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9secondkox2 said:

Adjust to irs calculations. Not ms taxes. As you can see Microsoft believes the irs is pulling something here. Microsoft did right by the irs now the irs wants to retroactively recalculate how much ms should have paid to transfer money to its different locales. That is just a scam to steal money. It’s like buying a MacBook Pro at $3000 10 years ago. Now, they say you owe $1000 because that model MacBook Pro costs $4000 today. It’s theft. Just because it’s the government doesn’t change that. 

and the irs is certainly not underfunded. They’ve been as big as they should be so as not to overreach. Now, we are looking at a juggernaut of an irs incoming to scrape every American over the coals and they were even planning to arm the agents before that bit became public. 

I’ll repeat there is no way the irs missed Microsoft’s numbers nor is there a possibility of waiting a decade to audit one of the worlds largest companies. This “adjustment”is a sham. 

That's not how any of this works. The IRS has 17,000 fewer agents than they did a decade ago, and lose out on an estimated $1 trillion in legally owed but uncollected taxes. 

9secondkox2 said:

welshdog said:

9secondkox2 said:

darkvader said:

9secondkox2 said:

This is theft. 

The government wants money. Solution? Just retroactively “adjust” someone’s taxes from years ago! A good solid decade ought to do it. 

Pure evil. If there was ac actual issue all this years ago, the IRS WOULD HAVE NOTIFIED THEM AND THEY COULD PAY WHAT WAS OWED. this isn’t that. This is an extortionist government. 

Microsoft didn’t do anything illegal. They took advantage of the way the tax systems were set up, like any smart company would do. 

The only theft is what Micro$oft did.  And the sad part is that a company with $136 billion in profits in 2022 only has to pay $29 billion in penalties for their decade of theft.

Minimizing tax burden by storing your money in a more favorable location (still within US jurisdiction) wasn’t illegal at the time. Retroactively making it so is just theft by the government. Pure and simple. “Adjustment” my left buttock! Microsoft didn’t do anything wrong. They looked at options available to them and utilized them. anything else would just be dumb. But now you have the government retroactively changing things. If a company knew that would happen, of course they’d do things differently in the past. But they didn’t. Because it wasn’t wrong at the time. It’s like an entrapment feature of the government. Pure thievery.

You don't know that "Microsoft didn’t do anything wrong.". No one has said they were doing anything illegal, they simply didn't do the tax dodging in a manner the IRS thinks is correct. There will be a back and forth and eventually a settlement will be reached. There is no reason to ever place any faith or belief in corporations doing the right thing, that's not how they operate. All desisions are based on what makes or saves the most money - period. Apple are slightly less guilty of that than some mega-corporations, but MSFT? Come on, they are not going to follow the law to the letter if they think they can get away with it. Gates' legacy of hacking and gaming everything, always and forever lives on.

If that was so, it would have been caught the first year. The IRS watches big corporations like s hawk. 

They are even calling this an “adjustment.” Thst means the government is changing things now. That can be applied moving forward but should never be retroactive. That’s wrong. If the rules for a gamrr we change next year, you shouldn’t lose your trophy thst you won playing by the rules in years prior. 

The IRS has been intentionally underfunded for decades, specifically so that they lack the capacity to ‘watch big corporations like a hawk.’ It’s a bit willfully naïve not to recognize the likelihood that the scads of talented tax attorneys employed by big corporations would push the limits of loopholes to the extreme (and beyond) with the expectation that the IRS won’t catch things, nor have the capacity to do anything about it if they do. The reality is that this issue is probably just one of many more instances where big corporations have been coloring outside the lines with impunity. 

mayfly said:

Apple's problem is that everyone who wants an Apple Watch already has one. And their incremental changes aren't going to drive upgrade cycles. The Ultra was new and different, but the buy-in was a big deterrent for the mass market. Things like Micro-LED screens won't do it. A total rethink is what it will take. I can't think of anything the Apple Watch 9 offers that would even make me consider upgrading my 7 series.

Oh, lort. The lament of incrementalism is so, so very tedious. Two years isn't the intended replacement cycle for a $400+ to $700+ watch. You are not the target audience for Series 9. The fact that you're still o.k. with your series 7 means they're doing it right.

Once again for the people in the cheap seats: Making incremental changes from one year to the next is the intentional pace for updates to all of Apple's product lines. They do not wish to raise the ire of someone who just dropped hundreds or thousands of dollars on a device by releasing a new model that renders the last one obsolete. Same thing goes for the model previous to last year. Making big leaps in feature sets from one year to the next not only makes recent customers unhappy, it also will add volatility in current year numbers, causing sales of new models to quickly drop off after they're introduced, as people decide earlier in the model-year cycle to wait to see what next year's dramatic update will bring.

The objective is to make incremental changes that accumulate over several years until they add up to a compelling argument for an upgrade.The target audience for series 9 among current watch owners is probably people wearing series 6 or even maybe 5 and earlier. Those folks will see enough that's new and interesting in a 9, while also feeling they got their money's worth out of the watch they bought a few years ago. That's the sweet spot, and you can be sure there are whole teams of folks at Apple whose job is to steer the pipeline toward that several year long rhythm.

michelb76 said:

They should have pressed on the removal of leather if they wanted to ask an interesting question. Leather is coproduct of the meat and dairy industry, so Apple no longer using leather does close to nothing, animals will still get raised and slaughtered for meat, the leather just goes elsewhere. Unless we reduce our meat and dairy consumption by drastic amounts, leather production will not decrease one bit.

It doesn't just "go elsewhere." There is a price attached to it. Apple pulling out of the market will, to one degree or another, decrease the demand for leather, and lower its price. Your "elsewhere" that the leather goes, previously was either buyers competing with Apple which helped drive up the price, or it was a buyer waiting in the wings for the price to drop before they'd buy. Either way, removing one not-insignificant buyer from the market will cause downward pressure on the price of leather. In turn, that downward pressure on the price of leather will have the reverse effect on the price of meat, as cattle farmers seek to cover the cost of raising the whole cow. As the price of meat increases, demand and consumption goes down. When consumption of meat goes down, so does future production.

The overall impact may ultimately be small, but it's exactly this nihilism I mentioned up-thread that is inherent in messaging like 'Apple's move away from using leather will have no effect' that serves the interest of fossil fuels and cattle production. It's dressed up in the sheep's clothing of a cynical, anti-establishment environmentalist, but it's just this sort of eye-rolling "why bother' posture that truly serves the wolf's interests. 

auxio said:

@WineCorr The reality is that companies trying to compete with Apple will stoop to whatever means necessary to try and make Apple look bad. Instead of actually investing in resources and brain power to compete with their products, they'd rather pay mass marketing companies to create misinformation campaigns. Sadly, because this seems to be effective on the large number people without critical thinking and analytical skills these days (just as it is with political campaigns around the world), it'll keep happening.

To @WineCorr's point, I think it's entirely possible that this is more than just competitors trying to damage Apple's reputation.

Nihilism is a key disinformation tactic when trying to undermine whole concepts like mitigation of climate change. By casting doubt on actual, meaningful actions being taken to reduce the carbon footprint of a large industry, it not only creates room for competitors to save costs by doing nothing, it undermines the goal of carbon neutrality itself. If consumers can be convinced that even the supposed 'good guys' are just faking it, they can then be convinced not to use their power of consumer choice to purchase products from companies that take responsibility and internalize their environmental costs. So a disinformation campaign to claim Apple is "greenwashing" not only benefits competitors who can sell their wares for less because they externalize their environmental impact costs, it also benefits every other industry that benefits when everyone thinks that facts and opinions have equal value and everyone is lying anyway, so don't expect better. Just buy whatever's cheapest and easiest when you don't think about it.