Seriously, must Apple target the bottom of the market as aggressively as the top of the market?
The vast majority of counties in NY state have no Apple store (but they do have Best Buy stores, which carry Apple products), and the vast majority of those under-served counties are majority white.
You have to look real hard to make this a racial issue.
With fewer than 300 stores nation-wide, it's perfectly acceptable that they locate their stores, peddling $1K phones, $2K laptops, and $3K desktops, where people can likely afford them.
Building a store in a neighborhood with few potential customers is a bad business decision.
These aren't social experiments or welfare offices - these are for-profit businesses.
Pai's staff said that states and other localities do not have jurisdiction over broadband because it is an interstate service and that it would subvert federal policy for states and localities to impose their own rules.
Seems odd that the very same people that argued against patchwork enforcement of immigration policy (clearly a federal domain) are arguing for patchwork enforcement of policies on 'broadband', another clearly federal domain.
Russians still fly American Astronauts to the ISS, and the next Human to set foot on the Moon will either be Chinese or Indian.
So what, there are many, many more Indians and Chinese people in the earth than there are Americans. Based on recent immigration arguments I've heard from the left, America needs immigrants from places like China and India in order to compete in areas of science and technology, with the clear implication they are better than Americans, so what is the problem if a few stay home and help their birth nation move forward?
So the FCC, up until a couple years ago had no "net neutrality" regulations, then they implemented some regulations, that the FCC is now considering rolling those "net neutrality" regulations back, and the best answer it to create your own unregulated internet as an alternative to the soon-to-be unregulated internet?
I didn't say "no technical solution", my issue was the existing regulations that he just decided don't apply, freeing this "new" internet from the legal shackles of regulations.
The linked-to article is talking about paralleling the existing physical plant owned by big ISPs with an alternate plant constructed of the same/similar technology owned by municipalities.
I don't understand how it is that a Comcast or Verizon-like company, classified as an ISP is subject to federal regulation, but somehow when your town or county buys the head-end equipment and sets up it's own ISP it isn't subject to the very same regulations.
But if you look at Health Care, for example, in many countries where a proper health care standard exists where people aren't bankrupted by hospital bills, that is always a public service and never is there a case supporting 3rd party health care where citizens are better off short term or long term.
Are you under the impression that there is no 3rd-party private healthcare option in places where there is a national health service, like in Canada or the UK? You may want to take another look at the situation... Bespoke healthcare is fairly common in the UK, and countless Canadians cross the border into the US for their medical needs.
The difference is bottom up local government, where comcast and others have to subvert thousands of municipalities
Right, because there's no way a Comcast or Verizon could subvert thousands of municipalities.
You understand that before you were likely born Verizon, Comcast, and dozens of other cable companies and telcos got their local monopolies willingly given to them by "thousands of municipalities"...
What a fantastic idea! All he is proposing is entering a regulated business (becoming your own "Internet Service Provider"), and simply ignoring the existing regulations! It's amazing how many brilliant ideas these Internet Wunder-kind come up with that have as a basic part of their business plan the simple disregard/ignoring of any applicable regulation.
So the plan is to exploit a non-existent "public backbone", erect your own wireless towers and maybe even lay cable along the right-of-way? I can't imagine anything standing in their way./sarcasm
there's a really fucked up financial incentive for them in pretending that college tuition actually costs $40,000 per year.
And still, every year thousands upon thousands of college students go deeper and deeper into debt to cover that $40K tuition bill that grad students get for free. If any other employer handed low-paid employees something worth $40K every year, they low-paid employee would be expected to pay taxes on that thing, why are grad students exempt?
Since when is declining to make someone pay for a service the same as giving them income?
Except grad students provide skilled labor in exchange for their tuition, labor that has value in the market place.
If Oprah gives you a car, you owe taxes on the car.
If your employer gives you a shoe box full of $20 bills, you owe taxes on the shoebox full of $20s.
If your employer gives you a car (to keep, take title on and own), you owe taxes on the car.
If your employer is a university, and that university gives you a year's tuition in exchange for you teaching a few classes/semester, you owe taxes on the waived tuition.
You do understand that grad students sign a contract accepting the free tuition as compensation for their labor, it isn't a unilateral agreement imposed on grad students arbitrarily by the university - it is sought out and coveted by the grad students who willingly agree to the terms of the contract.
And in the end, they'll just change it to a volunteer position and an award instead of a degree, and they'll easily dodge the tax definition.
Until the "award" now has a defined value in the marketplace, which it will as soon as employers treat them as equal to a degree from the same institution.
Blood from a stone is really easy to do, but you don't get very much blood, and you're not left with much of a stone.
The issue is that universities sit on millions if not billions of dollars in endowments, pay no taxes, and hand out $50K tuition wavers in exchange for labor they would otherwise have to pay a market salary for.
So what's the point?
If this were done by any other employer it would incur a tax bill for the employee on the receiving end of this benefit. The grad student is exchanging their effort for a year's tuition, something that has a tangible value in the marketplace, as evidenced by the number of their peers that take out massive student loans to pay for the same tuition bill.
College Credits and Degrees are the products offered by colleges and universities, they have defined values and costs. If an auto maker pays line assembly workers minimum wage, but after 12 months hands them a $40K car, wouldn't the auto worker owe taxes not only on the minimum wage earnings but also the $40K car? When a grad student works for minimum wage but also gets a $40K tuition wavier, why doesn't the grad student owe taxes on the value of the tuition wavier?
The answer is that grad students be paid a salary that covers their tuition, then pay their tuition from those earnings, and the amount of their earnings should be deductible, netting the grad student compensation equal to the value of the deduction:
Earn $50K salary as a grad student Pay university $40K for tuition Pay taxes on $50 in earnings, less $40K in deductible education expenses, netting the grad student a bit more than $10K in income for the year - except, of course, college tuition isn't deductible after the first $4,000...
Grad students don't get tuition waivers "given" to them. They earn them as RA's and TA's and work their asses off.
And they get a $50,000 benefit that other students pay $50,000 for - a years tuition at a graduate school like MIT.
This is a tax hike on people making minimum wage.
Uhm, no. Minimum wage is $7.45/hr (give or take), and once you factor in the value of their tuition waver, $50,000, in order for graduate students to be considered working at the minimum wage would have them doing 6,711 hours/year ($50K/$7.45), heck, if they were paid the so-called living wage of $15/hr that would still have them toiling away 3,333 hours/year. Are you claiming that grad students work 60-120 hours/week?
Grad Students want to pretend their tuition has no value, until they enter the workplace after graduation - this proposed change eliminates that fantasy.
Imagine an engineer at Tesla receives a low salary (stipend), but after 12 months of service gets a new $100K Tesla, and will continue to get an additional $100K Tesla for each additional year they remain at Tesla - doesn't the engineer owe taxes on the "free" Tesla? Why shouldn't the grad student who gets a "free" year of grad school ($50K tuition) owe taxes on that form of compensation?
The answer is that Universities, with their huge endowments, have given away "free" tuition in exchange for the grad student's labor - grad students should be paid a wage that covers their tuition expense, then the tax issue takes care of itself.
"My peers and I work between 40 and 80 hours a week as classroom teachers and laboratory researchers, and in return, our universities provide us with a tuition waiver for school. For M.I.T. students, this waiver keeps us from having to pay a tuition bill of about $50,000 every year -- a staggering amount, but one that is similar to the fees at many other colleges and universities," he writes. "No money from the tuition waivers actually ends up in our pockets, so under Section 117(d)(5), it isn't counted as taxable income." Rousseau continues by saying his tuition waivers will be taxed under the House's tax bill.
Yet, at the end of a few years they end up with something others have spent a quarter-million dollars to buy, a graduate degree from MIT, which has value (otherwise why would graduate students take on the work?).
However, when the university receives $50k in tuition, it pays tax on that revenue to the government.
No, they don't - colleges and universities are, almost exclusively non-profit, tax-exempt organizations. The federal gov't is trying very hard to shut down tax-paying private for-profit universities.
I've worked out a deal with Tesla, wherein I will work in the Tesla plant assembling cars for 9 months, in exchange for a brand new, $100K Tesla automobile... Should I pay taxes on that $100K Tesla?
That's exactly what universities are doing with graduate students, but somehow their graduate school tuition is tax-exempt.
Are the two really that different?
The issue isn't the value of the waived tuition, it's the low compensation the schools pay the graduate students.
I read something a bit ago that claimed AMC wanted to pull out of their relationship with moviePass
If the stories here are to be believed, MoviePass pays full price for movie tickets - if that's the case, why would any theater ever want to back out of this deal?
Because the stories here are wrong, moviepass does not pay full price for tickets.
Slashdot Mirror
But what about Netflix's competitors that can't afford to deploy portable data centers at ISP head-ends?
280 now...
The internet will be dragged all the way back to the way ias back in 2015 - Horrors!
But you have to be liberal to think protesting at his former employer will somehow be effective in effecting change.
Pacemakers aren't 'monitoring' devices.
has the lowest income per household
Seriously, must Apple target the bottom of the market as aggressively as the top of the market?
The vast majority of counties in NY state have no Apple store (but they do have Best Buy stores, which carry Apple products), and the vast majority of those under-served counties are majority white.
You have to look real hard to make this a racial issue.
With fewer than 300 stores nation-wide, it's perfectly acceptable that they locate their stores, peddling $1K phones, $2K laptops, and $3K desktops, where people can likely afford them.
Building a store in a neighborhood with few potential customers is a bad business decision.
These aren't social experiments or welfare offices - these are for-profit businesses.
Pai's staff said that states and other localities do not have jurisdiction over broadband because it is an interstate service and that it would subvert federal policy for states and localities to impose their own rules.
Seems odd that the very same people that argued against patchwork enforcement of immigration policy (clearly a federal domain) are arguing for patchwork enforcement of policies on 'broadband', another clearly federal domain.
Russians still fly American Astronauts to the ISS, and the next Human to set foot on the Moon will either be Chinese or Indian.
So what, there are many, many more Indians and Chinese people in the earth than there are Americans. Based on recent immigration arguments I've heard from the left, America needs immigrants from places like China and India in order to compete in areas of science and technology, with the clear implication they are better than Americans, so what is the problem if a few stay home and help their birth nation move forward?
So the FCC, up until a couple years ago had no "net neutrality" regulations, then they implemented some regulations, that the FCC is now considering rolling those "net neutrality" regulations back, and the best answer it to create your own unregulated internet as an alternative to the soon-to-be unregulated internet?
I didn't say "no technical solution", my issue was the existing regulations that he just decided don't apply, freeing this "new" internet from the legal shackles of regulations.
The linked-to article is talking about paralleling the existing physical plant owned by big ISPs with an alternate plant constructed of the same/similar technology owned by municipalities.
I don't understand how it is that a Comcast or Verizon-like company, classified as an ISP is subject to federal regulation, but somehow when your town or county buys the head-end equipment and sets up it's own ISP it isn't subject to the very same regulations.
But if you look at Health Care, for example, in many countries where a proper health care standard exists where people aren't bankrupted by hospital bills, that is always a public service and never is there a case supporting 3rd party health care where citizens are better off short term or long term.
Are you under the impression that there is no 3rd-party private healthcare option in places where there is a national health service, like in Canada or the UK? You may want to take another look at the situation... Bespoke healthcare is fairly common in the UK, and countless Canadians cross the border into the US for their medical needs.
It's cheap when you get taxpayer subsidies to build it.
Cost-shifting isn't cost-reduction.
The difference is bottom up local government, where comcast and others have to subvert thousands of municipalities
Right, because there's no way a Comcast or Verizon could subvert thousands of municipalities.
You understand that before you were likely born Verizon, Comcast, and dozens of other cable companies and telcos got their local monopolies willingly given to them by "thousands of municipalities"...
What a fantastic idea! All he is proposing is entering a regulated business (becoming your own "Internet Service Provider"), and simply ignoring the existing regulations! It's amazing how many brilliant ideas these Internet Wunder-kind come up with that have as a basic part of their business plan the simple disregard/ignoring of any applicable regulation.
So the plan is to exploit a non-existent "public backbone", erect your own wireless towers and maybe even lay cable along the right-of-way? I can't imagine anything standing in their way. /sarcasm
there's a really fucked up financial incentive for them in pretending that college tuition actually costs $40,000 per year.
And still, every year thousands upon thousands of college students go deeper and deeper into debt to cover that $40K tuition bill that grad students get for free. If any other employer handed low-paid employees something worth $40K every year, they low-paid employee would be expected to pay taxes on that thing, why are grad students exempt?
Since when is declining to make someone pay for a service the same as giving them income?
Except grad students provide skilled labor in exchange for their tuition, labor that has value in the market place.
If Oprah gives you a car, you owe taxes on the car.
If your employer gives you a shoe box full of $20 bills, you owe taxes on the shoebox full of $20s.
If your employer gives you a car (to keep, take title on and own), you owe taxes on the car.
If your employer is a university, and that university gives you a year's tuition in exchange for you teaching a few classes/semester, you owe taxes on the waived tuition.
You do understand that grad students sign a contract accepting the free tuition as compensation for their labor, it isn't a unilateral agreement imposed on grad students arbitrarily by the university - it is sought out and coveted by the grad students who willingly agree to the terms of the contract.
And you need to enforce it.
We have a mechanism for that, called the IRS.
And you need to collect it.
See above.
And you need to track it.
See above.
And in the end, they'll just change it to a volunteer position and an award instead of a degree, and they'll easily dodge the tax definition.
Until the "award" now has a defined value in the marketplace, which it will as soon as employers treat them as equal to a degree from the same institution.
Blood from a stone is really easy to do, but you don't get very much blood, and you're not left with much of a stone.
The issue is that universities sit on millions if not billions of dollars in endowments, pay no taxes, and hand out $50K tuition wavers in exchange for labor they would otherwise have to pay a market salary for.
So what's the point?
If this were done by any other employer it would incur a tax bill for the employee on the receiving end of this benefit. The grad student is exchanging their effort for a year's tuition, something that has a tangible value in the marketplace, as evidenced by the number of their peers that take out massive student loans to pay for the same tuition bill.
College Credits and Degrees are the products offered by colleges and universities, they have defined values and costs. If an auto maker pays line assembly workers minimum wage, but after 12 months hands them a $40K car, wouldn't the auto worker owe taxes not only on the minimum wage earnings but also the $40K car? When a grad student works for minimum wage but also gets a $40K tuition wavier, why doesn't the grad student owe taxes on the value of the tuition wavier?
The answer is that grad students be paid a salary that covers their tuition, then pay their tuition from those earnings, and the amount of their earnings should be deductible, netting the grad student compensation equal to the value of the deduction:
Earn $50K salary as a grad student
Pay university $40K for tuition
Pay taxes on $50 in earnings, less $40K in deductible education expenses, netting the grad student a bit more than $10K in income for the year - except, of course, college tuition isn't deductible after the first $4,000...
Grad students don't get tuition waivers "given" to them. They earn them as RA's and TA's and work their asses off.
And they get a $50,000 benefit that other students pay $50,000 for - a years tuition at a graduate school like MIT.
This is a tax hike on people making minimum wage.
Uhm, no. Minimum wage is $7.45/hr (give or take), and once you factor in the value of their tuition waver, $50,000, in order for graduate students to be considered working at the minimum wage would have them doing 6,711 hours/year ($50K/$7.45), heck, if they were paid the so-called living wage of $15/hr that would still have them toiling away 3,333 hours/year. Are you claiming that grad students work 60-120 hours/week?
Grad Students want to pretend their tuition has no value, until they enter the workplace after graduation - this proposed change eliminates that fantasy.
Imagine an engineer at Tesla receives a low salary (stipend), but after 12 months of service gets a new $100K Tesla, and will continue to get an additional $100K Tesla for each additional year they remain at Tesla - doesn't the engineer owe taxes on the "free" Tesla? Why shouldn't the grad student who gets a "free" year of grad school ($50K tuition) owe taxes on that form of compensation?
The answer is that Universities, with their huge endowments, have given away "free" tuition in exchange for the grad student's labor - grad students should be paid a wage that covers their tuition expense, then the tax issue takes care of itself.
"My peers and I work between 40 and 80 hours a week as classroom teachers and laboratory researchers, and in return, our universities provide us with a tuition waiver for school. For M.I.T. students, this waiver keeps us from having to pay a tuition bill of about $50,000 every year -- a staggering amount, but one that is similar to the fees at many other colleges and universities," he writes. "No money from the tuition waivers actually ends up in our pockets, so under Section 117(d)(5), it isn't counted as taxable income." Rousseau continues by saying his tuition waivers will be taxed under the House's tax bill.
Yet, at the end of a few years they end up with something others have spent a quarter-million dollars to buy, a graduate degree from MIT, which has value (otherwise why would graduate students take on the work?).
However, when the university receives $50k in tuition, it pays tax on that revenue to the government.
No, they don't - colleges and universities are, almost exclusively non-profit, tax-exempt organizations. The federal gov't is trying very hard to shut down tax-paying private for-profit universities.
I've worked out a deal with Tesla, wherein I will work in the Tesla plant assembling cars for 9 months, in exchange for a brand new, $100K Tesla automobile... Should I pay taxes on that $100K Tesla?
That's exactly what universities are doing with graduate students, but somehow their graduate school tuition is tax-exempt.
Are the two really that different?
The issue isn't the value of the waived tuition, it's the low compensation the schools pay the graduate students.
I read something a bit ago that claimed AMC wanted to pull out of their relationship with moviePass
If the stories here are to be believed, MoviePass pays full price for movie tickets - if that's the case, why would any theater ever want to back out of this deal?
Because the stories here are wrong, moviepass does not pay full price for tickets.
The theater gives a significant portion of ticket revenue to the film distributor, and the theater owner keeps the bulk of the concession revenue.
By sacrificing box office revenue, the theater will pocket greater revenue from concession sales.
As a theater owner why wouldn't I do this?
As a movie distributor I would hate this, if anyone forces this to end it will be the distributors.
vastly improve passenger and freight transportation.
freight? - there must be a better, more cost-effective way to move freight across India, rather than a hyperloop...