cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/6745228
TLDR: Apple wants to keep china happy, Stewart was going after china in some way, Apple said don’t, Stewart walked, the show is dead.
Not surprising at all, but sad and shitty and definitely reduces my loyalty to the platform. Hosting Stewart seemed like a real power play from Apple, where conflict like this was inevitable, but they were basically saying, yes we know, but we believe in things and, as a big company with deep pockets that can therefore take risks, to prove it we’re hosting this show.
Changing their minds like this is worse than ever hosting the show in the first place as it shows they probably don’t know what they’re doing or believe in at all, like any big company, and just going for what seems cool, and undermining the very idea of a company like Apple running a streaming platform. I wonder if the Morning Show/Wars people are paying close attention.
Let this be the regular reminder that any time that a gigantic for profit corporation seems to be doing the right thing it’s a mere coincidence and they are following their bottom line. The moment those two depart, they will look after their bottom line right thing be damned. There are no moral corporations.
Maybe those good things they do while are convenient to them are moral and bring real benefits and can be followed and celebrated, but ultimately they are a convenient mask to trick customers. So don’t ever be loyal to a brand, be loyal to principles.
Damn that’s a real shame, no surprise Jon walked out. That man actually has standards, he don’t need the money he was there because he cared and wanted to put out a positive voice that analyzed the bullshit we all have to deal with and his platform enabled that perfectly, just like his work for vets and burn pits.
I hope he transitions elsewhere but keeps the content as-is
don’t forget his battle with Congress to fund the 9-11 Emergency Responders
Yeah. Apple are the Machine
Apple users: buys iPhone for privacy
Apple: all your data belongs to me now
they were basically saying, yes we know, but we believe in things and, as a big company with deep pockets that can therefore take risks, to prove it we’re hosting this show
lol, they never said that. You were just being naive. They were after the money of people who like Stewart.
I hope he moves to a different platform, one that’s not so beholden to the Chinese audience.
HBO already has John Oliver. Put the Jon Stewart show back to back with him.
“Let’s talk about all the cheap Chinese labour that Apple uses despite being the 10th richest company in the world.”
“Let’s not.”
Chinese people deserve jobs too. Comparative advantage is a good thing that helps everyone involved.
The Yuan is currently trading at 7.32 to 1 USD
Companies that appease the CCP are the problem, not companies that leverage exchange rates to better lives globally.
The Yuan is currently trading at 7.32 to 1 USD
Ok?
The Yuan is currently trading at 7.32 to 1 USD
That means nothing without knowing the total supply
It means everything when talking about people’s pay.
For that you need 2 data pieces:
- The median pay of chinese workers in Yuan.
- The Yuan - Us Dollar cross currency exchange rate.
You then use the second to convert the first into US Dollars so that you compare the Chinese salaries in USD to American salaries is USD.
Merely the second piece of data wIthout the first means nothing if you’re trying to compare salaries.
For example, before the Euro the Italian Lira used to have a cross currency exchange rate with the dollar which was thousands of lire per dollar and that didn’t mean Italians in the 80s were incredibly poor: because for every dollar the average US worker received in their salary the average Italian worker got thousands of lire, all put together mean they got about 1/2 to 1/3 of a US salary rather that the 1/1000 that by your the exchange rate alone suffices “logic”.
By the way, that cross currency exchange rates are meaningless to compare incomes or costs without the actual incomes and prices in the local currency, is really, really, REALLY basic financial knowledge.
You then use the second to convert the first into US Dollars so that you compare the Chinese salaries in USD to American salaries is USD
You don’t need to do this because you only need to look at the fact that those jobs are competed for to see that they are desirable.
Wage parity isn’t a meaningful discussion when discussing comparative advantage. Too many other factors come into play.
Okay but you realize that any job would be competitive in situations of poverty right? That’s why you need the second data point.
That’s specifically why comparative advantage is a good thing - lifting people out of poverty is a good thing.
To fully measure Comparitive Advantages, you must include the differences in manpower costs, which brings us back to salaries (plus, since this is to compare manpower costs, you also need things like the employer-side tax costs such as social security payments), which then needs to be converted to a single currency using cross-currency exchange rates.
Further, every single monetary elements of calculating Comparitive Advantage which is in local currencies needs to go through those cross-currency exchange rates in order to be comparable.
There is no way you can calculate comparative advantage merelly with the single datapoint which is a cross-currency exchange rate because all that tells you is the relation between two units of measurement and says nothing about the actual quantities being measured.
As I said, this is incredibly basic financial stuff.
To give you a really basic non-financial example which hopefully will make you understand it:
- Two farms produce milk, one in Britain and the other in The Netherlands. The farm in Britain measures milk by the pint. The one in The Netherlands measures milk by the liter.
What you wrote in your original post is equivalent to saying that “The farm in Britain produces more milk because 1 pint = 1.759754 liters”.
You don’t know anything about how many pints the British farm produces, or about how many liters the Dutch farm produces, yet you claimed the ratio between two measurement units is enough by let you draw conclusions about production numbers even though you used no prodution numbers.
If I was to bet I would say you’ve read some articles about how the exchange rate of the Yuan vs USD is kept artificially low to increase the competiviness of Chinese exports, didn’t quite understand how it works and still thought you knew enough and applied it were it wasn’t applicable and/or in the wrong way.
No I just work in international business and know hy we outsource certain roles.
You keep pretending you know more about this, and you’re describing irrelevant things. I took econ/IB in college too, bud. Lots of people do.
Chinese people also deserve to not be sent to internment camps.
Yeah totally. Fuck the Chinese government.
Yes, fuck the Chinese government.
And the corporations, both Chinese and American, that help support it.
Depends on what that means imo. Global trade theoretically supports the Chinese government, because money is fungible, but is a net positive all around.
The Chinese will never stop clinging to autocracy without wealth of their own.
The “Chinese” will never have wealth, ask Jack ma.
The ccp would burn China to the ground before releasing an ounce of their power and stolen wealth.
That is not an excuse to stop trying to empower the Chinese to rise against their hellstate.
Capitalism broke the USSR and it will break the CCP.
Boy you sure do sound like you just got your MBA. Chasing the cheapest labor and lowest regulations really doesn’t do much for the populace other than make them slave laborers for better products for the benefits of other nations.
If the wages are the same across multiple industries then it doesn’t really help right? It’s just taking advantage of a poor countryand enriching higher members of that country who actually do see the most profit gained.It might help in getting advanced manufacturing set up in the country but that actually also hurts countries that rely on advanced manufacturing to keep GDP high when they are creating their competitors while doing little investment into themselves.
So yes it works to get the cheapest product possible but it’s really not the super helpful beneficial concept that you think it is and the whole world is not richer for these jobs we give to them to enrich further a group that just chases the quickest profit.
What a strange take when a mountain of evidence is right in front of you. China went from “nothing but cheap labor” to the next world superpower because of exactly this kind of exchange. They have modern cities with rapid transit, EVs, and a top tier domestic tech industry.
Well yeah I mean I kinda covered that. They now have advanced tooling and active investments into their infrastructure and country. It’s not yet actually reaching the majority of China and there is still wide issues with these investments. But now companies will have to find the new cheap labor if there is increasing access to jobs that are to pay enough for the citizens to access these higher standards.
A country can’t be cheap labor and an important market without either massive divide in the populace or slave labor.
And if they can’t get cheap labor there anymore these companies will leave and create rust belts like there are in the US. At which point the advanced manufacturing arm and service economy could take over if it’s built enough but they join into a already crowded space with dwindling access to resources. Not to say things haven’t gotten better in sense of moving forward technologically and amenities wise but that is basically always a guarantee of time passing. But this hunt for cheap goods for top level enrichment is not a wholly good venture and is quite destructive in ways that take little effort to see.
Why, specifically, do you hate the global poor?
Wow what a terrible response meant to cause an inflammatory response instead of having a discussion about a topic on an intellectual level. You have set up a pin with an impossible answer and claimed that you are the only right response to knock it down.
But, I have an answer. I care about their well being and not their economic status. I don’t care if they are making more money or not and they aren’t from my country. My countries laws will have no direct impact on them and while I care about the ecology of the planet I can’t be reasonably expected to care about everyone.
You falsely assume globalist ideals are the only right way to live and I would rather care for those immediately around me who have an impact on my life.
We can aim for bettering of societies that aren’t our own without it being based entirely around taking advantage of their cheap labor and unawareness of their lacking systems.
You speak as an economist who only thinks in terms of money without any real compassion and assumes money is compassion.But, I have an answer. I care about their well being and not their economic status. I don’t care if they are making more money or not
These two things are incompatible
You falsely assume globalist ideals are the only right way to live and I would rather care for those immediately around me who have an impact on my life.
And this is evil
Chasing the cheapest labor and lowest regulations
It demonstrably improves their personal wealth, incentives inclusive institutions, and changes countries. History is most assuredly not on your side here.
Nativism is a plague and populism is the cancer nativism spawns.
Chinese people deserve good jobs, not jump off of a building to kill yourself, but wait your the 4th person to do that this month so they installed a net jobs.
I am questioning where I supported Chinese government policies here?
Because the initial concern was pay, and that’s due to not understanding economic factors. I don’t support Chinese labor regs at all.
In fact I said
“Companies that appease the CCP are the problem” which I also thought was a nice little pun, given the show being discussed.
How is that a pun?
The show that Stewart walked out on is “The Problem with Jon Stewart”
I don’t support Chinese labor regs at all.
I wonder why labor is cheaper in China.
Two big reasons
1: currency exchange rates
2: China is sill fundamentally agrarian and industrializing, and many workers are looking for (comparatively) higher pay
Companies that appease the CCP are the problem, not companies that leverage exchange rates to better lives globally.
Companies in China ARE the CCP. Nothing is actually privately owned. Everything is owned by the government, so giving any money to a company in China is supporting the CCP.
Lots of foreign companies have branches in China, including most global corps
True, but that is completely irrelevant to the topic of whether it is ethical to use cheap Chinese labor. Those branches are not the ones employing cheap labor from the blue collar workers in China. Those are almost entirely white collar jobs, and many of them are in place specifically to work with the local companies who DO employ the blue collar laborers. The sweatshops aren’t OWNED by Nike or Gucci or Apple. They are contract facilities owned by a CCP-backed corporation.
Sure but that level of contracting is not contributing to the CCP so much as to the Chinese people
It’s ethical to employ any sort of labor
It’s ethical to employ any sort of labor
did this mfer just imply slavery is ethical
Slavery isn’t employment
the condition of having paid work. “a fall in the numbers in full-time employment”
Now he and Hassam can start a new show.
Vaush, Hasan, and Stewart. They can bring back a better version of Crossfire.
Oof. I got banned on reddit once for saying that stewart is no longer as good as i remember (but it was in a thread about some trans-issue so of course the mods went full hitler).
To be honest i don’t understand what he was expecting to happen in such a highly sanitized garden as apple’s. It’s so clearly not made for him
“Reports are not clear, but it’s probably China’s fault.” 🙄
Sounds more like apple not wanting to jeopardize their relationship with china
Apple tv sucks anyway. I’d like to remind people that it’s near the end of the mls season and they still have no android mobile app. They actively piss on anyone not totally in line with their ecosystem, etc.
I hate that every mofo wants to send me a goddamn video from their iPhone and they just do NOT understand that it doesnt work. You cannot make them grasp.
For what it’s worth, they do have an Android TV app.
Which makes the lack of an android app all the more shitty. They have one already but refuse to make it available if the device isn’t connected to a TV.
Then you get into the actual layout of the program. Spoilers are a huge issue. I can’t watch a game later without having the game ruined partially. Sure you can switch off scores, but you still have to scroll through game highlights to get to the full match replay.
Stewart for President.
For real.
Never gonna happen, unfortunately. He’s already said he won’t run for office, because he feels he does more useful work from outside the system, asking the uncomfortable questions that need asking, until he gets an answer.
Don’t get me wrong. I’d vote for Stewart for any office. I just know enough about the man to know that he refuses to run. He gets asked pretty regularly about it.
POTUS shouldn’t be an entry level job.
POTUS should be a job filled by people with regular careers who serve their term, then return to their careers afterwards, if they don’t wish to retire.
A POTUS who is a farmer will have unique insight on how to improve the lives of farmers. Then they go back to being a farmer too. Rinse and repeat for every other job. Doctor, college professor, cybersecurity professional, engineer, astronaut, etc, etc, etc.
Instead we just get career politician after career politician, usually with a background in law, or maybe finance.
There should be term limit reforms that also restrict ex-office holders from continuing careers as lobbyists* and other Capitol Hill creatures. Go back to your old career after holding office, or retire.
Sorry to burst your bubble but POTUS is a management position. You oversee millions of jobs as the head of the Executive branch.
It is a job that the vast majority do not have the skills or temperament to manage with any degree of competence. The plantation owner who oversaw the hundreds of jobs/slaves of the past might have been able to be the head of a smaller and weaker government but the modern farmer isn’t going to have skills that transfer to POTUS.
The reason why it’s finance, politicians, and lawyers that end up in the job is those are the fields whose skills actually do transfer.
POTUS isn’t an entry level job. You should have governmental experience and a history of managing large organizations.
i would totally help crowdfund a jon stewart show
Bummer. That’s some weak and feckless megacorp bullshit. Just like something Stewart would cover, which is why this show was such a great power move. And yet? Infinite profit over all else, so never mind.
Look at John Oliver, he talks shit about HBO constantly. Do they care? Nope, because he has more Emmys than anyone could know what to do with. Respect your talent and reap the rewards. Pretty basic stuff, Apple.
The difference is HBO is a media company that largely operates in the US, and Jon Oliver making fun of them isn’t going to hurt their business at all. Apple is a hardware company that also makes media. And selling hardware in China is critical to their business. Since the CCP owns China, they can get their panties in a twist and just ban Apple. Like they did with government devices.
As a publicly owned company they have a legal responsibility to maximize profit for shareholders. It’s the same reason why Twitter had to agree to the sale to Elon Musk and why they had to force it. It was a terrible move overall but since Elon was buying all outstanding shares and taking it private, the board literally had no legal choice but to take it since he was offering well over market value.
Public companies don’t get to take moral stands when there’s money on the line. They legally have to put shareholders first.
It was clarified that Apple devices are fine in government. Teslas ban would be a better example
Nah, Apple is an ad aggregation company same as Google. They use hardware and software to lock users into their products so they can show them ads and collect their data to make the ads more targeted. In return ad companies pay them to serve ads to their users. That’s how they make money.
The fuck you smoking. 80% of sales are hardware and 20% is services, ie music, tv, and their cut of App Store sales
Ad revenue from running ads on the app store, their news app , podcast app, etc.
I didn’t claim they were making most of their money that way, but that’s absolutely the business model they’ve been shifting to for the last decade as their hardware sales decrease pretty much quarterly, especially their phone sales.
“Public companies…legally have to put shareholders first.”
I thought this too, but it is apparently a myth.
"There is a common belief that corporate directors have a legal duty to maximize corporate profits and “shareholder value” — even if this means skirting ethical rules, damaging the environment or harming employees. But this belief is utterly false.
To quote the U.S. Supreme Court opinion in the recent Hobby Lobby case: “Modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not.”
Rare supreme Court w I guess? I dunno
It’s a good line in what is otherwise a very, very bad SCOTUS decision that a for-profit corporation can ignore laws protecting female employees because of the corporation’s religious beliefs.
So bizarre that companies are capable of believing in gods.
Lol try being a CEO and answering to your shareholders about how you’re not trying to maximize profits and growth. Like it may not be legally required but you’re kind of required to just by the nature of the role itself.
And to piggyback on this, the decision that’s often pointed to by sociopaths to justify that horseshit is Dodge Brothers vs Ford, wherein the Brothers Dodge invested in Ford Motor Company. Henry Ford was more interested in paying his employees and providing them with things like housing and antisemitic literature than he was in giving the Dodge boys massive ROI.
They sued and the STATE OF MICHIGAN Supreme Court, not the US Supreme Court, found that Ford had a responsibility to his investors before he had a responsibility to his employees. This does NOT mean that he had to “maximize profit”, it simply meant that Ford had to put the well-being of the business and investors ahead of the well-being of his employees.
It’s worth noting that Ford wasn’t just paying people well. He almost ran FMC like a charity, he was so focused on worker satisfaction. That’s where the issue came in. The idea that you have to underpay people because “MUXIMUSS PROOFIZ” is a Harvard Business sociopath lie.
well-being of the business…ahead of well-being of his employees.
Hey, I mean, like, corporations are people too, man.
Brb gonna go incorporate myself real quick
It’s called incarnation in humans.
So corporations too should have to go to jail if they break the law. Or in this case close down the building and not perform any commercial activity for a certain time
Funny how that worked out huh? All the benefits of personhood, but none of the downsides, like mortality, having to pay fair taxes, incarceration for crimes, possible death penalty for killing citizens …
That is literally the whole point of corporations, they’re designed to allow people to take more risk. Business law 101.
(If you grossly abuse it, they will “pierce the corporate veil” and arrest those responsible, but again, that’s only if you’re grossly abusing it)
Still a sticky problem from labor’s perspective, unless the corporate time-out includes salary and healthcare payments. Maybe except the C suite?
But then you might as well keep the company open (Unless it is currently doing harm), and throw the directors in jail.
I always understood stock investing as assuming the risk something like that could happen (I’d a director fucks up, you lose, or vote him out of the job). But now that all of our retirement is tied to the fucking thing it can’t work that way.
Specifically, the thing that is wrong is the idea that the only way to uphold their fiduciary duty to shareholders is to maximize profit. They have a legal obligation to put their shareholders’ interest first, and maximizing short term profit is not the only way to do this. Benefit corps give some of their revenue to a cause, sometimes companies invest in long-term stability or profitability.
It’s the same reason why Twitter had to agree to the sale to Elon Musk and why they had to force it. It was a terrible move overall but since Elon was buying all outstanding shares and taking it private, the board literally had no legal choice but to take it since he was offering well over market value.
It was put to an actual shareholder vote. The individual shareholders voted yes because he was overpaying. The board was fundamentally irrelevant.
Apple is a hardware company that also makes media.
Apple is a lifestyle company. The hardware is just the base layer.
They make some of the best CPUs in the industry nowadays, though.
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Meanwhile every major cloud provider is investing in designing and deploying their own ARM silicon. I’ve benchmarked graviton and T2A, the cost per performance is great and only going to get better.
Performance per watt, my dude. But sure, x86s can still heat your house better than Apple silicon.
Performance per watt is a CPU metric I’ve never seen anyone use before lol
It’s wild what Apple marketing comes up with
It’s wild what Apple marketing comes up with
Performance per watt has always been a major concern of chip manufacturers. Sure, they have increased the amount of watts you can throw at a chip without melting it (8086 used 1-2W) , but the most significant improvements have been towards making less watts give more power.
I can appreciate not liking Apple, there are plenty of valid reasons. This is not one of them. Their CPUs are state of the art and took both Intel and AMD with their pants down.
Yes, measuring the consumption of electricity for a given performance benchmark is totally irrelevant to datacenter providers, who get their electricity for free from the electricity fairy, and thus can harvest pure profit without operational costs.
It is also totally irrelevant for portable devices, because batteries last forever, and every smart phone has a huge fan inside to dump all the heat waste via dual XTREME exhausts.
Where’d did this “legal responsibility to maximize profit” bullshit come form?
There is no such law, an no entity to enforce the responsibility.
The entity is the civil court system, and while there is no law written “no company can work in a way that doesn’t maximize profit”, upon taking investment, it’s typical that companies, the fiduciary, come under the expectation that they’ll be working for the sake of their beneficiary’s interests. In public companies, this interest is clear-cut. Investors want dividends and to see the value of the company increase. This is typically done through maximizing of profits.
So while it’s not explicit that they must forever maximize profits, companies can be successfully sued for not doing so.
Learn more:
Then stop calling it a law.
Nobody called it a law. It’s a legal responsibility, and it is law, but it is not “a” law.
Companies have also been sued for not maximizing profits and won the case. “Best interests” can mean a lot of things. It can mean short term profit for one shareholder, long term profit for another, and stable, guaranteed profit for a third.
~Court precedent. Shareholders have sued and won for corporations “failing to uphold fiduciary responsibilities” and other similar bullshit. So, now it’s baked into corporate culture.~
Update: See reply below. Courts have upheld that corporations have no requirement to seek profits over all else.
That’s actually not the case.
“courts have consistently refused to hold directors liable for failing to maximise shareholder value”
"In 2014, the United States Supreme Court voiced its position in no uncertain terms. In Burwell v Hobby Lobby Stores Inc., the Supreme Court stated that “Modern corporate law does not require for profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else”. "
Just more corporate propaganda, that’s all.
https://legislate.ai/blog/does-the-law-require-public-companies-to-maximise-shareholder-value
Holy shit! That’s good to know. Thank you.
It’s frustrating but very much a real thing. You might google “fiduciary duty to shareholders.” Basically, once a company is public, the board has to act in the best interests of the shareholders (which means maximizing returns and/or shareprice.)
This is terrible for the world but pretending it doesn’t exist doesn’t help.
That’s not true. Courts have specifically ruled that maximizing returns is NOT required. The companies do have to consider the best interests of the shareholders, but that does not strictly mean maximizing profits:
I would re-read that article a bit more closely. The point they’re making is that recently there have been developments such that maximizing profits is not seen as the SOLE principle behind decision making above all else.
For example, they cite Hobby Lobby which has Christian practices that doubtless cut into profits but are allowed as part of the company’s mission.
But my apologies, a more accurate phrasing would’ve been duty to shareholders and the company.
Still, unless Apple has a really interesting company charter, annoying a capricious manufacturer of almost everything the company needs that is ALSO one of the world’s largest markets, well, not that tough a multi billion dollar decision.
Duty ≠ law
Duty is a legal concept, silly Billy.
You can commit a crime by violating a duty. A common one of which you’ve probably heard is “duty of care” I.e., a doctor can be charged with a crime by not fulfilling their duty of care to a patient.
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/legal/personal-injury/breach-of-duty/
I almost want to look up confidently incorrect. Just maybe learn from this and try googling when you are unfamiliar with a term, you look less silly!
Show me what law enforcers a company to profit.
You’re getting confused or you might not actually understand how companies work, so I’ll break it down.
There is no law forcing a company to profit. (Though Companies are generally formed for that purpose.) A private organization could do whatever it wants within legal bounds. (This is how non profits, charitable foundations etc exist.)
But, what happens next is many companies go “public” by selling shares. In essence, they put a percentage of themselves on the market and people by shares in that company, such that they, legally speaking, own a tiny percentage of that company. Part of that purchase is that the company now has a fiduciary duty to the shareholders. As noted before, a duty is a legal concept like assault, negligence etc. And I explained fiduciary duty earlier, you can look through.
Here is kind of a classic example of a company losing a case because its directors breached their fiduciary duty to minority shareholders:
Apple is pretty reliant on China for other aspects of their business though. HBO doesn’t make phones.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
But ahead of production kicking off on the show’s third season, Stewart and Apple have reportedly parted ways over “creative differences,” and The Problem is coming to an end.
Though new episodes of the show were scheduled to begin shooting in just a few weeks, staffers learned today that production had been halted.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, ahead of its decision to end The Problem, Apple approached Stewart directly and expressed its need for the host and his team to be “aligned” with the company’s views on topics discussed.
Rather than falling in line when Apple threatened to cancel the show, Stewart reportedly decided to walk.
The Times’ report doesn’t detail what about the show’s planned coverage of artificial intelligence and China prompted Apple’s executive leadership to butt heads with Stewart.
But considering how pointed criticality is a big part of what ultimately made The Problem With Jon Stewart a hit for Apple TV Plus and how maintaining a cordial relationship with China is crucial to Apple’s future plans for growth, it doesn’t come as a shock to see the show hit the chopping block this way.
The original article contains 283 words, the summary contains 188 words. Saved 34%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
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