Apple - the absolute kings of planned obsolescence. Who else could do it so brazenly AND have a bunch of zealots who will now reply to this defending them and attcking anyone who points it out.

Any industry not involving a computer they'd be in big trouble even with their massive (legal) bribes to politicians and fortune spent on legal teams.

If you buy a futures contract with 1m of underlying value - it is NOT on the balance sheet. The balance sheet is unchanged. Economically it is exactly the same thing. It is exactly like you borrowed a million and bought gold with it but the loan and asset are invisible. Shocking, isn't it?

The structured finance dept of an investment bank uses exactly this (among other techniques) for off-balance sheet financing. There are rules they have to follow designed to prevent or minimise off balance sheet financing. You think the regulators have the investment bankers in a bind where they can do nothing and can't charge big fees resulting in the closure of all the structured finance departments? Well you know that could have happened without my knowledge, but I'd be quite surprised. You might know better? Do you want to bet?

Start on the top left tab, now it's on the bottom row. Thanks.

https://i.chzbgr.com/full/9097033984/hE7CFF8DD/person-aa

That multirows tab UI thing was an utter abomination against usability, intelligence, good sense, decency, justice and obviously any and all aesthetics. Why bring it back? To fix it maybe?

You can borrow a million dollars and use it to buy gold. An asset and a liability on the balance sheet each ba million dollars.

You can buy futures contracts with an underlying value of a million dollars. Nothing on the balance sheet. Zero dollars on both assets and liabilities.

The two are economically indistinguishable.

There are regulations around leases, for example, about what you have to capitalise on the balance sheet and when. Then there are workarounds for those rules. New rules cause the investment bankers to go to work. For a fee.

Channelling the 1980s for off-balance sheet financing 101.

From an economic perspective there is zero difference between borrowing to buy an asset and entering into a non-cancellable long term (equivalent to its economic life) lease for the asset.

The first option causes an asset and a liability on the balance sheet, affecting debt ratios that appear in financing contracts and so on. The second does not appear on the balance sheet.

You pay every month, like it or not. You call it interest or you call it a lease payment. You need it off balance sheet for reasons, investment bankers will structure that to make it happen for a fee.

Technically, from an economic perspective, it's debt.

At no point is money as a resource being spent on this legal case any kind of meaningful constraint. Equally true for both open ai and apple.

You? You're toast if you need legal justice with either co on the other side. The law exists so that the strongest might not always get their way. It was a good ideal, maybe we should bring it back.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48755380

Points: 7

# Comments: 1

Look down that list of winners and the list of top finishers for two decades prior to Armstrong and the amount of doping among them that we actually found about and seriously try to make the case that Armstrong is the reason for "cheat or don't bother showing up."

Bernard Thévenet won in 1975 and has said he was using steroids. Armstrong was 4 years old at the time. We don't know about all the drug cheating at the TdF, just what we do know is damning in ways we can't pin on the vile Armstrong. Do continue to loathe him as much as you like. He's earned that.

Ulrich, Riis, Fignon, Zoetelmelk, we haven't caught them all nor tried 1% as hard as those who got Armstrong did.

Look through the list and try and claim with a straight face that Armstrong was first, led the charge or that the Tour de France actually wanted to catch him or any other winner at all.

I don't care at all about Armstrong. The sport is clean now despite an ugly past. Just as it was when Armstrong won all those tours. Can I interest you in this bridge at a good price?

Who gets off scot free with the "It was all Armstrong" line.

If Armstrong stayed retired he probably would have gotten away with it, kept lying forcefully and be a secular saint by now. The TdF didn't catch him.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doping_at_the_Tour_de_France#S...

https://quotefancy.com/media/wallpaper/3840x2160/2503086-Lan...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doping_at_the_Tour_de_France#D...

Note the quantity that actually got caught and with enough evidence. Lance won it 6 times without getting caught.

Looking at it systematically there's no way all of the top finishers were not taking drugs (how else could they compete with the world's best who were? The advantage isn't small.) And it had clearly been going on for many years before Armstrong entered the event for the first time.

I really don't care for Armstrong's yellow banded hypocrisy but blaming him for the "cheat or don't bother competing" reality lets rather a lot of people off the hook with a convenient scapegoat.

But I'm sure that's all in the past and it's not like that now. Just as was said when Armstrong won 6 times while correctly stating he was the most tested athlete on the planet.

Wrapping it up and tying all that to Armstrong, as has been done, stinks. He was clearly a bit player in that extensive fraud. Six titles with no meaningful positive drug test as the most tested athlete on the planet.

Instead of monetising software sales, they monetised access to Free software performing an end run around the GPL by distributing access to it over the internet allowing them to make the public good proprietary google property. They threw out some crumbs at best.

Remember the un-publicised puzzles to paradoxically get media attention, hiring highschool kids with a demo that made the news because it made the news and all the rest of the BS. I guess it worked. Now they're big and bad and the Free software optimism is largely dead so they don't have to bother and now make killbots for the Pentagon.

Where else you gonna work? Go test the market, nerd.

Launching a nuclear war is an interesting definition of "useful", not one I'd agree with and that exact scenario is what is being discussed.

So yes this is a perfectly valid and useful comparison in examining this particular, civilisation ending limitation.