econgeeker

You think property rights don't exist elsewhere? The only "free lunch" is the one paid for with stolen money, e.g.: taxes.

The rich are leaving and renouncing. There are a lot of countries out there, and many of them provide a more hospitable climate for wealth.

The rich are moving, and there's quite an exodus going on. I'm part of it.

Of course it is harder for the super-rich. The US government is not going to let you leave the country with a $5B fortune.

As a mental exercise, consider the thought process behind the perspective that this is "anti-competitive".

1. Apple has taken a technology- metal milling- that has existed for at least half a century, and used it to make a nicer laptop case.

2. Apple uses the modern manufacturing method to do this, requiring expensive CNC machines.

3. Apple introduced popular products that, when you open them, look like they were hand crafted by master metalworkers in the 1940s (I'm serious!) while their competition is still shipping cheap plastic cases.

4. Even though there are dozens of suppliers of CNC Mills of all type, Apple's requirements contain the market for a particular type (this is speculation on my, and the articles part.)

5. Therefore, this is "anti-competitive" because Apple's competition can't just copy the unibody case idea and order machines and make their own unibody cases?

6. So, what could possibly be the remedy? To fine Apple for being successful with an innovative new case design? To institute some government board of allocation to allocate the (currently, and only temporarily) limited supply of CNC machines?

If Apple hadn't been competitive-- that is, if Apple hadn't innovated and come up with a new case design-- there would be no demand for these machines from non-Apple people. So, this is a result of competition on Apple's part.

Sometimes I imagine that people think that if Apple is successful by doing something better, that this is "unfair" and that Apple should be punished.

Hell, I wish I could make a crapy video editor and then force Apple to give me some of their final cut profits, because, really, it is so unfair that apple makes such a good video editor, I'm just one guy and I can't hope to compete with that, right? (Just kidding, forcing Apple to do that is aggression, and is immoral. I'm just being illustrative. While I've thought about making a video editing app, I've not done that, actually.)

Good Point.

For instance, New Zealand. Nice place. Great People. First class quality of life-- better than the USA. Higher taxes than the USA in many ways, but the government is so much less corrupt that the taxes are much less of a burden. You don't mind paying when you see you're getting value for the money.

There are many places an american can go. Unlike the USA, most countries don't tax your worldwide income. So, for instance, you could become a citizen of any of the EU countries that don't tax worldwide income, and earn your income outside that country tax free (and live outside it as well.)

I know of several countries within the EU where you can be a citizen and pay essentially no taxes, or extremely low taxes. These are very pleasant places as well. For instance, one location is the side of a very nice lake in switzerland (Campoin d' Italia) and Andorra has some nice tax advantages, and one of the best climates in Europe. Monaco is not bad, though expensive for my tastes, while Licthenstein, Austria, Switzerland, and all this british islands whose existence is for purposes of avoiding taxes aren't too bad either.

The idea that you can't have a high quality of life in China or India compared to the USA seems silly to me, but I haven't lived in either of those countries. There are many countries in Latin, South America, Asia and Europe where you can have as high a quality of life as the USA, or higher, and at much less cost than the USA.

I think the idea that anywhere desirable is worse than the USA is a kind of parochial perception. Of course ones preferences can vary, but, for instance, in many ways much of eastern europe is nicer than the USA, even though they are "poorer". There are many countries that are in many ways richer, or where you can have a better quality of life at the same or less cost.

I just think that people in every country believe that their country s superior to others, and can't imagine how anyone would want to live in another country... but they also haven't experienced those other countries.

I've visited a lot of countries, and have yet to visit one that was terrible, and about %50 of them are better than the USA in noticeable ways, and the ones that aren't as good, aren't as good in ways that aren't really all that bad.

That's the number of people who renounced. And that number is going up dramatically, and I've heard that the published figures for renouncement are way under-reported. (as in here are lawyers who have more clients who have renounced than the government claims renounced in total.) But on both sides these are just claims.

The number of people who simply moved their butts and their assets overseas is much higher. You can tell this is the case because the administration has been saber rattling for the last four years, and starting to work their way into currency controls.

Did you know, in order to renounce, you have to get the permission of the government? They charge an exit tax too for your funds. This is a currency control and it is one of the things that marked the soviet union as a bad regime. If you can't move your money in and out of a country, then you're not likely to invest in that country.

I'm not very rich, and I will renounce as soon as my second citizenship gets in. It will be easier for me because, not being very rich yet, I will be more likely to get permission of the government to give up my citizenship.

Gold was criminalized for use in transactions in 1933 by executive order. I think that's a fair point to mark the end of the "gold standard" and the beginning of the fiat era. It is true the US government would redeem dollars for gold for foreign countries up to 1970 or so, under Nixon... but indie the USA, it was a crime to use gold as money. (Though jewelry was allowed) up until the 1970s.

He's using the term "counterfeiting" in the economic sense.

One of the things that makes something money in economics is that it is difficult to duplicate, so you can't just make more of it for yourself. Fiat currency doesn't have that restraint. So, we can say it is not money, or we can say that it is being counterfeited. This is not a word chosen for its alarm value, though it should make you alarmed.

Taking twitter for example, it is rendering content in a native app when you're looking at tweets. The content is delivered in json (or whatever) standard format and rendered in native controls, namely tableViewCells. Webkit is used if you look at a web page... but otherwise it is native.

The flexibility and quality you get by taking web "content" via json (rather than HTML) and rendering it natively is a huge win.

I don't see android customers paying for websites wrapped in an app anymore than I see iOS users paying for it, actually less.

Of course if you're making SaaS such as base camp then you can do native clients on either platform.... and sell them successfully... while selling a specialized web browser (That just gives you the base camp website in WebKit) wouldn't likely fly.

The pain of doing web development for a maze of twisty browsers, all alike and incompatible makes iOS a "superior" choice in the sense that it means less headaches.

For me, it doesn't really matter which is easier or harder, but which has the best return on invested pain.

I am working on some solutions to get web pain down for our particular area of the industry, and as a result, I think the web may have a positive return on the amount of pain it causes. (FWIW, of course iOS has pain too, everything does, just using this as a measure of the relative joy vs. hassle of doing what's needed for business reasons, vs. hassle of having to deal with painful technologies metric.)

All good reasons. My reasons are:

-- The Apple frameworks are first class. In the past 20 years, there has never been a set of GUI frameworks that I've seen that was anywhere near as good as things are in iOS right now. (I've not looked at android, but it being based on Java doesn't fill me with hope. A lot of what makes CocoaTouch work so well is due to Objective-C.)

-- You can write an app once and have it run on iOS on the iPhone, the iPod touch and the iPad. This is really great. No phone outsells the iPhone, no tablet outsells the iPad, and there doesn't seem to be any competition for the iPod touch. This means "cross platform" or, across the spectrum development is really easy. In fact, with some tools you can include Mac OS X in the mix, though it isn't as trivial as doing an "iPad Port".

-- The above means that you have the largest addressable market for your software. It is true that this market is also the one that is more likely to buy software. But, while people talk about android as a "platform" it really isn't, from the developers point of view. Android ships on phones with keyboards, and much of its volume is on phones that really are just feature phones that can run apps. IOW, they are low end cheap phones sold for little, or given away for free to people who use them only to make calls and whose design is such that you can't really do a modern iPhone style touch app for them. Or if you can, it involves a lot of porting. IF the phone doesn't have a touchscreen, it doesn't matter if it's android or not, you have to do another port.

-- Apple has proven to be a trustworthy partner. People like to complain about Apple and make them out like they don't treat developers well, but they really do. All of the reviews (and the one rejection) from the Appstore review team have been fair. Apple pays on time and reliably. Apple sells software world wide and supports addressing a worldwide market easily. Apple's terms are consistent and they keep expanding and improving their market. As someone whose business is selling (rather than writing, though I do all of our development, the software is worthless if it isn't sold) having a good market is really critical to success.

-- The consistency of the platform means that we can have free apps or very low cost apps and not be buried in support requests. I think this is really underestimated. On other platforms, either you're ignoring the customers, or you're dealing with innumerable bugs that show up on a particular model of device. You don't have that fragmentation or variation on the iOS platform, and you can therefore afford to do real customer support.... though most customers contacting us are telling us how much they love our apps rather than complaining about problems.

-- Apple keeps giving us really news stuff to play with. They don't have fundamental problems they have to address (like androids fragmentation) and when they do give us something where they're behind (like iCloud) when they deliver it is generally a first class implementation. I'd wish there was more sample code for iCloud but they took their time and did it right, and I appreciate that.

Of all the platforms I've developed for this has been the best so far. So, while there might be some financial advantage to developing for android as well, I don't really see it.

Here's the costs that keep me off of android:

-- Maintaining separate port of our software would be too much. One set of source code for all platforms keeps us working on new features and moving the ball forward, not maintaining a another code base.

-- As I mentioned, we'll be able to add Mac OS X to our single code base, and that's nice. Where we're likely to have to do a separate port is the web. I'm much more interested in doing a web app for our customers, because then I can point everyone to it-- android users, palm users, windows phone 7 system home plus users, etc. If I'm going to support an incompatible platform, its going to be the web.

-- Java. Frankly, at one time Java was my favorite language... but having worked with Objective-C, erlang and other languages, I've grown to hate it. It is ... bureaucratic, for lack of a better term. Like nails on a chalkboard now.

-- I don't see the market there for apps. The quality of the market in which we'd sell, and the quality of the customers doesn't seem like it would produce a worthwhile return on our investment. Sure, angry birds can do well, but that's a different kind of situation, that app is a phenomenon.

The only reason to not team up with Microsoft, et. al, is if google wanted to use the patents against them. If google simply wanted to be immune to claims from the Novell patents, they could have joined the group and saved money (vs. bidding by themselves against the group.)

Further, you make two assertions here: "MS teamed up with Google's competitors to bully them with bullshit patents. "

You haven't shown that MSFT has bullied google, nor that the patents are "bullshit".

If the patents are bogus, they would be easy to dispatch in court with prior art.

Is it really covert? In the case of the Nortel bids, the bidders were getting government approval before bidding, and it was made public after the fact who was in the groups.

I'm not sure that removing anonymity from bidders is a good thing or not. I mean, if you know who the other bidders are, that would affect your strategy, removing some purity from the auction process, wouldn't it?

But, maybe you feel I'm sidestepping your real issue, so let me make another point: In any situation where companies might collude like this, they're effectively creating a cartel. Say, in the case of the employee salaries that you mention.

The problem with a cartel is that there is always an incentive for a member of the cartel to violate the agreement. For instance, if MSFT, Apple, Facebook and Google agreed to cap software developer salaries, then Google (or one of the others) has an incentive to secretly violate that agreement to get the best employees, right?

Pretty soon the cartel falls apart, or the agreement has no effect. The stronger the agreement, the more incentive there is to violate it.

Further, imagine if they were successful and kept salaries below a market rate-- this would give a huge boost to any of their competitors who were willing to pay market rates, right?

They'd only be shooting themselves in the foot by doing so, driving the best employees to other companies.

This is why cartels don't really work, or at least aren't sustainable for very long.

I posit that android would not be on the market in the touch-screen form it is now, if Apple hadn't made its inventions public due to the patent process.

If you consider android innovative, then the patent process saved google the 7+ years Apple spent developing the iPhone and allowed them to get to the market much quicker with a touch screen phone (they'd been previously working on a blackberry style OS for android.)

I am the inventor of two software patents. One of which involved solving the visual glitches that appear in online games due to the high latency of playing over a modem. This patent involved a lot of timing issues, and was pretty narrow.

However it was claimed on slashdot that we "patented the idea of online gaming!!!!"

Later, in a discussion list, they claimed we'd patented the idea of IRC!

People seem to presume that patents are on ideas, and that people are patenting really obvious ideas.

In the case of the patents I've been involved in, that is not what has happened. In fact, the portrayal of what was covered by the patent didn't match the patent at all, and it is clear that the people putting forward those patents as examples of bad patents were, frankly misrepresenting them.

Every time I've seen a bogus patent claim and actually read the patent, I've found this to be the case as well. (I don't remember the linked-list example, so haven't read that particular one.)

I'm not saying that bogus patents don't exist. I'm sure you can get things by the examiner.

But the system has a solution for this-- if your patent is bogus then it won't stand up in court. If prior art exists, then you run the risk of spending a lot of money, only to have the patent nullified when someone presents prior art. (And I mean real prior art, not the kind of stuff that people claim is prior art, like the claim that IRC is prior art for solving clock jitter in 3D online games)

The patent system, as with anything else that relies on the meager US court system, is expensive... but there is no need for reform, that I can see, as all these allegedly bogus patents would be quickly thrown out if they really were as obvious as is claimed and if there really was the abundance of prior art, as is claimed.

Google is certainly capable, both financially and intellectually, of getting a bogus patent thrown out. There's no reason they should be calling on the federal government to intervene with a political "solution" on their behalf... unless they know that there isn't actually prior art and the patents are, in fact, legitimate.

In fact, I think googles call for reform is an admission that the patents aren't bogus after all.

Edit: I didn't change the text above, but want to clarify- I'm responsible for some claims on one of these patents, though not named as an inventor (I didn't realize the significance at the time.) For the other I am the sole inventor, but it hasn't been brought forth as "bogus" in a public forum yet, though, for those who don't read it carefully, they could easily make the claim. This is why I'm being vague about the specific patents. Previous experience on Hacker News tells me that if I wasn't vague the topic would turn to how those patents are so obviously "bogus" (to people who haven't read more than the headline)... and well, frankly my name is on them. I really don't to be discriminated against in business for having a pr-intellectual property position. The current climate makes that fear seem pretty legitimate.