playing games with where they recognize revenue and costs in order to make the balance low in high-tax areas, and high in low (or no) tax areas. Largely with no correspondence with where the work or sales actually take place. Two examples (which many other companies do in one form or another):
1. Apple sells a lot of hardware in Germany, but the hold a lot of licensing rights in a company chartered out of Ireland. The Irish subsidiary charges the German subsidiary (both wholly owned by Apple Inc.) whatever it decides to charge for the rights to sell Apple hardware. Suddenly all of the actual profits involved in sales in Germany suddenly actually happened in Ireland (despite no work for those sales having been done there). Additionally, Apple argued for a long time that the company in Ireland was not actually an Irish company (only chartered there), and negotiated a really low tax rate with the government there. Germany (and a number of other European companies) were not happy with this (reasonably). Note that this last part has been declared "illegal state aid", and Apple has had to pay a lot of back taxes to Ireland, but nothing to, say Germany where the sales were made.
2. Google sold a lot of AdWords advertisements to French customers (nee. French companies) using salespeople in France. Despite all of there correspondence being with Google France, when it came time to pay taxes on those sales, they were reported as sales from an Irish subsidiary of Google (one that does not employ those sales people). So the French subsidiary is now almost all cost, and no revenue.
This is how things have worked for a long time. News organizations during President Obama's terms did the same thing, attributing things to "the Obama Administration". Largely in cases such as this it is justified; a change like this is pretty obviously being driven by the political appointees, not the administrative (non-political... or "deep state" if you will) long-term employees.
Initially at least the Soviet Union deliberate stripped East Germany of most of their (non-destroyed) industry. They literally came in and shipped all of the heavy industrial equipment east. Partially it was to jump-start Soviet industries, and partially it was to ensure that “German would never rise again”, so a mirror of the thinking prevalent at the end of the First World War.
No Neural Nets are “trained” in the lab. Then you choose the best one for your deployment, and make it as efficient as possible. The th8ng you send out into the field is quite static. It no longer “learns”.
There actually are large parts of the Alps where there is basically no population. Ironically, there has been a lot of effort to make sure that there is basic cell service there, so that hikers who get lost (days from anything) can still be found in emergencies (which cost more than the cell infrastructure).
However, the U.S. (and even more so Canada) does still make Europe look very densely populated. A prime example is the state of Wyoming. It has about the same land area as the United Kingdom (253sq. km. vs. 242), but only 580k inhabitance vs. the U.K.'s 65.6 million. So roughly 100 times less.
I don't think that most of them are investments, they are toys. And just like kids, sometimes what people really want out of their toys is just to have them, not to play with them. I have heard of people buying two of some models at the same time, just so that one of them is always out of the shop (many are made for performance, not reliability).
My guess is that when you figure in maintenance and storage costs (many get stored at professional garages), that even ones that are kept in "mint" condition cost their owners far more than they eventually sell for. So they are not an investment by any stretch of the word.
You should be specific: they are ahead of the iPhone 7 on multicore tests. On single core tests the top of the Android lines (e.g. Samsung Galaxy S8 with a 1965 score) have been struggling to compete with the iPhone 6s (2302). And the newer iPhones have been racing away on those numbers: iPhone 7 is 3328 and iPhone 8 clocks in with 4195. Apple has been optimizing heavily for single core performance, as that is often what is important for most applications (followed up by energy efficiency... another place where Apple does very well).
You can argue what test should be the measure of "fastest", but for the one Apple has decided matters (and thus has thrown a lot of work at), they have a 2-year-and-growing lead.
https://browser.geekbench.com/ios-benchmarks
https://browser.geekbench.com/android-benchmarks
Apple is able to offer longer warrantees, and they do: it is called AppleCare and evidently the customer in question declined to buy it. But warrantees (and more generally insurance) are always about the statistics. Apple has calculated that guaranteeing the phone for 3 years is going to add more to their costs, so they charge more (of course there is also more profit in there). If you are arguing that Apple (and presumably their competitors) should be required to have a longer warrantee, then they are going to have to raise prices.
There may be good side effects to that (manufactures building more durable goods), but let us not forget that those goods are going to come at a greater price.