Philosophically, I disagree: taxes are for the public necessity, not the public good. Roadways, fire/police, civil governance = necessity.
Granted, there is a lot of grey area. But the phrase "public good" means different things to different people. For those grey areas, private donations have been important. (see Planned Parenthood, the NRA, etc.)
"Disprovable" in the sense that's how it looks on paper, but like you may know the USA "Department of Health and Human Services" is extremely corrupted and most of it is wasted thanks to an overpriced health system. Many European countries suffer as well from corruption in this area but USA levels of corruption are still unmatched (http://epianalysis.wordpress.com/2012/07/18/usversuseurope/)
Can you elaborate? My understanding is that most merchant accounts are in the 2% + .45 range. Are you suggesting that merchant margins depend on a 1% margin?
2% can have a big impact. Many business have a gross margin of 20-30%. If you take Square's 2.75% from $100, that's $2.75 off a $20-30 gross margin – or 9.2% to 13.75% of the gross margin. That is a very large cost for a service seen as a commodity.
Square gets 2.75%. They pay their acquirer (I think Wells Fargo) Interchange+maybe a small fee. For example a swiped (card present) debit card purchase at a retail store is 0.80% + $0.15 (an example - this varies wildly). On $100 that's $0.95. They get $2.75. That's a 60% or so margin. It can also go down quite a bit depending on the type of card used which they really have no control over. For example it could drop to 20% on a corporate rewards card. I would say overall they probably have a very good margin.
Sure.
If your ASP is $6, then 2.75% is $0.165. This is to be compared to a merchant account for which the 2%+ 0.45 is $0.57. As you can see there is a huge difference.
The problem is that credit card processors (Visa, Mastercard...) are charging Square 0.1+1.5% or something which basically means that Square loses money on the transaction.
I disagree, mostly because you presented your opinion as black and white.
Apple has, what, > 10k workers? If it cost them $100 billion to prevent one software worker from getting carpal tunnel, your statement suggests that cost should be born by Apple. Similarly, if it cost the cumulative GDP of the US to prevent N amount of pollution, your statement suggests that Apple should go bankrupt preventing that pollution.
Back in the real world, I suspect we generally agree. The problem, IMO, is that companies (and consumers) aren't forced to capture the hidden costs of injuries/pollution.
I just disagree with your black and white assessment. The laws of economics mean companies have to assign dollar values to human life and safety, as much as we dislike the feeling it gives us.
Not all good decisions can be rationalized as having a known, positive ROI. I think it is a pretty safe statement to say that many big decisions must be made for other reasons.
When you take the decision, you may not have enough information to know if it's going to be good or not. But when you took the decision and still refusing to know how much it costed you and how it influenced company finances - it's just willful ignorance and unwillingness to face the facts. That is never good. For the sake of Apple shareholders I hope Cook actually knows the figures he was asked for, and refusing to publish them just as a PR move, to gain some fanboy love from bashing an unpopular target. Because if they genuinely spend money and refuse to count them, it's not good for the company.
I must thank you for giving me enough motivation to finally leave hacker news. I was listening to the new import this podcast, with ken reitz, wherein they were discussing the negativity of this community.
Now I'm going to try and go do something useful with my time, rather than get into obnoxious arguments.
Although I'm cynical enough to not expect this, things could be partitioned into "grant access to people with no payment on file" and "need payment on file to download this app".
I'm not sure of your point. Cocaine does have legal uses, especially with ENT doctors/surgeons, who use it as an effective anaesthetic.
But the profit margins in the illegal drug market is largely because of the risk involved. Facing legal competition, which does not have to include that risk in its price, is effectively creating a market where legitimized producers have an extreme advantage.
Drug cartels have a myriad of other products, cocaine being one if them. All of their products are commodities worth multiples of their weight in gold. Taking marihuana away from them is not going to make as substantial hit to their profits as you suggest.
That means we should be legalizing cocaine as well, not that we shouldn't be legalizing pot. And reducing the profits (and thus power) of drug cartels a small amount is still substantially better than not reducing them at all (doubly so if it's something we want to do for other reasons as well).
Given the high fixed costs (salaries, bribes, infrastructure) of maintaining a criminal network, I expect that cutting revenues almost in half would be a tremendous blow to their profits.
You said legalizing marijuana, not all drugs. and legalizing all drugs is much, much different issue. There is a big difference between legalzing just marijuana versus all drugs. I don't think the profits would be reduced at all, simply replaced by other products.
Well, it wasn't me who said it in the first place, but that aside...
"legalizing all drugs is much, much different issue."
I'm not sure I agree - this is arguably the first step on that path (if we wish to continue down that path). I agree that there will be different outcomes.
That said...
"I don't think the profits would be reduced at all, simply replaced by other products."
I'm not sure you understand how business works. For that to happen, someone needs to start purchasing substantially more cocaine and methamphetamine. If the cartels are capable of making that happen, why aren't they making it happen now?
I think I do k ow how it works; I'm not sure you know how black markets, particularly those based on drugs. If you feel there is any lack of demand of cocaine or meth I guess you are free to believe it.
More than doubling your revenues on an existing product is never easy. Doubling production won't do it, because those most willing to pay will be satiated and it won't command the same price. Also, cocaine involves more processing and coca plants grow more slowly and need more space than cannabis, so even doubling revenues isn't going to double profits. It also takes a good year before coca plants can be harvested - and retooling a supply chain can always be expensive. Meth might be easier, but still suffers from the same market depth issue, and still involves building out more infrastructure, which is still expensive. It's also likely to raise the costs of precursors, which will again limit profits.
I really don't see that any of these considerations are any different due to it being a black market - if you think they are, explain why.
I was going to upvote you until I saw your edit about downvoting. I believe you should state your mind without concern for arbitrary internet points. If you express concern over these points, it weakens your perspective, in my opinion, and I am much less likely to award you those useless points.
I frequently wonder - is Facebook allowed to say, "bing, you can crawl us. NewCompetitor, you cannot."
I feel like once a company allows public access by posting stuff on the web, they can specify terms, but not include/exclude groups specifically. (In a legal sense; I understand blocking systems that hammer servers but will respect robots.txt. IME bing is the worst offender -- they hammer my sites, send no traffic, but will stop if I specify in robots.txt.)
Does anyone have an opinion about "once public, I can crawl"?
I can think of no reason why there would be any such restriction.
Suppose Facebook is getting paid by Bing, and won't offer crawling to those that aren't paying it? Suppose Facebook considers Baidu's crawler to be evil and chooses to prohibit it for that reason? Suppose Facebook just kind of likes the guys at Bing and decides to allow them special access? If you agree in the first place that Facebook should have the right to put ANY sort of restrictions on who can crawl their side, then why should ANY of these be prohibited? This is not a "common carrier" kind of situation.
IANAL, but that sounds either like you can't do all of those things together (the "and" conjunction), or you can't even read the website. After all, if you can't download it, you can't view it.
I"d like to add that I'm also OK with Facebook/Google/whomever making money off that. I think it's just a spectrum of perspective. One side is privacy concerns, the other is the win/win/win where I see ads relevant to me, facebook makes a little money [in exchange for providing a free service that I value], and the advertiser makes a sale for promoting a product that I want.
I don't know the right answer, but I think there's a balance to be struck.
Granted, there is a lot of grey area. But the phrase "public good" means different things to different people. For those grey areas, private donations have been important. (see Planned Parenthood, the NRA, etc.)