Not just Facebook but big tech generally now dominates the global economy.
The largest company by market capitalisation now globally is Apple and 5 of the top 10 biggest companies are all in tech ie Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet (which is the parent company of Google, the Android operating system and Youtube), Facebook (which also owns Instagram) and Tencent.
But market cap to GDP is a total wealth to income comparison. Still, your point in valid - Apple's revenues are probably greater than a good number of countries' GDP.
At $274.3 billion revenues, Apple is in the Czech, Romania, Pakistan, New Zealand, Portugal, Greece and Peru range of GDP, and would be ranked the 49th largest economy.
O/T: some hope for Conservatives in that Johnson only scores just above Priti Patel, but the real shocker is the two most swivelly of swivelly-eyed nutjobs, Frost and Rees-Mogg right up at the top. The modern Conservative Party clearly still has more extremists in it than Labour under Corbyn if so many want to endorse these two!
Neither Frost or JRM are as bad as Jezza.
But.
The people at the top of the list are the ones who make the Conservatives feel good about themselves, who tell the activists what they want to hear. In that sense, they are the mirror image of Corbyn.
In some ways, fair enough. But at some point, all parties need someone to remind them that not everyone thinks like them, or they can't have what they want. To give him his due, BoJo does that with greenery.
But who in the professional wing of the Conservative Party is left who is prepared to stand up to the activists?
Look, the Tories have been in power for 11 years now.
After 10 years in power all parties get a bit bored and less fresh and full of ideas. The activists too start to want a leader who is ideologically purer rather than to just stay in power for the sake of it.
Labour however has been out of power for over a decade, so it is they whose leadership needs to stand up to activists more than the Tories
Labour are out of power precisely because of your comments
However, the conservative party's desire for power is much more pragmatic
Was it so pragmatic when it picked Hague over Clarke after the 1997 defeat following 18 years in power and then followed that by picking IDS over Clarke and Portillo?
Hague wasn't such an unreasonable choice if you ask me, I think he just got the job too young and was unfairly discriminated against by the electorate on the basis of his northern accent. But picking IDS was lunacy.
You can also add picking Home over Butler in 1963.
On the Labour side similarly picking Foot over Healey in 1980, Ed Miliband over David Miliband in 2010 and Corbyn over Burnham in 2015
I think Miliband vs Miliband is a less extreme example, and I'm not only saying that because I voted for Ed!
Had David won Cameron would likely not have got a majority in 2015, the Tory-LD coalition would probably have continued, there would have been no EU referendum in 2016 and no Brexit.
New PM Osborne would be settling down to No 10 having narrowly beaten Corbyn in 2020 despite UKIP getting 20% of the vote (or else David Miliband could have stayed Labour leader having only narrowly lost and beaten Osborne and now be in No 10).
Boris meanwhile would be finishing his biography of Shakespeare not running the country.
Ed beating David had huge consequences
Doesn't everything have huge consequences though? I think so. Apologies for a quick diversion but I got to pondering this the other week when I had a hole in one at golf. It happened at 11.37 am on Wednesday 22nd Sept. The 12th hole, 162 yards, 7 iron, sweet spot, high with a touch of fade, landed on, rolled and ... IN.
My first and I'm sure last. I'm only an average player, about an 18, don't play that much, so you don't expect it to ever happen, it's massively unlikely. Such a buzz it was. Made me feel special, picked out by fate, as if I'd won the lottery or something. But as I continued to think about it, my thoughts took a bleaker turn. Rather than winning lotteries I started to think about other unlikely "special" things, such as plane crashes and bizarre diseases. If I could have a hole in one, if I was the sort who father fate was taking an interest in, could I also be in line for one of these?
Had to stop that train of thought and the way I did so was by considering it from another angle. My shot went into the hole only because everything at the time and prior to it was just so. A fraction of a millimetre different on the clubface, a smidgen more or less force, a different golfball, the tiniest scintilla of a change in the wind or atmospheric pressure, not wearing a glove, wearing a different sweater or trousers, wearing y fronts instead of boxers, a traffic jam on the drive to the club, an apple instead of a banana for breakfast, then the night before etc, keep going back and back and further back, all the way to the womb and even before that - point being, any change at all would have meant no hole in one. My life led inexorably to the moment and the moment was created by my life. More than this, it was created by the whole of history since I live not in isolation but in deep nexus with all else.
So, that cheered me up no end.
Ah but were you just playing out a predetermined act in the play that is Kinabalu?
Exactly so! It's all fate but because you don't (and can't) know this it may as well not be, and to all intents and purposes isn't. Thus the necessary (for a sane and productive life) illusion of free will and control is retained. I find this a nice thought. Interestingly, if the shot hadn't dropped it would have ran 15 feet by and I'd have 3 putted for a bogey 4. Then no deep thoughts would have ensued. I'd just have been pissed off.
You know you'll be haunted by your hole in one for the rest of your life, don't you? You'll dream about it. You'll replay it in your head when trying to get to sleep. When you're listening to a politician's speech, your mind will drift to that hole in one. It will never let you go. (My equivalent is a perfect cover drive I played in 1981). But congratulations, anyway.
It has messed me up a bit, yes.
I thought about using it to raise my standards - you know, expect a great shot every time from now on, but on reflection I think that leads to a world of mental anguish, so no.
Still, illustrates the great USP of golf. That shot was better than any pro could have done. I'd have won that hole against Tiger Woods at his peak. You can't say this for other sports. Eg your cover drive in 81, it was sublime, course it was, but it wouldn't have been quite as good as Gower. At tennis you never hit a backhand as good as one of Roger's. At football, you won't ever ... etc.
But, ok, enough. I'm banging on now. This "ace" of mine (22/9/21, 162 yards, 7 iron) will not be mentioned by me on this board again. Back to the knitting - holding this dreadful Tory government to account.
I can't remember who it was, but fairly recently there was a sports journalist who asked a sportsman how they felt about their recent exceptionally good performances, something along the lines of, "How does it feel to know you'll probably never play this well again?" Caused a bit of an upset....
Not just Facebook but big tech generally now dominates the global economy.
The largest company by market capitalisation now globally is Apple and 5 of the top 10 biggest companies are all in tech ie Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet (which is the parent company of Google, the Android operating system and Youtube), Facebook (which also owns Instagram) and Tencent.
But market cap to GDP is a total wealth to income comparison. Still, your point in valid - Apple's revenues are probably greater than a good number of countries' GDP.
At $274.3 billion revenues, Apple is in the Czech, Romania, Pakistan, New Zealand, Portugal, Greece and Peru range of GDP, and would be ranked the 49th largest economy.
Although, of course, that pales in comparison to Walmart. Who does more than half a trillion dollars of revenue per year, and which puts it between Switzerland and Sweden.
O/T: some hope for Conservatives in that Johnson only scores just above Priti Patel, but the real shocker is the two most swivelly of swivelly-eyed nutjobs, Frost and Rees-Mogg right up at the top. The modern Conservative Party clearly still has more extremists in it than Labour under Corbyn if so many want to endorse these two!
Neither Frost or JRM are as bad as Jezza.
But.
The people at the top of the list are the ones who make the Conservatives feel good about themselves, who tell the activists what they want to hear. In that sense, they are the mirror image of Corbyn.
In some ways, fair enough. But at some point, all parties need someone to remind them that not everyone thinks like them, or they can't have what they want. To give him his due, BoJo does that with greenery.
But who in the professional wing of the Conservative Party is left who is prepared to stand up to the activists?
Look, the Tories have been in power for 11 years now.
After 10 years in power all parties get a bit bored and less fresh and full of ideas. The activists too start to want a leader who is ideologically purer rather than to just stay in power for the sake of it.
Labour however has been out of power for over a decade, so it is they whose leadership needs to stand up to activists more than the Tories
Labour are out of power precisely because of your comments
However, the conservative party's desire for power is much more pragmatic
Was it so pragmatic when it picked Hague over Clarke after the 1997 defeat following 18 years in power and then followed that by picking IDS over Clarke and Portillo?
Hague wasn't such an unreasonable choice if you ask me, I think he just got the job too young and was unfairly discriminated against by the electorate on the basis of his northern accent. But picking IDS was lunacy.
You can also add picking Home over Butler in 1963.
On the Labour side similarly picking Foot over Healey in 1980, Ed Miliband over David Miliband in 2010 and Corbyn over Burnham in 2015
I think Miliband vs Miliband is a less extreme example, and I'm not only saying that because I voted for Ed!
Had David won Cameron would likely not have got a majority in 2015, the Tory-LD coalition would probably have continued, there would have been no EU referendum in 2016 and no Brexit.
New PM Osborne would be settling down to No 10 having narrowly beaten Corbyn in 2020 despite UKIP getting 20% of the vote (or else David Miliband could have stayed Labour leader having only narrowly lost and beaten Osborne and now be in No 10).
Boris meanwhile would be finishing his biography of Shakespeare not running the country.
Ed beating David had huge consequences
Doesn't everything have huge consequences though? I think so. Apologies for a quick diversion but I got to pondering this the other week when I had a hole in one at golf. It happened at 11.37 am on Wednesday 22nd Sept. The 12th hole, 162 yards, 7 iron, sweet spot, high with a touch of fade, landed on, rolled and ... IN.
My first and I'm sure last. I'm only an average player, about an 18, don't play that much, so you don't expect it to ever happen, it's massively unlikely. Such a buzz it was. Made me feel special, picked out by fate, as if I'd won the lottery or something. But as I continued to think about it, my thoughts took a bleaker turn. Rather than winning lotteries I started to think about other unlikely "special" things, such as plane crashes and bizarre diseases. If I could have a hole in one, if I was the sort who father fate was taking an interest in, could I also be in line for one of these?
Had to stop that train of thought and the way I did so was by considering it from another angle. My shot went into the hole only because everything at the time and prior to it was just so. A fraction of a millimetre different on the clubface, a smidgen more or less force, a different golfball, the tiniest scintilla of a change in the wind or atmospheric pressure, not wearing a glove, wearing a different sweater or trousers, wearing y fronts instead of boxers, a traffic jam on the drive to the club, an apple instead of a banana for breakfast, then the night before etc, keep going back and back and further back, all the way to the womb and even before that - point being, any change at all would have meant no hole in one. My life led inexorably to the moment and the moment was created by my life. More than this, it was created by the whole of history since I live not in isolation but in deep nexus with all else.
So, that cheered me up no end.
I have often thought that about the euromillions. Great yes you won but now you are in the zone of 75m-1 risks happening to you. Eaten in your bath by a shark; meteorite wiping out your house, you contract an illness that has an, um, one in 75m chance of being contracted, etc...
What btw are the odds of a hole in one?
I hate to break it to you but by merely being alive and in the UK you're pretty darned close to the zone of 75m-1 already and you are every day of your life. Indeed as others have said, they'll happen all the time.
I used to play a board game called Blood Bowl a lot and especially online people would blame 'bad beats' on 'bad luck' or a 'bad RNG' for rolling double skulls (snake-eyes or double 1) at an inopportune moment. Rolling that is unlikely (1/36) but if in the course of a typical game you roll around 100 pairs of dice, then the odds are you'll roll that 3 times on average. Sometimes more, sometimes less. So ultimately no, rolling that wasn't unlikely or unlucky.
Pedants corner! Offered not as criticism but just for information. Your average number of double 6s in 100 rolls should be about 2.78. And I THINK the mode number of double 6s is actually likelier to be 2. Which is a little surprising since the average is a lot closer to 3, but we're back to that long-tail effect of averages which has come up before.
O/T: some hope for Conservatives in that Johnson only scores just above Priti Patel, but the real shocker is the two most swivelly of swivelly-eyed nutjobs, Frost and Rees-Mogg right up at the top. The modern Conservative Party clearly still has more extremists in it than Labour under Corbyn if so many want to endorse these two!
Neither Frost or JRM are as bad as Jezza.
But.
The people at the top of the list are the ones who make the Conservatives feel good about themselves, who tell the activists what they want to hear. In that sense, they are the mirror image of Corbyn.
In some ways, fair enough. But at some point, all parties need someone to remind them that not everyone thinks like them, or they can't have what they want. To give him his due, BoJo does that with greenery.
But who in the professional wing of the Conservative Party is left who is prepared to stand up to the activists?
Look, the Tories have been in power for 11 years now.
After 10 years in power all parties get a bit bored and less fresh and full of ideas. The activists too start to want a leader who is ideologically purer rather than to just stay in power for the sake of it.
Labour however has been out of power for over a decade, so it is they whose leadership needs to stand up to activists more than the Tories
Labour are out of power precisely because of your comments
However, the conservative party's desire for power is much more pragmatic
Was it so pragmatic when it picked Hague over Clarke after the 1997 defeat following 18 years in power and then followed that by picking IDS over Clarke and Portillo?
Hague wasn't such an unreasonable choice if you ask me, I think he just got the job too young and was unfairly discriminated against by the electorate on the basis of his northern accent. But picking IDS was lunacy.
You can also add picking Home over Butler in 1963.
On the Labour side similarly picking Foot over Healey in 1980, Ed Miliband over David Miliband in 2010 and Corbyn over Burnham in 2015
I think Miliband vs Miliband is a less extreme example, and I'm not only saying that because I voted for Ed!
Had David won Cameron would likely not have got a majority in 2015, the Tory-LD coalition would probably have continued, there would have been no EU referendum in 2016 and no Brexit.
New PM Osborne would be settling down to No 10 having narrowly beaten Corbyn in 2020 despite UKIP getting 20% of the vote (or else David Miliband could have stayed Labour leader having only narrowly lost and beaten Osborne and now be in No 10).
Boris meanwhile would be finishing his biography of Shakespeare not running the country.
Ed beating David had huge consequences
Doesn't everything have huge consequences though? I think so. Apologies for a quick diversion but I got to pondering this the other week when I had a hole in one at golf. It happened at 11.37 am on Wednesday 22nd Sept. The 12th hole, 162 yards, 7 iron, sweet spot, high with a touch of fade, landed on, rolled and ... IN.
My first and I'm sure last. I'm only an average player, about an 18, don't play that much, so you don't expect it to ever happen, it's massively unlikely. Such a buzz it was. Made me feel special, picked out by fate, as if I'd won the lottery or something. But as I continued to think about it, my thoughts took a bleaker turn. Rather than winning lotteries I started to think about other unlikely "special" things, such as plane crashes and bizarre diseases. If I could have a hole in one, if I was the sort who father fate was taking an interest in, could I also be in line for one of these?
Had to stop that train of thought and the way I did so was by considering it from another angle. My shot went into the hole only because everything at the time and prior to it was just so. A fraction of a millimetre different on the clubface, a smidgen more or less force, a different golfball, the tiniest scintilla of a change in the wind or atmospheric pressure, not wearing a glove, wearing a different sweater or trousers, wearing y fronts instead of boxers, a traffic jam on the drive to the club, an apple instead of a banana for breakfast, then the night before etc, keep going back and back and further back, all the way to the womb and even before that - point being, any change at all would have meant no hole in one. My life led inexorably to the moment and the moment was created by my life. More than this, it was created by the whole of history since I live not in isolation but in deep nexus with all else.
So, that cheered me up no end.
Ah but were you just playing out a predetermined act in the play that is Kinabalu?
Exactly so! It's all fate but because you don't (and can't) know this it may as well not be, and to all intents and purposes isn't. Thus the necessary (for a sane and productive life) illusion of free will and control is retained. I find this a nice thought. Interestingly, if the shot hadn't dropped it would have ran 15 feet by and I'd have 3 putted for a bogey 4. Then no deep thoughts would have ensued. I'd just have been pissed off.
You know you'll be haunted by your hole in one for the rest of your life, don't you? You'll dream about it. You'll replay it in your head when trying to get to sleep. When you're listening to a politician's speech, your mind will drift to that hole in one. It will never let you go. (My equivalent is a perfect cover drive I played in 1981). But congratulations, anyway.
It has messed me up a bit, yes.
I thought about using it to raise my standards - you know, expect a great shot every time from now on, but on reflection I think that leads to a world of mental anguish, so no.
Still, illustrates the great USP of golf. That shot was better than any pro could have done. I'd have won that hole against Tiger Woods at his peak. You can't say this for other sports. Eg your cover drive in 81, it was sublime, course it was, but it wouldn't have been quite as good as Gower. At tennis you never hit a backhand as good as one of Roger's. At football, you won't ever ... etc.
But, ok, enough. I'm banging on now. This "ace" of mine (22/9/21, 162 yards, 7 iron) will not be mentioned by me on this board again. Back to the knitting - holding this dreadful Tory government to account.
I can't remember who it was, but fairly recently there was a sports journalist who asked a sportsman how they felt about their recent exceptionally good performances, something along the lines of, "How does it feel to know you'll probably never play this well again?" Caused a bit of an upset....
Alastair Cook, I think ?
Interesting. I think Cook also said that being in great form isn't a completely happy experience, because you know you'll lose it, you don't know when, and you don't know if you'll ever get it back again when you do.
A final word: I would caution against comparing GDP and revenue. If a company buys a fish for $1.00 and sells it for $1.01, then that will count as $0.01 added to GDP, but $1.01 for the purposes of the company's revenues.
I remember seeing the calendar when it came out. There are some really good roundabouts these days. Artistic and aesthetic.
PB is getting positively Proustian these days. I looked in that website and the first thing I saw was that roundabout at Swindon - I've only ever seen it once and that was walking to the bus station from a night spent camping on the Ridgeway. Had completely forgotten it for more than four decades.
I went through it once, but it was around 1230am so no traffic.
I spent some time at the Lakeland motor museum recently. Awesome. I love these old cars. I love watching old tv shows like the sweeney, just for the cars.
we keep teasing our grandchildren when we take them out that we are going to the Lakeland Pencil Museum. One day we might just do it.
A final word: I would caution against comparing GDP and revenue. If a company buys a fish for $1.00 and sells it for $1.01, then that will count as $0.01 added to GDP, but $1.01 for the purposes of the company's revenues.
Agreed it is not a straightforward comparison, but it is not as bad as that implies either, as companies' revenues do not* include internal pricing charges either.
Newly elected Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida expressed skepticism about China's qualification to join the CPTPP trade pact at his first press conference Monday, noting the bloc's tough free trade requirements.
Kishida, who was formally elected prime minister that day, also stressed the need to improve missile defense for Japan.
Sadly this kind of thing is on the decline. Too many other distractions for oddballs these days?
I wouldn't regard even oak apple enthusiasts as oddballs. My biology teacher was a serious researcher into galls. Quite an insight into ecology for a teenager.
As an amateur pursuit it might be regarded as a bit odd, although I'm not saying it isn't interesting. More useful than roundabouts, perhaps. How the biochemistry works (hijacking genes in the host) is definitely worthy of serious study but is probably not something you could pursue as an individual.
The UK has the best recorded flora and fauna of anywhere thanks to this tradition of having amateur naturalists who like nothing better than a nice empty list sheet, although of course it was at its height in the Victorian era. Based on the ones I know, it is definitely a bit on the geeky side...
I spent some time at the Lakeland motor museum recently. Awesome. I love these old cars. I love watching old tv shows like the sweeney, just for the cars.
we keep teasing our grandchildren when we take them out that we are going to the Lakeland Pencil Museum. One day we might just do it.
Is he a deep sleeper double agent for an extreme reactionary group out to destroy progressive politics? Perhaps the blacking up was just prior to his recruitment?
Is he a deep sleeper double agent for an extreme reactionary group out to destroy progressive politics? Perhaps the blacking up was just prior to his recruitment?
Have you been affected by this tweet? Call free on 1-800-WHO-CARES
I spent some time at the Lakeland motor museum recently. Awesome. I love these old cars. I love watching old tv shows like the sweeney, just for the cars.
we keep teasing our grandchildren when we take them out that we are going to the Lakeland Pencil Museum. One day we might just do it.
Is he a deep sleeper double agent for an extreme reactionary group out to destroy progressive politics? Perhaps the blacking up was just prior to his recruitment?
Have you been affected by this tweet? Call free on 1-800-WHO-CARES
Is he a deep sleeper double agent for an extreme reactionary group out to destroy progressive politics? Perhaps the blacking up was just prior to his recruitment?
Trudeau is the recently re elected world leader of the Woke movement it seems, alongside Jacinda Ardern and Sturgeon
Not just Facebook but big tech generally now dominates the global economy.
The largest company by market capitalisation now globally is Apple and 5 of the top 10 biggest companies are all in tech ie Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet (which is the parent company of Google, the Android operating system and Youtube), Facebook (which also owns Instagram) and Tencent.
But market cap to GDP is a total wealth to income comparison. Still, your point in valid - Apple's revenues are probably greater than a good number of countries' GDP.
At $274.3 billion revenues, Apple is in the Czech, Romania, Pakistan, New Zealand, Portugal, Greece and Peru range of GDP, and would be ranked the 49th largest economy.
No, as somebody else points out, GDP is a measure of value added, not of aggregate sales. So you're simply not comparing like with like.
You'd have to believe that Apple's 147,000 employees produce about the same as the 3 million in the New Zealand workforce. A better comparison is with the $57 billion in global profit, which puts it somewhere between Slovenia and Uruguay if we use nominal GDP, or Honduras and Estonia if we use PPP.
I spent some time at the Lakeland motor museum recently. Awesome. I love these old cars. I love watching old tv shows like the sweeney, just for the cars.
we keep teasing our grandchildren when we take them out that we are going to the Lakeland Pencil Museum. One day we might just do it.
Newly elected Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida expressed skepticism about China's qualification to join the CPTPP trade pact at his first press conference Monday, noting the bloc's tough free trade requirements.
Kishida, who was formally elected prime minister that day, also stressed the need to improve missile defense for Japan.
Remember, this is the country that redefined understatement.
"Events have not necessarily proceeded to our advantage....."
There is an entire generation of politicians who treat inflation like some bogeyman from the past. Like cholera or smallpox.
The only time I have ever seen my father ever worried about money/finances was Black Wednesday when interest rates went through the roof, and I've always known combating inflation is increasing interest rates.
It was the primary reason I was dubious about taking a mortgage in 2000 at the age of 21.
The last time a government really had to deal with inflation was John Major's time as Chancellor and PM. And Major's fate will be seared into BoJo's mind.
The temptation for any politician- let alone a Power Of Optimism one like Bozza- to hope it will just go away must be huge.
Maybe he'll get away with it.
I'm not an economist but my friends who are tell me that when you've got huge government debts one thing that is useful is high inflation to partially inflate the debt away.
Perhaps he sees inflation as a win/win scenario for him.
Inflation is the policy. I said this was the case when Sunak froze the income tax thresholds for five years.
If we get an average of 5% inflation per annum for five years then that puts £13,888 of their income into the higher rate tax bracket, and they'll be paying an extra £2,777 in income tax as a result. And then child benefit withdrawal too.
Similar effect on lower earners who will see the personal allowance inflated away.
And that's quite apart from all the problems that could arise if inflation gets out of control. Freezing the income tax thresholds for five years is a bigger tax increase than the National Insurance increase by far.
The personal allowance inflated away isn't just lower earners it's all of us.
Not everyone. High earners have no personal allowance.
Don't worry only the PB fanbois earn in excess of £123,000 p a.
I thought you were joking. But no. Apparently it means
"Two Spirit, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Questioning, Intersex, and Asexual Plus people"
File me under "Questioning"
Why do Asexual people need to be grouped under here? Surely they don't care enough as their approach is "meh".
They seem to not like being misunderstood. I'd expect there to be another two As in time, as the ARomantic and AGender people are added. I'm surprised Pansexual isn't already there.
O/T: some hope for Conservatives in that Johnson only scores just above Priti Patel, but the real shocker is the two most swivelly of swivelly-eyed nutjobs, Frost and Rees-Mogg right up at the top. The modern Conservative Party clearly still has more extremists in it than Labour under Corbyn if so many want to endorse these two!
Neither Frost or JRM are as bad as Jezza.
But.
The people at the top of the list are the ones who make the Conservatives feel good about themselves, who tell the activists what they want to hear. In that sense, they are the mirror image of Corbyn.
In some ways, fair enough. But at some point, all parties need someone to remind them that not everyone thinks like them, or they can't have what they want. To give him his due, BoJo does that with greenery.
But who in the professional wing of the Conservative Party is left who is prepared to stand up to the activists?
Look, the Tories have been in power for 11 years now.
After 10 years in power all parties get a bit bored and less fresh and full of ideas. The activists too start to want a leader who is ideologically purer rather than to just stay in power for the sake of it.
Labour however has been out of power for over a decade, so it is they whose leadership needs to stand up to activists more than the Tories
Labour are out of power precisely because of your comments
However, the conservative party's desire for power is much more pragmatic
Was it so pragmatic when it picked Hague over Clarke after the 1997 defeat following 18 years in power and then followed that by picking IDS over Clarke and Portillo?
Hague wasn't such an unreasonable choice if you ask me, I think he just got the job too young and was unfairly discriminated against by the electorate on the basis of his northern accent. But picking IDS was lunacy.
You can also add picking Home over Butler in 1963.
On the Labour side similarly picking Foot over Healey in 1980, Ed Miliband over David Miliband in 2010 and Corbyn over Burnham in 2015
I think Miliband vs Miliband is a less extreme example, and I'm not only saying that because I voted for Ed!
Had David won Cameron would likely not have got a majority in 2015, the Tory-LD coalition would probably have continued, there would have been no EU referendum in 2016 and no Brexit.
New PM Osborne would be settling down to No 10 having narrowly beaten Corbyn in 2020 despite UKIP getting 20% of the vote (or else David Miliband could have stayed Labour leader having only narrowly lost and beaten Osborne and now be in No 10).
Boris meanwhile would be finishing his biography of Shakespeare not running the country.
Ed beating David had huge consequences
Doesn't everything have huge consequences though? I think so. Apologies for a quick diversion but I got to pondering this the other week when I had a hole in one at golf. It happened at 11.37 am on Wednesday 22nd Sept. The 12th hole, 162 yards, 7 iron, sweet spot, high with a touch of fade, landed on, rolled and ... IN.
My first and I'm sure last. I'm only an average player, about an 18, don't play that much, so you don't expect it to ever happen, it's massively unlikely. Such a buzz it was. Made me feel special, picked out by fate, as if I'd won the lottery or something. But as I continued to think about it, my thoughts took a bleaker turn. Rather than winning lotteries I started to think about other unlikely "special" things, such as plane crashes and bizarre diseases. If I could have a hole in one, if I was the sort who father fate was taking an interest in, could I also be in line for one of these?
Had to stop that train of thought and the way I did so was by considering it from another angle. My shot went into the hole only because everything at the time and prior to it was just so. A fraction of a millimetre different on the clubface, a smidgen more or less force, a different golfball, the tiniest scintilla of a change in the wind or atmospheric pressure, not wearing a glove, wearing a different sweater or trousers, wearing y fronts instead of boxers, a traffic jam on the drive to the club, an apple instead of a banana for breakfast, then the night before etc, keep going back and back and further back, all the way to the womb and even before that - point being, any change at all would have meant no hole in one. My life led inexorably to the moment and the moment was created by my life. More than this, it was created by the whole of history since I live not in isolation but in deep nexus with all else.
So, that cheered me up no end.
I have often thought that about the euromillions. Great yes you won but now you are in the zone of 75m-1 risks happening to you. Eaten in your bath by a shark; meteorite wiping out your house, you contract an illness that has an, um, one in 75m chance of being contracted, etc...
What btw are the odds of a hole in one?
I hate to break it to you but by merely being alive and in the UK you're pretty darned close to the zone of 75m-1 already and you are every day of your life. Indeed as others have said, they'll happen all the time.
I used to play a board game called Blood Bowl a lot and especially online people would blame 'bad beats' on 'bad luck' or a 'bad RNG' for rolling double skulls (snake-eyes or double 1) at an inopportune moment. Rolling that is unlikely (1/36) but if in the course of a typical game you roll around 100 pairs of dice, then the odds are you'll roll that 3 times on average. Sometimes more, sometimes less. So ultimately no, rolling that wasn't unlikely or unlucky.
Pedants corner! Offered not as criticism but just for information. Your average number of double 6s in 100 rolls should be about 2.78. And I THINK the mode number of double 6s is actually likelier to be 2. Which is a little surprising since the average is a lot closer to 3, but we're back to that long-tail effect of averages which has come up before.
I thought you were joking. But no. Apparently it means
"Two Spirit, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Questioning, Intersex, and Asexual Plus people"
File me under "Questioning"
Why do Asexual people need to be grouped under here? Surely they don't care enough as their approach is "meh".
They seem to not like being misunderstood. I'd expect there to be another two As in time, as the ARomantic and AGender people are added. I'm surprised Pansexual isn't already there.
Can we leave the bile and misunderstandings to Guido Fawkes' website please?
Newly elected Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida expressed skepticism about China's qualification to join the CPTPP trade pact at his first press conference Monday, noting the bloc's tough free trade requirements.
Kishida, who was formally elected prime minister that day, also stressed the need to improve missile defense for Japan.
Newly elected Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida expressed skepticism about China's qualification to join the CPTPP trade pact at his first press conference Monday, noting the bloc's tough free trade requirements.
Kishida, who was formally elected prime minister that day, also stressed the need to improve missile defense for Japan.
Not just Facebook but big tech generally now dominates the global economy.
The largest company by market capitalisation now globally is Apple and 5 of the top 10 biggest companies are all in tech ie Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet (which is the parent company of Google, the Android operating system and Youtube), Facebook (which also owns Instagram) and Tencent.
But market cap to GDP is a total wealth to income comparison. Still, your point in valid - Apple's revenues are probably greater than a good number of countries' GDP.
At $274.3 billion revenues, Apple is in the Czech, Romania, Pakistan, New Zealand, Portugal, Greece and Peru range of GDP, and would be ranked the 49th largest economy.
No, as somebody else points out, GDP is a measure of value added, not of aggregate sales. So you're simply not comparing like with like.
You'd have to believe that Apple's 147,000 employees produce about the same as the 3 million in the New Zealand workforce. A better comparison is with the $57 billion in global profit, which puts it somewhere between Slovenia and Uruguay if we use nominal GDP, or Honduras and Estonia if we use PPP.
That's net profit, i.e. after tax - one should probably use the pretax (or even EBIT) number as that is the total value add of the company.
O/T: some hope for Conservatives in that Johnson only scores just above Priti Patel, but the real shocker is the two most swivelly of swivelly-eyed nutjobs, Frost and Rees-Mogg right up at the top. The modern Conservative Party clearly still has more extremists in it than Labour under Corbyn if so many want to endorse these two!
Neither Frost or JRM are as bad as Jezza.
But.
The people at the top of the list are the ones who make the Conservatives feel good about themselves, who tell the activists what they want to hear. In that sense, they are the mirror image of Corbyn.
In some ways, fair enough. But at some point, all parties need someone to remind them that not everyone thinks like them, or they can't have what they want. To give him his due, BoJo does that with greenery.
But who in the professional wing of the Conservative Party is left who is prepared to stand up to the activists?
Look, the Tories have been in power for 11 years now.
After 10 years in power all parties get a bit bored and less fresh and full of ideas. The activists too start to want a leader who is ideologically purer rather than to just stay in power for the sake of it.
Labour however has been out of power for over a decade, so it is they whose leadership needs to stand up to activists more than the Tories
Labour are out of power precisely because of your comments
However, the conservative party's desire for power is much more pragmatic
Was it so pragmatic when it picked Hague over Clarke after the 1997 defeat following 18 years in power and then followed that by picking IDS over Clarke and Portillo?
Hague wasn't such an unreasonable choice if you ask me, I think he just got the job too young and was unfairly discriminated against by the electorate on the basis of his northern accent. But picking IDS was lunacy.
You can also add picking Home over Butler in 1963.
On the Labour side similarly picking Foot over Healey in 1980, Ed Miliband over David Miliband in 2010 and Corbyn over Burnham in 2015
I think Miliband vs Miliband is a less extreme example, and I'm not only saying that because I voted for Ed!
Had David won Cameron would likely not have got a majority in 2015, the Tory-LD coalition would probably have continued, there would have been no EU referendum in 2016 and no Brexit.
New PM Osborne would be settling down to No 10 having narrowly beaten Corbyn in 2020 despite UKIP getting 20% of the vote (or else David Miliband could have stayed Labour leader having only narrowly lost and beaten Osborne and now be in No 10).
Boris meanwhile would be finishing his biography of Shakespeare not running the country.
Ed beating David had huge consequences
Doesn't everything have huge consequences though? I think so. Apologies for a quick diversion but I got to pondering this the other week when I had a hole in one at golf. It happened at 11.37 am on Wednesday 22nd Sept. The 12th hole, 162 yards, 7 iron, sweet spot, high with a touch of fade, landed on, rolled and ... IN.
My first and I'm sure last. I'm only an average player, about an 18, don't play that much, so you don't expect it to ever happen, it's massively unlikely. Such a buzz it was. Made me feel special, picked out by fate, as if I'd won the lottery or something. But as I continued to think about it, my thoughts took a bleaker turn. Rather than winning lotteries I started to think about other unlikely "special" things, such as plane crashes and bizarre diseases. If I could have a hole in one, if I was the sort who father fate was taking an interest in, could I also be in line for one of these?
Had to stop that train of thought and the way I did so was by considering it from another angle. My shot went into the hole only because everything at the time and prior to it was just so. A fraction of a millimetre different on the clubface, a smidgen more or less force, a different golfball, the tiniest scintilla of a change in the wind or atmospheric pressure, not wearing a glove, wearing a different sweater or trousers, wearing y fronts instead of boxers, a traffic jam on the drive to the club, an apple instead of a banana for breakfast, then the night before etc, keep going back and back and further back, all the way to the womb and even before that - point being, any change at all would have meant no hole in one. My life led inexorably to the moment and the moment was created by my life. More than this, it was created by the whole of history since I live not in isolation but in deep nexus with all else.
So, that cheered me up no end.
I have often thought that about the euromillions. Great yes you won but now you are in the zone of 75m-1 risks happening to you. Eaten in your bath by a shark; meteorite wiping out your house, you contract an illness that has an, um, one in 75m chance of being contracted, etc...
What btw are the odds of a hole in one?
I hate to break it to you but by merely being alive and in the UK you're pretty darned close to the zone of 75m-1 already and you are every day of your life. Indeed as others have said, they'll happen all the time.
I used to play a board game called Blood Bowl a lot and especially online people would blame 'bad beats' on 'bad luck' or a 'bad RNG' for rolling double skulls (snake-eyes or double 1) at an inopportune moment. Rolling that is unlikely (1/36) but if in the course of a typical game you roll around 100 pairs of dice, then the odds are you'll roll that 3 times on average. Sometimes more, sometimes less. So ultimately no, rolling that wasn't unlikely or unlucky.
Pedants corner! Offered not as criticism but just for information. Your average number of double 6s in 100 rolls should be about 2.78. And I THINK the mode number of double 6s is actually likelier to be 2. Which is a little surprising since the average is a lot closer to 3, but we're back to that long-tail effect of averages which has come up before.
The western world is gradually waking up to the complexities and nuances of gender, and indeed sex in the sense that radical feminists use it.
The fluidity of gender is a wonderful recognition, which many parts of the world east of here have known for thousands of years.
If you don't understand something, perhaps instead of ranting about it you can learn. I know this doesn't come easy to old white men stuck like cement in their ways but it's perfectly possible if you make an effort.
I thought you were joking. But no. Apparently it means
"Two Spirit, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Questioning, Intersex, and Asexual Plus people"
File me under "Questioning"
Good god I'm getting old. I definitely don't know what 2 of those are and 2 others are now in doubt as they appear to be duplicates of others but probably aren't.
Sadly this kind of thing is on the decline. Too many other distractions for oddballs these days?
I wouldn't regard even oak apple enthusiasts as oddballs. My biology teacher was a serious researcher into galls. Quite an insight into ecology for a teenager.
The western world is gradually waking up to the complexities and nuances of gender, and indeed sex in the sense that radical feminists use it.
The fluidity of gender is a wonderful recognition, which many parts of the world east of here have known for thousands of years.
If you don't understand something, perhaps instead of ranting about it you can learn. I know this doesn't come easy to old white men stuck like cement in their ways but it's perfectly possible if you make an effort.
We respect nearly everyone on PB
Just pineapple on Pizza, liking Radiohead or Python - those still put you on The List.
The western world is gradually waking up to the complexities and nuances of gender, and indeed sex in the sense that radical feminists use it.
The fluidity of gender is a wonderful recognition, which many parts of the world east of here have known for thousands of years.
If you don't understand something, perhaps instead of ranting about it you can learn. I know this doesn't come easy to old white men stuck like cement in their ways but it's perfectly possible if you make an effort.
Your last sentence insults a large part of the population and is not helpful as you are creating unnecessary divisions
Whiff of Cakeism here. Is this squeeze (thus whatever financial upside ensues for the low paid) a consequence of Brexit or not? It's not really respectable to say the positive aspect (higher wages) is due to Brexit but the negative aspect (chaos, shortages, higher prices) is not.
The western world is gradually waking up to the complexities and nuances of gender, and indeed sex in the sense that radical feminists use it.
The fluidity of gender is a wonderful recognition, which many parts of the world east of here have known for thousands of years.
If you don't understand something, perhaps instead of ranting about it you can learn. I know this doesn't come easy to old white men stuck like cement in their ways but it's perfectly possible if you make an effort.
I'd ask for a refund mate, the fish'll never bite at that.
The western world is gradually waking up to the complexities and nuances of gender, and indeed sex in the sense that radical feminists use it.
The fluidity of gender is a wonderful recognition, which many parts of the world east of here have known for thousands of years.
If you don't understand something, perhaps instead of ranting about it you can learn. I know this doesn't come easy to old white men stuck like cement in their ways but it's perfectly possible if you make an effort.
Yes, but you are the one implicitly claiming familiarity with Guido Fawkes' website. Most of us observe a touching pitch/being defiled correlation.
Please share how you identify, and your choice of personal pronoun. I find this sort of thing just as fascinating as a vegan's in depth account of their historical relationship with meat.
Newly elected Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida expressed skepticism about China's qualification to join the CPTPP trade pact at his first press conference Monday, noting the bloc's tough free trade requirements.
Kishida, who was formally elected prime minister that day, also stressed the need to improve missile defense for Japan.
Which China?
My Xiaomi phone exploded when it read that.
For some reason mine has issued me joining instructions and told me to report to Xiamen immediately.
I remember seeing the calendar when it came out. There are some really good roundabouts these days. Artistic and aesthetic.
PB is getting positively Proustian these days. I looked in that website and the first thing I saw was that roundabout at Swindon - I've only ever seen it once and that was walking to the bus station from a night spent camping on the Ridgeway. Had completely forgotten it for more than four decades.
I went through it once, but it was around 1230am so no traffic.
It’s a great concept if you know how to use it. Any number of routes across it. Really confuses people on first encounter and as it’s by the footy ground* often away fan’s first experience of Swindon is absolute carnage on the roundabout...
Not just Facebook but big tech generally now dominates the global economy.
The largest company by market capitalisation now globally is Apple and 5 of the top 10 biggest companies are all in tech ie Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet (which is the parent company of Google, the Android operating system and Youtube), Facebook (which also owns Instagram) and Tencent.
But market cap to GDP is a total wealth to income comparison. Still, your point in valid - Apple's revenues are probably greater than a good number of countries' GDP.
At $274.3 billion revenues, Apple is in the Czech, Romania, Pakistan, New Zealand, Portugal, Greece and Peru range of GDP, and would be ranked the 49th largest economy.
No, as somebody else points out, GDP is a measure of value added, not of aggregate sales. So you're simply not comparing like with like.
You'd have to believe that Apple's 147,000 employees produce about the same as the 3 million in the New Zealand workforce. A better comparison is with the $57 billion in global profit, which puts it somewhere between Slovenia and Uruguay if we use nominal GDP, or Honduras and Estonia if we use PPP.
That's net profit, i.e. after tax - one should probably use the pretax (or even EBIT) number as that is the total value add of the company.
Which is about $75bn...
No, I used net profit intentionally, because that's what the shareholders can spend.
Economists generally consider the government an external party to the company, but internal to the country.
The western world is gradually waking up to the complexities and nuances of gender, and indeed sex in the sense that radical feminists use it.
The fluidity of gender is a wonderful recognition, which many parts of the world east of here have known for thousands of years.
If you don't understand something, perhaps instead of ranting about it you can learn. I know this doesn't come easy to old white men stuck like cement in their ways but it's perfectly possible if you make an effort.
Your last sentence insults a large part of the population and is not helpful as you are creating unnecessary divisions
Big G we've had it too good for too long. Like British factory bosses using Eastern European labour.
Not just Facebook but big tech generally now dominates the global economy.
The largest company by market capitalisation now globally is Apple and 5 of the top 10 biggest companies are all in tech ie Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet (which is the parent company of Google, the Android operating system and Youtube), Facebook (which also owns Instagram) and Tencent.
But market cap to GDP is a total wealth to income comparison. Still, your point in valid - Apple's revenues are probably greater than a good number of countries' GDP.
At $274.3 billion revenues, Apple is in the Czech, Romania, Pakistan, New Zealand, Portugal, Greece and Peru range of GDP, and would be ranked the 49th largest economy.
No, as somebody else points out, GDP is a measure of value added, not of aggregate sales. So you're simply not comparing like with like.
You'd have to believe that Apple's 147,000 employees produce about the same as the 3 million in the New Zealand workforce. A better comparison is with the $57 billion in global profit, which puts it somewhere between Slovenia and Uruguay if we use nominal GDP, or Honduras and Estonia if we use PPP.
That's net profit, i.e. after tax - one should probably use the pretax (or even EBIT) number as that is the total value add of the company.
Which is about $75bn...
No, I used net profit intentionally, because that's what the shareholders can spend.
Economists generally consider the government an external party to the company, but internal to the country.
EBITDA is how shareholders know how well their company is doing, that said.
Newly elected Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida expressed skepticism about China's qualification to join the CPTPP trade pact at his first press conference Monday, noting the bloc's tough free trade requirements.
Kishida, who was formally elected prime minister that day, also stressed the need to improve missile defense for Japan.
Which China?
Don't be naive. Everyone knows there is only one China.
Not just Facebook but big tech generally now dominates the global economy.
The largest company by market capitalisation now globally is Apple and 5 of the top 10 biggest companies are all in tech ie Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet (which is the parent company of Google, the Android operating system and Youtube), Facebook (which also owns Instagram) and Tencent.
But market cap to GDP is a total wealth to income comparison. Still, your point in valid - Apple's revenues are probably greater than a good number of countries' GDP.
At $274.3 billion revenues, Apple is in the Czech, Romania, Pakistan, New Zealand, Portugal, Greece and Peru range of GDP, and would be ranked the 49th largest economy.
No, as somebody else points out, GDP is a measure of value added, not of aggregate sales. So you're simply not comparing like with like.
You'd have to believe that Apple's 147,000 employees produce about the same as the 3 million in the New Zealand workforce. A better comparison is with the $57 billion in global profit, which puts it somewhere between Slovenia and Uruguay if we use nominal GDP, or Honduras and Estonia if we use PPP.
That's net profit, i.e. after tax - one should probably use the pretax (or even EBIT) number as that is the total value add of the company.
Which is about $75bn...
No, I used net profit intentionally, because that's what the shareholders can spend.
Economists generally consider the government an external party to the company, but internal to the country.
EBITDA is how shareholders know how well their company is doing, that said.
I was being playful in that comparison between Apple’s market cap and entire countries like Italy
However some other comparisons minimise the power of these tech giants
I mean, Honduras, Estonia, really??
Apple or Google or Facebook are far more powerful than any of these countries. Especially in the way they control global media
I’d say a company like Facebook is more like Spain or maybe South Africa in the power it can exert in the world. ie not in the top ten nations but a lot more significant than “Uruguay”
Put it another way, if Boris is at some big shindig like the G20 does he carve out half an hour to talk alone with the prime minister of Uruguay, Slovenia or the Honduras? No
Does he carve out half an hour to be one on one with Zuckerberg? Yes
Not just Facebook but big tech generally now dominates the global economy.
The largest company by market capitalisation now globally is Apple and 5 of the top 10 biggest companies are all in tech ie Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet (which is the parent company of Google, the Android operating system and Youtube), Facebook (which also owns Instagram) and Tencent.
But market cap to GDP is a total wealth to income comparison. Still, your point in valid - Apple's revenues are probably greater than a good number of countries' GDP.
At $274.3 billion revenues, Apple is in the Czech, Romania, Pakistan, New Zealand, Portugal, Greece and Peru range of GDP, and would be ranked the 49th largest economy.
No, as somebody else points out, GDP is a measure of value added, not of aggregate sales. So you're simply not comparing like with like.
You'd have to believe that Apple's 147,000 employees produce about the same as the 3 million in the New Zealand workforce. A better comparison is with the $57 billion in global profit, which puts it somewhere between Slovenia and Uruguay if we use nominal GDP, or Honduras and Estonia if we use PPP.
That's net profit, i.e. after tax - one should probably use the pretax (or even EBIT) number as that is the total value add of the company.
Which is about $75bn...
No, I used net profit intentionally, because that's what the shareholders can spend.
Economists generally consider the government an external party to the company, but internal to the country.
EBITDA is how shareholders know how well their company is doing, that said.
I was being playful in that comparison between Apple’s market cap and entire countries like Italy
However some other comparisons minimise the power of these tech giants
I mean, Honduras, Estonia, really??
Apple or Google or Facebook are far more powerful than any of these countries. Especially in the way they control global media
I’d say a company like Facebook is more like Spain or maybe South Africa in the power it can exert in the world. ie not in the top ten nations but a lot more significant than “Uruguay”
It's interesting because without us it would be nothing.
Whiff of Cakeism here. Is this squeeze (thus whatever financial upside ensues for the low paid) a consequence of Brexit or not? It's not really respectable to say the positive aspect (higher wages) is due to Brexit but the negative aspect (chaos, shortages, higher prices) is not.
Changing the way the country runs just as a pandemic hits is not ideal obviously. Maybe had we known a pandemic were to strike, Brexit wouldn’t have happened.
But, as it is, what is happening regarding labour shortages/businesses complaining etc is what I thought should happen all along, so I’m not complaining. You’ve got to break an egg to make an omelette, business owners are grieving the loss of all their betting accounts because they turned out to be arbers, and aren’t happy. It was good for them while it lasted though, some people never get to be rich
Not just Facebook but big tech generally now dominates the global economy.
The largest company by market capitalisation now globally is Apple and 5 of the top 10 biggest companies are all in tech ie Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet (which is the parent company of Google, the Android operating system and Youtube), Facebook (which also owns Instagram) and Tencent.
But market cap to GDP is a total wealth to income comparison. Still, your point in valid - Apple's revenues are probably greater than a good number of countries' GDP.
At $274.3 billion revenues, Apple is in the Czech, Romania, Pakistan, New Zealand, Portugal, Greece and Peru range of GDP, and would be ranked the 49th largest economy.
No, as somebody else points out, GDP is a measure of value added, not of aggregate sales. So you're simply not comparing like with like.
You'd have to believe that Apple's 147,000 employees produce about the same as the 3 million in the New Zealand workforce. A better comparison is with the $57 billion in global profit, which puts it somewhere between Slovenia and Uruguay if we use nominal GDP, or Honduras and Estonia if we use PPP.
That's net profit, i.e. after tax - one should probably use the pretax (or even EBIT) number as that is the total value add of the company.
Which is about $75bn...
No, I used net profit intentionally, because that's what the shareholders can spend.
Economists generally consider the government an external party to the company, but internal to the country.
EBITDA is how shareholders know how well their company is doing, that said.
I was being playful in that comparison between Apple’s market cap and entire countries like Italy
However some other comparisons minimise the power of these tech giants
I mean, Honduras, Estonia, really??
Apple or Google or Facebook are far more powerful than any of these countries. Especially in the way they control global media
I’d say a company like Facebook is more like Spain or maybe South Africa in the power it can exert in the world. ie not in the top ten nations but a lot more significant than “Uruguay”
It's interesting because without us it would be nothing.
Yes and it’s sui generis. We’ve never encountered corporations with this kind of mega-power before. Even at their height, the great oil companies were trivial compared to the likes of Facebook today
Not just Facebook but big tech generally now dominates the global economy.
The largest company by market capitalisation now globally is Apple and 5 of the top 10 biggest companies are all in tech ie Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet (which is the parent company of Google, the Android operating system and Youtube), Facebook (which also owns Instagram) and Tencent.
But market cap to GDP is a total wealth to income comparison. Still, your point in valid - Apple's revenues are probably greater than a good number of countries' GDP.
At $274.3 billion revenues, Apple is in the Czech, Romania, Pakistan, New Zealand, Portugal, Greece and Peru range of GDP, and would be ranked the 49th largest economy.
No, as somebody else points out, GDP is a measure of value added, not of aggregate sales. So you're simply not comparing like with like.
You'd have to believe that Apple's 147,000 employees produce about the same as the 3 million in the New Zealand workforce. A better comparison is with the $57 billion in global profit, which puts it somewhere between Slovenia and Uruguay if we use nominal GDP, or Honduras and Estonia if we use PPP.
That's net profit, i.e. after tax - one should probably use the pretax (or even EBIT) number as that is the total value add of the company.
Which is about $75bn...
No, I used net profit intentionally, because that's what the shareholders can spend.
Economists generally consider the government an external party to the company, but internal to the country.
IIRC, GDP measures gross value added across a country, excluding inflows and outflows from dividends, rent, financing, etc.
Therefore I would suggest that the gross value add of a company - i.e. the sum of the output of its workers - is EBIT.
GNP - which includes financing flows - would be a better compare for net profit.
I remember seeing the calendar when it came out. There are some really good roundabouts these days. Artistic and aesthetic.
PB is getting positively Proustian these days. I looked in that website and the first thing I saw was that roundabout at Swindon - I've only ever seen it once and that was walking to the bus station from a night spent camping on the Ridgeway. Had completely forgotten it for more than four decades.
I went through it once, but it was around 1230am so no traffic.
It’s a great concept if you know how to use it. Any number of routes across it. Really confuses people on first encounter and as it’s by the footy ground* often away fan’s first experience of Swindon is absolute carnage on the roundabout...
*aka the hallowed turf
I had no problem with it on the way into Swindon. On the way out I think I was a bit complacent, and ended up somewhere I did not want to be. Twice.
Not just Facebook but big tech generally now dominates the global economy.
The largest company by market capitalisation now globally is Apple and 5 of the top 10 biggest companies are all in tech ie Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet (which is the parent company of Google, the Android operating system and Youtube), Facebook (which also owns Instagram) and Tencent.
But market cap to GDP is a total wealth to income comparison. Still, your point in valid - Apple's revenues are probably greater than a good number of countries' GDP.
At $274.3 billion revenues, Apple is in the Czech, Romania, Pakistan, New Zealand, Portugal, Greece and Peru range of GDP, and would be ranked the 49th largest economy.
No, as somebody else points out, GDP is a measure of value added, not of aggregate sales. So you're simply not comparing like with like.
You'd have to believe that Apple's 147,000 employees produce about the same as the 3 million in the New Zealand workforce. A better comparison is with the $57 billion in global profit, which puts it somewhere between Slovenia and Uruguay if we use nominal GDP, or Honduras and Estonia if we use PPP.
That's net profit, i.e. after tax - one should probably use the pretax (or even EBIT) number as that is the total value add of the company.
Which is about $75bn...
No, I used net profit intentionally, because that's what the shareholders can spend.
Economists generally consider the government an external party to the company, but internal to the country.
EBITDA is how shareholders know how well their company is doing, that said.
I was being playful in that comparison between Apple’s market cap and entire countries like Italy
However some other comparisons minimise the power of these tech giants
I mean, Honduras, Estonia, really??
Apple or Google or Facebook are far more powerful than any of these countries. Especially in the way they control global media
I’d say a company like Facebook is more like Spain or maybe South Africa in the power it can exert in the world. ie not in the top ten nations but a lot more significant than “Uruguay”
It's interesting because without us it would be nothing.
Yes and it’s sui generis. We’ve never encountered corporations with this kind of mega-power before. Even at their height, the great oil companies were trivial compared to the likes of Facebook today
This is not a geography/history I'm too familiar with, but how about the East India Company?
O/T: some hope for Conservatives in that Johnson only scores just above Priti Patel, but the real shocker is the two most swivelly of swivelly-eyed nutjobs, Frost and Rees-Mogg right up at the top. The modern Conservative Party clearly still has more extremists in it than Labour under Corbyn if so many want to endorse these two!
Neither Frost or JRM are as bad as Jezza.
But.
The people at the top of the list are the ones who make the Conservatives feel good about themselves, who tell the activists what they want to hear. In that sense, they are the mirror image of Corbyn.
In some ways, fair enough. But at some point, all parties need someone to remind them that not everyone thinks like them, or they can't have what they want. To give him his due, BoJo does that with greenery.
But who in the professional wing of the Conservative Party is left who is prepared to stand up to the activists?
Look, the Tories have been in power for 11 years now.
After 10 years in power all parties get a bit bored and less fresh and full of ideas. The activists too start to want a leader who is ideologically purer rather than to just stay in power for the sake of it.
Labour however has been out of power for over a decade, so it is they whose leadership needs to stand up to activists more than the Tories
Labour are out of power precisely because of your comments
However, the conservative party's desire for power is much more pragmatic
Was it so pragmatic when it picked Hague over Clarke after the 1997 defeat following 18 years in power and then followed that by picking IDS over Clarke and Portillo?
Hague wasn't such an unreasonable choice if you ask me, I think he just got the job too young and was unfairly discriminated against by the electorate on the basis of his northern accent. But picking IDS was lunacy.
You can also add picking Home over Butler in 1963.
On the Labour side similarly picking Foot over Healey in 1980, Ed Miliband over David Miliband in 2010 and Corbyn over Burnham in 2015
I think Miliband vs Miliband is a less extreme example, and I'm not only saying that because I voted for Ed!
Had David won Cameron would likely not have got a majority in 2015, the Tory-LD coalition would probably have continued, there would have been no EU referendum in 2016 and no Brexit.
New PM Osborne would be settling down to No 10 having narrowly beaten Corbyn in 2020 despite UKIP getting 20% of the vote (or else David Miliband could have stayed Labour leader having only narrowly lost and beaten Osborne and now be in No 10).
Boris meanwhile would be finishing his biography of Shakespeare not running the country.
Ed beating David had huge consequences
Doesn't everything have huge consequences though? I think so. Apologies for a quick diversion but I got to pondering this the other week when I had a hole in one at golf. It happened at 11.37 am on Wednesday 22nd Sept. The 12th hole, 162 yards, 7 iron, sweet spot, high with a touch of fade, landed on, rolled and ... IN.
My first and I'm sure last. I'm only an average player, about an 18, don't play that much, so you don't expect it to ever happen, it's massively unlikely. Such a buzz it was. Made me feel special, picked out by fate, as if I'd won the lottery or something. But as I continued to think about it, my thoughts took a bleaker turn. Rather than winning lotteries I started to think about other unlikely "special" things, such as plane crashes and bizarre diseases. If I could have a hole in one, if I was the sort who father fate was taking an interest in, could I also be in line for one of these?
Had to stop that train of thought and the way I did so was by considering it from another angle. My shot went into the hole only because everything at the time and prior to it was just so. A fraction of a millimetre different on the clubface, a smidgen more or less force, a different golfball, the tiniest scintilla of a change in the wind or atmospheric pressure, not wearing a glove, wearing a different sweater or trousers, wearing y fronts instead of boxers, a traffic jam on the drive to the club, an apple instead of a banana for breakfast, then the night before etc, keep going back and back and further back, all the way to the womb and even before that - point being, any change at all would have meant no hole in one. My life led inexorably to the moment and the moment was created by my life. More than this, it was created by the whole of history since I live not in isolation but in deep nexus with all else.
So, that cheered me up no end.
I have often thought that about the euromillions. Great yes you won but now you are in the zone of 75m-1 risks happening to you. Eaten in your bath by a shark; meteorite wiping out your house, you contract an illness that has an, um, one in 75m chance of being contracted, etc...
What btw are the odds of a hole in one?
I hate to break it to you but by merely being alive and in the UK you're pretty darned close to the zone of 75m-1 already and you are every day of your life. Indeed as others have said, they'll happen all the time.
I used to play a board game called Blood Bowl a lot and especially online people would blame 'bad beats' on 'bad luck' or a 'bad RNG' for rolling double skulls (snake-eyes or double 1) at an inopportune moment. Rolling that is unlikely (1/36) but if in the course of a typical game you roll around 100 pairs of dice, then the odds are you'll roll that 3 times on average. Sometimes more, sometimes less. So ultimately no, rolling that wasn't unlikely or unlucky.
Pedants corner! Offered not as criticism but just for information. Your average number of double 6s in 100 rolls should be about 2.78. And I THINK the mode number of double 6s is actually likelier to be 2. Which is a little surprising since the average is a lot closer to 3, but we're back to that long-tail effect of averages which has come up before.
Not just Facebook but big tech generally now dominates the global economy.
The largest company by market capitalisation now globally is Apple and 5 of the top 10 biggest companies are all in tech ie Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet (which is the parent company of Google, the Android operating system and Youtube), Facebook (which also owns Instagram) and Tencent.
But market cap to GDP is a total wealth to income comparison. Still, your point in valid - Apple's revenues are probably greater than a good number of countries' GDP.
At $274.3 billion revenues, Apple is in the Czech, Romania, Pakistan, New Zealand, Portugal, Greece and Peru range of GDP, and would be ranked the 49th largest economy.
No, as somebody else points out, GDP is a measure of value added, not of aggregate sales. So you're simply not comparing like with like.
You'd have to believe that Apple's 147,000 employees produce about the same as the 3 million in the New Zealand workforce. A better comparison is with the $57 billion in global profit, which puts it somewhere between Slovenia and Uruguay if we use nominal GDP, or Honduras and Estonia if we use PPP.
That's net profit, i.e. after tax - one should probably use the pretax (or even EBIT) number as that is the total value add of the company.
Which is about $75bn...
No, I used net profit intentionally, because that's what the shareholders can spend.
Economists generally consider the government an external party to the company, but internal to the country.
EBITDA is how shareholders know how well their company is doing, that said.
I was being playful in that comparison between Apple’s market cap and entire countries like Italy
However some other comparisons minimise the power of these tech giants
I mean, Honduras, Estonia, really??
Apple or Google or Facebook are far more powerful than any of these countries. Especially in the way they control global media
I’d say a company like Facebook is more like Spain or maybe South Africa in the power it can exert in the world. ie not in the top ten nations but a lot more significant than “Uruguay”
It's interesting because without us it would be nothing.
Yes and it’s sui generis. We’ve never encountered corporations with this kind of mega-power before. Even at their height, the great oil companies were trivial compared to the likes of Facebook today
This is not a geography/history I'm too familiar with, but how about the East India Company?
Standard Oil? I'm pretty damn sure you don't need facebook to transport goods or heat your home.
Put it another way, if Boris is at some big shindig like the G20 does he carve out half an hour to talk alone with the prime minister of Uruguay, Slovenia or the Honduras? No
Does he carve out half an hour to be one on one with Zuckerberg? Yes
I remember seeing the calendar when it came out. There are some really good roundabouts these days. Artistic and aesthetic.
PB is getting positively Proustian these days. I looked in that website and the first thing I saw was that roundabout at Swindon - I've only ever seen it once and that was walking to the bus station from a night spent camping on the Ridgeway. Had completely forgotten it for more than four decades.
I went through it once, but it was around 1230am so no traffic.
It’s a great concept if you know how to use it. Any number of routes across it. Really confuses people on first encounter and as it’s by the footy ground* often away fan’s first experience of Swindon is absolute carnage on the roundabout...
*aka the hallowed turf
I had no problem with it on the way into Swindon. On the way out I think I was a bit complacent, and ended up somewhere I did not want to be. Twice.
Since you were already headed into Swindon ending up somewhere you did not want to be seems inevitable.
O/T: some hope for Conservatives in that Johnson only scores just above Priti Patel, but the real shocker is the two most swivelly of swivelly-eyed nutjobs, Frost and Rees-Mogg right up at the top. The modern Conservative Party clearly still has more extremists in it than Labour under Corbyn if so many want to endorse these two!
Neither Frost or JRM are as bad as Jezza.
But.
The people at the top of the list are the ones who make the Conservatives feel good about themselves, who tell the activists what they want to hear. In that sense, they are the mirror image of Corbyn.
In some ways, fair enough. But at some point, all parties need someone to remind them that not everyone thinks like them, or they can't have what they want. To give him his due, BoJo does that with greenery.
But who in the professional wing of the Conservative Party is left who is prepared to stand up to the activists?
Look, the Tories have been in power for 11 years now.
After 10 years in power all parties get a bit bored and less fresh and full of ideas. The activists too start to want a leader who is ideologically purer rather than to just stay in power for the sake of it.
Labour however has been out of power for over a decade, so it is they whose leadership needs to stand up to activists more than the Tories
Labour are out of power precisely because of your comments
However, the conservative party's desire for power is much more pragmatic
Was it so pragmatic when it picked Hague over Clarke after the 1997 defeat following 18 years in power and then followed that by picking IDS over Clarke and Portillo?
Hague wasn't such an unreasonable choice if you ask me, I think he just got the job too young and was unfairly discriminated against by the electorate on the basis of his northern accent. But picking IDS was lunacy.
You can also add picking Home over Butler in 1963.
On the Labour side similarly picking Foot over Healey in 1980, Ed Miliband over David Miliband in 2010 and Corbyn over Burnham in 2015
I think Miliband vs Miliband is a less extreme example, and I'm not only saying that because I voted for Ed!
Had David won Cameron would likely not have got a majority in 2015, the Tory-LD coalition would probably have continued, there would have been no EU referendum in 2016 and no Brexit.
New PM Osborne would be settling down to No 10 having narrowly beaten Corbyn in 2020 despite UKIP getting 20% of the vote (or else David Miliband could have stayed Labour leader having only narrowly lost and beaten Osborne and now be in No 10).
Boris meanwhile would be finishing his biography of Shakespeare not running the country.
Ed beating David had huge consequences
Doesn't everything have huge consequences though? I think so. Apologies for a quick diversion but I got to pondering this the other week when I had a hole in one at golf. It happened at 11.37 am on Wednesday 22nd Sept. The 12th hole, 162 yards, 7 iron, sweet spot, high with a touch of fade, landed on, rolled and ... IN.
My first and I'm sure last. I'm only an average player, about an 18, don't play that much, so you don't expect it to ever happen, it's massively unlikely. Such a buzz it was. Made me feel special, picked out by fate, as if I'd won the lottery or something. But as I continued to think about it, my thoughts took a bleaker turn. Rather than winning lotteries I started to think about other unlikely "special" things, such as plane crashes and bizarre diseases. If I could have a hole in one, if I was the sort who father fate was taking an interest in, could I also be in line for one of these?
Had to stop that train of thought and the way I did so was by considering it from another angle. My shot went into the hole only because everything at the time and prior to it was just so. A fraction of a millimetre different on the clubface, a smidgen more or less force, a different golfball, the tiniest scintilla of a change in the wind or atmospheric pressure, not wearing a glove, wearing a different sweater or trousers, wearing y fronts instead of boxers, a traffic jam on the drive to the club, an apple instead of a banana for breakfast, then the night before etc, keep going back and back and further back, all the way to the womb and even before that - point being, any change at all would have meant no hole in one. My life led inexorably to the moment and the moment was created by my life. More than this, it was created by the whole of history since I live not in isolation but in deep nexus with all else.
So, that cheered me up no end.
I have often thought that about the euromillions. Great yes you won but now you are in the zone of 75m-1 risks happening to you. Eaten in your bath by a shark; meteorite wiping out your house, you contract an illness that has an, um, one in 75m chance of being contracted, etc...
What btw are the odds of a hole in one?
I hate to break it to you but by merely being alive and in the UK you're pretty darned close to the zone of 75m-1 already and you are every day of your life. Indeed as others have said, they'll happen all the time.
I used to play a board game called Blood Bowl a lot and especially online people would blame 'bad beats' on 'bad luck' or a 'bad RNG' for rolling double skulls (snake-eyes or double 1) at an inopportune moment. Rolling that is unlikely (1/36) but if in the course of a typical game you roll around 100 pairs of dice, then the odds are you'll roll that 3 times on average. Sometimes more, sometimes less. So ultimately no, rolling that wasn't unlikely or unlucky.
Pedants corner! Offered not as criticism but just for information. Your average number of double 6s in 100 rolls should be about 2.78. And I THINK the mode number of double 6s is actually likelier to be 2. Which is a little surprising since the average is a lot closer to 3, but we're back to that long-tail effect of averages which has come up before.
Not just Facebook but big tech generally now dominates the global economy.
The largest company by market capitalisation now globally is Apple and 5 of the top 10 biggest companies are all in tech ie Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet (which is the parent company of Google, the Android operating system and Youtube), Facebook (which also owns Instagram) and Tencent.
But market cap to GDP is a total wealth to income comparison. Still, your point in valid - Apple's revenues are probably greater than a good number of countries' GDP.
At $274.3 billion revenues, Apple is in the Czech, Romania, Pakistan, New Zealand, Portugal, Greece and Peru range of GDP, and would be ranked the 49th largest economy.
No, as somebody else points out, GDP is a measure of value added, not of aggregate sales. So you're simply not comparing like with like.
You'd have to believe that Apple's 147,000 employees produce about the same as the 3 million in the New Zealand workforce. A better comparison is with the $57 billion in global profit, which puts it somewhere between Slovenia and Uruguay if we use nominal GDP, or Honduras and Estonia if we use PPP.
That's net profit, i.e. after tax - one should probably use the pretax (or even EBIT) number as that is the total value add of the company.
Which is about $75bn...
No, I used net profit intentionally, because that's what the shareholders can spend.
Economists generally consider the government an external party to the company, but internal to the country.
EBITDA is how shareholders know how well their company is doing, that said.
I was being playful in that comparison between Apple’s market cap and entire countries like Italy
However some other comparisons minimise the power of these tech giants
I mean, Honduras, Estonia, really??
Apple or Google or Facebook are far more powerful than any of these countries. Especially in the way they control global media
I’d say a company like Facebook is more like Spain or maybe South Africa in the power it can exert in the world. ie not in the top ten nations but a lot more significant than “Uruguay”
It's interesting because without us it would be nothing.
I wonder whether one day people might just get fed up with using these social media companies.
Whiff of Cakeism here. Is this squeeze (thus whatever financial upside ensues for the low paid) a consequence of Brexit or not? It's not really respectable to say the positive aspect (higher wages) is due to Brexit but the negative aspect (chaos, shortages, higher prices) is not.
Changing the way the country runs just as a pandemic hits is not ideal obviously. Maybe had we known a pandemic were to strike, Brexit wouldn’t have happened.
But, as it is, what is happening regarding labour shortages/businesses complaining etc is what I thought should happen all along, so I’m not complaining. You’ve got to break an egg to make an omelette, business owners are grieving the loss of all their betting accounts because they turned out to be arbers, and aren’t happy. It was good for them while it lasted though, some people never get to be rich
Ok, you think because European FOM has ended for us, the living standards of our low paid are going to get a serious boost and this is why you wanted Brexit. I do believe that (unlike some others) you're telling the truth about this, ie that yes this WAS why you wanted Brexit. I also believe you'll be disappointed because it won't happen. You just see if I'm right.
Not just Facebook but big tech generally now dominates the global economy.
The largest company by market capitalisation now globally is Apple and 5 of the top 10 biggest companies are all in tech ie Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet (which is the parent company of Google, the Android operating system and Youtube), Facebook (which also owns Instagram) and Tencent.
But market cap to GDP is a total wealth to income comparison. Still, your point in valid - Apple's revenues are probably greater than a good number of countries' GDP.
At $274.3 billion revenues, Apple is in the Czech, Romania, Pakistan, New Zealand, Portugal, Greece and Peru range of GDP, and would be ranked the 49th largest economy.
No, as somebody else points out, GDP is a measure of value added, not of aggregate sales. So you're simply not comparing like with like.
You'd have to believe that Apple's 147,000 employees produce about the same as the 3 million in the New Zealand workforce. A better comparison is with the $57 billion in global profit, which puts it somewhere between Slovenia and Uruguay if we use nominal GDP, or Honduras and Estonia if we use PPP.
That's net profit, i.e. after tax - one should probably use the pretax (or even EBIT) number as that is the total value add of the company.
Which is about $75bn...
No, I used net profit intentionally, because that's what the shareholders can spend.
Economists generally consider the government an external party to the company, but internal to the country.
IIRC, GDP measures gross value added across a country, excluding inflows and outflows from dividends, rent, financing, etc.
Therefore I would suggest that the gross value add of a company - i.e. the sum of the output of its workers - is EBIT.
GNP - which includes financing flows - would be a better compare for net profit.
Gross value add includes the return to capital and the return to workers, so really you should be adding salaries onto EBIT. Of course, what we are actually considering here isn't the productive capacity, but financial power. On that logic, I would argue we should be comparing revenue to government income receipts. Or maybe expenditure matters more than income (as that is where your influence is felt), so total corporate cost vs government expenditure.
The primary thing I use Facebook for now is logging onto games and websites so I don't have to mess around with passwords.
I'm not really sure how secure that is though, using the same login for multiple sites means if your FB is compromised then everything is compromised simultaneously - but if you change your FB password then everything is changed simultaneously.
I thought you were joking. But no. Apparently it means
"Two Spirit, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Questioning, Intersex, and Asexual Plus people"
File me under "Questioning"
Why do Asexual people need to be grouped under here? Surely they don't care enough as their approach is "meh".
They seem to not like being misunderstood. I'd expect there to be another two As in time, as the ARomantic and AGender people are added. I'm surprised Pansexual isn't already there.
Can we leave the bile and misunderstandings to Guido Fawkes' website please?
I don't accept that there was any bile or misunderstanding in my post.
So the pig cull has started . Grown men left in tears at having to destroy their livestock and somehow what’s happening in the UK is being normalized by this cesspit of a government !
GDP is a measure of total economic output (i.e. overall domestic production). Not value added.
Its total value added with adjustments for direct taxes. You are correct that that is the total economic output of the country, but revenue is not the total economic output of a company, because some of it is just covering the cost of inputs. Gross output is the measure equivalent to revenue for countries.
Not just Facebook but big tech generally now dominates the global economy.
The largest company by market capitalisation now globally is Apple and 5 of the top 10 biggest companies are all in tech ie Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet (which is the parent company of Google, the Android operating system and Youtube), Facebook (which also owns Instagram) and Tencent.
But market cap to GDP is a total wealth to income comparison. Still, your point in valid - Apple's revenues are probably greater than a good number of countries' GDP.
At $274.3 billion revenues, Apple is in the Czech, Romania, Pakistan, New Zealand, Portugal, Greece and Peru range of GDP, and would be ranked the 49th largest economy.
No, as somebody else points out, GDP is a measure of value added, not of aggregate sales. So you're simply not comparing like with like.
You'd have to believe that Apple's 147,000 employees produce about the same as the 3 million in the New Zealand workforce. A better comparison is with the $57 billion in global profit, which puts it somewhere between Slovenia and Uruguay if we use nominal GDP, or Honduras and Estonia if we use PPP.
That's net profit, i.e. after tax - one should probably use the pretax (or even EBIT) number as that is the total value add of the company.
Which is about $75bn...
No, I used net profit intentionally, because that's what the shareholders can spend.
Economists generally consider the government an external party to the company, but internal to the country.
EBITDA is how shareholders know how well their company is doing, that said.
I was being playful in that comparison between Apple’s market cap and entire countries like Italy
However some other comparisons minimise the power of these tech giants
I mean, Honduras, Estonia, really??
Apple or Google or Facebook are far more powerful than any of these countries. Especially in the way they control global media
I’d say a company like Facebook is more like Spain or maybe South Africa in the power it can exert in the world. ie not in the top ten nations but a lot more significant than “Uruguay”
Seeing as Facebook is the internet in many developing countries. And its actions significantly distort their elections. I would put its influence up with the superpowers. And depending on how much influence American agencies have on the company maybe even higher
I'm sure the CIA would have done nasty things to have such mass influence during the cold war. I mean they practically had a man in every big newsroom according to Nick Davies in his book flat earth news. But the Facebook algorithms control the news stories you consume and the flow of user generated information around the network. A network that is nearly half of the worlds population.
So the pig cull has started . Grown men left in tears at having to destroy their livestock and somehow what’s happening in the UK is being normalized by this cesspit of a government !
So the pig cull has started . Grown men left in tears at having to destroy their livestock and somehow what’s happening in the UK is being normalized by this cesspit of a government !
Seriously bad karma.
tayatha om bekandze bekandze maha bekandze radza samudgate soha.
Comments
I think we should add Incel in there as well. That would manage to piss everyone off.
0 = 5.977979%
1 = 17.07994%
2 = 24.15591%
3 = 22.54552%
4 = 15.62082%
5 = 8.569138%
6 = 3.876515%
7 = 1.487316%
8 = 0.4940013%
9 = 0.1442798%
I don't regard that as a success.
* Edit. Unless you're Enron or some such
Newly elected Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida expressed skepticism about China's qualification to join the CPTPP trade pact at his first press conference Monday, noting the bloc's tough free trade requirements.
Kishida, who was formally elected prime minister that day, also stressed the need to improve missile defense for Japan.
The UK has the best recorded flora and fauna of anywhere thanks to this tradition of having amateur naturalists who like nothing better than a nice empty list sheet, although of course it was at its height in the Victorian era. Based on the ones I know, it is definitely a bit on the geeky side...
You'd have to believe that Apple's 147,000 employees produce about the same as the 3 million in the New Zealand workforce. A better comparison is with the $57 billion in global profit, which puts it somewhere between Slovenia and Uruguay if we use nominal GDP, or Honduras and Estonia if we use PPP.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/oct/05/germanys-greens-and-cdu-report-constructive-coalition-talks
"Having certain sectors entirely relying on cheap labour from around the world is not a long term solution."
Brandon Lewis says the labour shortages existed before Brexit and there will be a pressure on supply for a while.
@JPonpolitics | @BrandonLewis
https://twitter.com/timesradio/status/1445436471926792203?s=21
"Events have not necessarily proceeded to our advantage....."
Though only 18% in Northern Ireland unsurprisingly
Savanta ComRes
Success/failure of Brexit:
England
Success 37%
Failure 50%
Northern Ireland
Success 18%
Failure 74%
Wales
Success 34%
Failure 58%
Scotland
Success 35%
Failure 59%
4:39 PM · Oct 4, 2021
But- if this becomes the settled opinion of the British electorate, what should the government do next?
Which is about $75bn...
The fluidity of gender is a wonderful recognition, which many parts of the world east of here have known for thousands of years.
If you don't understand something, perhaps instead of ranting about it you can learn. I know this doesn't come easy to old white men stuck like cement in their ways but it's perfectly possible if you make an effort.
Any other casual bigotries you'd care to express?
Just pineapple on Pizza, liking Radiohead or Python - those still put you on The List.
Please share how you identify, and your choice of personal pronoun. I find this sort of thing just as fascinating as a vegan's in depth account of their historical relationship with meat.
*aka the hallowed turf
Economists generally consider the government an external party to the company, but internal to the country.
Take your best shot at what constitutes elderly (cf rich for tax purposes)
If voters want something different and closer alignment to the SM and CU they will vote for Starmer, Davey and Sturgeon at the next general election
https://twitter.com/SavantaComRes/status/1445048624535285767?s=20
However some other comparisons minimise the power of these tech giants
I mean, Honduras, Estonia, really??
Apple or Google or Facebook are far more powerful than any of these countries. Especially in the way they control global media
I’d say a company like Facebook is more like Spain or maybe South Africa in the power it can exert in the world. ie not in the top ten nations but a lot more significant than “Uruguay”
Does he carve out half an hour to be one on one with Zuckerberg? Yes
But, as it is, what is happening regarding labour shortages/businesses complaining etc is what I thought should happen all along, so I’m not complaining. You’ve got to break an egg to make an omelette, business owners are grieving the loss of all their betting accounts because they turned out to be arbers, and aren’t happy. It was good for them while it lasted though, some people never get to be rich
"Big G we've had it too good for too long. Like British factory bosses using Eastern European labour."
Duly rescued, we will now see if anybody either disputes or develops.
Therefore I would suggest that the gross value add of a company - i.e. the sum of the output of its workers - is EBIT.
GNP - which includes financing flows - would be a better compare for net profit.
3+ = 52.786171%
Though since the number of times an event can happen in a game is an integer, 2.78 rounded is 3 anyway.
Easy jokes for the win.
No, don't round it properly. Don't spoil this.
I'm not really sure how secure that is though, using the same login for multiple sites means if your FB is compromised then everything is compromised simultaneously - but if you change your FB password then everything is changed simultaneously.
I'm sure the CIA would have done nasty things to have such mass influence during the cold war. I mean they practically had a man in every big newsroom according to Nick Davies in his book flat earth news. But the Facebook algorithms control the news stories you consume and the flow of user generated information around the network. A network that is nearly half of the worlds population.
tayatha om bekandze bekandze maha bekandze radza samudgate soha.