As a person who has been receiving the "non-american" pay for the past few years in the IT industry, after familiarizing with the compensation norm, I may be 5-10% below the median. This is mostly attributed to asking conservatively in order to get the foot in the door. I also survived multiple rounds of layoffs (so far), and thought that the wage to productivity ratio has to do with it.

Even so I feel pretty comfortable affording the current standard of living. As long as it is still legal for a foreign person to find work in the US, and personally knowing many current foreign students who are willing to go through the same experience that I did, Americans are expected to continue to feel the same wage pressure and competition from this group of foreign graduates, who will take up real, secure jobs that other Americans probably can use to fulfill the American dream. In my opinion, the h1b sweat shops are simply a proxy for contracting to overseas and does not really mattters.

Examples of price discrimination

A detestable practice when taken to the extreme. Especially when in electronic world where consumer's data is increasingly used to exploit the consumers themselves, rather than help businesses provide better services.

IANAL, It looks like price discrimination is only illegal if it hampers competition, but not if it only unfairly treats a certain segment of consumers.

Don't underestimate a world's population of teenagers, young people who are more willing to part with the paycheck from their few years of working life, or high income folks who have abundant discretionary cash. I think even without Jobs, they can easily continue to market to these groups as long as there's no worthy competition. Apple don't need to make sense to everyone in the world, just those who are easy on their money.

If valuing based on dividends, you need to consider the possibility of the company growing for several years, and, upon reaching mature state, starts to pay dividends. In a few years time, earnings may have grown several times due to reinvestment and growth, and the resulting annual dividend payout would be a sizable amount. You'd get a justifiable price today by discounting the hypothetical payout.

However, many things could happen between now and then. Management can hoard the money and give themselves big bonuses, buy out/crush competition at significant premium, issue more stocks thus diluting the dividends, or the company could grow in size but keeping profits low (thus low dividends if any). These factors have to do with the quality of governance, safeguarding shareholders interests.

A shrewd investor should gauge the real possibility of the company being run into the ground by its management and board of directors.

Bear in mind that analog SD will be turned off next year. No more fuzzy picture, more HD programming, HD sports coverage and you can even read the small prints in Cialis commercial. When more people are forced to move to 1080i/p, it makes a ton more sense for the competition to lower the price of bluray players to compete for the additional market share. Before then, it doesn't make much business sense when not enough people are buying HDTVs.