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Apple is now worth 1.5 trillion dollars:
[On Wednesday, June 10], Apple became the first US company to achieve a $1.5 trillion market capitalization. The stock surged even as investors began pulling back in many other areas of the economy.
Reasons given by investors for the optimism include anticipation of the launch of a 5G iPhone this fall, signs of strong App Store sales, and interest in the potential of ARM-driven Macs, based on a Bloomberg report yesterday that said Apple may announce an ARM transition at its annual developer conference later this month.
Yesterday and today, Apple's movement ran counter to most of the rest of the market, where investors' actions have reflected fear of a global coronavirus resurgence and anticipation of bad news from the US Federal Reserve in a report due out today.
Market capitalization essentially means the total number of shares of a company being traded multiplied by the current trading value of a share in that company, making it the best publicly available measure of the company's actual value.
AAPL was at $338.40 per share as of June 13 which gave it a total market capitalization of $1.47 trillion.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday June 14 2020, @02:12PM (32 children)
Incidentally, this is a great example of why money hoarding isn't a thing. Even while most investments are getting hit by bad news and the few that aren't are overpriced, investors will still put the money anywhere they can rather than keep it as cash.
So the next time someone complains about rich people or billionaires "hoarding money" (such as here [soylentnews.org], here [soylentnews.org], here [soylentnews.org], here [soylentnews.org], or here [soylentnews.org]), please keep this counterexample in mind.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Sunday June 14 2020, @02:21PM (23 children)
Thanks, I prefer to remember the Panama papers, and the fact that Panama is far from the only tax haven that plays that game.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday June 14 2020, @02:47PM (2 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 15 2020, @10:34AM (1 child)
Google parent Alphabet overtakes Apple to become world's most cash-rich company [cnet.com]
The top two "cash hoarders" have a stash of $117B + $102B = $219B in cash.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday June 15 2020, @01:11PM
A savings account is a liquid reserve too and yet that money isn't hoarded.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 14 2020, @05:33PM (19 children)
nothing wrong with tax havens. what's wrong is that they are necessary in the first place. these governments deserve to go fucking broke.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Sunday June 14 2020, @05:38PM (18 children)
Broke government = no paychecks for the military or police, no maintenance for the roads, no more free schools.
Grow up and pay your taxes, or go live on a desert island and fight the pirates off with your bare hands - if you can even afford a desert island.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 14 2020, @08:27PM
Haven't you heard the news? That's a good thing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 15 2020, @02:53AM (1 child)
I fight the pirates off with methane emissions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 15 2020, @06:34AM
Haven't you heard that pirates like that smell?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday June 15 2020, @01:20PM (14 children)
So what? Without some sort of reform on what tax money is being spent on, that'll happen anyway. Those services will be hostages [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday June 15 2020, @01:43PM (13 children)
Even the Roman Empire and all of its corruption took 450 years to fall.
I'm honestly more concerned about fall due to ecological disaster than I am about fall due to governmental corruption or hostile takeover - we have considerably better (but still inadequate) transparency, both domestic and globally, than the Roman Empire did - absent serious challenges from nature, that transparency should serve to extend our viability as a republic much longer. Unless Kurzweil is more prophet than kook, nobody alive today will live to see the fall of civilization due to overtaxation.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 16 2020, @03:58AM (12 children)
Thing is, I see a lot more people here on SN complaining about corruption and hostile takeover in the US than ecological disaster. Something that is such a prevalent threat now, probably will continue to be a bigger threat than ecological disaster.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday June 16 2020, @11:32AM (11 children)
It's almost always the disaster you're not preparing for that does the fatal damage.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 16 2020, @12:51PM (10 children)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday June 16 2020, @01:39PM (9 children)
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday June 18 2020, @08:08AM (8 children)
So theater. Got to account for the screws, but nobody blinks an eye when multi-hundred billion dollar programs fail to deliver.
Meanwhile I can point to credible efforts to address ecological disaster over the past half century.
Wow, "speeches". Truly making great strides there.
Sense the pattern yet, Joe?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday June 18 2020, @11:32AM (7 children)
Meanwhile, you have been fooled by bird-washing PR programs where the oil industry spends a few millions (chump change) to make videos of "wildlife rescue efforts" like where they wash a seal and then release it to be eaten by an Orca 20 seconds later.
Both areas stop small amounts of the problem as theater to distract from the much larger problems that go un-addressed.
Yes, I've known about your selective perception and ignorance for a long time.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday June 19 2020, @01:44AM (6 children)
What do you have against feeding orcas? Let us keep in mind that there's a little more to environmentalism than oil cleanup theater. For example, there's the vast reduction in pollution in the developed world, particularly compared to the 50s and 60s. That's genuine ecological disaster averted. And there's the conservation movement which has for well over a century helped avert the ecological disaster of habitat destruction. A lot of that happened at the government level.
Now, when are we going to ever see similar movement towards addressing corruption, overtaxation, and related issues like complexity of regulation? See the pattern now? The huge difference between environmentalism and this other stuff is that government routinely goes beyond theater to address ecological problems.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday June 19 2020, @02:49AM (5 children)
Slow clap, I'm just as impressed by "pollution reduction" as I am by "population control."
May you be cursed to live 400 years, forced to eat bug paste and breathe through a machine because the air quality is incompatible with life, all because we've let ourselves be led around by psychopaths who are a decade or two from certain death themselves.
Yes, there are "real measures" being taken, it's been a long time since a U.S. river caught fire and that's progress, of a sort. It could be worse. The Cuban missile crisis certainly could have gone worse, lots of things could be worse, but the way we're going feels like an overweight underpowered aircraft heading for a short runway - we might live through the landing, but it's unlikely to be pretty.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday June 19 2020, @12:21PM (4 children)
Truth is an absolute defense against fallacy by babbling.
And may you be cursed to get a clue. Reality won this game.
See, you're already starting. I get that you long for the bug paste utopia where JoeMerchants are always right, but we don't live in that world. We'll just have to make due with the amazing successes we've had instead. Rivers not burning any more are a few of those successes.
How about we try going with what works?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday June 19 2020, @12:46PM (3 children)
I believe your truth to be short sighted, and therefore missing the bigger and more relevant picture.
Your statement, I believe that you believe that in your own mind, which is of course all that matters to you.
May I point out the tens of thousands of years that people lived near rivers which did not burn until "progress" happened? Your mental ability to move the goalposts to convenient low points and thereby demonstrate "progress" to yourself is worrying, not as worrying as the larger trends in the world, but indicative of a source of the ongoing problems.
Do you live under the delusion that either one of us has more than an infinitesimal influence on what really happens in the future?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday June 19 2020, @01:52PM (2 children)
Your beliefs don't matter. What you can back them with does.
It's billions of years really. And well, progress, such as it is, happened. You can't take it back now.
What moving the goalposts? History happened. It's folly to suppose that we can just revert to a pre-industrial world. And as I repeatedly have noted, we've made a lot of progress, including said curbing of ecological disasters, to the present.
Then there's no reason for you to continue. Become less wrong.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday June 19 2020, @05:50PM (1 child)
To who? Show me the people with the power to implement change who listen to "backed data," over emotion, greed, more power, more money, etc.
It's folly to even propose such a thing. Now: reverting to pre-industrial total human population numbers, that's virtually inevitable (on your scale of Billions of years) - the question is: how painful will the transition be?
I value knowledge of your perspective, but not with any intention of adopting it as my own. Your belief that you "know" with some form of absolutism right vs. wrong continues to devalue your opinions.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday June 19 2020, @11:58PM
You've already acknowledged that rivers in the US don't catch on fire anymore. And I mentioned the conservation thing. So someone has implemented positive environmental change (and checking off the doing something about ecological disaster but not the corruption list mentioned earlier). At this point, why does the motive for that positive change matter? If someone is making the world a better place for emotion, greed, more power, more money, etc, then that works for me. My take is that most environmentalists do it for emotion, so they fall solidly in that blob.
Moving on:
Good thing we're heading in a good direction, right?
And yet, we have absolute truth in this discussion. For example, both of us have acknowledged my basic premise, that there are examples of prepping for ecological disaster in such things as rivers getting cleaned up to the point they no longer catch on fire, land conservation, and demonstrate some degree of cleanup of oil spills to the point that the orcas are eating healthy. We also seem to have a problem coming up with examples of prepping for corruption and overtaxation (I grant that foreign invasion gets massive prep). So at this point, you've granted, whether you feel it or not, that there is prep for ecological disaster and not so much for the other.
You acknowledged it, I did as well. I consider it absolute between us now.
Now, we're supposed to care more about the motives for this prep than the actual prep itself? That's moving the goalposts.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 14 2020, @02:40PM (7 children)
So cutting taxes on the rich really does pay off! They don't hoard the money, they buy stocks that pay out to other rich people that are holding them, especially the CEO and board, since nobody really pays out dividends anyway.
So, yes, they aren't hoarding CASH, but they are hoarding the money, at least in the sense that it doesn't benefit anyone on the other end of the income bracket. That money doesn't turn into wage increases, because wages have been woefully stagnant for well over a decade, so how is this NOT hoarding it?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday June 14 2020, @03:20PM (6 children)
Which, let us note, isn't hoarding money in any sense. It just means that they aren't wasting that wealth on you. Interesting how so many of these broken bits of rhetoric are rooted in greed and envy.
Which means what? I find it interesting how so much of these claims devolve to complaining about financial tail chasing. So what if they're doing that and getting bigger numbers? What wealth/money is in that activity that you could actually use?
And even if that were true (and it's not [advisorperspectives.com]), so what? Why should wages rebound after recessions? What's the expectation here?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 14 2020, @09:33PM (5 children)
It's not about greed. People are getting more and more desperate - scraping by is the best the bottom 50‰ can hope for. It seems to me that Marx's theories about succession of economic systems are being validated in the US, where socialist institutions are sprouting on the corpse of capitalism and the people are screaming for more.
(Score: 0, Redundant) by khallow on Sunday June 14 2020, @11:41PM (4 children)
Why? Didn't someone just say that wages were merely stagnant? Where's the desperation coming from? I'll note that the developing world is becoming less and less desperate at this time. Maybe we ought to think about what works?
Sorry, Marx is just crazy. It's been a cluster every time someone implemented his theories.
And according to you, those same people are getting more and more desperate. What a coincidence. I think maybe if we dynamite these socialist institutions, revive that capitalism corpse, and do what works, then maybe we'll have less of these supposedly desperate people screaming.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 15 2020, @12:36AM (1 child)
I dunno. China's hybrid systems seems to be going pretty well for them - with a little of everything. Not that its any good for the folks that values freedom and liberty over everything else, but their current structure allows them to make really quick and cohesive decision instead of the opinion fest and indecisiveness (and in-fighting) of a lot of the western democratic system.
Of course some of this also hinged upon Xi Jinping's ability to unify the party - they weren't immune to infighting and tribal warlords ruling supreme over their domain. It was really bad for the common folks when that was the case as the nepotism meant anyone with any connection to the warlords can pretty much run amok without much repercussion.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday June 15 2020, @03:03AM
"Hybrid" here means abandoning Communism in all but name.
Which is great when those quick and cohesive decisions agree with what you want. When they don't, it sucks much worse than the indecisive Western democratic systems which mostly leave you alone.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 15 2020, @01:14AM (1 child)
Marxism is definitely crazy in an unindustrialized nation that hasn't gone through the rapid development of capitalism - Marx's own theory supports that.
Feudalism lays a stable foundation by concentrating populations, building infrastructure, and developing an educated class.
Capitalism expands the educated classes, incentivises R & D, and inevitably brings about it's own destruction through unrelenting advance. Requirements for education and training in advanced capitalist societies bring socialist institutions like public schooling into the fold. Automation displaces unskilled workers, leading to welfare systems in order to quell unrest. Bureaucratic corruption leads to the failure of political systems, and eventually the capitalist society is subsumed by socialism.
Soviets tried to jump from feudalism straight to socialism - failure. Vietnam was the same, China as well until they figured out the mistake and corrected it. Cuba's problems lie mostly with being an island and pissing off their largest neighbor, rather than improper implementation.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday June 15 2020, @01:00PM
There's always an excuse for why it doesn't work. The USSR for a glaring counterexample was quite industrialized in 1945. Now, the US is post-industrialized with the conditions of the 1850s no longer applying to it.
Pretty irrelevant since a lot happened in Europe between the development of feudalism, which started way back in the 4th century (!) during the decay of the Roman Empire, and the 1850s when Marx came up with his theories.
Which I should note, the "destruction through unrelenting advance" didn't happen - turns out all that unrelenting advance made labor more valuable, completely opposite of what was claimed would happen. Instead, we're seeing destruction of capitalism through the usual mechanisms of parasitism. For example, in the US a wealth transfer of roughly 3% of the US's GDP is going from young adults to the elderly, just because way-back-when someone didn't want granny eating cat food. A similar transfer of wealth happens through Medicare and government bonds too. Well, what a coincidence that we're hearing whining about Boomers who will be the last generation to (at least for the leading part) get more out of these programs than they put in.
Governments of the developed world, including those of the US, typically consume 30-50% of the respective country's GDP for stuff (like roads, emergency services, etc) that should cost a fraction of that. Another symptom is the complex and opaque bureaucracies that are funded with that money. And of course, the bribing of the public with those unsustainable levels of entitlements. That's not a flaw of capitalism, that's a flaw of any form of governance that goes on too long.
Marx tried to get around that by claiming that communism was some asymptotic process that would gradually eliminate the state. Sorry, that's yet another fairy tale. We haven't seen any withering of the state.