Japan is now moving the regulators to the environment to create more distance. See below on why that is imporant.
You are assuming that regulators can weigh the pros (cheap power) vs. the cons (rare events ) in a impartial manner. A weakness of regulation can be “Regulator Capture” where the interest of regulators and the industry align, thus diminishing true oversight..
For example, in Japan, the industrial ministry regulated nuclear power. The ministry pushed nuclear because industry needed cheap power. Bureaucrats graduated from low paying public jobs to higher paying industry jobs. Regulating a technical industry requires hiring technical people, which means hiring from the industry that they are regulating – and of course those people tend of have confidence in the system that they built.
10 years ago I knew a couple who owned the campus books of a small state university, and boy did they make a mint off of it. Lake house, lots of expensive toys, etc.
It won’t help Indian textbook authors – it helps booksellers and publishers (i.e. the people who actually own and run the printing press) who print Indian textbooks. (who may not be actually located in India.)
The books are written by whoever – American, British, Indian – take your pick. The books are then sold for a cut rate in India and then exported to the U.S. Basically Indian is just a way point.
What I think the original poster was trying to point out was that the book publisher was trying to be moral / a good corporate citizen by offering poor students cheap books. (Or one could take the flip view that their being evil by price gouging students in rich countries, but either way you look at it – same net effect.)
This, of course, makes lots of assumptions. That they can control the flow of goods in a global age. (Which is what the court case is about.) That students in underdeveloped countries are poor. Etc.
If the defendant wins (Which I hope he does) it may have the unintended consequence higher textbook prices in poor countries. Which I think is an indictment on the system, and it should be changed, but not by blocking the sale of international textbooks.
I work in a large financial institution. (Not banking, but close enough. And thankfully we tend to be conservative so the crisis did not hit us semi-hard) As for book recommendations, sure! What books would you recommend?
I would recommend “Reading About the Financial Crisis: A 21-Book Review” at http://www.argentumlux.org/ It’s good. I have read the majority of books on the list and I enjoyed Dr. Lo's review.
And what do you mean by:
Look at banking. The ethical behavior expected of a teller in a branch is a lot more carefully controlled than that of the CEO. If you doubt it, there have been a number of very good books and documentaries about the financial cataclysm of 2007-2008.
There is fraud – which is what we are talking about. That’s one thing and ti’s easy to define. Teller pockets a couple of hundred dollars and that’s theft. In the recent economic crisis I can think of very little fraud that went on – on most of that was secondary to the overall issues.
Then we have CEO’s making large bets with other peoples money. In the case of finance it’s what their paid to do. Kind of sad that the incentives were wrong (Heads we win (CEO and stockholder), tails you loose (stockholder)). And yes, the work they did was sloppy. It is one thing to take high risk, by sloppy, and fail. That poor management, so kick the bums out and all of that. (and I think a lot more people should have been tossed.) It’s another thing to accuse people of felonies.
I know in times of crisis that people like looking for scapegoats and snap judgments, but please – this is Slashdot. Let us have some reasoned discourse here.
This does not reflect well on my company, but it’s was the bank she was depositing the funds in that figured it out. Normally I have a low regard for anti-money laundering techniques that the banks use, but it worked here.
In my experience, as you move up the chain of command, any formalized controls become more stringent – not less. In my case, every level I move up in the company I have to disclose more, with the CEO having to disclose the most.
On the other hand, I have found misalignment increases. CEO’s don’t (normally) need to commit outright fraud – there is a host of grey areas to exploit.
The corporate jet is a classic example. It helps the CEO meet with clients, survey the business, saves time, etc. All of time & money will be well disclosed in the annual reports. If the CEO uses it for personal reasons, he has to pay it out of pocket. So everything is above board. Yet, who do a disproportionate number of CEO schedule official trips to Aspin during skiing season and during the summer?
It’s one of odd things – how do you monitor employees without draconian controls? I think the trust of these programs is not that they can detect fraud per say, but rather they can identify people and situations which generate extra temptation. It does not matter how well you treat your employees, if somebody develops a gambling addiction (see below) it does not matter how well you pay them.
In this case they are talking about detecting fraud with people who have level access to the books – think rouge trades and embezzling employers. However, from the article fraud comes from “incentive, rationalisation and opportunity”. You try to hire competent, well paid staff and put in controls. However, eventually you hit limits.
From personal experience, I know of a case in my company where a mid level middle age employee who had been with the company for over 20 years developed a gambling addiction. Over the course of 18 months she embezzled over $200,000 from the company via hundreds of transactions. She had been around long enough to know that the individual small amounts would never trigger a review
If the only place that this lawsuit is being discussed is in the niche locations like Slashdot, as Honeywell, I would not worry too much about the Streisand effect. I know that the vast majority of my customers will look at the rack in the hardware store and pick something familiar. Not much of a backfire here.
I agree. To elaborate. From the article: “Home working also allows women to combine their traditional roles of homemaker and mother, with being an entrepreneur.”
It’s not unusual for women to run business – but I find this sentence telling. There is a difference between starting a good solid small business and a start up.
The first is basically about creating a job for yourself. It may be a restaurant, day care, or a small professional business (lawyer, hair stylist, whatever ) but it’s about creating a job for yourself that lets you manage your life/work balance.
The second is about putting in long hours for months at a time to hit that grand slam.
This is, of course, a continuum between the two. I am just surprised that the submitter and article is pitching it this way. Are these woman truly liberality if they are forced into the shallow end of the pool? Small, home businesses are great, but it’s the lower end of the entrepreneurial market.
If you tell the manager that 1. You have reviewed the terms of the social media site and 2. They donâ(TM)t allow astroturfing (find a better phrase) and 3. You are concerned about the companyâ(TM)s reputation, so 4. Thank you but no
You are not threating them. You not saying that you are going to term them in and that in fact you are a team player.
If the employer has any sense of ethics you will be fine.
As a side note, something like this happened to me. It was not astroturfing, but the manager was trying to push a idea that was very very grey. Half a year later when there was a reorg I was kicked out. In the end it all turned out well, butâ¦.
Technically “petroleum products by value” – and that’s important.
First, the US has a lot of refiners. Low cost Nigerian crude oil is shipped to the US, we ship higher cost gasoline, etc. back to Nigeria.
Second, thanks to fracking, we have a lot of natural gas. And we export a lot of that – either directly or indirectly (like Propane, Petrochemical Feedstocks)
The market for audio books is small compared to printed books or movies. Hiring good talent to make decent audio books is higher than you expect (And this is something that you want – I listened to some pretty bad audio books in my life.) So you have higher fixed costs per unit sold – have to make up the difference someway.
It’s one of the reasons why I get most of my audio books via the library.
What is (alleged) to be happening is that Store A (Apple) sees that Store B (Amazon) is getting a better price, so they pressure the publisher to raise the price they sell to Store B (Amazon). The publishers are happy to follow Apple’s lead and crank up the price for everybody.
What you really want to do is study the structure of the market. The buyer, seller, and the middle man gains in a transaction – If they didn’t then there would be no transaction. However, the next question is how the gains are split. Does 80% of the gains towards the seller or only 20%. The lawsuit alleges that Apple et.al. restructured the marketplace so more gains would roll towards the Publishers (and thus indirectly hitting Apple’s competitor - Amazon)
Yeah, but if I understand correctly, you got rid of all of your Police Boxes back in the 70’s. It would seem the loss of that particular technology is more important then zoning laws. Or was that just London? Does Cardif still have them?
I think you missed my past tense usage. In the past, the amount of income tax you paid was public. Your right that today it’s private.
I thought that this data was still published when the income tax was reintroduced in the 1940s. I am not so sure about that. On the other hand, when the Income Tax was first introduced in the in 1860’s is was public – just like property tax. NPR’s plant money had a nice little story on this.
They will give you a refund. (with some and, if's and but's in that sentence.)
I seen a lot of polite letters from the IRS saying they found a mistake the in tax return, and
1. Here is your refund or
2. You underpaid, Please send in the differance plus intrest and (sometimes) penalty.
I would love that. Right now the company I work for uses a “conservative” interpretation of the tax code. With this would could specifically construct business transactions that would abuse any loophole. I mean, it's fair for Wizards of the Coast to update the rules to close loopholes found by Magic players - but it's harder for the IRS.
Of course, I jest. Here is a great “ambiguities” in the tax code: If a transaction is primarily for tax reasons and not business reasons it’s disallowed. Great way to retroactively close abusive. On the other hand, I would like to see a bit more detail on constructive sales.
You could file your taxes in the 1940's - where is was published in the local newspaper so everybody would know. Any early example of crowdsourcing law enforcement.
You can send in the forms yourself - then only the IRS and you know what was filed.
You can send in the info via Turbo Tax / H&R Block - Then another party konws. They are kind of limited to who they can share the data with, but.....
I am going to guess Straddles – a subclass of constructive sales. The IRS does not want you to effectively sells something this tax year and delay the payment for years. It used to be that one could delay taxes for years.
Some of the regulations conflict with each other since they were written to stop specific transactions while not considering the whole situation. Others are vague on purpose, to discourage people from getting anywhere close – but it does leave professionals guessing.
I have seen Tax Lawyers giving an opinion, and then disclaiming any responsibility for their opinion.
First, it’s not Turbo Tax which is lobbing for this stuff. They don’t have too. There is enough lobbyist pushing their special interest and crack pot positions searching for short term gain that they don’t need to spend the money – it’s done for them.
Second, It’s not that it’s technically difficult; it’s the Certification and fast turn around time.
It’s not like a word processor in which you can start off with the basic stuff and add stuff later. Nor is it static like a word processor – each year the IRS tweaks stuff. You kind of need the whole package up and running – perfectly - by February 1st.
At least they make the on-line software free for the easy, low income, returns.
That being said, I would like the IRS to come out with some basic tax forms which do the calculations and look up by itself. i.e., you would still need input the numbers, but the simple “multiple by 28%” and “Look up income in tax table” would be automated.
Or even better, tax simplification. Less work spent on make work, fewer loop holes to abuse.
O.K., that fact is kind of cool, and it's nice to know that Apple did not just abandoned the NeXT people.
But I think my point still stands – Apple quickly dropped the brand and integrated the NeXT engineers into Apple’s team (or was it the other way around?). As a counter point, look at when Tata Motors took over Jaguar. They kept the brand and engineers mainly in place. While they expect some cross pollination between the engineering groups, I am guess that not of British engineers will be working on the next 1 lakh car, or vice versa.
I am going to have to disagree with your opinion. From what I have read from other articles, Sony is losing money on LCDs and is trying to get out of the market.
Manufacturing LCD is very capital intensive. That is, the initial outlay to build the plant is high. So while Sony is making money on the variable costs (i.e. the cost of materials, labor, etc) is can’t justify all of the capital that’s tied up to it. It can’t sell it because there a glut of LCD manufacturing capacity right now.
So they are turning it into a Zombie. They won’t invest any more money in the plant, and they don’t expect anything from it, but they will just let it putter along as long as they can cover the variable costs.
Sometimes when companies are bought they are absorbed completely. Brand names are dropped, software works well with parent company but no other, etc. It’s like when Apple bought a little computer company called Next. Want support for that old Next computer? Not so much – buy a Mac instead.
On the other hand, sometimes the brand is left “independent” in the sense that the parent’s brand is not stamped all over it. And it sounds like they are not requiring you to open a FaceBook account to continue to use Instagram. Now, will the two share data? Yeah, I am sure.
Slashdot Mirror
Japan is now moving the regulators to the environment to create more distance. See below on why that is imporant.
You are assuming that regulators can weigh the pros (cheap power) vs. the cons (rare events ) in a impartial manner. A weakness of regulation can be “Regulator Capture” where the interest of regulators and the industry align, thus diminishing true oversight..
For example, in Japan, the industrial ministry regulated nuclear power. The ministry pushed nuclear because industry needed cheap power. Bureaucrats graduated from low paying public jobs to higher paying industry jobs. Regulating a technical industry requires hiring technical people, which means hiring from the industry that they are regulating – and of course those people tend of have confidence in the system that they built.
10 years ago I knew a couple who owned the campus books of a small state university, and boy did they make a mint off of it. Lake house, lots of expensive toys, etc.
It won’t help Indian textbook authors – it helps booksellers and publishers (i.e. the people who actually own and run the printing press) who print Indian textbooks. (who may not be actually located in India.)
The books are written by whoever – American, British, Indian – take your pick. The books are then sold for a cut rate in India and then exported to the U.S. Basically Indian is just a way point.
What I think the original poster was trying to point out was that the book publisher was trying to be moral / a good corporate citizen by offering poor students cheap books. (Or one could take the flip view that their being evil by price gouging students in rich countries, but either way you look at it – same net effect.)
This, of course, makes lots of assumptions. That they can control the flow of goods in a global age. (Which is what the court case is about.) That students in underdeveloped countries are poor. Etc.
If the defendant wins (Which I hope he does) it may have the unintended consequence higher textbook prices in poor countries. Which I think is an indictment on the system, and it should be changed, but not by blocking the sale of international textbooks.
I work in a large financial institution. (Not banking, but close enough. And thankfully we tend to be conservative so the crisis did not hit us semi-hard) As for book recommendations, sure! What books would you recommend?
I would recommend “Reading About the Financial Crisis: A 21-Book Review” at http://www.argentumlux.org/ It’s good. I have read the majority of books on the list and I enjoyed Dr. Lo's review.
And what do you mean by:
Look at banking. The ethical behavior expected of a teller in a branch is a lot more carefully controlled than that of the CEO. If you doubt it, there have been a number of very good books and documentaries about the financial cataclysm of 2007-2008.
There is fraud – which is what we are talking about. That’s one thing and ti’s easy to define. Teller pockets a couple of hundred dollars and that’s theft. In the recent economic crisis I can think of very little fraud that went on – on most of that was secondary to the overall issues.
Then we have CEO’s making large bets with other peoples money. In the case of finance it’s what their paid to do. Kind of sad that the incentives were wrong (Heads we win (CEO and stockholder), tails you loose (stockholder)). And yes, the work they did was sloppy. It is one thing to take high risk, by sloppy, and fail. That poor management, so kick the bums out and all of that. (and I think a lot more people should have been tossed.) It’s another thing to accuse people of felonies.
I know in times of crisis that people like looking for scapegoats and snap judgments, but please – this is Slashdot. Let us have some reasoned discourse here.
This does not reflect well on my company, but it’s was the bank she was depositing the funds in that figured it out. Normally I have a low regard for anti-money laundering techniques that the banks use, but it worked here.
In my experience, as you move up the chain of command, any formalized controls become more stringent – not less. In my case, every level I move up in the company I have to disclose more, with the CEO having to disclose the most.
On the other hand, I have found misalignment increases. CEO’s don’t (normally) need to commit outright fraud – there is a host of grey areas to exploit.
The corporate jet is a classic example. It helps the CEO meet with clients, survey the business, saves time, etc. All of time & money will be well disclosed in the annual reports. If the CEO uses it for personal reasons, he has to pay it out of pocket. So everything is above board. Yet, who do a disproportionate number of CEO schedule official trips to Aspin during skiing season and during the summer?
It’s one of odd things – how do you monitor employees without draconian controls? I think the trust of these programs is not that they can detect fraud per say, but rather they can identify people and situations which generate extra temptation. It does not matter how well you treat your employees, if somebody develops a gambling addiction (see below) it does not matter how well you pay them.
Here's another article.
http://www.economist.com/node/21547833
In this case they are talking about detecting fraud with people who have level access to the books – think rouge trades and embezzling employers. However, from the article fraud comes from “incentive, rationalisation and opportunity”. You try to hire competent, well paid staff and put in controls. However, eventually you hit limits.
From personal experience, I know of a case in my company where a mid level middle age employee who had been with the company for over 20 years developed a gambling addiction. Over the course of 18 months she embezzled over $200,000 from the company via hundreds of transactions. She had been around long enough to know that the individual small amounts would never trigger a review
I would
If the only place that this lawsuit is being discussed is in the niche locations like Slashdot, as Honeywell, I would not worry too much about the Streisand effect. I know that the vast majority of my customers will look at the rack in the hardware store and pick something familiar. Not much of a backfire here.
I agree. To elaborate. From the article: “Home working also allows women to combine their traditional roles of homemaker and mother, with being an entrepreneur.”
It’s not unusual for women to run business – but I find this sentence telling. There is a difference between starting a good solid small business and a start up.
The first is basically about creating a job for yourself. It may be a restaurant, day care, or a small professional business (lawyer, hair stylist, whatever ) but it’s about creating a job for yourself that lets you manage your life /work balance.
The second is about putting in long hours for months at a time to hit that grand slam.
This is, of course, a continuum between the two. I am just surprised that the submitter and article is pitching it this way. Are these woman truly liberality if they are forced into the shallow end of the pool? Small, home businesses are great, but it’s the lower end of the entrepreneurial market.
Depends on how you phrase it.
If you tell the manager that
1. You have reviewed the terms of the social media site and
2. They donâ(TM)t allow astroturfing (find a better phrase) and
3. You are concerned about the companyâ(TM)s reputation, so
4. Thank you but no
You are not threating them. You not saying that you are going to term them in and that in fact you are a team player.
If the employer has any sense of ethics you will be fine.
As a side note, something like this happened to me. It was not astroturfing, but the manager was trying to push a idea that was very very grey. Half a year later when there was a reorg I was kicked out. In the end it all turned out well, butâ¦.
Technically “petroleum products by value” – and that’s important.
First, the US has a lot of refiners. Low cost Nigerian crude oil is shipped to the US, we ship higher cost gasoline, etc. back to Nigeria.
Second, thanks to fracking, we have a lot of natural gas. And we export a lot of that – either directly or indirectly (like Propane, Petrochemical Feedstocks)
The market for audio books is small compared to printed books or movies. Hiring good talent to make decent audio books is higher than you expect (And this is something that you want – I listened to some pretty bad audio books in my life.) So you have higher fixed costs per unit sold – have to make up the difference someway.
It’s one of the reasons why I get most of my audio books via the library.
What is (alleged) to be happening is that Store A (Apple) sees that Store B (Amazon) is getting a better price, so they pressure the publisher to raise the price they sell to Store B (Amazon). The publishers are happy to follow Apple’s lead and crank up the price for everybody.
What you really want to do is study the structure of the market. The buyer, seller, and the middle man gains in a transaction – If they didn’t then there would be no transaction. However, the next question is how the gains are split. Does 80% of the gains towards the seller or only 20%. The lawsuit alleges that Apple et.al. restructured the marketplace so more gains would roll towards the Publishers (and thus indirectly hitting Apple’s competitor - Amazon)
Yeah, but if I understand correctly, you got rid of all of your Police Boxes back in the 70’s. It would seem the loss of that particular technology is more important then zoning laws. Or was that just London? Does Cardif still have them?
I think you missed my past tense usage. In the past, the amount of income tax you paid was public. Your right that today it’s private.
I thought that this data was still published when the income tax was reintroduced in the 1940s. I am not so sure about that. On the other hand, when the Income Tax was first introduced in the in 1860’s is was public – just like property tax. NPR’s plant money had a nice little story on this.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/03/23/149058446/from-abe-lincoln-to-donald-duck-history-of-the-income-tax
They will give you a refund. (with some and, if's and but's in that sentence.)
I seen a lot of polite letters from the IRS saying they found a mistake the in tax return, and
1. Here is your refund or
2. You underpaid, Please send in the differance plus intrest and (sometimes) penalty.
I would love that. Right now the company I work for uses a “conservative” interpretation of the tax code. With this would could specifically construct business transactions that would abuse any loophole. I mean, it's fair for Wizards of the Coast to update the rules to close loopholes found by Magic players - but it's harder for the IRS.
Of course, I jest. Here is a great “ambiguities” in the tax code: If a transaction is primarily for tax reasons and not business reasons it’s disallowed. Great way to retroactively close abusive. On the other hand, I would like to see a bit more detail on constructive sales.
You could file your taxes in the 1940's - where is was published in the local newspaper so everybody would know. Any early example of crowdsourcing law enforcement.
You can send in the forms yourself - then only the IRS and you know what was filed.
You can send in the info via Turbo Tax / H&R Block - Then another party konws. They are kind of limited to who they can share the data with, but.....
I am going to guess Straddles – a subclass of constructive sales. The IRS does not want you to effectively sells something this tax year and delay the payment for years. It used to be that one could delay taxes for years.
Some of the regulations conflict with each other since they were written to stop specific transactions while not considering the whole situation. Others are vague on purpose, to discourage people from getting anywhere close – but it does leave professionals guessing.
I have seen Tax Lawyers giving an opinion, and then disclaiming any responsibility for their opinion.
First, it’s not Turbo Tax which is lobbing for this stuff. They don’t have too. There is enough lobbyist pushing their special interest and crack pot positions searching for short term gain that they don’t need to spend the money – it’s done for them.
Second, It’s not that it’s technically difficult; it’s the Certification and fast turn around time.
It’s not like a word processor in which you can start off with the basic stuff and add stuff later. Nor is it static like a word processor – each year the IRS tweaks stuff. You kind of need the whole package up and running – perfectly - by February 1st.
At least they make the on-line software free for the easy, low income, returns.
That being said, I would like the IRS to come out with some basic tax forms which do the calculations and look up by itself. i.e., you would still need input the numbers, but the simple “multiple by 28%” and “Look up income in tax table” would be automated.
Or even better, tax simplification. Less work spent on make work, fewer loop holes to abuse.
It's spelling. Thanks for catching the mistake.
O.K., that fact is kind of cool, and it's nice to know that Apple did not just abandoned the NeXT people.
But I think my point still stands – Apple quickly dropped the brand and integrated the NeXT engineers into Apple’s team (or was it the other way around?). As a counter point, look at when Tata Motors took over Jaguar. They kept the brand and engineers mainly in place. While they expect some cross pollination between the engineering groups, I am guess that not of British engineers will be working on the next 1 lakh car, or vice versa.
I am going to have to disagree with your opinion. From what I have read from other articles, Sony is losing money on LCDs and is trying to get out of the market.
Manufacturing LCD is very capital intensive. That is, the initial outlay to build the plant is high. So while Sony is making money on the variable costs (i.e. the cost of materials, labor, etc) is can’t justify all of the capital that’s tied up to it. It can’t sell it because there a glut of LCD manufacturing capacity right now.
So they are turning it into a Zombie. They won’t invest any more money in the plant, and they don’t expect anything from it, but they will just let it putter along as long as they can cover the variable costs.
Context is important.
Sometimes when companies are bought they are absorbed completely. Brand names are dropped, software works well with parent company but no other, etc. It’s like when Apple bought a little computer company called Next. Want support for that old Next computer? Not so much – buy a Mac instead.
On the other hand, sometimes the brand is left “independent” in the sense that the parent’s brand is not stamped all over it. And it sounds like they are not requiring you to open a FaceBook account to continue to use Instagram. Now, will the two share data? Yeah, I am sure.