In general English, "secular" means "non-religious."
In MBA-speak, "secular" means "non-cyclical."
An example of cyclical growth would be ExxonMobil between 2004 and 2007. They couldn't keep up this growth, because it was due entirely to swings in the price of oil.
An example of secular growth would be Google between 2004 and 2007. They were able to ride the trend of advertising moving online. (Advertising is a cyclical business, but Google won't feel it until advertising stops moving online.)
Nadella is saying that he believes LinkedIn is riding a sustained trend.
It comes from the Latin saeculum which is a period of time longer than a person's life. Rome used to hold the secular games, which was an event so big, it'd never be seen again in a person's lifetime.
1250-1300; < Medieval Latin sēculāris, Late Latin saeculāris worldly, temporal (opposed to eternal), Latin: of an age, equivalent to Latin saecul (um) long period of time + -āris -ar1; replacing Middle English seculer < Old French < Latin, as above
A saeculum is a length of time roughly equal to the potential lifetime of a person or the equivalent of the complete renewal of a human population. The word has evolved within Romance languages (and Swedish) to mean "century".
> It's not "MBA-speak"; this sense of the word "secular" is used in economics, time-series analysis, astronomy, etc.
Of course it's MBA-speak. MBA-speak does not mean that they invented the word, or that only MBAs use the word. It just means that MBAs prefer to use the word where another one would do.
Nadella could have talked about "long-term trends" or "ongoing trends" or "sustainable trends." However, he chose to use "secular trends." His fondness for jargon makes him harder to understand.
Another example of MBA-speak is "synergy." The OED traces "joint action, cooperation" to 1632, and "a combined effect which is greater than additive" to 1904 ("synergism"). The first listed MBA-speak usage of the term is a 1981 article in The Economist on brokerage mergers.
Does that mean that "synergy" is "not MBA-speak" because the term is also used by scientists? Of course not! It just means that the MBAs adopted a term that others had already been using.
I would place "secular" into the same category as "synergy." The OED traces its astronomical usage to 1801 and its economics usage to 1895. Its first appearance outside a scientific context is in 1973, in an article in The Daily Telegraph on interest rates.
Before 2013, Visa and Mastercard forbade credit card surcharges. However, cash discounts were allowed.
The problem was the Most Favored Nation clause in the credit card contracts. Merchants could offer cash discounts, but they could not offer discounts to non-Visa credit cards.
Since the antitrust settlements, all four U.S. credit card networks have allowed surcharges. Also, the Most Favored Nation clause only applies to "equal or higher cost" competitors.
Walmart US could fight Visa by adding a surcharge only to Visa cards. Walmart Canada cannot. In 2013, a similar antitrust case was dismissed in Canada.
Oh. Then I agree with you that Microsoft screwed up the licensing -- but it's a different screw-up.
Windows 7 Ultimate is just like Windows 7 Enterprise, except for the virtualization rights. With Enterprise, each license allows 4 concurrent VMs. With Ultimate, you only get one.
The original idea of Ultimate was to be a consumer version of Enterprise. You didn't have to go through a salesman. You could just buy Ultimate on Newegg or Amazon.
However, Microsoft crippled Ultimate by putting in the 1-VM restriction. Considering how much Ultimate cost, this was a really cheap move on Microsoft's part.
> It's a shame that Google Maps is inferior to my iGo tablet running Windows Mobile from 10 years ago. And it didn't need to have continuous wireless data access. ... How was iGo capable to deliver superior maps so many years ago?
They purchased data from a mapping company. Ten years ago, the two largest mapping companies in the world were Navteq and Tele Atlas. Google used to buy data from these companies as well, but they stopped paying and decided to build up their own maps data from scratch.
Navteq was bought by Nokia, got renamed HERE Maps, and has just been sold to a consortium of German automakers.
Microsoft currently has a multi-year contract with HERE Maps as part of their deal with Nokia. Also, Helmut Panke is on the Microsoft Board of Directors. He used to be the Chairman of the Management Board of BMW.
I don't see why structured settlements should be allowed to be sold off at all.
The whole point of choosing a structured settlement is to prevent the person from spending a one-time windfall. So why allow that arrangement to be undone after the fact?
When you retire, you cannot assign your Social Security payments to a company in return for a lump sum. Many pension plans also prohibit you from assigning your pension checks. As a society, we've decided that preventing retirees from becoming destitute is more important than allowing those retirees to access their benefit as a lump sum.
Structured settlements are not exclusively used for those reasons:
> Structured settlement cases became more popular in the United States during the 1970s as an alternative to lump sum settlements. The increased popularity was due to several rulings by the IRS, an increase in personal injury awards, and higher interest rates. The IRS rulings changed policies such that if certain requirements were met then claimants could have federal income tax waived. Higher interest rates result in lower present values, hence annuity premiums, for deferred payments versus a lump sum.
They are presumably easier for the person paying the settlement as well. They can pay it from their cash flow over time, instead of liquidating businesses for up front payments, etc.
It's possible that the article is drawing a false connection between the nature of the injury that the settlement is redressing, and structured settlements. It seems like people who are properly unable to care for themselves will require legal guardianship or conservatorship by another, and a trust set up on their behalf, etc. I don't get the impression that structured settlements alone are meant to deny the person who was awarded the settlement a right, so much as that they provide an advantage to one or both parties.
> Structured settlement cases became more popular in the United States during the 1970s as an alternative to lump sum settlements. The increased popularity was due to several rulings by the IRS, an increase in personal injury awards, and higher interest rates.
Well, in the 1970s, people had pensions and the 401(k) was a "thrift plan." Yet we've enacted all sorts of protections for the 401(k), because it is now the primary mechanism of retirement savings available to most Americans.
Structured settlements may have originated as a tax break in the 1970s. However, in the last 40 years they've become a way to provide a secure income stream for plaintiffs. We need to treat them as such.
Even if you don't allow them to be sold off, nothing is stopping someone from entering an agreement where they have to pay the same amount monthly to a person X in exchange for a lump sum received now. So they still receive their checks but they have to pay that money to someone anyway.
> Even if you don't allow them to be sold off, nothing is stopping someone from entering an agreement where they have to pay the same amount monthly to a person X in exchange for a lump sum received now. So they still receive their checks but they have to pay that money to someone anyway.
Such an arrangement would be an unsecured personal loan, which would not survive a bankruptcy filing.
This is why you see commercials on late-night TV for structured settlement cash-outs, but you don't see commercials offering to pay you a lump sum in return for handing over your Social Security payments.
The Social Security system pays out $700 billion in benefits each year. The entire structured settlement market is only about $6 billion a year. However, Social Security payments cannot be assigned, and structured settlements can.
These companies don't want to give out unsecured loans to poor people with lead poisoning who don't have jobs. They want to pay pennies on the dollar for a guaranteed stream of payments.
"...these structured agreements often deliver monthly payments across decades to protect vulnerable recipients from immediately spending the money."
Why must someone, an adult, be "protected" from spending their own money. This nanny state nonsense has got to stop. Do people really have to be protected from themselves? If they aren't smart enough to take care of their business, they ought not be allowed outside of a group home.
> if they aren't smart enough to take care of their business, they ought not be allowed outside of a group home.
Lack of capacity should be limited as far as possible. A person with intellectual disability may be able to live a reasonably normal life but need help with cooking; or with financial planning. Suggesting that we imprison (because that's what you're calling for) people who have no committed any crime; who pose no risk of harm to others; and who lack capacity over one small aspect of their life is fascistic.
What you're asking appears to be is "Why should this industry, which is heavily regulated to protect the general population from abusive practices, and which has a long history of illegal, unethical, sleazy, behaviours have to comply with regulation to protect society's vulnerable members?"
>Suggesting that we imprison (because that's what you're calling for) people who have no committed any crime; who pose no risk of harm to others; and who lack capacity over one small aspect of their life is fascistic.
This is largely how we treat children. For the extreme cases, look at those re-education camps parents can send their teens to, often with a 'transporter' that would by any other name be called a kidnapper. And if the child runs away and claims abuse... the police will be right there to send them back.
Is it wrong that the child is treated in so many ways as belonging to the parent?
That's the American experience. It's less the case in any country that has signed up to the convention on the rights of the child.
In the case of children we protect them because they lack capacity. When they develop capacity we reduce the constraints.
Have a look at English guidelines for medical competance: "Gillick competance". This is used to decide whether someone under the age of 16 can consent to medical treatment without their parents knowledge or permission. (The perhaps odd age of 16 is used because that's the age of consent for sex and the name Gillick Competance comes from a case where a mother did not want girls under the age of 16 to be prescribed the contraceptive pill. (16 is the age of sexual consent in England.)
1) it genuinely protects people who otherwise don't have to live in a group home. silly exaggeration.
2) as you by now should know if you didn't know already, you can sell guaranteed future payments and get your lump-sum if you really want to. tons of businesses will do buy it from you. you're not forced into receiving monthly payments if you don't want to, you can change it on day 1, it just happens to be the default because it makes more sense for most people.
that's not a nanny state, it's incredibly sensible.
Is the state even involved in the decision to structure these settlements (other than through its role as enforcer of a contract between 2 non-state parties, namely, the insurer and the insured)?
It could be that the insurer chose to write structuring into the contract to avoid negative publicity from the insured's spending the entire settlement and ending up poor again.
This setup is also protecting the state from having to support these people through increased welfare and other social program costs. Therefore the state has an interest in encouraging or even mandating this form of agreement. Otherwise these people are more likely to end up on benefits and receiving assistance from social services that your tax money pays for. But if you'd rather have tax payer funded group homes set up with all the associated costs, that's up to you. I'm not a US citizen, so I've no skin in this particular game.
> I wonder how robust the GPS system is. Could an unexpected space phenomenon bring it down? What would happen if a rogue nation started shooting down the satellites?
GPS is not the only system. We currently have about 2.7 global satellite navigation constellations available for use.
The American GPS and the Russian GLONASS are both complete. The Chinese Beidou system is about 40% complete. The European Galileo system is about 30% complete. Each system also has about 20% redundancy in the form of on-orbit spares.
Dual-system GPS/GLONASS receivers are now nearly everywhere. I was just looking at a phone that has a triple-system GPS/GLONASS/Beidou receiver. In a few years, quad-system receivers will be commonplace.
A rogue nation would have to shoot down about 1.9 constellations, or about 60 satellites, before we drop below full coverage.
The American, Chinese, and European systems have the same orbital inclination. If a gap opened, any satellite from any of these three systems could theoretically fill that gap. It would take some time to reposition the satellites, though.
There is also additional redundancy in the eastern hemisphere. India and Japan have satellites that provide regional coverage. Part of the Chinese system also operates as a regional constellation.
At this point, the rogue state is at war with the US, Russia, China, the EU, India, and Japan. They might as well just surrender.
It would take only one nuclear device being "detonated" in low orbit, to wipe out nearly all of the satellites in a large area of that space. The resulting EMP may wreck quite a few ground-based systems too, IIRC from a book I read recently. Can't recall the name, though...
In any case, disrupting satellite-based navigation is the simplest kind of rocket science: a missile that just has to go up and then detonate, no aiming required.
> It would take only one nuclear device being "detonated" in low orbit, to wipe out nearly all of the satellites in a large area of that space. The resulting EMP may wreck quite a few ground-based systems too, IIRC from a book I read recently. Can't recall the name, though...
A nuclear weapon detonated in low earth orbit would not destroy a single global navigation satellite. They are not in low earth orbit.
A nuclear weapon detonated in medium earth orbit would wipe out between 0 and 1 navigation satellite, depending on how close you get. The satellites just aren't that close together.
An EMP would destroy electronics on the ground, but this will be a systemic effect. Satellite navigation would be collateral damage. When the ground-based electronics are replaced, though, the satellites will still be working.
> In any case, disrupting satellite-based navigation is the simplest kind of rocket science: a missile that just has to go up and then detonate, no aiming required.
Nuclear weapons are powerful, but they still have to obey the laws of physics. If you get far enough away, the inverse-squared law makes even a nuclear explosion look like a firecracker.
So basically, it's going to take one nuclear warhead to destroy one navigation satellite. If a rogue nation has 60 nuclear warheads, it's hardly going to waste them to take out 60 navigation satellites.
> His business means rockets are going to go from $400 million to $150 million. That's nice and all, but it's not an extraordinary revolution.
Rockets didn't cost $400 million before SpaceX. You could already get a satellite into geostationary orbit for about $70 million -- or rather, you would have been able to, if politics hadn't intervened.
Twenty years ago, the Chinese were major players in the launch services market. They picked up quite a bit of business after the Challenger explosion. One of the two commercial satellites that was retrieved by STS-51A was re-launched on a Chinese rocket. One-fifth of the original Iridium constellation was launched on Chinese rockets.
In the late 1990s, the United States banned launches on Chinese rockets if the satellite had any American parts. That meant that no Western satellites could be launched on Chinese rockets. What happens to prices when the low bidder isn't allowed to bid? You guessed it.
What SpaceX has accomplished so far is to restore prices to where they would be if the Chinese had stayed in the market. It's impressive that they can match "the China price" from California. However, it's not exactly revolutionizing the industry yet.
A large communications satellite costs hundreds of millions of dollars. A large military satellite costs over $1 billion. Launch costs are simply not the constraining factor in the satellite industry.
However, SpaceX is promising to drive costs even lower through reusability. Then we'll see if there's actually as much price elasticity in launch services as Elon Musk is expecting. That will ultimately determine SpaceX's legacy, whether it is a revolution or not.
> If you want to see some sci-fi magic, just look at the Space Shuttle, That's some amazing witchcraft right there.
A reusable spacecraft that costs more than an expendable launcher?
>You could already get a satellite into geostationary orbit for about $70 million -- or rather, you would have been able to, if politics hadn't intervened.
Japan had been allied to Germany. The Wehrmacht had been one of the most effective fighting forces the world has ever known. The Imperial Japanese Army had been formed on the Prussian model back in the 19th century.
The German Wehrmacht had just been defeated by the Soviet Army three months earlier.
Also, the Japanese army had already tried and failed to defeat the Soviet army in 1939. In fact, that's how Zhukov got his first Hero of the Soviet Union award. That was in 1939, before the massive Soviet arms buildup, before the dissipation of Japanese strength in the Pacific.
A Japanese general would have to be delusional to think that he could hold out against the Soviets in 1945.
> I think that the real problem is that most people will not pay for 5 different streaming services. Remember, the median family income in the US is only about 50k, which I'm guessing is less than most people here make by themselves.
Why won't they pay for 5 streaming services? They're already paying for 100 channels.
Remember, cable or satellite TV together have 80% penetration in the United States. That means that your median family with the $50k income is paying close to $80 per month for video entertainment. ($80 happens to be Comcast's video ARPU.)
If the end-game is the unbundling of video content from the delivery mechanism, then that $80 will buy a lot of streaming services. Probably more than five. Depends how they're bundled.
In general English, "secular" means "non-religious."
In MBA-speak, "secular" means "non-cyclical."
An example of cyclical growth would be ExxonMobil between 2004 and 2007. They couldn't keep up this growth, because it was due entirely to swings in the price of oil.
An example of secular growth would be Google between 2004 and 2007. They were able to ride the trend of advertising moving online. (Advertising is a cyclical business, but Google won't feel it until advertising stops moving online.)
Nadella is saying that he believes LinkedIn is riding a sustained trend.