Al Gore Sells $29.5 Million In Apple Stock (appleinsider.com) 198
An anonymous reader quotes a report from AppleInsider: A U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing on Friday reveals Apple board member Al Gore this week sold 215,437 shares of Apple stock (APPL) worth about $29.5 million. Gore's stock sale, which was accomplished in multiple trades ranging from $136.4 to $137.12 on Wednesday, nearly matches a $29.6 million purchase of Apple shares made in 2013. When Gore bought the stock batch more than four years ago, he exercised Apple's director stock option to acquire 59,000 shares at a price of about $7.48 per share, costing him approximately $441,000. This was pre-split AAPL, so shares were valued at $502.68 each. Following today's sale, Gore owns 230,137 shares of Apple stock worth $31.5 million at the end of trading on Friday.
That's a lot . . . (Score:5, Funny)
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The Global Warming Carbon Credit Kickback Scam is not progressing as he thought it would...
Call it what you will, but it's a compromise because no one wants to do anything about global warming if it comes out of their own pockets.
But one way or another, we will pay for it. And as time goes on while very little is done, the costs will be grow and become ever more expensive.
Even with the Free Markets making changes (green energy, EVs, etc...) there will be pain for the average folks as the climate gets worse. It's already happening.
In other words, any criticisms or "skepticism" by folks who are co
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we will pay for it
How much and what are the options? Measure it.
One example of little cost but a lot of benefit is the Fed raising flood insurance rates 5% + inflation every year until they are out of the business.
Another is to quit bailing out states for storms. I was in NJ when Sandy hit and 99% of the damage was self induced - they refused to cut trees away from power lines. Guess what happened? Thousands of down lines and power out for weeks. Something they've finally been intelligent enough to restart is putting ba
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Re: Poor Guy. Guess He Needs the Money... (Score:2, Funny)
Are those the same fifth graders who write Trumps' speeches?
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ISIS is taking your jobs!!!
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what do you mean qualified. any 5th grade science student can tell you global warming is a hoax
I'm rather more interested in the opinion of actual adult scientists.
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Anyone who mentions this kind of micro-trend is adding noise to the discussion instead of helping people understand the real issues with global warming.
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Higher number of warmer days means global warming is real.
Wrong. Here's how weather works: there's always going to be places/times where temperature will be higher or lower than average for a while, even months or years, but in the grand scheme of things it doesn't prove or disprove global warming.
The science at this point indicates a near-certainty that there's actually a global warming situation, and that it's more likely than not to be caused by man (yes, those are different issues with a different level of certainty). While this has an almost certain impact on
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Yeah, and a record number of warm days in India in one month means approximately nothing. Years of breaking high-temperature records worldwide is significant.
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What's meteorology got to do with climate?
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It also requires a 5" main to his house, which is why 80% of
rural Tennessee does not enjoy natural gas to their homes.
CAP === 'confers'
Being on a board of directors is good work (Score:5, Insightful)
That's good work if you can get it. A couple of hours per quarter, and the company usually flies you in and puts you up in swanky digs and takes you out for expensive dinners.
And for the effort he managed to pull in some $60+ million in bonus incentives. Nice.
Although, given his history as a politician who complained of many things of "the rich", including CEOs making exorbitant salaries and bonuses..... Doesn't that make this..... I dunno, ironic seems inadequate.
Still, if you are looking for someone to sit on your board, I'll be happy to do it at half that rate!
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given his history as a politician who complained of many things of "the rich", including CEOs making exorbitant salaries and bonuses
They're called Limousine Liberals for a reason.
Re:Being on a board of directors is good work (Score:4, Funny)
Still, if you are looking for someone to sit on your board, I'll be happy to do it at half that rate!
And I will do it for half your rate.
And I have 34 slashdot achievements, 5 more than the competitor's who is quoting double my price.
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That's good work if you can get it. A couple of hours per quarter, and the company usually flies you in and puts you up in swanky digs and takes you out for expensive dinners.
And for the effort he managed to pull in some $60+ million in bonus incentives. Nice.
Although, given his history as a politician who complained of many things of "the rich", including CEOs making exorbitant salaries and bonuses..... Doesn't that make this..... I dunno, ironic seems inadequate.
Still, if you are looking for someone to sit on your board, I'll be happy to do it at half that rate!
Exactly. Which of us reading these words would pass on the opportunity?
Re:Being on a board of directors is good work (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd have to pass on the opportunity. There's no way I could sit on the board and quietly agree with the rest of them that Tim Cook is doing a great job. There are a number of problems that need addressing and I couldn't keep quiet about them, no matter how good the money was.
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Didn't GM pay Ross Perot a couple of billion dollars to go away when he was on the board after they bought his company? Apparently there is "speaking your mind" and then there is "being $2 billion worth of annoying".
Also, good work if you can get it.
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You don't have to quietly agree with them, just make sure there's a clause that pays out when they get rid of you.
Re:Being on a board of directors is good work (Score:5, Interesting)
Who could be better qualified to complain about the rich than one of them? If a poor person complains about the rich, they're just jealous.
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For the record, I'm not disagreeing, since with the exception of the A/C bit, I've heard about the rest through various outlets for me to consider it reliable.
that A/C thing was even caught on video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Unjust (Score:3, Insightful)
Director stock options are another unjust method of the one percent to take from everyone else while adding no value.
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It only takes $500,000/year per household to be a one-percenter; this means that a couple of Silicon Valley engineers or Boston lawyers are in that bucket, and those are not people who typically have a seat on Fortune 500 boards or spend their weekends snorting coke lines on the bare ass of teenage prostitutes while shopping for Faberge eggs on eBay.
Maybe it's time for a more granular classification of the rich.
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Yes, if you are looking at the 1% by income. However, the biggest issue isn't income inequality, it's wealth inequality. To be in the top 1% in wealth you need around $8 million in assets. Very few Silicon Valley engineers or Boston lawyers have that kind of kitty.
The issue with wealth inequality is that money makes even more money and so the bulk of money made tends to flow to the people who already have the money and so they end up with more and more of it while there are fewer and fewer dollars availa
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The problem is not capitalism. The problem if the Federal Reserve giving money for free to big banks so those banks have no incentives to pay interests to people who want to have savings. The direct consequence is that investment banks are rewarded for taking risks, and institutional investors such as pension funds make riskier and riskier bets to merely beat the inflation and meet their annual benchmarks; they also pressure CEOs to focus on short-term profit, driving away the incentive for innovation and p
Re:Unjust (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Unjust (Score:4, Insightful)
s/Al Gore is not.../I think it's safe to say Al Gore is not.../
And as an Apple shareholder – indirectly through mutual funds in my 401k – I do object to sweetheart deals for selected individuals that rob me and other shareholders of the profits from our investments in the companies that do this..
Re:Unjust (Score:5, Interesting)
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In matters of exchange, justice is paying for what you get and getting what you pay for. Al Gore has beyond any possible doubt not provided any technical, organizational, business, or marketing expertise of any value to Apple. If legitimate guidance is what Gore is being paid for as a board member, it's not just.
So what is Gore's value as an Apple board member? Gore is politically connected, and his presence on the Apple board is a threat to Apple's competitors, an implicit promise that competitors of Apple
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The problem is that shareholders can't exercise effective control. Mutual funds, for example, will almost certainly vote their holdings as the board recommends. The result is that the boards are largely independent entities exercising control. If shareholder votes actually mattered for things like compensation, I'd feel a lot happier about it.
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TL;DR: Go fuck yourself.
Classy. Thanks. Can't argue with reasoning like that.
Since Apple is one of the most widely held stocks in 401(k) portfolios, [cnbc.com] ) , where does this voting you're talking about take place exactly?
Today, 28th of February, 9:00 AM PST, at 1 Infinite Loop in Cupertino, Town Hall (Building 4) [macobserver.com]. The meeting, which is open to all shareholders of record on a first-come basis. Why do you ask?
What does Apple get? (Score:5, Insightful)
A few hundred million in under priced stock options and bonus money for what? You may or may not like Apple, but they're not a stupid company. The value of a few meetings, a couple of favorable trade exceptions, and some lucrative government contract work probably more than covers this expense.
The really civilized thing is, we do almost all of our bribery above board these days.
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The really civilized thing is, we do almost all of our bribery above board these days.
Sometimes the money isn't a good investment. The Clinton Foundation went from collecting millions in donations from foreign nationals to layoffs in just a few weeks last fall.
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Those foundations are just legal money laundering establishments. There never was any money in the foundation nor did it spend it on charity. The layoffs happen in response to a political need to save face but I you can be assured by the time Chelsey runs for office it will be twice the size to handle the "donations".
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Re:What does Apple get? - Stability, sanity, (Score:5, Insightful)
What Apple gets is simple. Stability, sanity and some level of honesty in the face of huge temptation and fear.
You only have to look at Nokia to see what can happen if the wrong people get onto the board of a company. Somehow or other, the Nokia board managed to convince its self that a company which had managed to survive multiple revolutions in mobile communications was best led by a man who had failed repeatedly to build mobile success at Microsoft. The results are well known [blogs.com] (image from this article [blogs.com]).
Why the did this I have no idea. Panic? Bribes? Stupidity? There has been no clear criminal investigation when there should have been but it seems they were just taken in by fear and a smooth talking failure in Elop. Still, the point is that now Apple may be in a similar situation. They have various long term technologies which won't pay off immediately. Nokia was doing Meego, it's own independent touch screen OS; Apple is doing it's own smart phone chips. They will now be under pressure from Chinese rivals and will go both down as well as up. If you keep working on these technologies you will survive and profit but you are very likely to suffer some relative decline even so. If your board panics and changes everything to try to force growth in a market where there is no more space, you may lose everything that you already have.
No idea if Gore is the right guy, however I know how much could be lost if he's the wrong one. Apple's profits, around $40Billion yearly, are more than ten times Nokia's. Imagine those disappeared in two years because Apple became involved in someone like Microsoft and brought in someone like Elop.
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This is a nice textbook version of what a board should do, but this is not nearly all of what boards do. It's also a very simplified version of what went wrong at Nokia, which started well before Elop (he historically terrible anyway).
Yes, you need the board to give advice and help steer a company, but there are a LOT of other ways you can get that advice. You have a limited number of board seats to fill, so each seat necessarily does more than just give advice. The strategy of how to approach these variou
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This is what Apple gets:
President Obama and his administration today issued a veto on an International Trade Commission patent ruling that would have banned the import of some older models of the iPhone and iPad, dealing a blow to Samsung in its ongoing patent disputes with Apple. [forbes.com]
Sold at 1/5th original value? ummm... (Score:2)
So when he acquired them they were worth ~ $500 ... and sold for ~$136. Must have read that wrong, yeah?
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You missed that it said pre-split. In 2014 Apple stock had a 7:1 split so $502.68 was equivalent to buying at $71.81. What blow my mind is they let him buy director options for $7.48/share when they were worth $71.81. Must be nice being able to spend $441,000 to buy stock worth $4.2 million.
Re:Sold at 1/5th original value? ummm... (Score:4, Funny)
So when he acquired them they were worth ~ $500 ... and sold for ~$136. Must have read that wrong, yeah?
Pst. I'll let you in on a secret Wallstreet doesn't want you to know about: It's called a 7:1 stock split.
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And? (Score:5, Insightful)
What's in there for us, mere mortals? The guy got lucky and earned 6800% on his investment, great. Now where are the stories of people losing money by investing in a bad stock?
Also, where would most people get $400K to invest in stock options when they have no spare money at all or even owe lots of money until they hit their late 50s?
Or is it a story about a super successful company which is known to have a cult status, which allows it to sell the same product year after year with minimal changes, yet earn billions? I don't understand.
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Technically, you don't *need* $400K to exercise the stock options. You can do an immediate exercise -> sell and just take the profits of the difference between the strike price and current price of the instrument. However, doing that means instant capital gains tax hit, and also if you think the stock will continue to do alright and/or you want to collect dividends, you've lost the opportunity to hold the stock - which *would* require the $400K outlay.
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Technically, you don't *need* $400K to exercise the stock options.
What you usually do is you exercise your options, but you sell the exact amount that you need so that the sale covers the exercise cost and capital gains tax. You won't have to pay capital gains tax for the shares that you exercised but didn't sell.
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Thanks for this response. I'm familiar with exchange-traded options but not employer-granted options. And, as I never exercise options, I hadn't fully considered strategies involving exercising them. Appreciate it.
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Someone who makes $26k a year starting out (with 3% cost of living raises) can retire with well over $1,000,000 if they do it properly.
Source: http://wisdomsreward.com/2014/... [wisdomsreward.com]
tl;dr: Invest a little of each paycheck in a low expense ration total stock market index fund. Compounding interest over decades with get you back much more than you would expect.
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That's Low Expense Ratio, not Ration.
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Well, he exercised his option to buy, then held on to them for a few years as an investment.
News for Nerds ? (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't even front page material for Yahoo Finance.
Re:News for Nerds ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Funny how conservatives hate success (Score:2)
I read through some of the comments on this story, and I couldn't help but notice there were quite a few that related Gore's politics and finance. None gave him any credit at all for financial acumen.
Yet not only did Gore make a lot of money by accepting (at the time cheap) stock for sitting on Apple's board, he made 'way more when he and another guy started up Current TV. Gore built it up and wound up selling it for major bucks.
So basically, Gore showed real financial chops. But because he's an unapolog
Re:Funny how conservatives hate success (Score:4, Insightful)
Financial acumen? Gore got rich the same way Clinton did: by translating his political power, political advocacy, and connections into money.
If you get rich legally before you enter politics, that shows that you can succeed by producing stuff people want. If you get rich after you leave high government office, it strongly suggests that you are a corrupt fraud. Gore clearly did the latter.
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You're assuming that said person wasn't born into the connections like Trump was. Or Gore for that matter, his father was in politics too.
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Wrong. Gore made all the right moves, especially with Current, and conservatives hate him for walking the walk. Meanwhile Trump, their anointed god, made a fortune by ripping off hard-working small businessmen in a series of planned bankruptcies made possible through laws enacted by crooked politicians bought and paid for by people like Trump.
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Gore just cut out the middleman and passed the laws himself.
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Current TV was a commercial failure. Gore bet on his government connections, his name recognition, and a big influx of money from foreign dictators.
Yes, indeed. Crooked politicians like Gore for example.
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Wrong again. Current made a lot of money, and Gore sold it at a huge profit.
Conservatives really do hate people who succeed without cheating! I guess it makes them feel like they can't keep up when the playing field is level.
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Current TV was a financial failure, and Gore made his money by selling it to a Qatari prince. His Apple stock, incidentally, came from him being put on their boards of directors, also because of his name recognition.
Al Gore was born with a silver spoon in his mouth; he made his fame and
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Or inherited a hell of a good chunk.
I don't have any real issues with someone getting rich after they leave govt office, as you stated. As someone else mentioned once, it just means they're smart, right?
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Al Capone was smart. Joseph Stalin was smart. Hitler and Goebbels were smart. Getting money and power through being smart is not intrinsically a good thing.
Getting money and power through voluntary exchanges is a good thing; often the people who do that happen to be smart, but it is neither necessary nor sufficient.
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I said no such thing. What I said was: "Getting money and power through voluntary exchanges is a good thing"
That is, Trump got rich in the market (good), while Gore and Clinton got rich through being politicians (bad).
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I read through some of the comments on this story, and I couldn't help but notice there were quite a few that related Gore's politics and finance. None gave him any credit at all for financial acumen.
Yet not only did Gore make a lot of money by accepting (at the time cheap) stock for sitting on Apple's board, he made 'way more when he and another guy started up Current TV. Gore built it up and wound up selling it for major bucks.
So basically, Gore showed real financial chops. But because he's an unapologetic hypocrite, there's all kinds of sniping about private jets and save the whales by the same people who venerate Donald Trump. Yet Trump's main claim to fame is the number of times he's declared bankruptcy in ways allowing him to screw contractors over without losing any of his own money.
Fixed that for you.
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I should add that FWIW, my stance on environmentalism is such that I wish (for example) that police would fingerprint or DNA litter, then fine the owners. Or that if I saw someone throwing a cigarette butt out of their window, it was legal for me to get out of my car, retrieve their cigarette butt, and put it out in their eyeballs.
That doesn't make me see Al Gore as any less of a douche than he is.
If everyone would stop speculating what they think OTHER people with opposing views would think as a means to
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What makes you think the majority of litter is assholes throwing shit out their window? Most of the litter I've seen on my 50 mile commute has been waste management vehicles with improperly secured gates or tops, or just degraded tops to the point where there are huge holes. These vehicles leave miles-long "comet tails" of debris in their wake that are very annoying to drive through and hazardous to paint and windshields.
Not to mention the possibility of high winds at the landfill before a particular segment gets covered again.
My stance on environmentalism is that I would like its advocates to live by their advice. For instance, if they advocate that I should eschew plane travel to reduce carbon footprint, they should not do it from conferences that they reached by traveling by plane, especially not by private jet. Otherwise, my suspicion is that they want me to suffer to preserve their playground.
Fine fine. You can have the point on the "majority" of litter, as long as I can still pick up the smoldering butts that people throw out their window and extinguish them in their eyeballs.
What idiot wrote this article? (Score:3)
Apparently that idiot isn't aware that APPL is a long defunct oil company that hasn't traded for many years. Apple's stock symbol is AAPL.
Obligatory (Score:2)
I doubt he needs the money (Score:2)
I hear Google are investing a lot in AI these days.
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If he's smart, since Apple's revenues have been losing momentum. The last quarter's numbers were pretty disappointing, after adjusting for the extra week.
Compared to what exactly?
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If he's smart, since Apple's revenues have been losing momentum. The last quarter's numbers were pretty disappointing, after adjusting for the extra week.
Compared to what exactly?
As compared to the same period in the previous year. [lapcatsoftware.com] (via [daringfireball.net])
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If he's smart, since Apple's revenues have been losing momentum. The last quarter's numbers were pretty disappointing, after adjusting for the extra week.
Compared to what exactly?
As compared to the same period in the previous year. [lapcatsoftware.com] (via [daringfireball.net])
Ahh, so not compared to the lame quarters of the competition.
Re:He should sell the remainder... (Score:5, Insightful)
regardless of whether or not this was the optimal time to sell, you can't buy groceries with stocks. Gotta cash out at some point. He's just decided he's ready to quit growing his money and start spending it.
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I heard he's a big fan of headphone sockets.
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Generally you will sell off only a small portion of your stocks for income unless you either need the money for something large or think the stock will underperform.
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Given that he's on the board I take this as a sign that if you have a lot of Apple stock it might be time to start selling it off. People like Al get the word way ahead of everyone else.
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If he's smart, since Apple's revenues have been losing momentum. The last quarter's numbers were pretty disappointing, after adjusting for the extra week.
Apple: Proudly going out of business for nearly a half century!
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And therein lies precisely the problem, they make a lot of money out of cell phones and if you ask Apple or Motorola if that is the market to be in you will find the answer is no. So Apple have no new products and are about to go over the cliff. No wonder he sold his stocks.
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The gadgets only work because of the development tools that allow developers to make compelling software for those gadgets. And those tools run on Apple's computers.
Mac isn't going anywhere, any time soon. As long as the Mac business is anywhere close to break-even, Apple keeps it around due to the absurd profits generated by iOS. And Mac makes a profit.
That's not how it works. The only reason a well-managed company keeps a break-even product line is if it helps another product line by allowing them some kind of economy of scale in deals with vendors. For instance, that's why Dell is still selling laptops and desktops: so they can get lower prices for their server components.
The day Apple can no longer use their computer sales to get better prices for their iPhone components, they'll drop the line. That's obvious when you see how stale their hardware and s
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God damnit it's AAPL not APPL!
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God damnit it's AAPL not APPL!
Chill out or you'll have to throw away another pair of underwear.
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I find the list suspicious as the "poorest" member of the senate has an estimated net worth of -$720k. The fact that he is able to borrow that much money makes me think that he is not actually that poor, which casts doubt on the rest of the list. My best guess is that the list is including mortgages without including the value of the property.
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Because he forced us to pay him millions (Score:2, Insightful)
> How do your politicians, both left and right, so filthy rich?
In Gore's case, he wasn't filthy rich when he started. As a Senator, he sponsored a law forcing companies to buy something called "carbon credits" (pieces of paper) from another company called an "exchange". Guess who owned the exchange? Before that, he had hundreds of thousands of dollars, his carbon exchange made hundreds of millions by legally forcing people to buy his product.
You might ask how he got away with that. The key is, the
More seriously, we pick a team & don't pay att (Score:5, Insightful)
I joked that politicians can do anything they want as long as they complain about big business while they do it.
The more serious explanation, I think, is that most Americans just pick a party or politician as their "team", then move on to other things. Most don't spend a lot of time, or have the inclination, to carefully watch what "their" politicians do after they are elected. Their attention span is just long enough to root for their favorite team/player, not enough to actually see what the politician is doing. So whoever originally decided they like Hillary, or Trump, or Gore, is unlikely to later hold them accountable for their actions. Once a majority of Americans "like" you, once they are rooting for you, you can do whatever you want with little consequences.
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I know! That's why all elected officials should be wearing body cams with audio 24/7 with the feed live-uploaded where anyone can tune in at any time! Can I have my billion dollar consulting check now?
Ex: Holding "Hillary" sign, can't name anything (Score:2)
I'm going to mention one clear example of what I'm talking about. This isn't at all limited to one party, I'm just going to use Hillary's name as an example:
Many of us have probably seen video clips where someone goes to a political rally or whatever and asks people who are holding signs with a politician's name, or wearing a "Hillary" shirt, a question something like this:
"Hillary is very experienced, she's been involved in politics for 30 years; what's something she's done that you like?"
Of course the an
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There are middle class politicans, like Bernie Sanders:.. and some politicians are in considerable debt, though it's fair to say you have to be rich to be in extreme debt: http://www.politifact.com/trut... [politifact.com]
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Getting rich in elective office requires that your office have enough power to sway laws in economically effective ways. That limits them to President, US Senators, US Representatives, many governors, some state senators and state representatives (or equivalent offices) and mayors of cities in proportion to their size. By influencing laws and the enforcement of regulations they either gain through scams like Gore's carbon credits or bribery. They are also open to bribes in making appointments.
Bribes can tak
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I get this all the time.
When I do, I hit mother fuckers like you with eight links from other fact-checking sites that support the same position as snopes.
So fuck you [factcheck.org].
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https://ethicsalarms.com/2016/07/31/bye-bye-snopes-youre-dead-to-me-now/
Plenty of evidence that they produce lots of partisan garbage.
You know you are in trouble when you have to quote a site by a self-proclaimed ethicist (who just happens to be a lawyer). Especially when that ethicist has to use selective quotes to come to his conclusion.
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<quote><tt>
if (you make money){</tt><p><tt>
if (you agree with the far right {</tt></p><p><tt>
you are the smartest latest and greatest person;</tt></p><p><tt>
Everyone must worship you.</tt></p><p><tt>
} else {</tt></