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My wife and I have lawyer friends in HK, and they are staying clear of any potential client connected with the protest violence.  Not saying this is right.  They are just scared.  It is shocking how bad the situation has become in a truly unique city that fuses eastern and western culture so well.

The protestors have been targeting local businesses that they believe support the HK government.  The destruction and violence caused by the protesters is an invitation to mainland China to act, and not in a good way.

Apple’s HK stores may be at risk now.  Security should be increased immediately.

SpamSandwich said:

georgie01 said:

maestro64 said:

...
As the saying going as long as you are using other people's money they get to decide how you spend that money. You can not take other people's money and then ignore them. 

... If investors/venture capitalist think they will not have a front and only seat at the show, they will not bring their resources to new companies looking to get off the ground and grow. It is going to be very hard to have startups who can not be focus those who give them money and all about everything else for everyone else.

This is an important post.

I don’t like companies focusing on benefitting shareholders who are in it solely to make money, but good intentions don’t automatically solve problems. We need to always consider reality rather then just assume our well-meaning intentions will make the world better. Contrary to popular belief, people are not basically ‘good’. People are ultimately self serving, and we as a culture are getting worse and worse (so obviously seen in things like ‘someone feels a particular way and so let’s all defy science and common sense to affirm that person’s feelings’).

It seems to me that taking away shareholder incentive will take away shareholder investment which will harm startups and businesses needing money.

The shareholders vote on who makes up the board of directors and other measures put before shareholders. Publicly held companies ARE answerable to the shareholders.

Everyone here is aware of that.  But you’re missing the point.

The laws enshrining the notion of fiduciary responsibility are relatively modern and not based upon historical practices.  Theses laws have had the perverse effect of incentivizing companies to devise annual bonus plans that are tied to stock market performance.  Managers who’s annual bonuses are tied to stock performance will do anything to make their numbers, regardless of the impact to the business down the road.  These incentives have also served to accelerate the off-shoring of industrial capacity, as managers will shut down a US factory in a heartbeat if it saves a few pennies on product cost, allowing them to get bonuses for the cost savings effort.  This is a company eating its own, with damaging effects all around.

Shareholders are not experts at running a company - any company.  Reacting to their near term wants and needs is a great way to drive a company into the ground.  This has been demonstrated repeatedly in the real world.  I have seen the idiocy this end of quarter scramble generates myself.  It is harmful to the long term health of a company, let alone other stakeholders, who haven’t had much of a voice.

seanismorris said:

The Samsung Galaxy Book 2 was carried (sold) through Verizon at 41.66/month for 24 months.  The Galaxy Book S will probably be similar...

Will the MacBook Pro or Air ever get LTE?  Maybe a 12” MacBook (A Series) LTE in 2020?

AI should kick the tires on the Samsung Book S as a college machine.  Colleges seem to prefer Windows for engineering majors, and Macs for Arts...  Will a Windows on ARM even run the software? Or, is this a hobbled Windows machine that will run little more than Microsoft Office?

If the software is well behaved and doesn’t go around Windows OS by directly accessing the ARM processor, it should work fine.

So, Tim is right, as far as his statement goes.  But let’s not forget who built up China - American bean counters who, it turns out, really didn’t know which beans they should be counting.

First it was, ‘Chinese labor is cheap’ so let’s manufacture there.  And then ‘oh crap, the Chinese don’t have proper infrastructure’ so let’s get them started with that.  Then more second tier Chinese suppliers sprung up, and more infrastructure was put in place.  And then large regions such as Shenzhen turned into massive draws for subsistence farmers looking for a better life.  And they morphed into a large and highly skilled labor force.  And then even more infrastructure was put in place.

But the bean counters neglected to take full account of the logistics needed to ship all the bits and pieces all around the world.  And what might have worked OK 20 years ago is woefully out of date today.  But we can’t change our sourcing now.  China has the infrastructure, right??!

So yea, China has all that going for it now.  I begrudge them not.  But the US, and Europe, can and should have that too.

All the excuses in the world can’t take away from the fact that American CEOs, CFOs and their assorted bean counters sold out their communities and their company rank and file to get a few extra pennies on the dollar out of product so they could please their stockholders and get those extra bonuses, while their US factories got shut down and their once loyal employees got a pick slip.  That’s a f-ing bitter pill to swallow.

Tim, do better!

During his NeXT years Jobs was a regular visitor at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, mostly because he was interested in the Mach kernel being developed by Avie Tevanian and his fellow researchers at the university’s Center for Art and Technology, where I worked as a student.

One day we had guest calligraphers who traveled all the way from Switzerland to show us the work they had done trying to translate individual letters into pixelated form so they could be legible on a bit mapped screen.  Jobs happened to be there that day and naturally he took an interest.  I think Avie was in the room too but I’m not sure.

The Swiss calligraphers showed slides of letters that they had individually mapped pixel by pixel.  I actually think they were using MacPaint!  As they were running through their slides showing examples of their work, one of them lamented the fact that they had to recreate each letter for every single font size, which was naturally quite tedious.

At that point Jobs interrupted their presentation by jumping up and saying, “Stop, stop!  That’s all wrong!”  He immediately grabbed the two calligraphers and walked them over to a nearby Mac that had Adobe Illustrator on it.  The Swiss were amazed as they had never seen Illustrator before.  But it kind of took the wind out of them and everything they had done up to that point.  They didn’t realize that the problem they were dealing with had already been solved.