"I've worked for a number of companies who did the "we pay less but we're such a great place to work!" thing. Someday I'd like to at least visit a "we pay lots but it sucks to work here" company, just to see what it's like."
I've always found that the former was a lie, and the latter doesn't exist.
Companies that pay lots are wealthy enough to do so, and they're wealthy enough to do so because they're well run, and they don't suck to work at because they're well run. An effective workforce is a happy workforce, so if you can make your workforce happy your company is going to do better than one that pisses their employees off and this is why those that pay better often also don't suck to work at whilst those who pay less do, whatever they like to claim.
"Dude, Firefox has worked as well as it always has. Just because its not your cup of tea doesn't make it crappy."
I think the GP was referring to the fact that Firefox has seen a decline in marketshare in recent years, it not being his cup of tea may not make it crappy, but it actually being crappy is why people have flocked away from it to Chrome.
Yeah great, buy a PS4 and end up with a console that has less and less features the longer you own it, where the company denies you replacement if it develops a fault because that'd make them red faced after they made such a fuss about RROD, where your personal details are spread far and wide across the net by inept security practices and where you're treated like you should be grateful for being allowed to have a PS4 rather than as a customer.
Seriously, the fact you've claimed how good you think the PS4 will be in every post so far on this thread (despite the fact Sony hasn't even given enough information to know how they may or may not fuck you yet) shows you're just a Sony fanboy. Fuck off already, we saw that tactic a million times over last time, it's not new, it's not clever, and we don't care.
We will however laugh in your face after you spend 2 years spending every waking moment supporting your beloved Sony only for them to turn around and fuck you over, because that's what happened last time, and that's what we did last time.
But they'd have to actually create an emulator, something which when they did it on the 360 for the XBox One turned out to be quite a development and PR headache (as things didn't run quite as expected in the real world).
Also, Microsoft has axed XNA, so I wouldn't count on XNA support being available on the new console.
You don't need to be connected to Live to play games you bought on Live Arcade, the licenses are stored on your local system so even if they just shut down the live servers you could carry on playing.
I agree with you about duplicate games on both systems though, I certainly wouldn't pay again for any live arcade titles I wanted on the other system, but then even if I did get an XBox One I'd keep my 360 anyway because of the lack of backwards compat.
So why did you say you'd go for a PS4? Do you seriously think the publishers if they're going to go the Sim City route of needing "cloud processing" that they'll somehow skip that on the PS4?
I'm not happy with the XBox one unveil because of the crap about publishers being able to charge a fee for second hand games - for me, someone with two consoles because my partner likes to play at the same time as me too that usually means that it's going to be tied to my account meaning she can't play it on her account when I'm using mine in a different room.
That doesn't mean I'll get a PS4 though as I also have a PS3 and whilst I enjoy some of the exclusives on it like the Uncharted and the LBP series and find it makes a decent Bluray player it can be frustrating to use sometimes given that it seems to constantly need updating and when it does the updates are large and slow compared to the 360. Given the PS4's lacklustre unveil too (arguably worse than the XBox one's) given that it seems to be even more of the same than the new XBox is I think most realistically right now I'll get neither unless one offers some compelling looking games or something.
I don't think anyone is taking issue with your annoyance at the way things are going, but if you scream "I'm going to get a PS4 instead!" as if it's some magical panacea that doesn't have the same and arguably worse flaws than the XBox One then it just makes you sound like a fanboy. At least both seem way better than the WiiU but I'm baffled as to why both Sony and Microsoft seem to think it's a good idea to announce features that are anti-consumer, it's as if they've forgotten who the customer is and believe it's the publisher, not the gamer.
"As any business, their primary objective is to line their own and their investor's coffers."
This is stupid, whilst it may be true in the majority of cases it's not true in all cases. As much as it may upset your cynical world view there are ethical companies out there and it largely depends on who is running those companies.
Born and bred sociopathic business types like Larry Ellison and Steve Ballmer may not give a damn about anything but profit, and hell, it may even be true of Schmidt but counter-balancing that are people like Sergey Brin who was bought up under the USSR's surveillance state before his parents fled to the US with him and hence has an inherent distaste for this sort of thing.
If you think there aren't ethical people in positions of power or even outright running some businesses then you're just a bitter sad individual pissed off that they've been more successful in life than you and just want at least something to try and make yourself feel superior than them with. It's pathetic.
The problem is that even if they take it elsewhere in Europe they'll likely get taxed on it, especially as Europe now has a financial transactions tax they can't even shift it using some underhanded financial mechanism.
All they can do to retain the full amount is spend it where it is, but what can you spend $102bn on in countries like Ireland and other small tax havens that will make the money back in a reasonable timeframe? Even if they built a new chip fabrication plant there it'd probably take a decade or more to pay for itself especially as the workers in Ireland are guaranteed minimum wages and so forth.
As I said to the other poster, more than likely Apple is just desperately hoping it'll be successful in it's lobbying attempts to get a tax holiday on bringing cash into the US, but until/if that ever happens it's just sat doing nothing. I suspect it will never happen for reasons I cited in another post - if the US allows Apple et. al. to bring money into the US that they haven't paid the intended taxes on overseas it'll trigger a tradewar. Europe/India/China et. al. will likely slap their own tax on it to make a point.
No it's not, not if you can't do anything with it.
The shareholders are much better off with say $47bn using one of the accounts bought into the US and losing $17bn in tax but ending up with $30bn of usable cash than they are keeping it as $47bn unusable cash.
Do you seriously think that the shareholders would prefer useless cash sitting idle over a $30bn dividend windfall, share buyback so they can cash out or see their shares increase, or investment at the companies main HQ?
The only thing they can do with it is spend it where it's sat, in a tax haven like Ireland, the Cayman Islands or whatever but these countries have nothing to offer it that you can spend $30bn on so it'd just be throwing money away just because it's there which is worse than having it sat in a bank doing nothing.
I don't think you understand the fact that this isn't "say in Apple's account", it's sat in the account of a shell company and they can't use it without bringing it into a country and paying tax on it, the reason they're not is that they hope one day through political lobbying they'll be able to get a free pass on importing it without tax.
"Apple spends comparatively little on lobbying, even by tech standards."
How do you know? I mean, it sounds like you're stating fact here, but I suspect you're actually just speculating.
Do you know exactly how much Apple spends on lobbying or are you just taking a wild guess based on something arbitrary such as "I've not heard much about Apple lobbying in the news"?
That doesn't make sense, absolute values are meaningless in that context.
If a company like Valve is producing more profit per member of staff for example which I believe they were for some time, then it's far better to have 7 Valve like companies paying "only" $1bn in tax than it is to have one Apple paying $6bn.
$6bn makes a good headline figure but if Apple is consuming a disproportionate amount of talent stemming from state sponsored resources, or using state sponsored resources in general less efficiently then it's not a good thing.
There's too many other factors to take into account to get a real measure of the net benefit to society of a company, but for example Apple has also been implicated as a major player in eBook price fixing - that has a net negative impact on society in reducing availability of knowledge and reducing the ability of other firms to compete, that results a necessary reduction in the evaluation of their worth.
If Apple paid $6bn on $20bn of profit then the tax payer did indeed get a really good ROI, but that's not what happened. They paid $6bn on $102bn in profit and carried out actions (patent wars, eBook price fixing) over the same period that amongst other things quite arguably wiped out the $6bn they gave to society in terms of the cost to other companies and the economy in general. In that case the tax payer most definitely did not get a good deal and 5 smaller companies making 1/5th of Apple's profits over the period and not carrying out actions detrimental to society or the economy despite giving smaller figures each to society would have been massively more beneficial to society.
It's about the fact that if the US did that, then it would be acting in the same was as countries like Luxembourg that provide little of actual worth to the world but retain a highly wealthy existence by acting as a tax haven.
If a major economy like the US did that it would trigger a massive trade war, the EU, Russia, China, India and so forth would be perfectly justified in slapping massive tariffs on money transfers to the US. You can't reasonably have a situation where US companies avoid paying tax overseas using loopholes to effectively smuggle billions on which corporation tax should've been paid into the US and then have the US government just assist them in that. That's just asking for international retaliation and retaliation that would result in a trade war is in absolutely no ones interest, especially not for the sake of just doing a few US companies a favour.
Whilst it's only being done to a limited degree by small countries not much has historically been said, but if somewhere like the US turns itself into a tax haven it'll just trigger a race to the bottom and guess what? Countries like China and India will win because so much of their population are used to living in poverty so reduced corporate tax take is of lesser consequence to them, it's not nice, but they could handle it. In contrast see how it works when your average American has their Western life style obliterated as the US government finds itself reducing corporate tax take to nothing to try and compete in such a trade war.
The proposed one time tax holiday was blocked with good reason, it would've caused way more political and trade trouble for the US than bringing that money into their economy would have ever been close to being worth.
If he is then fine - mod the post he trolled in troll, but the particular post in response to me was absolutely not a troll. It was reasoned and decently written so like it or not that post was not deserving of a troll mod.
You can call it "kissing his ass" if you want but it's far better to encourage posts that are reasoned by not modding them troll and mod ones that are trolling troll rather than just arbitrarily mod any post troll otherwise what incentive has he got to do anything other than troll if he's going to get modded that way regardless?
This is the problem with Slashdot, it's mob justice with no rationality, people mod politically and when it goes down that route there's no point having any intelligent or insightful debate, you might as well just troll and troll because no matter how you behave you'll get modded the same by politically motivated fuckwads.
All that does is reduce the tax revenue from smaller and more responsible companies who can't afford to/don't want to avoid paying the taxes they're expected to pay.
So sure you may get a $10bn tax windfall from the large companies, but you'll lose $30bn from all the other companies that pay the normal corporation tax rate without a fuss as they're only then expected to pay less.
Even then you assume companies like Apple, Google, Amazon etc. wont just then find other excuses not to pay that lower amount which really isn't a given.
"If it is legal, and apple DIDN'T do it, then they are not doing what is in the best interest of their sharheolders."
Wrong. This is not in the interests of the shareholders. It's money held off shore that is not being used for any beneficial purpose. It does not aid the goals of the shareholder which is to make money themselves. The money isn't making the company grow in value (Apple's value has decreased by about $300bn) and it isn't being paid as dividends.
There's literally no benefit to the shareholders in all this money being held off shore doing nothing. Bringing it back, paying the tax and distributing the remaining money amongst shareholders or alternatively using it to fund expansion and increasing value of the companies stock price would benefit the shareholders, but this does not.
It's really in no one's interest (apart from the tax havens themselves), it's not promoting growth, it's not being given to the shareholders, it's not even being given to government or charity so that they can put it to good use. It doesn't even make Apple look like a more cash-rich company than it is because everyone can see through that veil - that it's no use having cash that's completely unusable so even that doesn't work now.
It really is little more than Tim Cook's ego pile.
I don't think that saying means what you think it means. If you interpret it literally rather than recognise it for what it is - a phrase intended sarcastically, then you're bound to come out with the wrong interpretation.
Depending on where you're from you may file your mistake under either cultural differences in phrases or alternatively just plain ignorance.
So they can have someone murdered and frame a guy for it, they can have a house burnt down, but they can't figure out how to legally seize the property?
The day that Slashdot finally became a gossip mag has arrived.
Tomorrow on Slashdot we interview Britney Spears about her new tits and on Wednesday we'll have an interview with Taylor Swift about how many times she feels she's been shafted by her boyfriends.
Really, McAfee is the best celebrity you can get Slashdot? He's not even had anything to do with tech for what, 20 years?
Honestly I think more than anything it's because extreme views are also populist.
For example, it's easy to get the long term unemployed poorly educated lazy angry guy on side by telling him it's all because of the immigrants and how you're going to start blocking all immigrants because he wants someone to blame for his predicament other than himself. This doesn't mean it's actually because of immigrants in practice though, the chances are if you get rid of all immigrants altogether he'll still be a poorly educated lazy angry guy and employers will still find little use for him. The solution is to educate him and do away with his laziness by giving him something to strive for, but it takes too long to educate him and get him on side by making him a clever self-motivated individual compared to just feeding him quick sound bites about immigrants.
When you have a two party system it's just natural that each is going to tend towards their populist ideas because it turns into a race to the bottom - when the Tories decide to leap to the anti-immigration populist ideal Labour need to respond, so they start up the whole class issue or whatever - "don't vote Tory, they're all rich toffs and aren't interested in you!"
But I think Europe is where it's been most amusingly/tragically (pick one) illustrated over the years. David Cameron for example has long (and I mean long - way before he was PM) used the EU as a scapegoat, saying it's a cause of the countries problems and so on, it made it easy for him to get votes when he wasn't PM - he could use the populist idea that Europe was a problem and stir up support by (ab)using that scapegoat. The problem is he then became PM, and had to reconcile what he'd said in the past, with the reality that he knows deep down that Europe is essential to the UK's economic health, hence why he went from attacking Europe pre-PM to being reluctant to make any kind of move on it whilst PM, only, somewhere along the line it turns out his party is still full of people who swallow the populist tosh themselves. Ooops.
Like you say, modern news cycles are a lot to do with it, but I don't think it's ever been much different, I think populism is always where things inevitably descend to, this is why politicians have a reputation as liars - because they do lie, they tell populist lies that they don't even believe themselves to get votes, then when they get in they have to try and disassociate with the populist lies they made up to get in because actually going through with them is untenable. You only have to look at the US' largely two party system and the almost comical political fud you get on the likes of Fox news to see quite how bad things can get when it turns too badly into a populist quagmire of ignorance - think, "Obama isn't an American and has a fake birth certificate" and other such stuff which is a clear play on the idea that Obama is black and has a non Christian name and so can't be American, because that's exactly the sort of deep down racism amongst the ignorant that they're playing on.
That's okay, you don't have to believe it, I could frankly care less what you want to believe. What you believe is really of no consequence to me. However, the fact a few people have pointed it out individually (Basil Brush has me as a foe by the way, because we rarely agree on anything so I didn't exactly make the post I did in a show of brotherly kinship or something) should give you a hint that just because you refuse to believe it doesn't mean it doesn't happen. I really have better things to do than spend hours scouring for old posts which I can barely even remember the month it happened let alone the day, but it doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
Frankly though this attitude of yours highlights the problem to a degree - the people who have posted about it you've jumped on and tried to suppress the idea with "pics or it didn't happen" - the fact there are people like you who will refuse to acknowledge fault in their beloved clique is exactly why such fault in their beloved clique exists in the first place, because any asshole in the clique can be an asshole and they know they can count on people like you to flock to their defence, even when they're in the wrong. It's this sort of zealotry that enables the problem to exist.
I noticed in another post you mentioned you'd never seen that attitude towards beginners, but it's not simply about beginners, in fact, on the contrary in the examples I cited, what we had were experienced developers (outside of FOSS) offering suggestions or asking questions and being belittled over it with the net result being that, particularly in the PHP example that comes to mind, you had someone who clearly knew what they were on about being attacked by a bunch of devs that didn't, but because said devs were the oh-so-great (Hah!) developers of PHP and the other guy was some nameless person they were obviously correct and this highlights the sort of issue you've quoted, you get these cliques who assume they're the best in their fields, and when someone comes along who apparently knows better than them they get shot down because the clique can't deal with accepting honest well phrased constructive criticism and offers of help to fix said issues from someone outside the clique. It's too much of a dent to their overblown egos.
You most definitely see the issue with UX suggestions too (though I wont pretend it's a FOSS specific issue), there's often massive hostility from programmers to being told by artsy types how they should design parts of their application. I've even some outright say the UX should be kept complicated to keep "noobs" away from Linux and such, but how do you balance that with the same folks also wanting Linux to kill Windows and take over the desktop? They can't have it both ways.
"Did you see what you did there? Is "gun violence" somehow more criminal, cruel, or notable than any other kind of violence?"
Yes, it's more notable, because it has a higher fatality rate.
It's a factor in the US' disproportionately high homicide rate relative to other comparable countries. Brazil and South Africa have high levels of gun violence and also have higher levels of homicides as a result.
It's perfectly possible for violent crime to decrease, gun crime to increase and homicide rates to increase. How you feel about that I guess depends on how you rate being injured against being outright killed I suppose. Is it better to be more likely to be injured and less likely to be killed, or more likely to be killed but less likely to be injured? I'll let you decide that.
Slashdot Mirror
"I've worked for a number of companies who did the "we pay less but we're such a great place to work!" thing. Someday I'd like to at least visit a "we pay lots but it sucks to work here" company, just to see what it's like."
I've always found that the former was a lie, and the latter doesn't exist.
Companies that pay lots are wealthy enough to do so, and they're wealthy enough to do so because they're well run, and they don't suck to work at because they're well run. An effective workforce is a happy workforce, so if you can make your workforce happy your company is going to do better than one that pisses their employees off and this is why those that pay better often also don't suck to work at whilst those who pay less do, whatever they like to claim.
"Dude, Firefox has worked as well as it always has. Just because its not your cup of tea doesn't make it crappy."
I think the GP was referring to the fact that Firefox has seen a decline in marketshare in recent years, it not being his cup of tea may not make it crappy, but it actually being crappy is why people have flocked away from it to Chrome.
If free sodas and not having free sodas is the difference between a measurable impact in morale at your company then you have bigger problems.
Yeah great, buy a PS4 and end up with a console that has less and less features the longer you own it, where the company denies you replacement if it develops a fault because that'd make them red faced after they made such a fuss about RROD, where your personal details are spread far and wide across the net by inept security practices and where you're treated like you should be grateful for being allowed to have a PS4 rather than as a customer.
Seriously, the fact you've claimed how good you think the PS4 will be in every post so far on this thread (despite the fact Sony hasn't even given enough information to know how they may or may not fuck you yet) shows you're just a Sony fanboy. Fuck off already, we saw that tactic a million times over last time, it's not new, it's not clever, and we don't care.
We will however laugh in your face after you spend 2 years spending every waking moment supporting your beloved Sony only for them to turn around and fuck you over, because that's what happened last time, and that's what we did last time.
But they'd have to actually create an emulator, something which when they did it on the 360 for the XBox One turned out to be quite a development and PR headache (as things didn't run quite as expected in the real world).
Also, Microsoft has axed XNA, so I wouldn't count on XNA support being available on the new console.
You don't need to be connected to Live to play games you bought on Live Arcade, the licenses are stored on your local system so even if they just shut down the live servers you could carry on playing.
I agree with you about duplicate games on both systems though, I certainly wouldn't pay again for any live arcade titles I wanted on the other system, but then even if I did get an XBox One I'd keep my 360 anyway because of the lack of backwards compat.
So why did you say you'd go for a PS4? Do you seriously think the publishers if they're going to go the Sim City route of needing "cloud processing" that they'll somehow skip that on the PS4?
I'm not happy with the XBox one unveil because of the crap about publishers being able to charge a fee for second hand games - for me, someone with two consoles because my partner likes to play at the same time as me too that usually means that it's going to be tied to my account meaning she can't play it on her account when I'm using mine in a different room.
That doesn't mean I'll get a PS4 though as I also have a PS3 and whilst I enjoy some of the exclusives on it like the Uncharted and the LBP series and find it makes a decent Bluray player it can be frustrating to use sometimes given that it seems to constantly need updating and when it does the updates are large and slow compared to the 360. Given the PS4's lacklustre unveil too (arguably worse than the XBox one's) given that it seems to be even more of the same than the new XBox is I think most realistically right now I'll get neither unless one offers some compelling looking games or something.
I don't think anyone is taking issue with your annoyance at the way things are going, but if you scream "I'm going to get a PS4 instead!" as if it's some magical panacea that doesn't have the same and arguably worse flaws than the XBox One then it just makes you sound like a fanboy. At least both seem way better than the WiiU but I'm baffled as to why both Sony and Microsoft seem to think it's a good idea to announce features that are anti-consumer, it's as if they've forgotten who the customer is and believe it's the publisher, not the gamer.
"As any business, their primary objective is to line their own and their investor's coffers."
This is stupid, whilst it may be true in the majority of cases it's not true in all cases. As much as it may upset your cynical world view there are ethical companies out there and it largely depends on who is running those companies.
Born and bred sociopathic business types like Larry Ellison and Steve Ballmer may not give a damn about anything but profit, and hell, it may even be true of Schmidt but counter-balancing that are people like Sergey Brin who was bought up under the USSR's surveillance state before his parents fled to the US with him and hence has an inherent distaste for this sort of thing.
If you think there aren't ethical people in positions of power or even outright running some businesses then you're just a bitter sad individual pissed off that they've been more successful in life than you and just want at least something to try and make yourself feel superior than them with. It's pathetic.
The problem is that even if they take it elsewhere in Europe they'll likely get taxed on it, especially as Europe now has a financial transactions tax they can't even shift it using some underhanded financial mechanism.
All they can do to retain the full amount is spend it where it is, but what can you spend $102bn on in countries like Ireland and other small tax havens that will make the money back in a reasonable timeframe? Even if they built a new chip fabrication plant there it'd probably take a decade or more to pay for itself especially as the workers in Ireland are guaranteed minimum wages and so forth.
As I said to the other poster, more than likely Apple is just desperately hoping it'll be successful in it's lobbying attempts to get a tax holiday on bringing cash into the US, but until/if that ever happens it's just sat doing nothing. I suspect it will never happen for reasons I cited in another post - if the US allows Apple et. al. to bring money into the US that they haven't paid the intended taxes on overseas it'll trigger a tradewar. Europe/India/China et. al. will likely slap their own tax on it to make a point.
No it's not, not if you can't do anything with it.
The shareholders are much better off with say $47bn using one of the accounts bought into the US and losing $17bn in tax but ending up with $30bn of usable cash than they are keeping it as $47bn unusable cash.
Do you seriously think that the shareholders would prefer useless cash sitting idle over a $30bn dividend windfall, share buyback so they can cash out or see their shares increase, or investment at the companies main HQ?
The only thing they can do with it is spend it where it's sat, in a tax haven like Ireland, the Cayman Islands or whatever but these countries have nothing to offer it that you can spend $30bn on so it'd just be throwing money away just because it's there which is worse than having it sat in a bank doing nothing.
I don't think you understand the fact that this isn't "say in Apple's account", it's sat in the account of a shell company and they can't use it without bringing it into a country and paying tax on it, the reason they're not is that they hope one day through political lobbying they'll be able to get a free pass on importing it without tax.
"Apple spends comparatively little on lobbying, even by tech standards."
How do you know? I mean, it sounds like you're stating fact here, but I suspect you're actually just speculating.
Do you know exactly how much Apple spends on lobbying or are you just taking a wild guess based on something arbitrary such as "I've not heard much about Apple lobbying in the news"?
That doesn't make sense, absolute values are meaningless in that context.
If a company like Valve is producing more profit per member of staff for example which I believe they were for some time, then it's far better to have 7 Valve like companies paying "only" $1bn in tax than it is to have one Apple paying $6bn.
$6bn makes a good headline figure but if Apple is consuming a disproportionate amount of talent stemming from state sponsored resources, or using state sponsored resources in general less efficiently then it's not a good thing.
There's too many other factors to take into account to get a real measure of the net benefit to society of a company, but for example Apple has also been implicated as a major player in eBook price fixing - that has a net negative impact on society in reducing availability of knowledge and reducing the ability of other firms to compete, that results a necessary reduction in the evaluation of their worth.
If Apple paid $6bn on $20bn of profit then the tax payer did indeed get a really good ROI, but that's not what happened. They paid $6bn on $102bn in profit and carried out actions (patent wars, eBook price fixing) over the same period that amongst other things quite arguably wiped out the $6bn they gave to society in terms of the cost to other companies and the economy in general. In that case the tax payer most definitely did not get a good deal and 5 smaller companies making 1/5th of Apple's profits over the period and not carrying out actions detrimental to society or the economy despite giving smaller figures each to society would have been massively more beneficial to society.
That's not what it's about.
It's about the fact that if the US did that, then it would be acting in the same was as countries like Luxembourg that provide little of actual worth to the world but retain a highly wealthy existence by acting as a tax haven.
If a major economy like the US did that it would trigger a massive trade war, the EU, Russia, China, India and so forth would be perfectly justified in slapping massive tariffs on money transfers to the US. You can't reasonably have a situation where US companies avoid paying tax overseas using loopholes to effectively smuggle billions on which corporation tax should've been paid into the US and then have the US government just assist them in that. That's just asking for international retaliation and retaliation that would result in a trade war is in absolutely no ones interest, especially not for the sake of just doing a few US companies a favour.
Whilst it's only being done to a limited degree by small countries not much has historically been said, but if somewhere like the US turns itself into a tax haven it'll just trigger a race to the bottom and guess what? Countries like China and India will win because so much of their population are used to living in poverty so reduced corporate tax take is of lesser consequence to them, it's not nice, but they could handle it. In contrast see how it works when your average American has their Western life style obliterated as the US government finds itself reducing corporate tax take to nothing to try and compete in such a trade war.
The proposed one time tax holiday was blocked with good reason, it would've caused way more political and trade trouble for the US than bringing that money into their economy would have ever been close to being worth.
If he is then fine - mod the post he trolled in troll, but the particular post in response to me was absolutely not a troll. It was reasoned and decently written so like it or not that post was not deserving of a troll mod.
You can call it "kissing his ass" if you want but it's far better to encourage posts that are reasoned by not modding them troll and mod ones that are trolling troll rather than just arbitrarily mod any post troll otherwise what incentive has he got to do anything other than troll if he's going to get modded that way regardless?
This is the problem with Slashdot, it's mob justice with no rationality, people mod politically and when it goes down that route there's no point having any intelligent or insightful debate, you might as well just troll and troll because no matter how you behave you'll get modded the same by politically motivated fuckwads.
All that does is reduce the tax revenue from smaller and more responsible companies who can't afford to/don't want to avoid paying the taxes they're expected to pay.
So sure you may get a $10bn tax windfall from the large companies, but you'll lose $30bn from all the other companies that pay the normal corporation tax rate without a fuss as they're only then expected to pay less.
Even then you assume companies like Apple, Google, Amazon etc. wont just then find other excuses not to pay that lower amount which really isn't a given.
"If it is legal, and apple DIDN'T do it, then they are not doing what is in the best interest of their sharheolders."
Wrong. This is not in the interests of the shareholders. It's money held off shore that is not being used for any beneficial purpose. It does not aid the goals of the shareholder which is to make money themselves. The money isn't making the company grow in value (Apple's value has decreased by about $300bn) and it isn't being paid as dividends.
There's literally no benefit to the shareholders in all this money being held off shore doing nothing. Bringing it back, paying the tax and distributing the remaining money amongst shareholders or alternatively using it to fund expansion and increasing value of the companies stock price would benefit the shareholders, but this does not.
It's really in no one's interest (apart from the tax havens themselves), it's not promoting growth, it's not being given to the shareholders, it's not even being given to government or charity so that they can put it to good use. It doesn't even make Apple look like a more cash-rich company than it is because everyone can see through that veil - that it's no use having cash that's completely unusable so even that doesn't work now.
It really is little more than Tim Cook's ego pile.
I don't think that saying means what you think it means. If you interpret it literally rather than recognise it for what it is - a phrase intended sarcastically, then you're bound to come out with the wrong interpretation.
Depending on where you're from you may file your mistake under either cultural differences in phrases or alternatively just plain ignorance.
Whoever modded you troll is a dick. It's a heated topic and whilst I don't agree with you 100% on it you stayed respectful and didn't deserve it.
Moderators who moderate politically need to die.
By:
a) Innovating
b) Not being Microsoft
So they can have someone murdered and frame a guy for it, they can have a house burnt down, but they can't figure out how to legally seize the property?
You're not the sharpest tool in the box are you?
The day that Slashdot finally became a gossip mag has arrived.
Tomorrow on Slashdot we interview Britney Spears about her new tits and on Wednesday we'll have an interview with Taylor Swift about how many times she feels she's been shafted by her boyfriends.
Really, McAfee is the best celebrity you can get Slashdot? He's not even had anything to do with tech for what, 20 years?
Honestly I think more than anything it's because extreme views are also populist.
For example, it's easy to get the long term unemployed poorly educated lazy angry guy on side by telling him it's all because of the immigrants and how you're going to start blocking all immigrants because he wants someone to blame for his predicament other than himself. This doesn't mean it's actually because of immigrants in practice though, the chances are if you get rid of all immigrants altogether he'll still be a poorly educated lazy angry guy and employers will still find little use for him. The solution is to educate him and do away with his laziness by giving him something to strive for, but it takes too long to educate him and get him on side by making him a clever self-motivated individual compared to just feeding him quick sound bites about immigrants.
When you have a two party system it's just natural that each is going to tend towards their populist ideas because it turns into a race to the bottom - when the Tories decide to leap to the anti-immigration populist ideal Labour need to respond, so they start up the whole class issue or whatever - "don't vote Tory, they're all rich toffs and aren't interested in you!"
But I think Europe is where it's been most amusingly/tragically (pick one) illustrated over the years. David Cameron for example has long (and I mean long - way before he was PM) used the EU as a scapegoat, saying it's a cause of the countries problems and so on, it made it easy for him to get votes when he wasn't PM - he could use the populist idea that Europe was a problem and stir up support by (ab)using that scapegoat. The problem is he then became PM, and had to reconcile what he'd said in the past, with the reality that he knows deep down that Europe is essential to the UK's economic health, hence why he went from attacking Europe pre-PM to being reluctant to make any kind of move on it whilst PM, only, somewhere along the line it turns out his party is still full of people who swallow the populist tosh themselves. Ooops.
Like you say, modern news cycles are a lot to do with it, but I don't think it's ever been much different, I think populism is always where things inevitably descend to, this is why politicians have a reputation as liars - because they do lie, they tell populist lies that they don't even believe themselves to get votes, then when they get in they have to try and disassociate with the populist lies they made up to get in because actually going through with them is untenable. You only have to look at the US' largely two party system and the almost comical political fud you get on the likes of Fox news to see quite how bad things can get when it turns too badly into a populist quagmire of ignorance - think, "Obama isn't an American and has a fake birth certificate" and other such stuff which is a clear play on the idea that Obama is black and has a non Christian name and so can't be American, because that's exactly the sort of deep down racism amongst the ignorant that they're playing on.
That's okay, you don't have to believe it, I could frankly care less what you want to believe. What you believe is really of no consequence to me. However, the fact a few people have pointed it out individually (Basil Brush has me as a foe by the way, because we rarely agree on anything so I didn't exactly make the post I did in a show of brotherly kinship or something) should give you a hint that just because you refuse to believe it doesn't mean it doesn't happen. I really have better things to do than spend hours scouring for old posts which I can barely even remember the month it happened let alone the day, but it doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
Frankly though this attitude of yours highlights the problem to a degree - the people who have posted about it you've jumped on and tried to suppress the idea with "pics or it didn't happen" - the fact there are people like you who will refuse to acknowledge fault in their beloved clique is exactly why such fault in their beloved clique exists in the first place, because any asshole in the clique can be an asshole and they know they can count on people like you to flock to their defence, even when they're in the wrong. It's this sort of zealotry that enables the problem to exist.
I noticed in another post you mentioned you'd never seen that attitude towards beginners, but it's not simply about beginners, in fact, on the contrary in the examples I cited, what we had were experienced developers (outside of FOSS) offering suggestions or asking questions and being belittled over it with the net result being that, particularly in the PHP example that comes to mind, you had someone who clearly knew what they were on about being attacked by a bunch of devs that didn't, but because said devs were the oh-so-great (Hah!) developers of PHP and the other guy was some nameless person they were obviously correct and this highlights the sort of issue you've quoted, you get these cliques who assume they're the best in their fields, and when someone comes along who apparently knows better than them they get shot down because the clique can't deal with accepting honest well phrased constructive criticism and offers of help to fix said issues from someone outside the clique. It's too much of a dent to their overblown egos.
You most definitely see the issue with UX suggestions too (though I wont pretend it's a FOSS specific issue), there's often massive hostility from programmers to being told by artsy types how they should design parts of their application. I've even some outright say the UX should be kept complicated to keep "noobs" away from Linux and such, but how do you balance that with the same folks also wanting Linux to kill Windows and take over the desktop? They can't have it both ways.
...and I've certainly seen it with PHP, Firefox, and MySQL.
"Did you see what you did there? Is "gun violence" somehow more criminal, cruel, or notable than any other kind of violence?"
Yes, it's more notable, because it has a higher fatality rate.
It's a factor in the US' disproportionately high homicide rate relative to other comparable countries. Brazil and South Africa have high levels of gun violence and also have higher levels of homicides as a result.
It's perfectly possible for violent crime to decrease, gun crime to increase and homicide rates to increase. How you feel about that I guess depends on how you rate being injured against being outright killed I suppose. Is it better to be more likely to be injured and less likely to be killed, or more likely to be killed but less likely to be injured? I'll let you decide that.