It an ironclad economic reality that Apple has $200 billion literally sitting in offshore tax heavens. It has failed to effectively invest or spend it for the past decade.
If you deny that this is unproductive, then you have left the realm of reasonable discourse and it's like debating Nasa's research with a flat-earther.
It’s not actual banknotes. It’s in investment vehicles.
Generally that means it’s invested in things like stocks commodities etc.
We can debate whether Apple is investing their money in productive vehicles or not.
But it’s not literally sitting anywhere.
> It has failed to effectively invest or spend it for the past decade.
Has it? You may be right.
You are certainly right that they have this much capital offshore.
To claim that it hasn’t been invested effectively isn’t something you can say without qualification.
> If you deny that this is unproductive, then you have left the realm of reasonable discourse and it's like debating Nasa's research with a flat-earther.
If you say so.
One reason businesses keep large amounts of securities on hand, is to mitigate risk.
I’d say Apple faces some of the largest risks of any company in the world.
It is dependent on China for most of its manufacturing, and Taiwan for all of almost all of it’s silicon.
It’s not at all unreasonable for them to consider a future where one or both of these are the subject of political instability.
The government can certainly precipitate disaster for Apple in China or Taiwan, or fail to protect Apple’s interests.
What it cannot do is rebuild its supply chain or silicon vendor in such an event. For that Apple would need a large reserve in the order of 100’s of billions of dollars.
Do you deny that?
Which is ultimately my point. None of us have to view Apple as “valuable”.
It’s simply a political routine built upon exposure to previous political routine. Time series of the brain.
There’s a tax on our agency to keep propping up systems that are devaluing our agency to the benefit of a moneyed minority.
We’re under no political obligation to enable or protect that, no matter how much economic theory you copy-paste.
Imo the free market is not Apple and Dell computers, or Ford and Chevy cars. It’s between public and private power.
One has cost us reliability and resiliency for fiscal efficiency. We do not have to politically accept that.
Not really. Also I’m not copying and pasting anything here.
Notice that the person I am replying to is the one who is talking about ‘iron clad economic realities’.
You’re welcome to deny the value of anything you like, or the existence of it for that matter.
Nobody is obliging you to accept any reality you don’t like.
> There’s a tax on our agency to keep propping up systems that are devaluing our agency to the benefit of a moneyed minority.
Why are you propping them up then?
> Imo the free market is not Apple and Dell computers, or Ford and Chevy cars. It’s between public and private power. One has cost us reliability and resiliency for fiscal efficiency. We do not have to politically accept that.
It’s not clear what you are trying to say here. Can you explain?
What do you mean by a ‘free market between public and private power’?
I talk trash about big tech constantly, I’m hardly propping them up. They have no information advantage, just a political capital one.
The authors are using their political insight, based on the last generation or so of political rhetoric to emotionally minimize others value of Big Tech, suggesting that to be of local economic benefit.
> It’s not clear what you are trying to say here. Can you explain.
Our economy is predicated on a post hoc conclusion based upon information manipulation.
We denigrate humans spending time economy on public solutions to problems, and celebrate deference to privatization.
This creates a neurological preference for the latter over the former. We circularly continue to justify storing more value in these organizations ultimately based upon the initial post hoc observation; this is what happened so it must keep happening!
Never mind that ultimately it’s human agency being co-opted into propping up the value of others and undermining themselves.
Politics needs to consider the time dimension for the masses. If it’s going to take someone their life to pay off a debt because society told them that’s just how it works, that’s hardly freedom. Politics largely just concerns itself with space; ownership of property. Not the tax on our time for things other than making sure Bezos and Musk are still rich.
I don’t see what this adds except a vaguely insulting innuendo which applies equally to you and lowers trust. Also, it seems odd to me that you are reading emotion into what you call copy pasted economic theory.
I actually agree with a lot of what you are saying, except that I don’t think it reduces purely to information manipulation, and to a certain extent, that claim can result in a facile justification for one’s own attempts at manipulation.
It’s also just not clear how any of this is relevant to the topics at hand.
Isn’t your comment just a generic ‘the system is bad’ and ‘politics needs to change’ (agreed), and ‘it’s all a scam to keep the rich in power’ (partially agreed), we need to think differently (agreed). But with no additional content?
This is true. Such a colloquial definition does exist.
However using that definition in a discussion about government and economic policy is a form of dissembling.
> From a mathematical perspective alone, these companies have soaked up immense wealth.
This makes no sense. The concept of ‘soaking up wealth’ is a completely subjective political characterization. It cannot be a mathematical perspective.
> There’s little to go around for infrastructure projects while it’s locked up in private vaults.
What are you talking about when you talk about infrastructure? Is this point about taxing corporations so you can build schools?
If so, that’s nothing to do with what the article (written by Republican politicans) support.
A generalized attack on neoliberalism has nothing to do with the points being made here.
For example, I support the idea of forcing something like bootcamp to be made available for all general purpose computers.