Chinese Billionaire Linked to Giant Aluminum Stockpile in Mexican Desert - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/chinese-billionaire-linked-to-giant-aluminum-stockpile-in-mexican-desert-1473356054 <comment><USER3> This is a simple duty arbitrage play.

For anyone wondering what he actually did wrong, there are a few key points to note. Aluminum (and all materials, really) is exported and imported and duties are paid on the basis of the HS code and (if there is a trade agreement to be taken advantage of) certificates of origin (COO) along with the usual shipping docs.

China is inclined to tax exports of primary aluminum because aluminum is power intensive to produce. Thus, exporting raw aluminum ingots whose production has been state subsidized is basically akin to exporting (even giving away!) power. However, China relaxed export duties on certain 'finished' aluminum products. This opened up a loophole where Chinese companies could make 'finished aluminum products' which are classified under a different HS code than primary aluminum and ship it out of the country, duty free. In reality, this meant that they sloppily made it into whatever shape wasn't ingots or T bars rather than into any concretely useful shapes.

These 'finished' products then made their way out to places like Mexico and more recently Vietnam. Since they were still carrying Chinese COOs, they couldn't be directly re-exported to the US (or any other country without a FTA with China). They needed to be remelted/recycled into 'raw aluminum' and given a new COO (or for the less scrupulous given a fake COO...), hence the need for the Mexico factory.

So...if cost to ship to Mexico + cost to extrude and remelt < difference in Chinese VS Western manufacturing costs + duties on primary aluminum ... this is a profitable (and legal) trade!

<comment><USER4> A similar, and perhaps more amusing, situation happened in Canada a few years ago. We have a 245.5% import tariff on cheese (why? Because dairy farmers are more important than poor people, apparently) but there was a much lower tax on "food preparations", including packaged pizza toppings.

So companies would package up "pizza topping kits" in the USA, import them to Canada as "food preparations"... and then remove the cheese, which could be sold separately for far more than the cost of the complete kit.

After a couple years, the classification rules were amended to exclude anything containing cheese from the "food preparations" tariff class.

<comment><USER5> I loathe farmer subsidies. I have no idea why our government gives farmers so much money and so many advantages - nobody in our society really benefits from those incredible spendings and it's a significant fraction of our state budget.

<comment><USER6> If you don't subsidize farming in rich countries, all your food will come from poor countries. Poor countries without standards for food safety, scruples about burning down rainforest for a few years of fertility, or worker rights or fair wages. You starve poor countries by selling off all of their food to rich countries and making what's left very expensive. What farming is left in rich countries can only possibly be made economical doing so at the largest most industrial scales. When shit hits the fan external sources get much leverage on rich countries because they don't own their own food supply and don't have the economy in place to make their own when the suppliers get disagreeable.

And folks at the grocery store aren't going to like the prices if they want their unsubsidized groceries to be grown by their own countrymen earning middle-class wages.

Subsidies right now are certainly not where they need to be. The whole thing needs to be reformed but there are basically two classes of people: rich powerful special interests that profit from the status quo, and ignorant citizens that don't understand the very basics of why anything is being done.

Ignorance and greed underly most of our problems. Which one are you guilty of?

<comment><USER7> This argument doesn't hold up. By that reasoning (safety, workers rights, environmental concerns) every industry is special and deserves subsidy. Can mine be better subsidised please?

<comment><USER6> To be fair, I don't believe in free trade outside equal partners.

That is, I think trade should be completely unrestricted to foreign markets that are within some economic margin (let's say US, Japan, Canada, and Germany to come up with a very incomplete list) and in any other cases should be subject to significant restrictions.

I don't like the fact that it's nearly impossible to pay someone in America an honest wage to put together t-shirts or running shoes. I don't like the fact that I'd be hard-pressed to buy a t-shirt or a running shoe that wasn't assembled by a person who is more like a slave than not.

But also,

Food is something fundamental, something important, more important than almost anything else and really easy to export the production. We might be ok letting some industries be entirely foreign, because maybe they're less essential... basic sustenance though is in a different class of importance. It's not a fad, it'll never go away unlike many industries that seek protections when they should just be allowed to die.

<comment><USER7> Your last point is very good. It applies to other sectors too, but I'm not going to die if a few days/weeks without those other things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The article mentions that aluminum prices have fallen 50% since 2010. However, prices were double historical normal from 2005 to 2011. The price lowering was just a return to normal prices.

<comment><USER9> This is correct. Three factors drove the bubble in aluminum and other commodities: Increased energy expense, speculative and fraudulent investment, and some increased consumption. However, three factors are likely to continue to drive aluminum and other commodities under the mean: Lack of confidence, spectacular debt burdens and deflationary trends across commodity price inputs. Its likely to be years before a stable mean is established, despite the occasional mirage of stability from month to month.

<comment> at-fates-hands I remember working at a bike shop around this time and within 6 months all of our bikes went up in price like $50-100. I had no idea what was going on and asked one of corporate office guys what the deal was.

He said between India and China, they had both put huge strains on steel, aluminum and titanium and it was causing a shortage for bike manufacturers, so they were raising their prices since the prices for these metals had skyrocketed in recent months.

Good to know it was a little more to it, but interesting nonetheless.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> One of the reader comments said: "Extradite him to the US and then prosecute him. Getting rich without any merits is horrible."

and I thought: you must be new here

<comment><USER11> Really? Wouldn't you think U.S. has the lowest proportion of "rich without merits" as %age of rich of any nation in the world – and indeed in history of world?

<comment><USER12> Not sure why you're getting downvoted. This is a totally valid point. For the downvoters: malchow's claim is that in the US, rich people are more likely to be businessmen or people who have otherwise worked for their wealth, rather than simply having been born to the right parents.

<comment><USER13> I agree with what you're saying, but at the same time it's a hell of a lot easier to end up a wealthy adult if you come from a wealthy family. "Small" loans from family etc.

<comment><USER14> Roughly 80% of American millionaires are the first generation of their families to be wealthy. Here's the surprising part - most of them get there by working hard and spending less money than they earn...

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/books/first/s/stanley- millionaire.ht...](https://www.nytimes.com/books/first/s/stanley- millionaire.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> I like your link, but I couldn't find that particular statistic within it. Could you clarify?

Most of the studies I've seen reach the opposite conclusion, that parental lifetime income highly predicts the income of their children. For example, a child of parents in the 90th percentile has an expected income of over $100K, while a child of parents in the 10th percentile has an expected income of less than $40K.

[http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/07/america-...](http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/07/america- social-mobility-parents-income/399311/) (which comes from [http://inequality.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/economic_...](http://inequality.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/economic_mobility_short.pdf))

Income isn't wealth, but I'd be surprised if the correlation isn't strong. What percentage of individuals in the US of 90th percent household wealth came from families in the top half versus bottom half growing up? I don't know off hand, but if I had to bet blindly on outcomes I'd strongly favor betting on the individual who started out better off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> _"My Moby-Dick has been Zhongwang," says Mr. Henderson, president of the Aluminum Extruders Council, a U.S. trade group._

Without context, I would have thought that a Markov text generator was on the loose.

<comment><USER16> Really? Why? Mr. Henderson is simply claiming that hist situation bears some similarities to Captain Ahab's. It might or might not really be true but the statement is clear enough for anyone moderately well read in English language literature.

<comment><USER15> It's not that the reference is obtuse (it isn't), it's that one usually doesn't encounter "Moby Dick", "aluminum extruders" and "Zhongwang" in the same sentence. It can give one pause, in the same manner as if the sentence were full of alliteration.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This isn't happening with just Aluminum. All Carbon and Stainless Steel also.

The Chinese have hacked and stolen many of the recipes the Steel Industry has spent decades working on. It was one of the reasons Washington had to act. Now they can supply markets where their product was not within spec.

Chinese industry gets subsidized by the Chinese Government. Depending on the exact industry they get a certain percentage back on exports. It can be up to 20 % on each export dollar. I once spoke to a shop that made specialized tools for CNC and Screw Machines. The guy told me that if he had a robot that could make the tool from start to finish without anyone needing to even come to work. Just place a load of steel down in the shop and leave. When you get back in a weeks time everything will be made and packed. He still couldn't compete with the Chinese. He says their steel is subsidized, their power is subsidized, they get subsidized to export and by the time you take all the subsidies into account they are 20-30 % cheaper than he can even buy the raw material for. Then to avoid any tariffs they ship product all over the world and move it through other countries. Hence Mexico has become one of these countries, especially when it comes to all metals.

They will stop at nothing to destroy Industry in other countries. They have the support of their Government at the highest levels and are encouraged. It is what makes this difficult to police.

<comment><USER7> Nicely said. Crap Chinese still is causing problems here in New Zealand - <USER2> I thought we were too far away to matter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This reminds me of the 2013 Goldman Sachs aluminum story: [http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/21/business/a-shuffle-of- alum...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/21/business/a-shuffle-of-aluminum-but- to-banks-pure-gold.html?pagewanted=1)

</comment><comment><USER19> Now imagine the TPP goes through, how much of a footprint will be exposed to similar practices.

</comment><comment><USER20> the smoking gun graph[0] is missing how much of MX al is sold to the US.

[0] well, they split them into several images [http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/BN- PS529_201609_G_...](http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/BN- PS529_201609_G_20160907120101.jpg) [http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/BN- PS530_201609_G_...](http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/BN- PS530_201609_G_20160907120306.jpg) [http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/BN- PS533_201609_G_...](http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/BN- PS533_201609_G_20160907120405.jpg) [http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/BN- PT063_201609_G_...](http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/BN- PT063_201609_G_20160908091611.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm sure this guy will just get a little slap on the wrist.

<comment><USER22> Its not clear he's done anything wrong. Shipping Aluminum to Mexico? What's the problem.

<comment><USER23> The simple version: If a foreign government is unfairly subsidizing an industry, America will slap a tariff on it. This is good policy - imagine, for example, if Airbus could afford to sell their planes for $1, because they are being entirely subsidized by the French government. Everyone buys airbus, no one buys Boeing any more. Boeing(along with tens of thousands of jobs) goes bye bye, and now Airbus starts selling their planes for whatever they want, because there is no competition left.

So, that's what China was doing - they were giving this aluminum company tons of money, and it allowed them to produce and sell aluminum for far cheaper than should be possible. So America put a tariff on importing that aluminum from China.

Instead, they sent it to Mexico, and then pretended that the aluminum came there when shipping it into America. No more tariffs!

<comment><USER24> Note that this trick is very hard to pull off in the long-term. China tried it with rare-earth metals, and production just started up elsewhere. In the short term it's annoying and causes disruptions.

<comment><USER25> It isn't very hard to pull off dumping, it's game that's been played for centuries. That's why all modern governments disallow it. China especially does it all the time, here's an example with solar: [http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/17/business/energy- environmen...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/17/business/energy- environment/-us-imposes-steep-tariffs-on-chinese-solar-panels.html) .

<comment><USER26> A genuine question: why is this dumping, but importing any other electronics (say any modern computer, cellphone, appliances) not so?

<comment><USER27> As the article mentions:

> the companies were selling products below the cost of manufacture and that > the Chinese companies were benefiting from unfair subsidies from their > government.

I assume Foxconn does not get subsidies to sell iPhones below cost :)

<comment><USER26> I just don't understand how easy it is to determine the cost of manufacture something outside of one's economy and infrastruture.

I'm in Argentina at the moment and I'm constantly hearing local businesses accusing china of dumping because they can't produce more cheaply, but than everywhere else in the world we buy Huawei, Xiaomi, etc I feel that accusations of dumping are more political interpretations than measurable facts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> What's wrong with it? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_strategic_petroleum_res...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_strategic_petroleum_reserves)

</comment><comment><USER29> What an awesome article title

</comment><comment><USER30> At least it's not a giant pile of cocaine I guess... Edit: that was a bit of sarcasm, as these usually don't get reported...

</comment><comment><USER31> It's infuriating how these crooks are the ones who get to be rich, while people who play by the rules, work and live honestly, end up being in debt to these criminals.

Nice bit of reporting by WSJ. I'm sure they will also get blocked in China, just like when NYT reported on the massive wealth of Party officials.

In a few years when people ask "when did the war start?" We might be pointing to this very incident, and many others like it.

<comment><USER32> Which crooks shall we start with first? The Chinese crooks, the American crooks or perhaps crooks of a less powerful third nation?

IE, US brokerages have engaged in similar or even more baldly speculative dodges -

NYTimes: "Hundreds of millions of times a day, thirsty Americans open a can of soda, beer or juice. And every time they do it, they pay a fraction of a penny more because of a shrewd maneuver by Goldman Sachs and other financial players that ultimately costs consumers billions of dollars."

[http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/21/business/a-shuffle-of- alum...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/21/business/a-shuffle-of-aluminum-but- to-banks-pure-gold.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0)

And whether any of this actually illegal is to-be-determined but we're dealing with the people who make the laws, fighting with other people who also make their laws, right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Good timing to distract public from Clinton's scandal.

<comment><USER7> Are you referring to the one which she has been cleared of pretty comprehensively? I can't stand her but the faux email scandal is tiresome.</comment></comment>


When Is It Time to Hire a Recruiter? - <AUTHOR> https://shift.newco.co/when-is-it-time-to-hire-a-recruiter-590220a28c8e#.orxw8bqco <comment><USER2> Answer:

When you have money to burn, just want bodies in the door by a certain date, and don't really care about quality or fit of candidates you hire.

Longer Answer:

Recruiters fuck up. A lot. They work on commission, so it's just a numbers game to them. They screen out good candidates because they look for interviewing skills, or communication / sales skills, or ability to complete LinkedIn profiles... signals that aren't nearly as important to the job as they are to the job application process. Additionally, recruiters don't tend to have the background to know how to screen technical talent.

You are the best judge of your company needs and culture. Hiring the wrong person is very costly -- money, time, productivity, and frustration. Hire an incompetent manager, and you may lose the entire team of junior talent under him. With all this in mind, it's always OK to carve out some time for interviews. You know first-hand what really matters and what you're really looking for -- you can make the judgement call on compromises in real-time.

What I tell my clients who say they can't find talent is to make sure they have built up their farm system. Budget time for their team members to network and socialize -- as part of work. Make sure it's the sort of place where your current employees want to tell their friends about job openings. Sponsor some Meetup groups, host some public lunch and learns, participate in career fairs, be active on social media... way better use of your company resources than paying recruiter commission.</comment>


Snapchat Gives Up on Original Content, Axes 'Snapchat Channel' - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/10/12/ephemeral-ephemeral-ephemeral/ <comment><USER2> Oh, good. I haven't used Snapchat since they required an app update and I didn't feel like bothering with the hassle of signing back up for a google account on my phone again, but their push content was always annoying and the fact that you couldn't disable it doubly so.

</comment><comment><USER3> Aw, that's a shame. They were doing interesting things with made-for- smartphone content.

</comment><comment><USER4> These always seemed a little intrusive and came at odd hours which was annoying.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think their success in this case can be best summed up in my thoughts on their channel. As in 'Hot damn! Snapchat made original content?'

I seriously had no idea.

</comment><comment><USER6> It's seriously annoying!</comment>


Leaked Pentagon video is a science fiction story about the future of cities - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/10/bizarre-leaked-pentagon-video-is-a-science-fiction-story-about-the-future-of-cities/?comments=1 <comment><USER2> I feel like the video really really was based on faith that the future will just become more complex. This is prolly the number one reason why man doesn't progress as much as it should. It just presumes so much and yet so very little. It's like the whole AI taking over theory. Really really doesn't go well with people because it lacks complete and utter detail.

<comment><USER3> > I feel like the video really really was based on faith that the future will > just become more complex.

Well as long as we keep churning out more coders and more code, it will! Automatically. Just by definition.

We're buffering some of that explosion & redirecting a lot of that complexity potential by evolving a relatively harmless "JS frameworks all the way down" song-and-dance. Turns out we don't need Basic Income, we can just have unlimited middlemen ("the service economy") multiply a single GDP-growing transaction into infinite GDP-growing transactions, and have infinite "creatives" each add their own unique superfluous additions of bits & bytes to infinite new numbers of "products & services". Who cares about "economical", prudent, frugal, there's too many pensions to save and nothing else can as credibly inflate into infinity as the digital "industries". Crikey, I'm railing off track here.

Ever more complexity, thus ever more fragility, ever more reproduction. Has been the name of the game since the coal age. Would have to happen this way with _any_ brainy species ending up at the top of the foodchain sooner or later. Once you eat up your prey animals and go "civilized", the direction is irreversably set. But hey, Elon is gonna blow us into space so the future is as bright as the night sky :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Reminds me of that time the head writer for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare was hired by a think tank, because he'd spent so much time imagining what the future of warfare could be. [http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/news/press- releases/call-of-d...](http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/news/press- releases/call-of-duty-writer-and-director-dave-anthony-named-nonresident- fellow-at-atlantic-council)</comment>


Cupertino's mayor: Apple 'abuses us' by not paying taxes - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/05/apple-taxes-cupertino-mayor-infrastructure-plan <comment><USER2> I can't believe Apple is wilfully not paying property taxes on their headquarters! That's quite illegal, and I'm sure...

...oh, they are paying their property taxes? I see. So which taxes, precisely, are they not paying the Cupertino government?

Oh, there aren't any taxes, but you sort of wish someone with the authority to do so would pass a law making new taxes, but they won't, so you're mad at...Apple?

'k.

<comment><USER3> They're called impact fees, and the dumb shmuck should have created laws to levy them beforehand

<comment><USER4> He tried and failed, which makes his position even more absurd, regardless of what you think of the merits of his case.

<comment><USER3> If I remember correctly, that was a special assessment tax for the particular development in question which Jobs ripped to shreds by threatening to move Apple's operations elsewhere in the valley. What they would have had to have done was to create a catch-all impact fee law to apply to all developments based on the number of new traffic they would create. This would probably be bad for business though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This reporter is credulous, because the Guardian is just awful.

"Barry Chang barely made it into the lobby when Apple's security team surrounded and escorted him off the property.

"They said 'you cannot come in, you're not invited'. After that I left and have not gone back," said an exasperated Chang."

Uh huh. Yeah I bet it happened just like that.

What buffoon of a reporter prints a politician's self-serving and incredible story as plain fact? If you buy this story, I've got a pile of Trump steaks and a bottle of hot sauce from Hillary's purse to sell you. So, Barry takes a couple steps into the lobby, and the security just leaps out from behind a plant and says, "Whoever you are, you're not invited. You cannot come in." Sure. Was it the main public entrance lobby or like did he walk in behind someone else into an office building? If he wanted to talk to a higher-up, had he made an appointment? Is it that crazy that local politicians can't just walk into corporations without making an appointment and say, "I want to talk to the man in charge! Several thousand people voted for me!" Did a whole "team" really "surround" him? He makes it sound like it was a hostage situation.

<comment><USER6> Did you also notice that the way the Guardian wrote that paragraph makes it sound like Apple turned away the mayor, when in fact he was not the mayor at the time he went to Apple unannounced.

I cannot read that any other way except to intentionally mislead people for a greater impact on the story. I really hate this kind of journalism.

"The last time the mayor of Cupertino walked into Apple"

Yes, he is the current mayor since Dec 2015, but he was not when he "walked in to Apple."

From the article:

""They said 'you cannot come in, you're not invited'. After that I left and have not gone back," said an exasperated Chang, who's been mayor since December 2015 and had approached the computing firm when he was serving on the city council three years ago."

He was on city council, he was not the mayor, when he went to Apple unannounced and was turned away. And I'm glad Apple turned him away -- why does he think he can show up anywhere unannounced just because of his title, be that mayor or city council member?

This is on top of this entire bullshit article, which as others have pointed out, says nothing about actual local/state taxes that Apple is not paying (because i'm sure they're probably in compliance). This article really comes down to "Mayor says life isn't fair, wants reparations."

<comment><USER7> _I cannot read that any other way except to intentionally mislead people for a greater impact on the story._

It was a bit careless on their part. Most likely the author simply didn't know when the uninvited visit occurred didn't think to double check.

In general I don't see much benefit in imputing malicious motives to others, when far simpler explanations will suffice.

<comment><USER8> This would be a reasonable approach if we weren't talking about a piece of published journalism. That makes it both more unlikely that it was accidental (due to a higher bar of fact-checking), and more blameworthy even if it was due to negligence.

<comment><USER7> What can I say?

If you're looking for bad actors and intentional wrongdoers behind every mishap in the world... then that's the kind of world you'll end up living in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Question towards Steve Jobs on a Cupertino City Council Meeting in 2011:

"[How do] city residents benefit from [Apple's new campus]?"

Jobs: "Well, as you know, we're the largest taxpayer in Cupertino. So we'd like to continue to stay here and pay taxes. [...]. Because if we can't, then we have to go somehwere like Mountain View [and] the largest tax base will go away. This wouldn't be good for Cupertino."

[https://youtu.be/gtuz5OmOh_M?t=11m1s](https://youtu.be/gtuz5OmOh_M?t=11m1s)

<comment><USER10> Can you blame him? There's nothing sleazier than municipal governments, at least once they reach a certain size. They all see the business class as a gravy train to ride instead of finding ways to do a better job with the already large budgets they have.

Chicago doesn't have a Jobs to control it, so its endless tax raises to pay for sweetheart public union pension deals and other backroom corruption. I think the internet-friendly narrative of government being bullied by evil corporations is a fairly unrealistic. Its usually the other way around.

I find it amusing that so many have an undying love for Jobs' judgement in business, technology, etc but his political dealings give them pause because it goes against the left's idea of how the world works. Jobs didn't act like this to be difficult, he said and did these things because its one of the more effective ways to control a city government that can hurt or even destroy your business trivially.

<comment><USER11> While we're talking generalities, here's something more serious.

> What has been created by this half century of massive corporate propaganda > is what's called "anti-politics". So that anything that goes wrong, you > blame the government. Well okay, there's plenty to blame the government > about, but the government is the one institution that people can change... > the one institution that you can affect without institutional change. That's > exactly why all the anger and fear has been directed at the government. The > government has a defect - it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no > defect - they're pure tyrannies. So therefore you want to keep corporations > invisible, and focus all anger on the government. So if you don't like > something, you know, your wages are going down, you blame the government. > Not blame the guys in the Fortune 500, because you don't _read_ the Fortune > 500. You just read what they tell you in the newspapers... so you don't read > about the dazzling profits and the stupendous dizz, and the wages going down > and so on, all you know is that the bad government is doing something, so > let's get mad at the government.

\-- Noam Chomsky

<comment><USER12> Oh boy... a Chomsky quote.

> "so you don't read about the dazzling profits and the stupendous dizz, and > the wages going down and so on"

Yeah, that's _never_ in the news.

<comment><USER11> Oh, an ad-hominem and a straw man, and of course total avoidance of the core point. What a surprise.

<comment><USER13> What? There's no ad-hominem there. And what straw man? Chomsky claimed in the quoted sentence that things like huge corporate profits were not reported, your parent post says that's incorrect and they're often reported. Maybe he's right, maybe you're right, but there's no straw man.

Sometimes I feel like people have browser plugins that randomly pluck sins from the Wikipedia page for logical fallacies.

<comment><USER11> > What? There's no ad-hominem there

"oh boy, a Chomsky quote"? That implies no connotation there to you? There is no ad hominem _you notice_ then.

> Chomsky claimed in the quoted sentence that things like huge corporate > profits were not reported, your parent post says that's incorrect and > they're often reported

Does that address the central point, or does it take one sentence out of context, then takes it literally without seeing the woods for the trees? Call it a straw man, call it not getting the point and splitting irrelevant hairs, same difference. Yes, all sorts of things do get reported, nope, doesn't change anything about the gist of the quote.

Here's a random comment from you to explain it better:

> your remarks are no different than a 7 year old putting down somebody for > throwing like a girl.

Does that mean that's what they are literally saying, saying word by word the exact same sentence any 7 year old would say? Is the discussion about throwing? You didn't say "similar to", you said "no difference", after all. It gets worse, notice that you said "7 year old", not "roughly 7 years old". So a person who is exact 7 years old, no day, no minute, not even a second, not even tenth of a second older... but hey, it would take too long for any child to say a few words while they are still exactly 7, we could even wonder if that exact moment can even be found. So that clearly makes no sense.

Imagine getting such a response of someone either acting dumb or not getting it, and when you call it out as such, you get MORE games and a downvote. You would notice the problem quite easily, why don't you notice it here? Maybe because you don't even feel forced to seriously think about it; the difference is not that the Chomsky quote has been dealt with even just one iota more seriously or more honestly, the difference is in where the status quo lies, and what power doesn't care about or even supports. When you are on its side, one can get away with "oh boy, a Chomsky quote" and other such nonsense. Just like you could accuse someone of throwing like a girl around jocks no questions asked. Nobody will ever take you to task for your response to me. It's not like you just called anyone a racial slur, you just supported someone dismissing words with utter sophistry. Nothing to even skip a beat over, right? And the interwebs is positively littered with that, that's kind of one of the reactions Chomsky evokes. You might call him a litmus test.

And you know, I said "ad-hominem and straw man" because I didn't want to insult anyone's intelligence with this rant. It's not that I can't back up what I say in however much detail you need, I just find it unproductive. Just like I tend to collect and re-post quotes that say things I agree with; which I could say in my own words, in more words and less elegantly. Why do that, when there is a "quote for the occasion"? When people interpret a quote as saying "this is true because X says it", that's their problem, I don't operate that way.

<comment><USER13> OK, well in my opinion if your complaint was that the original poster was misinterpreting or misrepresenting Chomsky, I think it would have been more helpful to say that, and maybe to reiterate the central point that you (through the Chomsky quote) were trying to convey.

To me, the "oh boy, a Chomsky quote" telegraphed the writer's bias against Chomsky, and the follow-on sentence showed what the writer read in your quote. Bias or dislike for a writer is not ad-hominem: it's bias and dislike. And the interpretation of the sentence was fair: a central theme of Chomsky _is_ that the media acts to maintain the status quo, through selective reporting. And a fair criticism of Chomsky is that observation shows a fair bit of reporting on many sides of many issues.

That's quite a bit different then the comment you pulled from me (posted minutes after this one, and a pretty good indicator that I'm probably too cranky to be using the Internet this evening), since the throw-like-a-girl quote makes no sense outside of its context: you have to manufacture context for it to make sense. The Chomsky snippet you object to makes perfect sense to anyone who's read Chomsky, and even if not, the poster can hardly be accused of trying to sneak something past us _when the full quote is right above it_.

I like Chomsky: I think he's smart and observant and courageous. But that interpretation was what I got out of the quote as well, even though I'll bet we're pretty aligned on many issues. So if that wasn't what you meant I think you would have been better served with a response that actually said the point you were trying to make. Saying "ad hominem!" just because somebody doesn't like Chomsky doesn't serve you or your argument.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is such a crappy hit job on Apple. The mayor green lighted a bunch of projects in Cupertino and the people hated it. The congestion is not happening because of Apple but because of the new home developments that are approved. He wants to protect himself by getting free money from Apple to make his people happy with some infrastructure construction. Apple is not obligated to give the guy free money.

</comment><comment><USER15> > Apple pays a 2.3% effective tax rate on its $181bn in cash held offshore...

> ...shield themselves off from the theoretically 35% federal corporate tax > rate

Something seems wrong here. I don't think companies are expected to pay 35% yearly on cash reserves. Am I confused, or is the article? If anyone is knowledgable about this I'd be interested to know the deal!

<comment><USER16> Basically all countries tax companies on income earned in that country. So, if you're a UK company and you earn $1B in the UK and $500M in France, you pay tax on $1B to the UK government and tax on $500M to the French government.

The US taxes companies on their worldwide income when they re-patriate that money to the US. So, if you earned $500M in France and want to bring that money back into the US, you owe US taxes on it (in addition to the French taxes already paid). If you don't bring the money back to the US, you just pay the French taxes.

People have called the ability to hold the money overseas a loophole, but given that basically no other country taxes companies on their worldwide income, it seems more that the US is the outlier.

Let's put it this way. A UK-based firm earns $1B in the US and $1B in the UK and has to pay the American tax authorities on $1B and UK tax authorities on $1B and it can then bring the profit back from the US. That seems fair. By contrast, a US-based firm earns the same amount in each country and must pay the US tax on $1B, the UK tax on $1B, and then the US tax on whatever they bring back from the UK (which has already had UK tax paid on it). This encourages companies to reinvest their profits overseas rather than bring the money back to the US where it would get taxed again.

It's partly because the US is so large and has been more isolated than most countries. Likewise, it's basically the only country that taxes individuals based on citizenship rather than residency.

<comment><USER17> This isn't entirely accurate. First, You can deduct foreign taxes paid, so $1B earned in the UK could would come back only in paying the difference of higher US and UK taxes. But tax systems in different countries are different, deductions are different, as are fees and such....it leads to a huge mess.

The other hard thing to reason about is where the value was added. If the IP was developed in the states, technically, it has to be sold through, so profits on it are still taxed here, to the foreign branch, where only retail profits are taxed...or something like that. It gets really messy when you are also doing R&D abroad...and you can see why tax games are possible and even necessary.

<comment><USER18> Corporations get a tax credit on taxes paid to foreign countries.

This is where the U.S. nominal rate comes in. If it was about the same as other countries', then it would not be an impediment to repatriating profits. But at 35%, it's the highest in the world, so corps repatriating profits will indeed pay additional taxes to the U.S. government, even taking the foreign tax credits into account.

That's why corps want the corporate tax rate lowered--so that business purposes can have a bigger role in decisions about moving capital. Right now tax avoidance has a large role in those decisions, at least when it comes to the U.S.

It's also why a temporary corporate tax holiday does not really help. It lets companies bring back one big lump sum, but does not change their long-term decision making, and it is long-term decision making that determines where investment goes and where jobs are created.

<comment><USER19> The 'before deductions' part makes that 35% rate meaningless. A 10% tax on 10 billion is > than a 35% tax on 2 billion.

 _Corporate share of federal tax revenue has dropped by two-thirds in 60 years — from 32% in 1952 to 10% in 2013.

General Electric, Boeing, Verizon and 23 other profitable Fortune 500 firms paid no federal income taxes from 2008 to 2012.

Our average effective tax rate is 27.1% compared with 27.7% for the other 30 OECD countries, according to CRS. _

[http://staging.americansfortaxfairness.org/tax-fairness- brie...](http://staging.americansfortaxfairness.org/tax-fairness-briefing- booklet/fact-sheet-corporate-tax-rates/)

[http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R41743.pdf](http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R41743.pdf)

<comment><USER17> The problem is, for income earned abroad, meaning of the deduction that lower the rate domestically don't apply as easily, so you wind up actually paying somewhere near 35%. "Hey here is an incentive to do stuff in the states" doesn't apply when you aren't doing stuff in the states.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> So, uh, the city is already highly dependent on one payer, and the solution proposed is to _increase the proportion that payer pays_?

I guess i never understand why people think the solution to something having too much influence due to money is to become more dependent on their money. I can see no magic way to accomplish this without an increase in influence from that payer, and to think you can seems ... pretty pie-in-the-sky.

The real solution is to diversify where your money comes from, at pretty much any cost.

<comment><USER21> (I'm not addressing the article at all, just your logic):

By that logic, the simplest way to get rid of the dependence is to decrease their tax to 0%...

<comment><USER20> Yes, or increase the amount you get from others.

If you don't need them, and they aren't providing anything for you, they have less influence on you.

The way you be less dependent on people is ... to be less dependent on them. Not by being more dependent and trying to set up magic firewalls or whatever.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > At a recent Cupertino city council meeting, some residents protested about a > lack of funding for public projects, Chang said – even crumpling up meeting > agendas and throwing them. "They ball up the paper and throw it, and they > say 'You're making all the wrong decisions'," Chang said. "In the meantime > Apple is not willing to pay a dime. They're making profit, and they should > share the responsibility for our city, but they won't. They abuse us."

Is it just me, or does this Mr. Chang just sound incompetent?

His citizens are saying he's making the wrong decisions. He's walking onto Apple's property and being forced out. He's asking for special taxes against Apple without saying why Apple deserves these taxes.

How about Chang makes the right decisions that pleases his citizens? Has anyone actually been to a Town Hall meeting? People don't just crumple-up the agendas because your budget sucks. They crumple-up agendas because the meeting was a waste of everybody's time.

I think this Mayor can't run a Town Hall, doesn't have much support of the citizens, and his only "big idea" is to increase taxes against Apple (and maybe some moonshot projects no one gives a care about)

A REAL Mayor would have said something along the lines of "The highway leading to Apple Headquarters is full of potholes, and I don't have the budget to fix it!". Or maybe "Teachers deserve a higher salary in this town" (or something... connected to reality, you know?). This guy just seems jealous of Apple's cash.

<comment><USER23> If Apple is meant to pay a new tax based on their net income, then every business that operates in Cupertino should obviously pay the same tax. Let's see how that goes over.

<comment><USER22> Exactly.

Although really, Apple would just change headquarters and Cupertino would be in a bit of a mess if you made an corporate-level income-tax

<comment><USER24> They wouldn't have to physically move. Only legally. It'd be easy enough for them to arrange so that the corporate entity in Cupertino is a subsidiary which only ever makes a loss. No profits, no tax for Chang.

Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple is already structured this way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> In the UK we have the concept of "Section 106" payments which allow a development through planning by the developer paying the local government some amount of money to redress the cost of dealing with congestion, public relam, affordable housing, etc. For large skyscraper developments in London, this can be many many millions of pounds.

Does something similar exist in CA?

<comment><USER26> Wow... outstanding haha. So in bringing more business to an area, they need to pay twice? At what point do people actually own the land they own?

<comment><USER27> 1) the developer doesn't "bring" business to the area, they are supported by their clients and are responding to economic incentives, same as anyone else.

2) if you do perceive them as "bringing" business, then it's only right to equally perceive them as bringing congestion, pollution, and all the other undesirable side effects of economic activity.

3) when does one ever "own" land? Property rights are enforced by the government, it's only fair that they receive compensation for that.

<comment><USER28> > Property rights are enforced by the government, it's only fair that they > receive compensation for that.

The compensation they extract has nothing to do with the cost of enforcing property rights, because those costs are trivial.

<comment><USER27> Not trivial at all, just mostly invisible and most of us who've only known modern western societies never give it a second thought.

<comment><USER28> Try again. Law enforcement was just 9% of the Cupertino municipal budget in 2015.

[http://www.cupertino.org/index.aspx?page=1222](http://www.cupertino.org/index.aspx?page=1222)

What fraction of that do you want to bet has anything to do with protecting private property, as opposed to the large revenue generating activities like parking tickets?

<comment><USER27> Like I said, completely invisible to you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Regardless of the politics, Apple and Google and all the other Peninsula companies should be willing to help fund public transit because it is directly affecting their ability to recruit employees.

<comment><USER30> They are. The people who control the munis don't want to bother building transit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> So Apple is already contributing nearly twenty percent of the city's budget? I think the real problem is not enough diversification.

Apparently there is also an agreement where the city refunds sales taxes back to Apple? Originally 50% and now down to 35%? Why does this even exist?

The way to get Apple to pay for infrastructure improvements is simple, don't do any near their campus and their own employees will be impacted and that will get Apple to agree to help redevelop the area.

<comment><USER32> > The way to get Apple to pay for infrastructure improvements is simple, don't > do any near their campus and their own employees will be impacted and that > will get Apple to agree to help redevelop the area.

And whatever they build they will control. I think you might be slowly giving away the city to a corporation.

<comment><USER22> That'd only happen if you ceded zoning regulations over to Apple though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> You might argue that the mayor is abusing us because of the cities housing restrictions.

<comment><USER3> PREACH

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Absolutely terrible article.

In an article about property taxes paid or unpaid, it doesn't even mention property taxes. Is Apple's campus under-assessed? A little Googling shows Cupertino's tax rate as $7.96 on a thousand which would value Apple's campus at $1.16B. Is that a lot? Is that a little? What are other companies assessed at in Cupertino and surrounding cities?

The article talks about income taxes which are totally irrelevant to the situation and Woz's assertion that Apple should pay 50% income tax. The article talks about money earned offshore that Apple doesn't pay standard US income tax on, but fails to mention that pretty much every other country in the world doesn't tax foreign earned income as income earned locally (just letting it be taxed in the country it was earned). Plus, it's irrelevant to Cupertino.

This is just "you should hate on Apple. Why? Um, they're not paying taxes. What taxes aren't they paying? Um. . . _the_ taxes."

Really, my simple Googling of Cupertino's tax rate and then trying to come up with an assessment off that isn't good journalism. But I'm just writing a comment on HN at 8am. I'm not a paid journalist - but that paid journalist hasn't researched the simplest questions possible. If Apple were replaced by hundreds of companies that added up to the same number of desks, would Cupertino get more money? If the answer is "no", then there's no story here.

[http://venturebeat.com/2013/06/04/apple- campus-2-7k-employee...](http://venturebeat.com/2013/06/04/apple- campus-2-7k-employees-32m-in-property-tax-9k-construction-jobs-66m-in-public- improvements/)

The simplest Googling comes up with a much more useful article. Apple paid $25M in property tax in 2012 and that is going to grow by $32M annually with Campus 2 to over $56.5 annually. Apple is funding $66M in local public improvements and $35M on transportation demand programs. Plus, Cupertino is getting $38.1 in one-time construction fees and taxes and Apple is going to pay the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority $15.4M annually.

The caption of the image on the guardian article says the mayor wanted $100M from Apple for infrastructure - beyond the more than hundred million the VentureBeat article notes. It kind of sounds like the Mayor is incompetent, hated by voters who are trying to recall him, trying to salvage his career by running for state assembly, and trying to blame his incompetence on Apple. It seems to be more an article about how Cupertino has a terrible mayor.

[http://articles.latimes.com/2013/sep/27/business/la-fi- apple...](http://articles.latimes.com/2013/sep/27/business/la-fi-apple- company-town-20130929)

Here's another, much better article. It notes that Apple's original campus was 856,000 square feet and that Apple has bought (which they would pay tax on) or leased (which their landlord would pay tax on) another 2M square feet. That makes it hard to say exactly what the property should be assessed at given that we don't know what proportion of the 2M they own, but let's say half. At $500/sq ft, 1.856M square feet would come out to $928M in property value. That's pretty close to $1.16B. At the very least, it seems like Apple's taxes are in the ballpark - especially when you consider the amazing deals that companies regularly negotiate to move to locations. Tesla negotated a 100% property tax and sales tax abatement from Nevada for 10 and 20 years respectively, $12,500 for every job, 10 years of 100% business tax abatement, discounted electricity rates for 8 years, plus $120M - totaling $1.2 Billion.

Again, it sounds like an incompetent mayor that voters are trying to recall attempting to save his career.

<comment><USER34> "The Guardian" has a left leaning bias. So I am not surprised with the way of reporting.

<comment><USER35> As well as that notorious bias, they have an axe to grind with Silicon Valley in general. Still it plays to their masses, just have a look at the comments.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> > Barry Chang barely made it into the lobby when Apple's security team > surrounded and escorted him off the property.

I had to read it again to make sure I'm not making a mistake. Its unimaginable in some geographies. Evokes mixed feelings like : "cool, they can do that?" to "that's quite arrogant"

Also reminds me of a video where Steve Jobs met the council. The mayor was delighted like a teenager, showing off his iPad to Steve, asking for free Wifi : [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtuz5OmOh_M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtuz5OmOh_M) ( t=19:54 )

<comment><USER37> Why couldn't they? It's private property.

<comment><USER36> As I said, in some countries, you can't treat an on duty public/government "servant" like that.

<comment><USER38> If he'd been a police officer investigating a crime, or a fire marshall, that wouldn't fly. Doing it to the mayor is just rude.

<comment><USER22> > If he'd been a police officer investigating a crime,

Which means he'd have to have a warrant. If an Officer was "just investigating", they have to be invited or have a court order to get onto private property.

In America anyway.

<comment><USER38> It's not quite that simple. If the police officer has probable cause to believe a crime is in progress, or the fire marshal believes a dangerous code violation might exist, woe to the dumbass who tries to escort them off the property.

Otherwise, yes, a police investigator needs permission, or a warrant, to go onto the Apple campus and ask questions or look around.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Another example of "High Tech is the new Banking"... in the bad public perception sense.

</comment><comment><USER40> What's forgotten in this discussion are the property taxes in Cupertino. The property values in Cupertino are among the highest in the Bay Area, and with that comes more property taxes. I doubt Cupertino would be this desirable were it not for Apple (and the school district). So once again Apple, albeit indirectly, helps pad city coffers.

<comment><USER41> Most residents of Cupertino pay very little property tax due to prop 13. Some residents pay 3000$ for the same house when their neighbors pay 18000$.

<comment><USER40> "Most" requires some hard data; and whether the fraction is higher or lower than the neighboring areas. Prop 13 is California-wide, so it's not specific to Cupertino.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Unable to find a source, but I thought Cupertino City Council approved this; if true, the Mayor blaming Apple for the City Council's actions seems a bit twisted.

Is anyone know if what if any role the Cupertino City Council played in the situation and provided a source to back this up?

</comment><comment><USER43> [http://9to5mac.com/2016/05/02/apple-campus-2-drone- flyover-m...](http://9to5mac.com/2016/05/02/apple-campus-2-drone-flyover-may/)

</comment><comment><USER44> Perfect article while the Life and Death of Cities is in mind.

Apple could be a better citizen, and contribute a lot more than money to the city around it. If the company fully subscribes to shareholder theory, they will contribute only what the law requires. But Apple seems to stand for higher things such as design excellence and human dignity.

The company can contribute to making Cupertino a functional and wonderful "city". It is neither of those things now with its car-centric configuration and lack of enough housing construction.

The actions taken by Cook regarding issues such as protecting privacy indicate that he stands for values beyond serving the shareholders. Those values could be developed for the community immediately outside the campus. Apple's ability to design such great things and manufacture them in vast numbers indicates that it has the ability to address very difficult problems. Those skills could be applied to the problems 25 feet away from their windows.

The people at Apple might think of Cupertino as a source of design challenges, and start by understanding the shape of the city and the people who interact with it. Take a look at the aggregate data coming in from the watch, or hang out by one of the main stroads. Try to take a walk to various useful places some time, or get three things done in a morning without a car.

All of us have the capacity to be more than a minimal tax payer. Being more starts with noticing.

<comment><USER45> > The company can contribute to making Cupertino a functional and wonderful > "city". It is neither of those things now with its car-centric configuration > and lack of enough housing construction.

The car-centric configuration is what most of the current residents want (if they wanted something else, they would choose to live somewhere else). Since they control a majority voting block in city politics, there's very little that Apple can do to change that; significant changes to the status quo will be blocked by the city residents.

<comment><USER44> What is "want"? And why does it have to be so immovable?

We can't always walk away from what we do or where we live. Car-centric, earth-wasting behavior is ostensibly what we want, because most of us engage in it every day. So is sugar soda and processed food, lack of exercise, and any number of unhealthy things we do. So is paying huge amounts of money for a house, then fighting any new development near our neighborhood out of self interest.

It is possible for people to essentially be trapped in a situation in which rational choices are a bad ones. How might we break out of that?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Slightly off topic, but is that really the design for Apple's new headquarters, a giant ring? So if you want to get from a place on one side to the other, you have to walk halfway around the circle or cut through the giant park in the middle? That seems horribly inefficient.

<comment><USER47> You might need to think more about what "efficient" actually means.

Apple did.

<comment><USER46> If you can move in a 2 dimensional plane, such as inside a regular building, you can go in a straight line between any two points.

If you're constricted to moving around the circumference of a circle, you necessarily have to go in a curved line.

Curved lines are longer than straight lines.

So the average distance between any two points is necessarily going to be longer in the Apple building than in a normal building with the same floor area.

Add to that, normal buildings have cores where the utilities are run in the center and radiate out to the edges. Running wiring, plumbing, and ductwork around a circle will involve _miles_ of additional material that would otherwise be unnecessary.

I think maybe you and Apple have a definition of efficient that differs from the rest of the population.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> It's not just apple, it is every company that dodges taxes. Making an example of apple is not fair - everyone should pay their taxes... who knows how the systems we have in place would actually work if people used it the way it is designed (instead of finding loopholes for their own benefit).

<comment><USER49> Which taxes is Apple dodging? I'm not sure you read the article carefully. The mayor wanted to pass a new tax, but the other council members voted his proposal down.

<comment><USER48> Ah, thanks - it seems I was talking about something else; [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/15/apple- eur...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/15/apple-european- commission-ruling-back-taxes-ireland)

<comment><USER49> That's not Apple dodging taxes either; they were just caught in the crossfire of the tax war that's been happening in the EU. Ireland, the Netherlands, etc try to lure companies by competing on tax rates, which the rest of the EU doesn't like, so as in any cartel, they forbid member states from dropping them too low. Since Ireland's was found to be in infringement, the companies have to pay the difference.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Is the money better in the hands of a super overgrown and overstaffed organisation like the US government when most of it goes to paying interest to the lovely central banks folks and the public has almost 0 transparency over its expenditure? The perfect portrayal of profound inefficiency and over- bloated corporate structure.

It's fun and easy to point fingers, and while tax avoidance should by no means by encouraged, why is 35% of your money the direct property of a government who does superb things like conjure into existence some of the most criminal oligopolies in the medical industry?

Maybe demand Apple to build the infrastructure themselves at their own expense, and let them manage it, seems they can actually get things done.

Uncle Sam's virtues seem to end with insane taxation used to bomb other countries and slowly but surely kill its citizens through rudimentary medical care bills in the hundreds of thousands, maybe leave real work to other people, who don't spend 600 mil of taxpayer dollar on a website.

<comment><USER51> Apple has yet to provide me with food stamps or public housing, both of which saved me when I was a refugee. I can check with my spouse but I'm pretty sure the public hospital she works at was not an apple product.

The rest is just ridiculous. If you want an effective government, you have to take privatization out of it, not rely on it as we have.

<comment><USER23> Apple paid $46 billion in just income taxes over the last three fiscal years. The majority of that was likely in the US market, where they're more heavily taxed and have a very large market share.

I don't know where you live, but if it's in the US, then you're wrong: they did in fact help pay for food stamps and public housing.

Last fiscal year, Apple generated $72.5 billion in income before income taxes, and paid $19.1 billion in income taxes ($53.3b in net income). That's a 26.3% rate. That rate is higher than corporations pay in almost any other developed nation (Europe typically has the lowest corporate income tax rates for example), and that's after they go out of their way to try to avoid paying taxes. That $19 billion in taxes pays for a lot of welfare state benefits.

<comment><USER52> The parent's point is precisely that: The welfare is paid by the government, with money that it takes in taxes from e.g. corporations.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


TLS 1.3 draft - jor-el http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-tls-rfc5246-bis-00#page-5

<comment><AUTHOR> Links to the the middle of a rfc.

Look for 1.2. Major Differences from TLS 1.1</comment>


New NASA budget eats the seed corn of its Journey to Mars - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/04/new-nasa-budget-eats-the-seed-corn-of-its-journey-to-mars/ <comment><USER2> Having just read about the Apollo project, I now appreciate what a huge and sustained national effort it was. Moreover, it would have been impossible had it not been for the "space race" with the USSR.

Sadly, it seems hard to imagine we'd be able to pull off something on this scale nowadays.</comment>


What is the minimum viable blog? - <AUTHOR> http://www.dev.gd/20130212-minimum-viable-blog.html

<comment><USER2> Interestingly, I think blogging will come back full circle for 'hacker' bloggers, and go back to basics.

As the other mentions in another [post]([http://www.dev.gd/20130211-your-blog- navigation-is-superfluo...](http://www.dev.gd/20130211-your-blog-navigation- is-superfluous.html)), blog navigation is bordering on superflous. How often do you stay to read the rest of a blog, and if so, do you go through complex CMS tagging systems?

I'm currently exploring the option of using Cake to generate new posts, and a simple list of links on the root domain for navigation (which I believe I should be able to append to with Cake). This will generate static HTML that I can rsync to my server, or push to S3.</comment>


Before Apple, America Dominated Watchmaking. Then History Forgot - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-27/before-apple-america-dominated-watchmaking-then-history-forgot <comment><USER2> I disagree with the point of this article.

Watches are gaudy and completely unnecessary. You want those, there are american manufactures that will convince your poorest friend that a watch will improve their life.

You want a watch? Digital is fine. they are 10$.

I love my calculator watch</comment>


Ask HN: When are we finally going to start defaulting to TLS/SSL? - <AUTHOR>

Considering all the recent controversy regarding government programs that analyze and store your HTTP traffic (and potentially malicious and immoral ISPs that sell it to 3rd parties), is there a good reason why there are still websites that don't use TLS/SSL? Whenever I see a website that uses unencrypted HTTP it makes me feel nervous and even disinclined to use it. Furthermore, if your website requires me to register/log in via an insecure connection, I simply won't use it - no matter how good it might be. I'm sure there are many hackers out there that feel the same way.
Some people argue that if your key-pair is compromised that TLS doesn't really mean a whole lot. While that is true, there are still key exchange mechanisms that guarantee perfect forward secrecy such as discrete logarithm Diffie-Hellman and elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman.
Pretty much all modern browsers support these ciphersuites and enabling them on the server shouldn't really be a big deal. Is there a GOOD reason why we aren't defaulting to these modes nowadays? (Ignorance and laziness don't count).
If you own and maintain a website, please enable TLS - at the very least. <comment><USER2> > Is there a GOOD reason why we aren't defaulting to these modes nowadays?

Two of them:

(1) SSL certificates for public-facing sites (where you don't control the trusted CAs/certs) cost money. More money than many individuals with sites spend on their hosting.

(2) Because you need one IP address per domain to do SSL, which costs even more money. Most sites are on shared hosting where dedicated IPs are not even offered, and on VPS/dedicated hosting additional IPs cost extra.

There's not enough free IPv4 space available to switch every domain to SSL if we wanted to. It won't be until Windows XP and Android 2.x usage is much lower that we can start using SNI on public-facing websites, which would relieve us of the need for a separate IP per domain.

On a personal note, SSL can be really expensive even if you're willing to spend money on it. I run three sites that give users subdomains. To run SSL on the sites, I need three wildcard certificates that cost over $300 per year.

<comment><USER3> 1) Free SSL certificates: [http://www.startssl.com/](http://www.startssl.com/)

2) The benefits of SSL far outweigh the inability to serve XP and Android 2.X clients. Use a dedicated IP if you can and its cost-effective, if not, use SNI.

<comment><USER2> 1) Not free for commercial use per their terms of service. You have to use their $59.90+ paid product.

2) No, the benefits of SSL do not "far outweigh" the cost of not being available at all. If 1 in 5 people can't reach your site, it doesn't matter how secure you are. That's about how much of the web you would be shutting out by deploying SNI today.

If those were reasonable choices to make, at least some companies would be making them, but not a single well-known site has done so.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I already do default to SSL when possible with the KB SSL Enforcer extension[1]. It breaks some sites some times, but it's generally pretty good.

[1][https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kb-ssl- enforcer/fl...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kb-ssl- enforcer/flcpelgcagfhfoegekianiofphddckof?hl=en)

</comment><comment><USER5> I feel like people just aren't used to it ("What is this green lock in my address bar? This is just XYZNewsNet, if they need security, they must be doing something wrong", so large sites aren't inclined to make the switch.</comment>


What the Hackintosh community wants in the new modular Mac Pro - <AUTHOR> https://9to5mac.com/2017/04/14/what-the-hackintosh-community-wants-new-modular-mac-pro/ <comment><USER2> I've got a Hackintosh as my main system, I love it.

I dual boot macOS (default) and Windows 10 on it. A nice feature is that I can use my Windows installation while I'm using macOS through virtualization (Parallels), yet boot natively to the same Windows installation when I need the full performance.

Getting the Hackintosh working properly was hard as hell though, although I kinda enjoyed it since I'm a geek. Now that I've got it working, it works flawlessly. Recommended for people who want to save money/maximize performance and don't mind the grueling effort required.

<comment><USER3> How much effort was required?

I'm curious because I've been considering building one for a while, but the reports from idly skimming eg tonymacx86 are all over the place. Some say as long as you buy from their build guide it's very easy, and some people seem to have tons of problems anyway.

<comment><USER4> My main desktop is a hackintosh.

It took maybe an afternoon to build, and then a few more hours to get running. It's been running solid ever since.

Everything works (thunderbolt 3, usb 3, sound, airdrop, iMessage, handoff, etc) except you can't use apps that use SceneKit. So iBooks, Xcode instruments and SceneKit editor don't work. You can get them to work, by using Apple's drivers, but its a pita.

Some people claim the new nvidia pascal drivers work for SceneKit, but I've not upgraded to a 1080 yet so I can't confirm.

This is my build: [https://pcpartpicker.com/list/gwV6qk](https://pcpartpicker.com/list/gwV6qk)

<comment><USER5> SceneKit apparently works if you enable the Intel iGPU. The issue is related to driver signing; it happens on real Mac hardware too and Nvidia has acknowledged the issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> By "modular", Apple probably means that it is easier for themselves to provide multiple configurations and make updates, rather than end-users having the ability to stick in random cards/drives/memory/CPUs.

<comment><USER7> I agree, I think they just mean they probably will stop the soldering and glueing of pieces that should be easily replaceable.

<comment><USER6> I hope they improve things on the iMac as well. The situation with the current iMacs is ridiculous. The 27 inch iMac has user-accessible SO-DIMM slots, but the 21 inch iMac has the memory glued on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm curious, most of the people with the skills to build a hackintosh could easily build a Linux box as well and some probably do. However, is there any reason they just don't go to Linux? Is it hardware support or Adobe?

<comment><USER9> Two deal breakers:

1\. None of the Ui packages out there in Linux is as good as macOS.

1.5. Gestures. Though I can live without one, I've grown accustomed to the slick motions.

2\. Chinese input on Linux is unusable. It was so confusing I gave up setting it up on my (was) Ubuntu installation.

<comment><USER10> You can get really close on point #1 with some work. I've never looked into gestures, and I don't write Chinese, so I can't speak to those.

<comment><USER11> Re #1: Yes, maybe I could get the main use cases to approximate OS X well. But (a) I don't want to learn how multiple windowing systems work and how to script them, and (b) then to fine tune them so corner cases are covered: how to integrate Gnome and KDE applications so their menu bars have the same shortcuts for the same operations, use the same font, have the same DPI scaling, etc... It's a never-ending set of options to fiddle with, little cohesive documentation, and no objective criteria to decide when they've been fiddled enough. Not saying it's a fault of Linux, but that's what we get in a open source ecosystem where the kernel team doesn't dictate how the desktop works.

<comment><USER10> I wasn't responding to "approximating OS X," I was saying you can get the UI to be "as good as" OS X, with some work.

<comment><USER11> I think the problems I gave examples of do relate to the UI. If not, then what we define as "UI" seems pretty trivial.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > I think it's also important that Apple continues to keep the CPUs in Mac > Pros socketed.#5

Honestly I wonder if this is actually the future of CPUs or if it will all be soldered in. That, and RAM too. The history of computers is a history of demodularization. Unlike, say, 15 years ago, today I expect a high-end CPU + Memory configuration to remain high-end for a few years, so I'm not worried about upgradability. That's definitely not true with GPUs.

</comment><comment><USER13> Mac Pro represent may be 1% of Mac Sales, and in terms of volume it is likely to be a rounding error for Apple.

If this assumption is correct, I wonder why Apple doesn't make a high price but also high value machine. Aiming at Prosumers, Pro Gamers ( If they are still on Mac ) and Professionals. With starting price of $1299. The lowest config could have been done with AMD Zen 2 and non ECC Memory. And Scale up all the way to 32 Core Zen and 256GB ECC Memory. It fix the developer's need for a "Desktop" Machine to program the iPhone, or Web Development. And the years' of cry for just "Mac". And Something clearly the Mac mini shouldn't be aiming at.

I still believe there is at least another 5 - 10 years of life in Mac before we sunset it, and unless Apple will be moving to ARM Mac ( which i doubt they will ), there is no better time to bring some of these people into the Apple's ecosystem. Whether it is iPhone, iPad, or Mac.

</comment><comment><USER14> What distinguishes the Mac ecosystem over other PC OS'es is that the small number of supported hardware configurations makes it possible to do much more thorough system-level testing and optimization. The result is a much more stable and secure OS. As soon as you start letting users swap out components without restriction, you're going to see user experience decline.

EDIT: I'm still fully expecting Apple to allow change-outs of key components through Apple-supplied upgrades.

</comment><comment><USER15> I've been using a Linux workstation for the past year and actually feel like I could go with a Linux laptop too. I was contemplating Hackintosh but no need. I only miss the Magic Trackpad.

Atom + Chrome (with a dozen extensions) makes web development a breeze. I can do a lot of quality front-end work.

You're also not stuck with god awful Homebrew for installing dependencies. OS X is a pretty hostile place for developers who don't live out of XCode.

<comment><USER16> I've only used Homebrew to install Node and that went well. What're the areas Homebrew gets ugly?

<comment><USER15> Install a modern Bash and set it as your default shell. When Homebrew updates (which it does automatically now) you might be locked out of your Terminal.

`brew --prefix package` returns the latest _installable_ package, and not the version you actually have installed.

Also things like: [https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/issues/2402](https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/issues/2402)

It tries to do too much and ends up being a never ending surprise from hell.

(The solution to the Bash issue is to hard code the path for chsh, etc.)

<comment><USER17> I've never had issues with Homebrew, and no one I know has either.

I _have_ had apt refuse to install npm because of a full /boot partition (Imagine if Homebrew refused to run because I couldn't update OS X)

I think it's ironic you say _homebrew_ is the one trying to do too much...

<comment><USER15> What. I've seen issues with Homebrew at every company/team I've worked with since it came out. The solution is always the same: Use vagrant and chef/puppet for your development environment.

Meanwhile, apt packages are incredibly stable, install the same way every time, and are exactly what you'd run on the server anyway. You can use PPAs if you need bleeding edge versions.

<comment><USER17> I really don't know what to tell you then, because I've yet to see a Homebrew installation that couldn't install packages, but _many_ times I've had apt break and require either fixing something unrelated to installing my packages (like failed upgrades) or copying and pasting some dpkg invocations until things weren't broken anymore. And when I mention the latter most Linux users I've spoken to say PPAs are a great way to end up doing that (I don't want to start vetting PPAs when I need software, I've never had an issue with a Homebrew installation, be it bleeding edge or old as dirt and requiring finding an old version).

I have no idea how you'd compare Vagrant to... homebrew. Sometimes it's convenient to have software on my actual machine, not a VM...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Also known as "please tell us how you might try to make our system more open so we know where to close it off."

</comment><comment><USER19> I wouldn't mind if the CPU remained soldered - I don't think I've ever done an upgrade that didn't require a new chipset too.

Give me standard ram, m2 slots, and pcie graphics card slot, and I will order on day one.

</comment><comment><USER20> "Here's what people who don't buy Macs want Apple to do"

<comment><USER21> Yeah, that was my first thought too. Has Apple ever seen a single dime from the "Hackintosh community"? Why would they care about what people who by defintion are not customers want?

<comment><USER22> >Has Apple ever seen a single dime from the "Hackintosh community"?

My first three Mac systems as a poor student were Hackintoshes. Couldn't afford a real Macbook. The first one was a Dell Mini 9, which was a $200 netboook that could somehow run Snow Leopard flawlessly (with significant contributions from the community of course).

As a working professional, I have spent close to $10k on Apple hardware in the past two years. I've also helped them make quite a bit of money through their App Store cut.

I recently put together a dual-booting Windows 10/OSX system for usage at home, used for both gaming and development. I spent about $1200 on it, and I couldn't even get an equivalent desktop from Apple no matter how much I spent. My ceiling would have probably been around $3k.

<comment><USER23> > My ceiling would have probably been around $3k.

That gets you real close to buying an iMac for development and a PC for gaming. I think this is part of the reason Apple has pulled back from the high end. Hardware is cheap enough that we can use different devices for different purposes now. There are often some good advantages to doing it too. I like having my workstation in the office, my gaming PC in the living room, and a tiny little laptop for travel. That would have cost me close to $10k a decade ago!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It seems Apple is pushing away more and more of the "Pros," just take a look at the latest macbook pros. The only way I use MacOS anymore is with a hackintosh.</comment>


The internet loves potato salad! - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/324283889/potato-salad/

<comment><USER2> And now the $1.2m funding for Yo makes sense.

<comment><USER3> I think the Yo team will actually turn that app into something remarkable. This guy is simply a jokester..</comment></comment>


Bowing to pressure, YouTube will reconsider its harassment policies - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/6/18654604/youtube-policy-change-harassment-maza-crowder <comment><USER2> You've posted the same article with the exact same comments twice now. Perhaps because you didn't like the comments you received the first time you posted the story here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20111571](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20111571) ?

Why are you so fervently in favor of censorship? Remember when the church oppressed dissenting views and minority voices? Now that your clique has power we should silence the rest?

</comment><comment><USER3> Maza is an activist who claims to be a journalist. He is a public figure and so fair game to criticism.

Crowder is a _comedian_. He has made fun of Maza. Apparently Maza has a thin skin.

Maza's also a hypocrite. Here's how he respectfully deals with people he disagrees with:

[https://mobile.twitter.com/gaywonk/status/113086281371350221...](https://mobile.twitter.com/gaywonk/status/1130862813713502210)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> From the Youtube blog post:

"To be clear, using racial, homophobic, or sexist epithets on their own would not necessarily violate either of these policies. For example, as noted above, lewd or offensive language is often used in songs and comedic routines. It's when the primary purpose of the video is hate or harassment. And when videos violate these policies, we remove them."

I don't see how Google/Youtube can view Crowders videos as non-harassment, non-hate speech and still keep a straight face with their pride month campaign. You can't support homophobic creators and claim to be supportive to LGBTI issues at the same time.

<comment><USER4> I understand this is an important topic to you, but is this copy & paste frequent resubmission really the best way to tackle the issue when it already has been to the front page and discussed exhaustively?</comment></comment>