That Japan Times article is hilarious

So your own link reveals that stress was a greater killer than any combination of a massive earthquake, massive tidal wave AND nuclear meltdown, which only shows how dangerous irresponsible reporting is (like the headline in the article, oddly).

While I don't disagree with you about the need for equality, the quote

is a canard.
For the same roles with the same experiences any differences between male and female employees looks like statistical noise. The variation only appears if you consider all male and all females regardless of age, experience, role or any other consideration.

It appears that the major barrier to equal earnings is still that females tend to take extended maternity leave and career breaks to raise children which leaves them with less experience at a similar age to their male counterparts. So later in her career the female employee will earn less, but then so will the male who started the career later in life.

This is a little confusing - each card has 3 Card Verification Values (which, depending on the type of card can be CVV, CID or CVC - lets use CVV)

CVV is stored on the track data.
CVV2 is the one on your card. It is transmitted as a separate field for non-card-present transactions (eCommerce, for instance).
CVV3, also known as dCVV (dynamic card verification value) is an EMV thing.

Most people use CVV to refer to CVV2.

This whole token thing is not AMEX only, Mastercard and Visa published specifications on this already and are certifying their acquirers. AMEX are late to the party :) The specifications are transitional at the moment, so the acquirer sends the token, and what's called the Token Service Provider (TSP, yay for TLA's) de-tokenizes it, then the real values are sent to the issuer for authorization.
The TSP can be the Switch (AMEX, Mastercard, Visa, etc.) or the card issuer, or a separate provider somewhere else that does only this.

If you think that without government regulation we would not all be paying on MasterVISA cards with all other competitors being summarily crushed I have some bad news for you...

They can all do fall back, but in practise in much of Europe, if your Chip fails you better have cash or a nearby bank, because most merchants won't take the risk on a mag-stripe. The transaction fees are higher because the fraud risk is higher.

EMV support is being mandated in the US by the card networks over the course of the next year or so, so POS system upgrades are or will be happening even if you don't see it locally right now.

That's a fair enough point. When you say "playing in that sandbox" I was thinking beyond casual meddling, which is what I think the post I was responding to was referring to. Ike absolutely refused to put combat troops on the ground, even at a high cost to the US-French relations. The advisors, observers and intelligence people I was putting to one side.

Ike point blank refused to get involved in Vietnam, both when it was French Indochina (which indirectly led to NATO becuase the French vetoed a European Defense Force as a result) and afterwards. He was, as I recall, quoted as saying something along the lines of "if we go in there it will be difficult to get out". He was not, however, against giving the French tactical nuclear artillery shells until the British asked him if he was insane.

Ike was most definitely not playing in that particular sandbox.

I'm always amused the way that hurricane damage is reported in dollar damage, particularly in Florida. More people live on the coast now, so these places have more stuff to trash when a hurricane makes landfall. This is not happening any more frequently or with any more intensity than in the past, it just costs more to fix the more stuff. Miami-Dade county went from 500,000 to 2.5 million (approximately!) between 1950 and 2013. That's a 500% increase in population so anything less than a 500% increase in damage costs in the area would be surprising.

One of the things to note is that the developing economies have a huge opportunity to skip the crappy polluting coal plant step and jump directly to better solutions - it happened with mobile technology (many sub-saharan countries have extremely well developed mobile networks but no landlines, for instance) and internet (here in Romania I get 150 Mb/s download plus cable TV for about 15 euro per month, entirely uncapped - in Ireland it cost 70 euro per month for 50 Mb/s download which was capped). This happened because they missed the "crappy internet" stage of internet evolution that Ireland is still struggling out of.

Well, the trader has one point - the Tesla batteries are serious tech. With the advent of many things that could use them (airliners, other electric cars, trains, etc), and the fact that current batteries are frankly shit, if Tesla batteries are that much better then they would need to build a vault to hold the piles of money that they would get. However, he has a market for the cars and they are driving the battery tech, so it would be nuts at this point. If the car making business starts to dry up, then they have a second core competency that they can keep building around.

I'm guessing you have never read any of Heinlein's papers - and if you read the book Starship Troopers I suggest you read it again. Along with all of his work not tagged as "Young Adult". You might not agree with him but he was writing stuff that was unthinkable at the time.

Military participation was not the the road. It was _one_ road. Other forms of service existed and anyone could start as it was a legal requirement. There was, in the book, no war when Rico joined. The key was danger in service, and the war started while he was still in service. His father was a successful business owner was adamantly against Rico joining the military.

Heinlein also discussed a female only government in other writings (his conclusion was something along the lines of "it can't be worse than the mostly males ones, and it might be better") and in Stranger in a Strange Land manages to break every single social taboo of the day. In the Moon is a Harsh Mistress he describes what stable poly relationships would look like and how living in a hostile environment with a scarcity of females enforced social order.

He also gave a KGB officer a lecture on why communism was bad while in Russia in 1960 when the U2 spyplane was shot down, translated by his wife (who had learned Russian from tapes over 2 years at home).

Basically, you got what you wanted to out of the book, but I would suggest that you didn't get the actual book.

Your smug assertion that I expect to live off other's taxes despite knowing nothing about me aside, let me respond.

You trimmed the first quote. I didn't say that Apple isn't paying you dividends, I said they're not paying it out of that cash pile (which they are not). Their EPS and their dividend is respectable enough without it so they don't need to.

Your basis is irrelevant to the general point I was making (and I still bet that things did look better at ~$700 per share)! The point I'm trying to make is that the size of that the cash pile is giving no value to shareholders. If Apple increased their dividend by 100% by bringing back some of their billions and paying taxes on them, how is that losing stockholder value? The truth is, no stockholder value is diluted and any stockholder who took a case would lose.

That money is not being used and cannot be used without taking the tax penalty. Expansion and investment in infrastructure comes out of the budget before taxes are assessed (and in many cases can be offset against the tax bill anyway), so it does not hinder either of these. You could argue that it's underpinning the share price but I strongly disagree - Apple's performace as a company is what affects the share price and Apple's amazing performance continues which i'm sure delights you as an Apple shareholder.

On to your point number 2. Whether you hate your government or not (and the state of political discourse in the US at the moment is deeply saddening), surely you must see that govenment investment in infrastructure and education is important? Personally, I pay all my taxes and while it doesn't delight me I make sure they are paid because I believe that the benefits are worth it. That goes double for every company - their employees were educated by the state, they travel on infrastructure built by the state and they are largely safer than they have ever been before from crime due to society agreeing to give the state powers to punish criminals. They can trade internationally within a structure that enables exactly this, and ship their goods, both manufactured and virtual, on infrastructure that largely comes from investment encouraged by or flat out made by their governments. They are standing on the shoulders of all those invested in this beforehand by contributing by way of taxes. Why shouldn't the companies that have benefited from this long-term investment contribute back when they are successful?

No, I'm not high. If they bring that money anywhere they have to pay taxes on it. This is not used for funding expansions - that comes out of another budget (and all gets written off as investment against revenue anyway). This is money sitting in a pile that they don't really have a use for right now in a tax haven.

Traditionally a proprtion of this would be re-invested in the business (it's not because a) they don't need to and b) it's cheaper for them to borrow money using their cash pile as security than it is to use it for tax reasons), used to buy back stock, or distributed as dividends. Apple is paying dividends, but that cash pile is not actually doing anything.

The cash pile is making some large investors nervous because historically companies with big cash piles end up wasting them.

That's not correct, the company has to be tax-resident somewhere. So of course they are tax resident somewhere there is a 0% tax rate (Bermuda, in this case).

Except Apple employs thousands of people in Ireland - it's not a shell company.