mpat

The narrative is that overtime hours represent hard-work and dedication towards the employer and its mission. As the average worker is looking for an opportunity to advance their position, they accept overtime as a necessity, and sometimes as a badge of honor.

However, from a management perspective, unpaid overtime is great. It lets you be lazy in your management. You have no incentive to help an employee finish their tasks in 40 hours when you know they are going to stay 55 hours to complete it by brute force.

If you assign a cost to those overtime hours, the manager now has an incentive to actively participate in your workstream by coaching or seeking efficiences to get you home in 40 hours. And you have the incentive to do likewise since your overtime hours now represent an additional cost to your employer. It will transform overtime from a badge of honor into a topic to be avoided unless truly necessary. It will no longer be the norm.

We can discuss the virtues and detriments of labor unions at length, but they seemed to at least serve as a mechanism of protecting the worker from themselves (i.e. by placing a cap on hours worked, you could not stand out by putting in more time than everyone else).

We as a society need to decide if we want to prioritize time incurred in the workplace, or if we want to judge worker quality off of other behaviors. If we want to de-emphasize time incurred, adding incremental cost to overtime hours would be a useful tool.

I don't buy bread. I have sandwiches that I would like to make, but I can't eat a whole loaf before it goes bad, so I don't buy it. I would gladly buy half a loaf, but my grocery store doesn't sell half loaves. If they won't make a half loaf to suit my needs and what I want to pay, I should just be able to steal whole loaves?

Cable television requires a subscription with a cable company, telecom, or DTH satellite operator.

Broadband internet requires a subscription with a cable company, telecom, or DTH satellite operator.

An "internet-based model" has no impact on the supply chain. Cable companies, telecoms, and DTH satellite providers still sit between the content providers and the consumer.

"As of September 24, 2011 and September 25, 2010, $54.3 billion and $30.8 billion, respectively, of the Company’s cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities were held by foreign subsidiaries and are generally based in U.S. dollar-denominated holdings. Amounts held by foreign subsidiaries are generally subject to U.S. income taxation on repatriation to the U.S."

http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/AAPL/1826229879x0xS11...

These tactics don't exempt corporations from US federal taxation, they just serve to delay when the taxes are payable. Apple owes US federal income taxes on the earnings of its foreign subsidiaries that is payable upon repatriation of the cash to the US. Accordingly, Apple and has booked an $8.9 billion liability for the taxes it owes on the unremitted earnings of foreign subsidiaries. Unless Congress moves forward with a "repatriation holiday," that liability will remain until Apple brings back the cash to the US to fund domestic investment or to return to shareholders and pays the US taxes it owes.

How much would you pay for an ESPN stream? ESPN makes about $3/mo per cable subscriber (not including its other networks like ESPN2, ESPNU, etc). An a la carte equivalent would have to be in the $15-20 range. I don't see this having many takers.

The same board that approved this deal would be responsible for appointing a new CEO.

Even more baffling is the notion that leadership only influences a company through "atmosphere".

What's the best estimate on their revenue?

And all the 2nd year med students must finish their remaining three years without "opportunities for efficient, mobile, and innovative learning." Condolences, class of 2013.

The analysis makes sense on a micro level. To any one consumer, it is possible to prefer one bundle of goods (groupon quantity at groupon price) to another bundle of goods (standard quantity at standard price) even though the first bundle lies outside of the individual's demand curve.

However, relative to the quantity desired by any one consumer, the number of units required to activate the groupon deal is quite high. The pressure any one customer feels to buy more to ensure that the deal is activated would be negligible. I would expect that the number of units sold at the groupon price to coincide with the market demand curve.