Which Company Is the Largest? 378
Fudge Factor 3000 writes "Apple and Exxon are fighting it out to be the company with the largest market cap. Tuesday, Apple pulled ahead. It is hard to believe a tech company can beat out an oil giant, but is the market cap really the measure of the size/influence of a company? It is certainly the simplest metric to consider. Ars is running an excellent article on how to measure the size of a company. They discuss different metrics such as cash balance, revenue, number of employees, etc."
Who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
Does it really matter? Honestly, who gives a shit what company is the biggest?
I only care about the products/services they produce.
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only gadgets (Score:4, Insightful)
what is the future of a civilisation whose most capitalised stock is gadget manufacturer?
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I prefer that to a company whose business is making the planet inevitably inhabitable.
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I prefer that to a company whose business is making the planet inevitably inhabitable.
Your modern lifestyle and that of almost every other person currently living on this planet is made possible by relatively cheap access to hydrocarbons. If nothing else, remember this:
1. Be careful what you wish for, lest you actually receive it.
2. Don't bite the hand that feeds you.
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While this is true, there's a quickly closing time window where it might be possible to keep that lifestyle while still having a planet to live on, by switching to alternative power sources when they're sufficiently developed.
At one point in the past, stone-based tools allowed humans to improve their lifestyle. As soon as better alternatives were developed, a switch occurred. This isn't any different (except for the irreparable implications of not making the switch soon).
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While this is true, there's a quickly closing time window where it might be possible to keep that lifestyle while still having a planet to live on, by switching to alternative power sources when they're sufficiently developed.
At one point in the past, stone-based tools allowed humans to improve their lifestyle. As soon as better alternatives were developed, a switch occurred. This isn't any different (except for the irreparable implications of not making the switch soon).
That's a bloody big exception. So what happens if the new technology is not developed at all or even delayed? We just keep on destroying what we have until its gone?
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I prefer that to a company whose business is making the planet inevitably inhabitable.
Curious typo. It's also a bit ironic since oil companies do help make the planet more inhabitable by providing the energy medium that the construction and transportation infrastructure mostly depends on.
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I use an analytical engine you insensitive clod!
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A future where more people have more time dedicated to the top parts of Maslow's pyramid rather than the bottom sections.
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what is the future of a civilisation whose most capitalised stock is gadget manufacturer?
They're not a gadget manufacturer (though they are also that). They are mostly an entertainment company. Just like the good old days of RCA, when they ran broadcasts, and sold televisions too ... to make sure that people could get their broadcasts.
It's not at all surprising that a company that makes money delivering entertainment, services, and other IP-ish stuff (iTunes, the App Store, etc) is huge. Because the US has a huge hunger for that sort of stuff. And that stuff is hugely more marked up than ar
But I thought... (Score:2, Interesting)
...Apple was dying...
I've heard that for the last 20 years from dozens of tech magazines and from numerous Slashdotters...
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20 years? I've personally been hearing it since the IBM PC was introduced, and that was '81... so 30 years?
The Market Is a Lie (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course it isn't. If it were, then the gyrations of the DJIA would mean that the total size of the representative corporations in the stock market have grown and shrunk across a 10% margin over the past couple of weeks. Those companies, and by extension the rest of publicly traded corps, and indeed business in general, have clearly not been growing and shrinking that much in any size except solely their market cap. The market cap is undeniably a contrived measure that is primarily an artifact of nothing but finance. Which in the past generation has become almost completely independent of underlying business, and even independent of any underlying reality except preferential treatment by the powerful.
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Market cap is not an indication of size at all. It's an indication of, well, present market value.
For size, there are few things you can look at it: there is size based on net worth, total number of employees, total sales in dollars, total unit sales, etc. Most of these are only useful when comparing to companies within the same industry, however. In fact, most useful statistics are really only useful when comparing companies within the same industry. That's why so many people focus on market capitaliz
Re:The Market Is a Lie (Score:4, Interesting)
EPS is only relevant for a company with no foreseeable change in demand.
Every tech company has a high uphill to remain relevant. Apple's iPhone was/is pretty cool, the Motorola RAZR was pretty cool, the blackberry was cool, Windows XP was pretty cool, Windows 95 was cool... etc etc You can't just sit on what you have and make money. Your against the clock
An oil company similarly has limited oil supplies and must keep exploring, but those don't deplete nearly as fast as relevance depletes does for a tech company (also don't forget oil companies are becoming 'energy' companies as they move away from oil).
Apple's iPhone is already feeling... dated to me. Its weird but when I hold my wife's iPhone 4 it just feels old compared to my Atrix even though the iPhone does many key features better than the atrix and motoblur isn't exactly the spiffiest interface out there. Her home button issues don't help at all (randomly quits working). Eventually she'll get like me and say "well, I'm not buying another Apple product again" after she gets fed up with all its quirks and shortcomings like I did with my iPhone 3G.
Apple's market capital is driven by speculation, but its probably the wrong kind. Some people buy into apple because they think it has a future, others buy into it because it seems to be more resistant against market swings as a large-cap stock and because it's had a long-term growth trend. The rest are bots running an algorithm that will continually drive up the price of the stock until something triggers them to decide the stock is going to go down... Then those bots will drive down the price of the stock when they go bearish on it. It is likely Apple's price/share is too high given their long term viability, but you do have to give credit to the fact Apple has built their long-term income on their iTunes store which people will probably keep on using well beyond when they decide Apple's hardware just isn't the best item to buy with their money.
However, when someone major starts selling songs cheaper than apple while at the same time giving more money to the creators of the content being sold, then I would say apple is in trouble. At that point, creators may stop using apple as a distribution source
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If anyone could have known that Goldman Sachs was planning to get bailed out by the Treasury after crashing the economy with bottomless CDS liabilities, that might have resembled a legitimate market. But we didn't - only GS, a few other investment banks, government players and their cronies knew.
Huh, I thought that was a pretty obvious strategy even in foresight.
Most of the real estate repossessed by banks that loaned money they shouldn't have is standing and rotting, unmaintained. That is just the most obvious example of asset destruction.
So what does that have to do with markets? Choosing not to maintain real estate is not a fault of the market. The obvious solution would be to sell the real estate to someone who would maintain it. That's the ready market solution. That it apparently is not being done in this case means that some non-market force is at work.
Then there's all the businesses that rely on normal credit operations that were destroyed when even deserved credit was denied for a year or more. There's all the public infrastructure that needs preventive maintenance not to decay faster, that is now destroyed by years of neglect as government cut back on that spending since the economy collapsed.
A change in cash flow doesn't destroy assets. And the public infrastructure has nothing to do with markets. One doesn'
Carrying value (Score:5, Insightful)
Market cap is a completely nonsensical way of saying "what's the largest company". Market cap is simply whatever irrational price the market has placed upon a company, and has zilch to do with its actual value as a cash generating engine.
For that, one has to look at book value or intrinsic value, as defined by Graham, Dodd, Buffett and others in the value investing fold. Book value (or carrying value) is simply assets minus liabilities minus intangibles (e.g. goodwill, the paid in capital during acquisition of other companies in excess of their book value). Intrinsic value, more or less, includes the net present value of discounted cash flows looking probably five or six quarters forward (any more than that is pure speculation as companies tend not to forecast out more than a year or two from the known inputs into their business).
A third way of looking at it is net working capital plus net operating cash flows... paring it down to inventories on the balance sheet side (working capital) and cash flows related directly to the sale of their goods/services, and not via financing activities, acquisition, etc. This is a really strong measure of how powerful a business is. By almost all of these measures, Apple is pretty strong, but their market capitalization seems to have them overvalued several times relative to what their future cash generating ability truly is.... which is why you won't see any offers for acquisition any time soon, not that Apple would entertain any of them anyway.
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Re:Carrying value (Score:4, Interesting)
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How about volatility (Score:5, Interesting)
Although Apple is on top at the moment, they have a very volatile stock. This tend to discourage long-term investments generally accounts for less than 15% of a well balanced portfolio. Microsoft and also Exxon on the other hand have a stable stock price and they both tend to play it generally safe. It might not please stock holders who were looking to make money quickly but perhaps is how a company can achieve more maturity.
So yeah, they are big now but they might be tiny in a few months.
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Re:How about volatility (Score:4, Informative)
What do you mean about volatility? Aside from Steve Jobs announcing his first medical leave to get a liver transplant in January 2008 and the economic recession hitting later that year, there haven't been any major drops in Apple's stock price. With the exception of the two cases I mentioned, you could have bought Apple stock at any point in the last five years, sold it a year later, and come out well ahead (and in those two cases, holding it for two years would have meant a major profit). It hasn't been a monotonic increase, but it's certainly on an upward trend at the moment, so even if there are fluctuations on a day-to-day basis, holding onto it for even a month or two is almost always enough to see a return on your investment.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=AAPL&t=5y&l=off&z=l&q=l&c= [yahoo.com]
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I mean from the inception of the company to today, Apple has been relatively volatile compared to Exxon or even Microsoft. Unlike Exxon and Microsoft, Apple doesn't really have a long term cash cow. Exxon has oil, Microsoft has MS Office. Apple has recently been very successful with the iPod and iPad but competition is lurking. There is no guarantee they will remain leaders 4 years from now. It's likely but this uncertainty is what makes it more volatile.
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Battling it out? Really? (Score:3)
Is that SJ and Tillerson duking it out, mano a mano?
Are they launching missiles at each other's corporate HQs?
No, I didn't think so. They're just minding their businesses and the stock market is setting a price on their shares. Hardly what I'd call battling it out. Strange metaphor.
effect on the world is a company disappeared (Score:5, Interesting)
Here is another way to think about it.
What if the company disappeared over night? How "important" are these companies?
If Apple disappeared, people wouldn't have their toys and music anymore and people who actually get work done with Apple products (like designers or movie editors) would have to migrate to other platforms like Linux or Windows.
If Exxon disappeared, the world would have a temporarily huge reduction in the available oil until competitors could pick up the slack which could take a long time in which case the whole world will fall apart (only slightly exaggerating).
So I say that Exxon is way more important than Apple.
By that metric, Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle are also way more important than Apple.
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By that metric, Fox TV is more important than all of those companies. Within 45 minutes of it's demise the majority of the American population would start to go through a slow, unpleasant and eventually fatal withdrawal.
Re:effect on the world is a company disappeared (Score:4, Insightful)
And yet, despite this, it would *still* be for the best... Sad but true.
Simon.
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And nothing of value would be lost...
Don't agree, quite (Score:2)
Visa/Mastercard > Exxon >= {Oracle|IBM|HP} > Microsoft > Apple.
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Yeah, but I'd hate to be Alexandre Julliard. The poor guy would drown in the money that people threw at him.
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I don't think so. By your own account Apple is more important than Oracle. What would happen if Oracle were to disappear overnigth? Think it twice. Yeah: absolutly nothing. Running databases still running, new deployed ones by copying from somewhere else's without the BSA minding... At least in the case of Apple I would be unable to buy a new iPhone.
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At least in the case of Apple I would be unable to buy a new iPhone.
And your old one would suddenly no longer work?
Unless you are addicted to having a new shiny object in your pocket, it should be no big deal.
Dec1999 - MS's Market Cap Surpasses 600 Billion (Score:3)
Tech stocks are a bit more volatile than that of oil companies. Back then, Microsoft looked even better than Apple does today, virtually unstoppable.
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Translation: Apple's won't be at the top forever, any more than Microsoft's was.
Everyone wants to know what happens when SJ leaves. I suspect a lot of people will be shorting AAPL big time when he does.
And I don't wish for it, but there's no denying that SJ's health issues are in the forefront of everyone's thoughts.
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How Many Times To Run This Story? (Score:2)
C'mon, this is a repackaged duplication. http://apple.slashdot.org/story/11/08/10/1928206/Wall-Street-Software-More-Valuable-Than-Oil [slashdot.org]
And THAT one was really not adding much to this. http://slashdot.org/index2.pl?fhfilter=apple+exxon [slashdot.org] Slashdot, make another pot of coffee.
Funny-money and pixie dust (Score:3)
This sentence from the last page sums it up nicely:
Most pundits would say that Exxon is the larger company by far in every comparison that matters, particularly when you're thinking about who does or does not drive the American economy.
I would go a step further and say that fossil fuel extraction is the most important sector of the economy, at least from the perspective of what makes industrial civilization possible and allows human beings to number over 7 billion. After all, the last few centuries of technological progress and human biomass growth can largely be attributed to how we've creatively employed the vast armies of energy slaves liberated by the combustion of fossil fuels to do things like power generators, run combines and tractors, and make plastics and fertilizers. And human biomass proliferated in the 20th century largely due to our ability to convert stocks of low entropy stored solar energy into edible calories and fertilizers. The energy sector (which is dominated by fossil fuels) subsidizes other service and production sectors and makes our highly complex society possible (1).
So Apple or some bank may be largest or "most important" based on some metric employing fiat currency (that's being inflated away by the Federal Reserve) or the Wall Street casino's latest valuation based on pixie dust, but energy (or more precisely, exergy) is what really matters for civilization; everything else is just playing with your food.
(1) Joseph Tainter, "Complexity, Problem Solving, and Complex Societies."
http://www.oilcrash.com/articles/complex.htm [oilcrash.com]
See also:
Ayres and Warr, "Accounting for Growth: The Role of Physical Work."
http://www.fraw.org.uk/files/economics/ayres_2005.pdf [fraw.org.uk]
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I would go a step further and say that fossil fuel extraction is the most important sector of the economy,
If Apple just stopped existing, would it hurt Exxon? Probably not. If Exxon suddenly stopped, would Apple notice? Most certainly...
Keep the masses entertained. (Score:2)
So yah a tech company making shiny things for the masses will be on top till the masses revolt.
Taxes (Score:2)
Okay then, which one pays/evades/avoids the most corporate taxes?
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That would be General Electric [msn.com].
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The NY Times article that your source is based on has been discredited:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/the-truth-about-ges-tax-bill/2011/04/05/AFZm0L9C_story.html [washingtonpost.com]
it's not about size, it's about (future) profit (Score:2)
The fundamental reason for a stock having a particular price is the profit (or, future profit.....no one wants to hold stock in a company that makes less each year).
There is no doubt that Exxon is bigge
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Or not. Technology trends can be fickle. There comes a point in time where everybody already has a phone, a music player and a tablet computer. Especially when the economy goes south, spending a few hundred buck to upgrade a perfectly fine black phone with a white version may not be as appealing anymore. On the other hand, energy is a pretty basic
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But Apple's been pretty consistently improving its profit, which obviously can't go on forever, but do you have a reason to believe it will stop now, instead of in three, or five, or ten years?
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No particular reason, but look at Cisco. In 2000, their stock price was more than 3x times what it is now, and people thought it was justified because their earnings would grow rapidly.
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Sure, but extending their trend for the next 3 years by drawing a straight line is equally poor analysis. Sales have been high because of a lot of first-time buyers of Apple products. At some point in time, the market becomes saturated, and sales will drop, unless they can keep coming up with newer and better stuff that people want, and can afford to buy. I have no idea whether that point is 3, 5 or 10 years from now, though.
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In my original post, I wrote some analysis explaining why I think the trend will continue, but I deleted it because it didn't seem relevant to my main point.
If you want to know, here it is: the (world) market for the PC, and smartphones, in general isn't saturated yet. Apple will benefit from this fact. On top of that, the Mac has only 10% of the marketshare. That is a lot of room for growth, there is no indica
A couple complaints: (Score:2)
First of all, would it have killed them to update their fucking metrics? Hello? Does anybody in journalism do anything other than repeat old articles anymore? This is ridiculous.
Second of all, this:
Important metric left out (Score:2)
Largest, in terms of average belt size.
Market cap is a bogus static calculation (Score:2)
"Market cap" of bid shares is bogus. What happens after the first 10% (or 1% or less) of shares get sold? The price goes down. This is especially true for volatile, speculative, or foward-looking stocks where there are comparatively few buyers who are willing to bid a high price, as opposed to a company like Exxon that has reserves in the ground and the price is more readily and more universally agreed upon and the bids have "depth" that strongly support a price not much less than the highest bid price,
Which CEO has the biggest dick? (Score:2)
Which CEO thinks he has the biggest dick? It's about as relevant.
Hypothetically, what if it was GM? And what would change if GM was just a holding company and Chevrolet, Buick and Cadillac were listed separately?
What about which is more important? (Score:3)
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Yes they did. They just called it cash flow, and explained why this was the best measure of profits.
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Cash flow is not profit. It is a derived measure of revenues, mismatched to costs.
The best measure of profits is the actual net revenue return after expenses invested are subtracted.
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He didn't say they are the same, just that they DID in fact mention net profit, and argued in detail how FCF was a better metric (which of course is debatable, but many do agree with that claim).
The real problem with the article is not that claim, though, but the fact that they listed completely wrong free cash flow numbers for some of the companies in their chart. Even thinking Barclays could have $177B of free cash flow in a year is absurd, and makes me question the rest of the author's analysis. That n
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The measure of cash flow as profits is fundamentally wrong. The fact that profit accounting can be rigged doesn't make cash flow a better profit measure, since cash flow also can be (and is) rigged to cook the books. Hiding debt from profits or cash flow is done all the time by corrupt corporations.
There's no accounting trick that makes any accounting technique more resistant to book cooking. Only audits by parties with overriding access, the interest in catching fake books, and the power to report them mak
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It's possible to lie about anything, but it's a lot easier to invent fake profits than fake cash[1].
Turnover is vanity, profit is sanity - but cash is reality.
[1] Unless you're a central bank ;-)
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Cash flow is riggable by hiding debts and defaults on them, or just endlessly rolling them over into new debt instruments (with higher deferred interest). Which is an essential part of most "post"-Enron corporate finance, and of most outstanding debt.
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Size is interesting, but stability is too. The oil company doesn't depend on short term technological fads...they're practically selling toilet paper. Sure, you could go without it...but you'll always be spending a fixed portion of your income to make sure you don't! After the sloooow shifts in transportation energy infrastructure change to some other technology, we might see them shrink a bit...but that's not going to happen in any significant way for a while. I highly doubt a jump from 35mpg to 50mpg is e
Not profit (Score:2)
I would rather own a firm that has a net worth of $10 billion and zero profit than a firm with a net worth of $0 and, say, fifty million in annual profit.
From the perspective of the owner, the firm's profit is not the only thing that matters. It is one metric among many--albeit it an important one.
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Interesting that Microsoft is above Apple on that page. I guess the fanbois didn't think that was terribly important...
Re:Profit? (Score:4, Interesting)
pay people a living wage in a western country (Score:2, Insightful)
People gotta live outside the west too.
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Of course. Let's all make a statement by refusing to purchase any products from the following companies (from Wikipedia) since AC's tend to conveniently ignore them while making it sound it's only Apple:
Acer, Amazon, Intel, Cisco, HP, Nintendo, Nokia, Microsoft, Sony, Vizio
Let's see how long your crusade lasts!
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The only 'difficult' ones are Intel (Can use AMD or ARM though),
ARM don't have any fabs. They are purely an IP licensing company; licensees make the chips.
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AMD's factories are in China, Malaysia, and Singapore. Intel's are in the US, Ireland, Israel, China, Malaysia, Vietnam and Costa Rica.
I seriously doubt you can claim any moral high ground by using AMD.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_manufacturing_sites [wikipedia.org]
http://www.amd.com/US/ABOUTAMD/CONTACT-US/Pages/locations-type.aspx [amd.com]
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I think a lot of people don't realise how big Foxconn is. They have factories the size of a reasonable town; you will see all sorts of things in an organisation that size - births, marriages, deaths, the lot - and suicide will be part of it. If you were to talk about Foxconn as a town and say "this town has a quarter the suicide rate of any other town in China", it'd be fantastic. But because we talk about it as a company, it sounds terrible.
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Yes, that is why most companies do it.
Congrats! (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Evil tech companies with their huge profits (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not the "making too much money" part that needs investigation, and really just correction. It's the "not paying taxes" part. Corporations, including rich tech corps, don't pay the costs the public pays for them to operate. In 2010, corporations paid only $176B in taxes [fool.com]; individuals paid over 100x that much. Corporations cost the public far more than 1% of our 2010 expenses. The $TRILLIONS spent by the public bailing them out of their failures, and of the failures of other corps they depend upon, is the bulk of our financial problems.
That they don't pay what they cost is the problem. That only about 50% of voters, the "liberals", even realize that's the problem is what keeps the problem getting worse. It's you Republicans who are to blame, which is why you're corporations' favorite suckers.
Re:Evil tech companies with their huge profits (Score:4, Informative)
In 2010, corporations paid only $176B in taxes [fool.com]; individuals paid over 100x that much.
Individuals paid 17.6 trillion dollars in taxes? The link said it was $1.8 trillion, which would make 10x, not 100x.
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You're right. That's why I have an accountant do my taxes :).
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The corps that move overseas lose the benefits of being US corps. Or at least they should - that's the other part of the rigged game corps have set up in the USA in the past couple of generations. Those of us who are actually Americans should protect ourselves from those foreign corps that just exploit us.
But the threat you cite is not a real one. The corps don't move overseas now to avoid taxes, though there are places where they could. Because those places have other expenses and threats to corporations.
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Put the crackpipe down, Republican loafer.
Re:Evil tech companies with their huge profits (Score:4, Insightful)
No, corporations are privileged groups that own assets themselves. And spend on benefits for privileged people, like their executives, that are consumed without taxation. Groups that add many additional expenses to the public, like policing, investigations, courts, wars, trade diplomacy and bailouts. They are taxed at under 1% the total rate that humans are taxed in this country, but consume much more than half the expensive operations.
Money they don't pay in taxes they spend in foreign economies more than they spend here, and on Americans who are much less productive (bankers, lawyers, consultants, media spinners) than people to whom they must pay for their core operations.
The current corporate profits are higher than ever before in American history. Corporations are spending on neither current nor future employees (as we've seen for going on 3-5 years now). They aren't even investing in other corporate equity. With the exception of pure financial speculation, which keeps crashing the stock market and destroying real assets with every cycle. And the new exception of unlimited, secret and anonymous bribes, er, donations to politicians and their henchmen, er, henchcorps.
Somehow when getting government benefits corporations are people, but when facing liabilities like convictions and taxes corporations are not people. That is an obvious scam, that has brought this country just past the brink of catastrophe several times in just the past decade.
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Where business fraud is illegal, businesses are regulated. You do understand that "illegal" requires a regulation, right?
Besides, there's a vast array of examples. Just look at the businesses operating in North America before the USA and its states were established and regulated them. Those unregulated businesses genocided whole societies, ruined whole ecosystems, and of course destroyed whole economies with them. Look across Africa and any other post-colonial region where law doesn't rule, but rather corpo
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I had two, different complaints. I'm going to try again because you didn't understand me at all. And you should really read up on Tax incidence, because you are really not understanding me.
1) Corporate taxes are a way of hiding taxes from people who actually pay them. People who advocate corporate taxes often do so as a proxy for taxing the wealthy. That is dishonest, and it is not a good practice of government.
2) Assuming your goal is taxing wealthy individuals, you are SOL because government does not
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Out of interest, which $50 product are Apple selling for $500?
Or, to be more general, which product are they selling at 10 times the market price, assuming you were using 50/500 as an example?
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Apple "invented" the desktop computer, the smartphone, the tablet computer, and the workstation?
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Your reading comprehension needs work.
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No, Apple invented its versions of each of those, which revolutionized each of their industries. Most innovation, and nearly all the most revolutionary innovation, is not the original invention but rather an improvement of it.
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When they said "Well, but thats not the same" I challenged them to tell me what was deficient about it or what the extra money bought them. They couldnt come up with a thing.
Why don't you challenge us? I'm sure someone here can tell you.
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In other words, he's the kind of CEO that actually knows what he's doing, and is willing to do the work associated with the position. While other CEOs simply pass the buck on to middle management and hope for the best. Just because most of the other CEOs are grossly incompetent and should probably be sued by their shareholders for it, doesn't mean th
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This company makes Apple, Google, MS et al look silly.
Hmm, after a bit of googling, I have the impression that the Roman Catholic Church isn't all that wealthy. According to the stats in this it's comparable in wealth / turnover to a major sports team. (By the way, major sports teams are another example of entities that everyone assumes to be a lot bigger and more powerful than they really are.)
Maybe a lot of money could be made in some sort of execution sale, by selling off art work, churches and that lovely piece of real estate in the center of Rome, but the
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link didn't work, try this: http://www.tnerb.org/archives/000208.html [tnerb.org]
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and distribute the proceeds to shareholders.
That's really old news - if anyone should liquidate and distribute the proceeds to its shareholders at this point, it's Dell. Hey that sounds like an Onion article I read long ago (unfortunately The Onion has a problem with deep linking).
BTW Dell now sells smartphones and tablets, too.
Dell has tried to be the Windows version of Apple many times, and failed each time. Dell was somewhat innovative in terms of PC manufacturing, but they rode that particular horse into the ground long ago - and Mr. Dell seems to be a bit of an idiot savant, unable to do most