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Apple CEO Tim Cook 'secretly' signed $275B deal with China in 2016

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Re: Apple CEO Tim Cook 'secretly' signed $275B deal with China in 2016

#721

Post by hogFeast »

robocat wrote: post #710
hogFeast wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key word there is "received". He didn't buy stock himself, he was given it, he is a wage worker. He is purely out for his own wealth. He is one of the most absurdly overpaid execs in the US. How anyone can become a billionaire as an employee is utterly beyond me. Taking no risk, getting all the reward.

> How anyone can become a billionaire as an employee is utterly beyond me. You are thinking of all employees as fungible replaceable units, but employees are capitalistic units that can get monopoly power or economic rents. An employee can provide a function that can’t be replaced, and that employee can capture a lot of the business profits, well beyond their actual “value” to the business. For example, Tim Cook’s pe…

No, I didn't. I said execs are replaceable...and they are. If you replace Tim Cook with a ham sandwich, it will make no difference to AAPL at all. It is very rare (I have never seen it) where the SP will fall because of a CEO leaving, it is more common for it to rise when a CEO leaves.

Again, it is important to realise too...there are probably no other CEOs that have made as much as Tim Cook. Even amongst execs, he is wildly wildly wildly overpaid. Corporate governance at AAPL is basically non-existent.

Re: Apple CEO Tim Cook 'secretly' signed $275B deal with China in 2016

#722

Post by CincinnatiMan »

soapdog wrote: post #646
quitit wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People outside of China are served a different set of maps. Each country is served maps that conform to their territorial claims. E.g. If you view the map of India while in India, it'll appear different than if you viewed it in China.

Just do a Google search for the kinds of maps the some American schools use, you'll be amazed. Once, my wife had to hear from a university geography professor in America that Texas was larger than Brazil. When contested the professor said he was pretty sure. I'm not supporting China territorial claims, but I don't expect anything different from their government. I did however expected better from the U.S.

One professor making a mistake implies the US government is manipulating maps? How did you come to that conclusion?

Re: Apple CEO Tim Cook 'secretly' signed $275B deal with China in 2016

#723

Post by scrubs »

jollybean wrote: post #635
scrubs wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I seriously disagree with this. I expect a whole hell of a lot more out of American management. Money is not the measurement of all things. Apple could have: - pointed out China is confusing its politics with business - thrown this out to a shareholder vote - tried to see what customers outside of China thought - threatened to pull all manufacturing out of China - required China concede control elsewhere: Apple can o…

... no, none of these things apply. 1) 'Pointing out to China it's confusing politics with business' implies a total misunderstanding of their posture, their view of governance, and would probably be antagonistically insulting. It also assumes they are operating in 'good faith', which they are not. 'Politics is Business' to them, they know exactly what they are doing and they have most of the leverage so you risk onl…

Apple had choice. They just didn't use it or much of it.

You write like China has a lock on this ... like it's the perfect lobby. There's only one perfect lobby: and that's the NRA in Doonesbury cartoons.

Re: Apple CEO Tim Cook 'secretly' signed $275B deal with China in 2016

#724

Post by musicale »

burkaman wrote: post #353
tatrajim wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Historians generally agree that Martina Navratilova was rightfully and lawfully detained for insulting the Republican party. What incident? What insult? What historians?

I've been trying to understand this comment for like half an hour, I think maybe the idea is to imagine 1980s America with a CCP-style government? So, Martina Navratilova was a prominent critic of the dominant political party in the 80s, and if she was in China that could have gotten her arrested, but she was in the US so she wasn't. That's as far as I got, I can't figure out what point the comment is trying to make.

The question I was responding to was "how different is this from the 1980s in the US?"

A possible difference I was suggesting is that Apple is being required to do things such as storing data locally not only for business reasons related to local industry, as the parent post had suggested, but also to enable surveillance of political dissidents, suppression of criticism of the government, etc..

Perhaps I should have picked John McEnroe as he might be more recognizable, but as I understand it Navratilova was a women's tennis #1 in the 1980s who actually did criticize the Republican party (and the US government) so I thought it might be an interesting comparison.

Re: Apple CEO Tim Cook 'secretly' signed $275B deal with China in 2016

#725

Post by musicale »

warkdarrior wrote: post #527
musicale wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How different is this from the 1980's in the U.S. Historians generally agree that Martina Navratilova was rightfully and lawfully detained for insulting the Republican party. And that it was important for Toyota to comply with US lawful interception requirements for any communication in automobiles.

> And that it was important for Toyota to comply with US lawful interception requirements for any communication in automobiles. Are you just stringing random words together to create sentences?

No, but perhaps I can explain the analogy more directly:

The most likely driving reason for requiring Apple to maintain iCloud data in local datacenters in mainland China rather than offshore (as it had done previously) is to facilitate data access by local investigative authorities.

Re: Apple CEO Tim Cook 'secretly' signed $275B deal with China in 2016

#726

Post by seanmcdirmid »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #665
tooltalk wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Apple is like .1% of the political clout and lobbying being brought to bear Sure, as Tim Apple testified before Congress, Apple pays the most tax in the US and is also the most valuable company in the world. I'm pretty sure there is nothing going on between Apple and American/Chinese gov't. /s

>Apple pays the most tax in the US // Interesting, how much, what percentage is that of Apple revenue and what percentage of total federal tax income?

Companies pay taxes on profit, not revenue. Otherwise capital intensive industries like banks and oil companies would be screwed.

Re: Apple CEO Tim Cook 'secretly' signed $275B deal with China in 2016

#727

Post by seanmcdirmid »

wyattpeak wrote: post #602
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your little coffee shop goes out of business if they don't attract enough business, if they have competitors that provide a better product for example. But even then, you are rewarding their good behavior directly, if you want to scale that up, you and and a bunch of your friends will need to stop buying Apple products to let them know you find their behavior to not be of your liking (and become patrons of the compan…

I'm going to disagree with you there. I agree that their bottom line benefits from their being nice to me, but that's not the same as being motivated by profit. Similarly, I'm not looking to obsessively optimise for the best product. I find your description distastefully cynical, but more importantly not particularly in line with my experience of how people behave.

I guess we have to agree to disagree. In order to get Apple to stop their behavior, you either have to regulate morality and go beyond not just buying their products, but forcing others to not buy them either.

Re: Apple CEO Tim Cook 'secretly' signed $275B deal with China in 2016

#728

Post by seanmcdirmid »

stale2002 wrote: post #476
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point was that if Apple didn't adhere to maximizing profits, they simply wouldn't exist and we wouldn't be talking about their behavior in China. Regardless of whether you are a libertarian or not, you are wagging your finger at the wrong party (or to say, the party isn't really in a position to fix things). If you want change, it has to be via whoever is setting/enforcing the rules (in our case, government). The…

Yeah they would exist. Lots of companies are able to exist without giving in to completely silly demands like "increase the size of these islands". > If you want change Actually, customers are able to cause lots of economic damages to companies, or their employees. There is more that one way to Target Apple employees than what you suggested.

For example?

Re: Apple CEO Tim Cook 'secretly' signed $275B deal with China in 2016

#729

Post by 434123r32f »

brutal_chaos_ wrote: post #302

When businesses become so large, they no longer are a $countryOfOrigin company (A US company in the case of Apple). They become multinational entities that have no loyalty to a nation, just loyalty to pocket books.

Not really, they are listed on NASDAQ, a US-based stock exchange regulated by the SEC (also US)

Re: Apple CEO Tim Cook 'secretly' signed $275B deal with China in 2016

#730

Post by systemvoltage »

tablespoon wrote: post #670
systemvoltage wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NYT is extremely predictable - both in its choice of what to inform its viewers as well as what will fit their political stance (globalists). If you need this to be spelled out, either you’re being rhetorical or you’re uninformed - I suspect the former.

> If you need this to be spelled out, either you’re being rhetorical or you’re uninformed - I suspect the former. No, I suspect you have things wrong in this case, but you're being so vague it's difficult to figure out where the error is. > NYT is extremely predictable - both in its choice of what to inform its viewers as well as what will fit their political stance (globalists). Even if that's true, it's no reason t…

Btw Fox is covering this story! Very predictable.
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