We are currently much better than lime jello at these tasks, too. "Currently" implies an expectation that things will change, which is a claim that needs some kind of argument in support. Rhetoric alone doesn't advance the discussion.
We are in the midst of a massive trend towards automation and robotics. Every year, we are seeing more tasks and more jobs successfully completed by robots, and more and more robots completing "work" tasks more efficiently than humans.
I am not qualified to statistically prove the automation trend, but I believe you are being obtuse in rejecting the premise that said trend exists at all.
"Its amazing how difficult these problems are. This type of work relies on things that humans are optimized to do - forage and produce food. We are arguably the best robot for some of these tasks."
It really is amazing how difficult some of these problems are. That was the point of GP's post. By saying "currently" you wave away that point without addressing it.
While robots are getting better, there are lots of things we take for granted about human and animal competence and that we have made very slow progress on replicating in robots.
It's much more fun to think and talk about those tricky bits than to simply expect them to be solved.
I don't need statistical proof that there is an automation trend. I'd like an argument about why the interesting hard parts are going to turn out to be doable.
You might infer from my username that I am moderately optimistic.
Your entire rant completely forgets that Apple runs, on average ~70% profit margin ($700 phone costs about $200 to make). Samsung's profit margins aren't AS high, but still are massive which help drive profit.
Your analysis pretends that Apple and Samsung are selling very custom hardware at a margin, and so one cannot beat the margin AND beat the custom hardware.
But there is a LOT of wiggle room to experiment with price when the incumbents are running 70% profit margins.
>Your entire rant completely forgets that Apple runs, on average ~70% profit margin ($700 phone costs about $200 to make).
I doubt he forgets it, because it's not true. The 70% difference between retail price and cost to stamp a device at a factory is not "profit margin", because there are further costs, before and after manufacturing, such R&D, organizational and business costs. You can bet Apple is spending more on R&D than almost anyone else, so there is likely no wiggle room at all for anyone to compete on innovation, unless they aim for some niche market.
>You can bet Apple is spending more on R&D than almost anyone else, so there is likely no wiggle room at all for anyone to compete on innovation, unless they aim for some niche market.
Actually, Apple spends comparatively less on R&D than any of its competitors. It's increased recently, but for many years - especially in the late Jobs years - people were scratching their heads at how comparatively little they spent on it.
Apple does spend comparatively little on R&D (perhaps part of that is because they don't produce 400 different models of every darn device), but their margins on iPhones are still nowhere near 70%.
I was just speaking specifically the notion that Apple's margins as a company are eaten up by R&D spend which we agree they're clearly not. (The fact that they're doing multi-billion dollar stock buybacks and issuing increasing dividends show they have more money than they know what to do with).
Although since you brought it up, I did a quick search and found that the margins on the iPhone as an individual product (vs. the company's overall margin) are speculated to be near 70% and that figure isn't just pulled out of thin air:
Because all the companies producing the several parts involved did absolutely no r&d and they got information on how to produce all those batteries, cpus, glass, radios, sensors, etc from aliens.
Every company does r&d and manage just fine with non obscene profits on each product. Apple and Samsung create artificial scarcity with lawsuits. They probably spend more on legal than r&d.
It is true. Apple has a 70% profit margin on sales that they reinvest.
Just because revenue is reinvested doesn't mean it isn't revenue or a margin.
And, seeing as Apple has >$100,000,000,000 of cash and near cash, your "reinvestment" line is a total fantasy. Apple is printing cash with a massive profit margin, and reinvesting a tiny tiny tiny fraction of that money back into their business.
>> Just because revenue is reinvested doesn't mean it isn't revenue or a margin.
Your sentence is a little confusing, because calling something revenue means it is revenue. And while related, revenue is not the same as margin.
And please note that the bill of materials for a phone is only a part of the cost of goods sold, which as mentioned by others, also includes manufacturing, assembly, marketing, r&d and other costs. Those costs are generally not considered to be "reinvestment".
I used to track AAPL when I was interning at a financial services firm last summer, and I can assure you that their profit margin is around 20%. Since AAPL is publicly traded, this information is publicly available so anyone can verify it. I'm not sure where you get the idea that their profit margin is 70%.
According to Yahoo Finance (which is a pretty good resource for non-professionals), the profit margin is currently 21%.
Unit margin is the marginal profit for selling one more unit. It doesn't include the (large) fixed costs of, for example, your personnel or your office real estate costs or R&D or legal. It's basically the bill of materials for your item plus the costs for transporting the item from where you made it/bought it to where you hand it off to the customer, any taxes on that particular item (like import duties), etc.
Unit margin is an important number to account for and work to maximize, basically because you assume that as the number of units you sell increase, your fixed costs become less and less relevant to your overall company profit. But unit margin is always higher than overall company profit margin.
EDIT: Also, obviously, unit margin varies by sku. The iPhone 5s and the iPad Air are probably the highest-margin items that Apple sells (some of their Macs may compete). Things like iPods and iPhone 5cs are likely lower-margin.
Thanks for the clarification. I had actually never heard of this concept of ``unit margin,'' but it makes sense now. It's funny that I managed to go through an entire internship at a financial services firm (which included working with valuation models of AAPL) without ever encountering this concept. I guess it's no surprise that I didn't get offered a job at the end of the internship!
I'm sometimes amazed how otherwise competent adults believe that one investor focused for profit corporation isn't capable of behaving just like another investor focused for profit corporation.
When I look at Google services, I see a lot of monopolies forming. For example, Hangouts now takes over SMS messages, and is automatically installed on all Android devices as a system app that cannot be removed. Or, in order to interact with Youtube, one requires a wholly unrelated public Google+ profile.
For someone to say that Google is incapable of abusing monopolies for strategic reasons including profit, while they are already abusing monopolies for strategic reasons including profit, is amazing to me.
You would benefit from a sense of proportion. Come back with this noise when there's a Google line running through my front yard that I'm not allowed to dig up. If you don't like the Android that Google built for you, then don't use it. Google haven't been purchasing laws and agencies since 1937. Ma Bell has.
...Verizon, SBC, CenturyLink, Qwest, FairPoint, Frontier, etc.? Eh, seems unlikely. Or perhaps the extent of your telecom purchasing is cell service from an MVNO? Guess where the majority of your payments are going... Apparently it is difficult for some people outside telecom to separate what's going on from the marketing of what's going on. Don't feel bad: back in the late 1990s I believed the hype too.
"In my opinion, the best way to deal with these unsolicited emails is to use the unsubscribe link, delete the email, and then swear at them on Twitter or find their CEO's email and send them goatse or something. Fuck 'em. That way you get your revenge, and you don't muck up the spam filter for everyone."
This is totally absurd. My choices are "click one button" or "do a whole lot of bullshit that sounds like a lot of annoying work".
I hope you can understand why "one button" is taken more often than "raise hell on and offline".
The real solution is to separate spam and unwanted emails. Gmail and services need to add a separate button for non-spam unwanted emails, so they can categorize and learn about usage habits effectively.
But it's horrific, insanely bad UX design to create a flawed system then blame the users for using it naturally. I'm sorry but the user is not wrong, the system is wrong. The solution isn't "user training", it's "system redesign".
If the system were designed correctly, users would naturally gravitate to the correct option without training. That's good UX. Until then, it's perfectly acceptable to use whatever tools are available to achieve the desired outcome. That's software for you.
You can (from most providers) block emails from a sender or domain as easily as flagging it as spam; however, flagging it as spam has consequences for the company that relays the messages, not the one that sends them.
You're punishing the phone company because a company you had a business relationship with can't magically read your mind that you don't want further calls, after you agreed to a couple sales calls in exchange for a product demo.
Actually, the part where you invent a bad strawman solely for the purpose of labeling me an asshole makes you an asshole.
You couldn't even quote me. You couldn't even use my words. You just invented a pathetic little fantasy and then attacked ME directly based on your fantasy world.
Personally, there are a select few brands from whom I enjoy reading unsolicited emails.
They have proven themselves to me and I like them on an irrationally human level.
What bothers me, however, is when the other 99.9% of the brands I interact with automatically assume that they are the 0.1%.
Yes, it's possible and acceptable to have that kind of relationship between a client/business, but the problem becomes when a brand believes that they can control that relationship, or define it themselves, or simply assume that it exists.
Hahaha! YES! I have a personal vendetta against unsolicited email.
If you send me an email that I am not expecting, then I will flag it as "unsolicited".
I do not care if you provide other mechanisms for handling unsolicited email. I do not care if you used a dark pattern to technically ask me to solicit the email without my conscious knowledge.
The way you call it vindictive is empowering and enlightening.
It's your way of calling it unfair, of attacking the person as immoral and undermining the point of their behavior. You're trivializing them as petty. Instead of saying "I understand why someone might be unhappy at me sending them email they do not want" you say "it is vindictive and petty for someone to treat unwanted advertising from for-profit businesses this way". What a sick joke.
So you know what? GOOD! If "vindictive" means "control over your inbox" then I AM VINDICTIVE. I will PUNISH anyone who gets into my inbox without my approval. Email is WAR and I am fighting for Inbox Zero. Send those emails my way lightly ... tread carefully with that send button, because you might just find your messages are unwanted and end up clearly marked as unwanted.
Insult us users all you want, trivialize us all you want, attack our behavior all you want: I DO NOT WANT UNSOLICITED EMAIL and will HAPPILY and "vindictively" (lol) mark unwanted email as "unsolicited".
I use the term "vindictive" because the people using their spam filter in this fashion feel that they are not only training a dataset, but punishing the sender: this attitude leads to behaviors that lead to feature creep on the usage of flagging things as "spam", and if you read threads related to spam you find people using the filter to mark all kinds of things they don't like, including business models they take issue with that really have nothing to do with email at all. I thereby simply think your entire rant here is nothing more than self-rationalization of behavior you know is overstepping a boundary: email is not "war", the attitude you are describing is objectively "vindictive", and I frankly find it rather disappointing that you just don't get this.
And again: I don't send email from my service; I don't even send receipts... so most i your rant is fundamentally mistargetted. I am a user who doesn't appreciate people's emotional responses to something that isn't really fixable anyway making email fundamentally more complicated as a protocol, breaking use cases like shared mailing lists (see the recent issues with Yahoo DMARC on the IETF list), and mis-training spam filters. If you ask me about real-life "actual" criminals I would frankly have similar responses against people who prefer vigilante, vindictive punishment for behaviors they dislike :/.
Surge Pricing is illegal in Berlin, and probably other European countries. And I imagine the illegality of price gouging ("surge pricing") while also skirting taxi regulation will be expanded dramatically in the coming years, all across much of Europe and blue states.
Yes, you can profit when you find loopholes in regulations that your competitors can't take advantage of. Color me shocked.
There is nothing we can do, really. Money is very close to power, and obviously the relatively poor (those who rely on a salary) have far less say and control than the extravagantly paid (those who do not require a salary). It is a fundamental trait of our free and capitalist society. We're merely mourning obvious inefficiencies, "bugs" in the convoluted system of laws and philosophies and culture that govern our society.
This is a suboptimum outcome, in our opinion. Watching inequality rise dramatically over a few short decades only bolsters the belief that these are suboptimal outcomes.
And watching these unmeritorious fools perform poorly while being paid thousands of times the average pay of their own staff is disheartening. It's obviously not a meritocracy. It's obvious that the extravagant, suboptimal pay scheme isn't buying quality leadership, nor is it rewarding any kind of out-sized risk on the part of management. Tiny risk compared to venture or entrepreneur, small or negative benefit, massive reward.
I would point out the recent fun little study showing that the class we are (those who work for a salary) have less say in policy outcomes than the rich (those who do not require a salary).
They bill it as "The US is more of an oligarchy than democracy" because those very few >0.1% of Americans have a greater political say than the rest of us.
I don't think engineers earning six figures are relatively poor. You should learn what poor is before you say something like that. They are solidly middle class in one of the most prosperous times to be middle class. And the middle class is designed to sit between the upper (capital owners) and the lower. You're paid to augment their capital. So if they get filthy rich off of your work, despite their bad decisions, it shouldn't matter to you. You're every bit a part of the problem, and you choose to be a part of it. You don't need to live in the Bay Area. You don't need the best schools. You don't need fancy new tech toys. You don't even need US. You choose to be a part of the middle class in order to receive those luxuries.
Not really. If you earn $120k a year (just over 6 figures) you're in the top 10% of income earners in the US. The fact that you think they're 'middle class' (and relatively speaking, I don't think you're wrong) is indicative of how bad the wealth gap has gotten.
The bottom 50-90% of the top 10% of earners is very much part of what is traditionally called "middle class". People in high-paying professional occupations such as doctors, lawyers and engineers have always been considered part of the middle class. The upper class is made up of capitalists and high-level executives, not people who work for a living.
Interesting! I didn't know there were different distinctions.
Still, I think your source really just proves my point: by no means is anyone earning 120K a year "solidly middle class". By pretty much all of the definitions you listed, 120K a year would either be "upper middle class", or "the rich" (e.g. find me a homeowner in SF who doesn't have >1 million in home equity).
Sure, I'm not discounting that. I live in NYC, and the cost of living is certainly an adjustment to your wealth. That said, I think it would still be disingenuous to consider anyone making $120K a year middle class.
>>You don't need to live in the Bay Area. You don't need the best schools. You don't need fancy new tech toys. You don't even need US. You choose to be a part of the middle class in order to receive those luxuries.
I was with you until this part. You can't just tell people they don't need their current resident city or country or what schools they(or their children) need.
Running away from a problem is almost never the right solution.
I'm pointing out that they're choices, not needs. They are things you can live without, and if you see a problem, and you feel strongly about changing the world, then you can sacrifice these luxuries.
And it is absurd to claim that I am advocating running away from a problem. I absolutely want you to tackle the problem head-on. But by voluntarily enriching the aristocracy, you are part of the problem. So I find it painfully hypocritical to complain about your bosses earning too much, while at the same time choosing to be their employee.
I think the point he or she was trying to make is that you control your own happiness and shouldn't make that depend on things that are outside of your control.
I agree with that sentiment, it's the advice I generally give people who are in a bad situation. But if you look at it from the country's perspective it feels like avoiding the problem, and isn't a solution.
That's wholly untrue. Yes, the tax preparation industry has made token donations to efforts to preserve the current tax code.
But I would argue that the failure of tax reform is not so simple. Major tax reform is a massive, massive legislative undertaking. And doing so redefines many of the basic American incentives. Having your say in tax reform is the equivalent of leaving your mark on the next 20-30 years of American society.
Suffice to say, the massive polarization of our Legislature, combined with the hyper-efficacy of Senate obstruction, and finished off with the fact that tax reform is hard to campaign on means that there is no real incentive for our legislators to reform. But sure, a token campaign contribution making up a miniscule fraction of total donations doesn't hurt...
The tax code isn't just overly complicated, it's poorly equipped for dealing with a global economy and effectively encourages you to shirk as many taxes as you can legally get away with. This is especially noticeable in the business world where you're forced to file more frequently and actively put yourself at a disadvantage if you don't exploit the loopholes to the level your competitors do.
There's a certain irony in wealthy corps/individuals being able to pay less effective taxes than the less fortunate purely because they can afford to work the system to their advantage. The only reason most of these gimmicks are possible is because the government is so damn determined to influence behavior through taxes.
A billion dollars has already been raised in the 2014 midterms. A non-presidential year, 6 months before the election, and a billion has already flowed in.
So yes, your millions are a very tiny fraction of the money flowing in.
