#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
Patreon just deplatformed Mister Metokur in what can only be described as an epic fuckup of proportions that have seldom hitherto been seen. So much so that Mister Metokur may not even know it yet.
If anyone has his email address, send it to me. And if you are he, get in touch! Because you’re not going to believe this….
Forget the good of society and the interests of the employees. The giant corporations aren’t even acting in the interests of their shareholders anymore, if this emailer is to be believed.
I work for a company that was involved in [REDACTED]. It struck me as strange that a company with the cash pile that Apple has – just over $100bn in their last earnings release – would be issuing debt to raise even more cash, so I looked a little deeper and the below may be something relevant to your blog given some of your recent posts on financialisation…
When Steve Jobs died in 2011 Apple didn’t have a single penny of debt, which was unique among Silicon Valley’s tech giants. That lasted not a full 2 years after his death because in April 2013 Apple conducted the largest non-bank bond issuance in history, raising $17bn in debt (as an aside, Goldman Sachs led the bond issue). The justification for this would likely seem counter-intuitive to those outside finance: Jobs’ successor Tim Cook was supposedly under pressure from investors to return some of its cash to shareholders, which meant a program of buying back shares and paying out higher dividends. However, a large portion of Apple’s then $200bn cash pile was held outside the US and if repatriated would face a 35{c8b69934959f35692add933dfd6e84e28f27befea47b321eb3fcbffc0ec5bc03} tax charge, so it made ‘financial sense’ to keep the cash abroad and raise debt in the US at interest rates of c.3{c8b69934959f35692add933dfd6e84e28f27befea47b321eb3fcbffc0ec5bc03} instead to fund this gigantic shareholder return program. Paying out a 3{c8b69934959f35692add933dfd6e84e28f27befea47b321eb3fcbffc0ec5bc03} charge on cash instead of 35{c8b69934959f35692add933dfd6e84e28f27befea47b321eb3fcbffc0ec5bc03} sounds good, right? Apple certainly thought so, as they continued to issue debt over the next few years.
As we know, Trump’s signature piece of legislation so far is his tax cuts bill. It slashed the rate of corporation tax payable on foreign-held cash reserves when repatriated. Interestingly, Apple duly began repatriating some of its cash held abroad in 2017. So presumably it then stopped raising more debt? Nope. Throughout 2017 and 2018 Apple issued more and more debt to fund payouts to its equity investors. This brings me back to this month’s ‘Green Bond’ issue – the largest of its kind in Europe. Putting aside the virtue signalling aspect of issuing a ‘Green’ bond (the idea is that it’s used to fund initiatives designed to reduce Apple’s carbon footprint), it appears that Apple has become addicted to debt. In short, just 8 years on from Steve Jobs’ death when they were entirely debt-free, Apple now owes around $106bn in debt and pays out around $3.5bn annually in interest payments alone.
There is literally no business case for Apple to be taking on such debt. It is simply sucking cash out of the company. It does not need to raise cash to invest in R&D, hire new staff or expand its business. If you read through the FT, Forbes etc., the best explanations are that “debt right now is cheap, so they may as well raise cash this way to pay shareholders”. Apple themselves state the reason for issuing debt is for “corporate reasons” according to their Italian CFO, i.e. nothing related to creating productive value for the firm. They now hold slightly more debt than cash – a remarkable turnaround for a company that was once debt-free and held over $200bn in cash at its peak. Even more alarmingly, Apple has issued releases saying that they intend to become a “cash neutral” company, i.e. it will pay out any excess cash to shareholders and debt holders, and given Apple’s ever-increasing debt pile it therefore looks as though the lenders will be milking the firm for years to come. The debt vampires have well and truly sunk their teeth into Apple.
There are plenty of arguments one can make on this, but one wonders whether any of this would have happened if Steve Jobs was still alive and running the company.
They’re just so advanced! Seriously, though, who reads about the convoluted maze that is Israeli politics and then concludes, “you know, the USA would just be so much better if only it had super-smart people like that running the media, the courts, and the financial system?”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been indicted on charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust, Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit announced Thursday, prolonging the country’s political uncertainty as it looks set to head into its third national election in a year.
Netanyahu, who has denied any wrongdoing and said he is the victim of a “witch hunt” and “political coup,” faces up to 10 years in prison if convicted of bribery and a maximum 3-year term for fraud and breach of trust, according to legal experts.
The Israeli inability to form a stable government does certainly tend to confirm the DNA studies that indicate their Italian ancestry.
A supporter of the Junior Classics 2020 edition observes 60’s-era convergence:
My father in law recently gave us a 1962 edition of the Junior Classics that was sitting around his house. All female editors with a corresponding convergence in the stories included therein. Still some good stuff by today’s standards, but the rot was well established by then.
I’ve never seen that edition, having grown up on the 1958 edition, but I’m not even remotely surprised. Preserving knowledge, teaching children, and taking back cultural ground. The objective is right there in the name.
Speaking of the intellectual offensive, if you emailed about your interest in the Castalia Deluxe subscription but haven’t signed up yet, this is the time to do so. I don’t know if we’re going to close subscription sign-ups for the even months or add a sign-up fee during those months, but regardless, we want to pass 50 percent before we place the initial order with the bindery. Right now, we’re at 32 percent, which isn’t at all bad for the first 18 hours, but we can certainly do better.
I wouldn’t wear a Fitbit regularly anymore now that Google has purchased them. And I certainly wouldn’t have an account tied to it recording my data:
When Mike Carpenter learned Google’s latest acquisition would be Fitbit, the maker of a device he wore at all hours of the day except in the shower, he left his Fitbit Charge 3 on the table at his office where he was working that day. He, and others like him, haven’t picked it up since.
On Nov. 1, Google said would be buying Fitbit for $2.1 billion in hopes of boosting its hardware business getting a foothold in the health space. Google explicitly said in the announcing the deal that it won’t sell users’ personal or health data. Despite that assurance, some Fitbit users say they don’t trust the company, and are shedding the product altogether.
“I’m not only afraid of what they can do with the data currently, but what they can do with it once their AI advances in 10 or 20 years,” Carpenter told CNBC, saying he didn’t believe the company’s privacy assurances. “Health insurance companies would love to get their hands on that data and their purposes wouldn’t be advertising so is that what they are going to do with it? They didn’t spend the money to not utilize it in some way.”
The trend of people throwing or threatening to throw out their Fitbit devices comes as Google faces a perception problem that has spanned everyday users and regulators alike. The company has paid data privacy fines in the EU and made recent strides into the stringently regulated healthcare industry, which has caused the public to re-think seemingly harmless tools.
“I only recently got it and now I’m thinking I don’t need Google watching literally my every step or my every heartbeat,” said Dan Kleinman, who said he is getting rid of his Fitbit Versa.
Any benefit of knowing that information is significantly outweighed by the disadvantage of Google also having it
Economists are upset that Americans aren’t uprooting themselves from their communities as readily as the Baby Boomers and preceding generations did:
Mobility in the United States has fallen to record lows. In 1985, nearly 20 percent of Americans had changed their residence within the preceding 12 months, but by 2018, fewer than ten percent had. That’s the lowest level since 1948, when the Census Bureau first started tracking mobility.
The decline in Americans’ mobility has been staggering, as the chart below shows. Mobility rates have fallen for nearly every group, across age, gender, income, homeownership status, and marital status.
Declining mobility contributes to a host of economic and social issues: less economic dynamism, lower rates of innovation, and lower productivity. By locking people into place, it exacerbates inequality by limiting the economic opportunities for workers.
A wide range of explanations have been offered to account for these substantial declines in mobility. Many consider the culprit to be the economic crisis, which locked people into declining-value homes; others attribute it to the huge differential in the housing prices in expensive cities. Some economists contend that job opportunities have become similar across places, meaning people are less likely to move for work; others see rising student debt as a key factor that has kept young Americans in their parents’ basements.
Now, a new study from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York suggests that other, more emotional and psychological factors may be at work. The study uses data from the bank’s Survey of Consumer Expectations to examine the degree to which people’s attachment to their communities affects their willingness and ability to move. To get at this, they use data from the survey (which covers a monthly panel of 1,300 respondents and is nationally representative) to group Americans into the three mobility classes I identified in my book Who’s Your City: “the mobile” who have the means, education, and capability to move to spaces of opportunity; “the stuck” who lack the resources to relocate; and “the rooted” who have the resources to move, but prefer to stay where they are.
The survey identifies respondents’ most recent move, their probability of moving in the next two years, and other data related to moving including job opportunities and income prospects, housing costs, the distance from current home, costs of moving to various locations, crime rates, taxes, community values and norms, and proximity to family and friends. The researchers use these data to estimate the overall costs—what they call the “willingness to pay” or WTP—for people to move different locations. They then use statistical models to examine the importance of these psychological factors compared to other mostly financial explanations.
A significant reason for the decline in mobility is that many of us are highly attached to our towns. Nearly half of those in the survey (47 percent) identify as rooted. The rooted are disproportionately white, older, married, homeowners, and rural. Their reasons for not moving are more psychological than economic: proximity to family and friends, and their involvement in the local community or church.
Note the significance of the “disproportionately white” aspect of the so-called “rooted”. In the 1950s and 1960s, even in the 1980s, all those Midwesterners who moved to California were moving, or so they assumed, to another white state. My parents moved from Massachusetts to Minnesota in the 1970s, then my parents’ best friends moved from Minnesota to California in the 1980s. Both moves were textbooks moves made for purely economic reasons.
Would the latter move be made today? Almost certainly not.
Now keep in mind that the entire purpose of free trade’s supposed economic benefits is to expand this labor mobility worldwide. The only price is the complete destruction of everything you know and love, including your relationships with your friends and family. So, it’s good that the US labor mobility rate is falling, the real problem is that it can’t fall fast enough to prevent the country from collapsing or preserve the remaining unity of the least-invaded states.
I didn’t even know that stepping down was an option. What does that even mean?
Prince Andrew was forced to quit royal duties last night after a dramatic intervention by the Queen and the Prince of Wales. They took decisive action to contain the fall-out from the duke’s disastrous TV interview about his friendship with a paedophile billionaire.
The interview triggered days of catastrophic headlines and caused a string of businesses and charities to desert him.
Following lengthy discussions with Charles, who is touring New Zealand, the Queen summoned Andrew to Buckingham Palace and told him to step down.
That’s fine and all, but now tell him to fly to the USA and be interviewed by the FBI. (reads royal statement) Ah, “for the foreseeable future”. In other words, it’s just a PR stunt until everything blows over, or so they hope.
The much-anticipated monthly subscription to join the Castalia Deluxe Book Club and receive a deluxe leather-bound book published by Castalia House every other month is now available.
The first Deluxe Book Club book is the Deluxe edition of The Missionaries by Owen Stanley. And for the seriously hard-core book collector who has all the Franklin Signed First Editions, it’s also possible to sign up for the limited-edition Library subscription.
Just to be clear, Castalia Deluxe is the main product and the Deluxe editions are the focus of this project. The Library editions are an ancillary experiment we’re doing at the request of some very serious book collectors, and which the Deluxe editions make possible. In quality terms, we are targeting the late ’80s Franklin Library editions for our Deluxe editions, albeit with better cover designs.
There are so many New Canadians that they have their own veteran’s associations now.
Dressed in the uniform of China’s People’s Liberation Army, the 40 or so singers stood proudly in neat rows and belted out an old favourite.
I am a Soldier talks of defeating the Japanese, vanquishing Nationalist leader Chiang Kai Shek in the Communist revolution and being tested by the revolutionary war. The performance “brought forth a whirlwind of Chinese military spirit in a foreign land,” said a report on the concert.
The recital earlier this month at the Centre for the Performing Arts in Richmond Hill, Ont., was not offered by a visiting martial choir from Beijing.
It was the work of a surprising new Canadian association, dedicated to retired troops of the China’s People’s Liberation Army or PLA — China’s armed forces — who are now settled in this country.
Interesting that we don’t often hear how “Canada is fallen” even though it is a tossup between Canada and Australia concerning which will be the first to follow South Africa into the “formerly First World” category.
There is a stronger case for breaking up Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon than there was for breaking up Standard Oil:
Apple, Google, Facebook and Microsoft all easily have more than 10 times the net income as did Standard Oil when it was broken apart. Apple coming in at close to 50 times the net income! Cisco and Intel come in just under 10 times the net income as compared to Standard Oil, both at 9.9 times greater net income than Standard Oil when it was broken apart.
If 91 percent control of the oil refining industry and net income of $35 million per year was enough to break apart Standard Oil under the terms of the Sherman Antitrust Act, there are a few tech super giants that would face a similar fate if the trust-busting philosophies that held sway during the administration of President Theodore Roosevelt were en vogue today.
In January, The Wall Street Journal published an article titled The Antitrust Case Against Facebook, Google and Amazon. The article reports that these major tech firms each have greater control over certain high tech industry sectors than Standard Oil had over oil production during its heyday. For example, 95 percent of young adults using the Internet subscribe to a Facebook product, whether it’s the company’s flagship social network or other services like Instagram or WhatsApp. Google controls 89 percent of Internet searches.
Where monopolies don’t exist, duopolies certainly do; Google and Apple, for example, collectively hold 99 percent of the mobile operating software market.
If the percentage of market share for important tech sectors held by these titans wasn’t enough, the massive fortunes these companies continue to generate would seem likely to trigger at least some antitrust scrutiny. Remember, Standard Oil’s annual net earnings through 1906 earned what today would be $969 million each year in 2017 dollars, adjusted for inflation. To some of the tech super giants of today, $1 billion in profits is nothing more than pocket change.
What is holding Republicans back? This is an absolute no-brainer as well as a certain vote winner across the political spectrum?