shrave10

Outside of this forum I’ve never met any one who didn’t think Siri was a pathetic joke.   More a pain to use than worth trying.   I actively try to stay away from Miss Annoyance.   Alexa on the other hand works great and was cheap.  

What is a joke is to trust a company that intentionally bypassed Safari's security settings to spy on people, and trust them so much that you would actually place their spy microphones in your house. Just say the wrong thing even as a joke and next thing you know, you could be stopped at the border by various customs officials with a hand on their gun. People putting Google and Amazon "smart speakers" in their home do not seem so to be so smart themselves.

hexclock said:

foregoneconclusion said:

The 2017 tax cuts that CEOs used for stock buybacks are due to expire. These are the same tax cuts that the Fed predicted would increase inflation. Go figure…

Reducing the corporate tax rate to compete with other countries allowed  US companies to repatriate billions of dollars back to the United States. 

According to the CBO those tax cuts increased federal tax revenue because the economy grew. Inflation came from all the crazy spending congress has done over the last few years, starting during the pandemic. 

There will always be spending need but this doesn't account for jump in inflation.  Recent jump may be proving stubborn because of money printing during pandemic coupled with increasing trade deficit with a certain manufacturing monopolist country > increased money printing each year to help cover deficit.  Trump thinks he can deal with the problem by raising tariffs and letting the average consumer pick up the tab.  Biden thinks the better way is to raise taxes on the very wealthy and corporations and use these revenues to fund U.S. jobs.  Biden's approach hurts the average consumer less and makes more sense.  Plus, Biden is encouraging friend-shoring of manufacturing out of China while Trump has come out against friend-shoring for some weird reason he is not disclosing.  All the while he maintains his personal bank account in Hong Kong.  Biden has no personal bank account in HK. 

Whitehouse is right here IMO.  Unless Epic, Nintendo, and third party app stores for iOS all reduce their own commissions to developers to zero as well, Pres. Trump has full right to raise EU tariffs to the amount to recover any illegal fines to US companies.  

It is not fair that all other platform vendors can charge a platform fee commission while Apple is not allowed to do same to recover costs of development, support, and marketing.  Core platform licensing fees can be negotiated to be on similar or even slightly lower than that of other platform vendors but it can not be zero.  

semi_guy said:

In short, greed caused inflation. Crazy spending in excessive tax breaks, low interest, and government handouts to industry added a second wave to the inflation. Pandemic spending prevented many companies and individuals from going bankrupt and that spending ended 3 years ago. However, companies realized they could raise prices and still maintain their customers. Hence, many companies have reported record profits in the past couple of years: greed...

I agree, as per my earlier post on this thread, pandemic related spending and low interest rates definitely contributed to inflation.  However, the resilience of the inflation 3 y out may also be due to the annual increase in trade deficit, particularly with China as they never buy more than they sell.   Biden's effort to friend shore supply chains to work out more balanced trade deals as countries compete for them makes sense.  Trump does not support this, and it makes no sense ... unless of course you take into account his personal Hong Kong bank account perhaps?  Trump walked away from the multilateral Trans-Pacific Partnership deal negotiated by Obama.  It would have promoted supply chains to move out of China and these other countries would then be competing for contracts from the US.   Thanks to Trump, we were left negotiating with a manufacturing monopolist for another four years.  Perhaps Trump's Hong Kong bank account may have something to do with it?  It's only thanks to Xi's own threats to invade Taiwan that is now causing supply chains to become a bit more diversified.  However, I am left wondering if a second Trump presidency would reverse even this trend?  How can the American public trust a sitting president that has a personal bank account in their most powerful economic and military competitor?  

araquen said:

I am skeptical. Apple Intelligence is not a product, and everyone gets that wrong. Apple Intelligence is functionality that is intended to enhance and improve the various platforms Apple has (macOS, iOS, iPadOS, etc). How do you monetize that without monetizing the OS? An OS Apple offers for free.

Bundling AI features as part of the OS encourages antitrust zealots like Vestegier to force Apple to give it away for free to third party developers who already enjoy making $ billions off of the Apple ecosystem for free.  Separating advanced features of Apple Intelligence out of the OS and as an optional add-on allows Apple to charge these rich freeloader developers without violating the DMA in EU or similar potential actions in other countries.  

Is there a benchmark for measuring how fast the OnePlus ships your personal data to China vs. iPhone?

Maybe they wanted to protect their iPhones from Chinese and Russian app stores?  Smart move.

AppleZulu said:

shrave10 said:

Whitehouse is right here IMO.  Unless Epic, Nintendo, and third party app stores for iOS all reduce their own commissions to developers to zero as well, Pres. Trump has full right to raise EU tariffs to the amount to recover any illegal fines to US companies.  

It is not fair that all other platform vendors can charge a platform fee commission while Apple is not allowed to do same to recover costs of development, support, and marketing.  Core platform licensing fees can be negotiated to be on similar or even slightly lower than that of other platform vendors but it can not be zero.  

I feel like a lot of people don’t understand how tariffs work. They are a government tax on goods being imported into this country. The US importers pay the tax. Then, either they eat that cost, or add it to the price of the goods as they are sold to US consumers. 

So what you’re proposing here seems to be that the federal government should collect $570 million in taxes from US consumers who buy EU-made goods and then give those tax dollars to Apple so they can pay the $570 million fine to the EU. 

That ought to show ‘em. 

That's a short term view.  The reason EU manufacturing wants tariffs down is because of the longer term implications.  For ex. cars manufactured in EU will drop in marketshare > raises costs on their cars due to loss of economies of scale > negative feedback loop.  

 Meanwhile US manufactured cars gain market share, gain advantages of scaling up volumes, drop in costs > positive feedback loop.  

So yes, tariffs may be paid by US importers.  But in the long run, it leads to reorienting of supply chains and jobs that go with it.

"the report fails to state exactly how Apple isn't complying with the law and what is drawing the potential fine in November."

# Seems like Ms. Vestager does not want to even tell Apple how to avoid the fine because she just want the fine paid first then she will let them know.  Courts should have something to say about that. 

tiredskills said:

shrave10 said:

Appeal to what?  A kangaroo court that always fines US companies guilty and EU companies innocent?  

Do you really believe that the US news bubble that you live in would report on the EU Commission fining EU companies?  Newsflash, they have done so many times, you are just ignorant of it.

US does not have any organization that can fine companies 10% of global turnover before any court appeals are done.  If the EU is not a definition of a kangaroo court, I don't know what is