AmirS2

Because what matters is _Capital_ requirements, which differ by the _risk_ of the loan. A bank's Capital is what limits their ability to lend. Reserve requirements are irrelevant in the modern banking system.

You can give any amount to your kids tax free ... if this is within 7 years of your death then Inheritance tax applies to amounts given over 3k per year (on a sliding scale). So works fine if you want to give away large amounts of assets long enough before you die.

If you want to give away property, then you have to make sure you don't continue living in the property rent-free for it to count for IHT.

As others have mentioned, serious estates just use trusts etc. instead.

http://www.money.co.uk/guides/gifting-money-to-your-children...

> what concretely happened: a poaching of a key employee

Not quite the reason for the fine according to TFA:

> Instead, it ruled that Luckey, who was working as a contractor for Zenimax before starting the Kickstarter for the Oculus Rift headset, violated his non-disclosure agreement,

> fulltime labor for everyone is simply not going to happen. We just don't need it.

and from the article

> there’s not enough work to go around

I disagree.

There's not enough paid employment to go around, but there is an enormous amount of work that needs to be done!

Our entire society needs to be weaned off its carbon dependence if we want humans to survive the next century. This will involve at the very least the wholesale transformation of our transport and energy systems, and probably construction too. We should be putting massive numbers of people to work on solving and fixing this, and there's no point leaving people unemployed while there's still work that needs to be done. Whether we can organise society in time to achieve this is the real question. Once we've fixed the environment and created a truly sustainable civilization, then we can talk about labor that is surplus.

Other work that will be in increasing demand is healthcare and elderly care (especially given the aging populations of most countries). I don't see robots replacing humans for this any time soon, and we are far from the point where we have enough health / personal care for everyone. Plenty more examples of work that's needed but not currently being done can be found with a bit of creative thought...

The $1.8 billion in consumer relief is not actually a penalty, since most of it is money that has already been lost, and is only being recognised now under the pretence of it being a penalty.

> "The consumer relief will be in the form of principal forgiveness for underwater homeowners and distressed borrowers; financing for construction, rehabilitation and preservation of affordable housing; and support for debt restructuring, foreclosure prevention and housing quality improvement programs, as well as land banks."

The principal forgiveness had to happen anyway in the normal course of business, one way or another. If underwater homeowners and distressed borrowers owe you a billion dollars, that does not mean that those mortgages and loans are worth a billion dollars in reality. At best you can realistically hope to eventually be repaid 60% of that (to pick an arbitrary number), given that these are distressed borrowers we're talking about. So writing down those assets in your books to e.g. $600 million dollars does NOT constitute a penalty or consumer relief of $400 million, since your assets were not really worth a billion to begin with and probably haven't been for years.

Same for the rest of the "relief", for example foreclosure prevention is almost always a net positive for the lender. Finding a way for the owner to stay in the house, look after it, and keep repaying whatever they can afford, will usually recoup more money for the bank than a distressed sale at auction (how foreclosed properties are usually sold).

Principal relief for homeowners who are above water and up to date with mortgage payments, now that would be an actual penalty

Don't forget that the money that the "big equity market players" invest is mostly held on behalf of members of the public, in their pension and investment funds, so the public is definitely affected.

Sounds like the EU versions of US cars are currently re-engineered to meet EU standards, and that costs manufacturers money. They're trying to save that cost by saying all rules are equivalent. From the article:

> under current rules cars sold globally, such as the Ford Focus or Volkswagen Golf, must still be re-engineered multiple times - at considerable expense to manufacturers - to satisfy crash-test standards around the world

This concern about economic growth in 1000+ years is entirely academic. The more relevant question is whether exponential growth (at whatever rate) is feasible for the next few decades and even centuries, and to me the answer to that question is yes, just using the examples from the article. So we can build appropriate policies for the present and near-ish future. Our descendants can decide for themselves at that point whether it's reasonable to continue economic growth, based on knowledge and science and experience they have gained.

I mean, how many physical theories can be argued to work into the infinite future? Does quantum mechanics or GR hold past the end of the universe? It's not even a meaningful question. Why hold economic models to the equivalent standard, when all that is needed is whether they hold in the relevant domain?

I feel that this question and argument is often used to try to draw the conclusion that we must stop trying for economic growth NOW, because infinite growth is impossible. Maybe it is impossible, but I don't think something happening or not happening at infinity or even in a thousand years has any bearing on what we should be doing now.

> Also, why is the cost of employees with overhead lower?

I think that's the cost of the employees for the 9 months (not 12) it takes them to do the required work.

> normal to the rip tide

as an engineer, I assumed this ('normal') meant across/perpendicular/90 degrees to the rip tide, not against it ...

I believe 90 degrees to a rip tide is the correct thing to do ...

These buy-to-leave flats are generally newly built (and were bought off plan), in high rise buildings with concierge / security, so there are no worries about heating, burglary or squatting...

I'd guess the price of these is around £350k - £1.5m (for a reasonable 1 - 3 bed flat in a new build), which is well within the reach of well off foreign middle class investors.

> Not sure you should be selling your house, then deciding to look.

It's buying a house before you've sold yours that's a problem, not this way around (think cashflow), especially if you don't mind putting your furniture in storage and renting for a few weeks in between.

Apparently there was top level code (that couldn't be changed as it was needed several other places) that DID free the pointer though...

hopefully the controller id was just the lowest bit or two, which would then align back to zero or something when it came time to free ;-)

Well, in our hyper simplified economy, the macbook airs are produced domestically - it's the only thing produced in fact (apart from ditches I guess)!

In Economy C, the workers who've been paid by the govt can then purchase 5000 Retina Macbook Airs at $1k each, the govt receives sales tax, apple employees get paid and pay income tax, and apple employees then spend their remaining money buying more Macbook Airs (going by your simpification that the only asset produced is computers) ... net GDP is then some way over $10m and everybody has a computer and is employed either producing computers or digging ditches

I would suggest that hyper-simplified economies are probably not a good model for anything ...

>Sure, maybe a Chinese middle-class person can buy more Beijing Frappucinos than a middle-class person in Minneapolis,

No, this isn't what's being said as the number we're talking about isn't per capita.

I guess you could read it as approx 4.3 (1.3bn / 300m) middle class Chinese people, between them, can buy more Beijing Frappucinos than a single middle-class person in Minneapolis ...

(of course this still isn't true as GDP is still only a crude proxy for individual income, it really measures the total of a particular subset of all _transactions_ in the economy).

Looks like the author explicitly considered that:

> To try to understand whether people really were this bad at the task or whether perhaps the task itself was flawed, I ran some more stats. One thing I wanted to understand, in particular, was whether inter-rater agreement was high. In other words, when rating resumes, were participants disagreeing with each other more often than you’d expect to happen by chance? If so, then even if my criteria for whether each resume belonged to a strong candidate wasn’t perfect, the results would still be compelling

The result of the Fleiss' kappa test subsequently run was negative, i.e. people didn't agree with each other either. So maybe the author's judgement was wrong, but that doesn't affect the conclusions.

I believe that, as a written rule, it took 90 days minimum to become a regulated bank, in addition to complying with all the other paperwork one would expect.

GS and MS were able to sidestep all the rules, and with the Fed's help, become banks overnight.

Please find me a single CDS contract that allows that definition of "default"? Or a law or a solvency judge who would agree? If your contract stated that you are to pay back 100 USD or JPY or whatever, on a certain date, and you pay exactly as stated, then that cannot be a default, regardless of the prevailing FX or inflation rate at the time. You should have FX or inflation hedged if you were worried about those risks...

You may consider it a "moral" default if the debt is paid back in inflated currency, but it is in no way a technical default and you can't just redefine long standing meanings of the word "default" to suit the point you're trying to make.

I'm not saying that nobody cares if debt is paid back in debased currency, but if it's paid back according to the letter of the contract, then it's not a default.

>It's "literally impossible" only in a very literal sense of the word.

The literal sense of the word "literally"?

Yes, I think that's exactly what was meant!

Has the word "literal" been so badly abused across the internet (true) that you thought a correct use of the word needed clarification?

Or is contemplating the fact that Japan's govt. debts are entirely in its own currency, which can be issued at will with no constraint from the financial markets, so shocking and nonsensical to orthodox thinking that you thought that the original statement couldn't possibly have meant what it said?

It's certainly a large scale problem, but a smaller problem than learning all the points of interest in the first place ... no one is saying it's easy ...

Kenya has pretty good rates for prepaid data, approx 1 US cent per MB if you buy a 500Mb bundle:

http://www.safaricom.co.ke/personal/internet/data-plans/prep...

500KSH for the 500Mb bundle, current FX rate is 90KSH/USD. Even the smallest bundle, 4Mb, is hardly more expensive per MD, at only 5 KSH (5.6 cents).

Are these prices unrepresentative of other African countries?

> There was hope that the Japanese would figure out something. 25 years later, they haven't. They've built up their safety net and put money into infrastructure projects, so that fewer people are suffering. That's the best they could come up with.

Improved safety net and infrastructure projects so fewer people are suffering? Sounds terrible. Please don't sign me up. /sarc

Seriously, what is wrong with improving the safety net and infrastructure projects? It's far better than the solutions being tried in the west, i.e. high unemployment and the gutting of social safety nets in the name of austerity. Once we can at least match Japan, then we can consider better still models of dealing with a lack of demand for labour, e.g. Basic Incomes or Job Guarantees (or whatever else).

Looks like it's an Apple / iPhone 'feature' [0] so not directly EE's fault or intention. EE's initial response was quite unhelpful though, probably through misunderstanding. After all, who expects an unlocked phone to magically lock itself?

[0] http://selfhelp.carphonewarehouse.com/SelfHelp/request.do?vi...

Is routine use of pesticides on 'organic' farms an american thing? I'm not familiar with the US organic standards / regulations.

In the UK, the Soil Association (organic standards body) claims [1] that pesticides are used "Very rarely" on organic farms. So it strikes me as quite odd that there's all this discussion about organic pesticides as if their use is on par (or even greater than) non-organic pesticide use.

[1] http://www.soilassociation.org/frequentlyaskedquestions/your...

Why bother with exponentially increasing costs? Even a token fee would ensure that copyright expires on abandoned/orphaned works.

> It'll be owned by a shell company in the Vigin Islands or some other tax haven & only the ownership of the company will ever change hands so no stamp duty will be due in the UK.

I believe this isn't true any more. Legally, stamp duty will be due at 15% in this case.

Of course, whether this is enforceable, whether the authorities make any effort to enforce this (as opposed to it being a nice sounding law to appease the public), and whether the people involved actually report these transactions are entirely different matters, and I wouldn't be optimistic.

With the latest hike in British tuition fees (to around £9000/year from around £3000), studying in the US probably costs around the same as studying in the UK, so I'm not surprised that many more kids are suddenly considering going abroad.

Previously, studying in the UK was far cheaper, so it was ridiculous for a British citizen to voluntarily pay much more to study abroad for a similar quality of education.

Agreed.

Looks like they know they cannot offer a video platform without providing DRM, because the media industry demands it, and they also know that trying to implement unbreakable DRM is futile. Therefore, they just need to implement the minimum needed to convince the media suppliers that their content is really DRM'd.

+1 for "assertive riding" and "taking the lane when necessary"

Cyclists need to be assertive, ride a safe distance away from parked cars and the kerb (so you can't be doored or have pedestrians step out in front of you), and generally expect drivers NOT to see you, and take avoiding action just in case.

Sure, riding in the middle of the lane when necessary will annoy car drivers, but it will force them to see you and keep you safer.