Tariffs are only a sneaky way to tax US consumers to make political insiders rich. There is no "foreign advantage" all trade is a two way street. Every dollar we spend overseas comes back either as purchases of goods, services or investment.

Understand that all benefits and payroll taxes come out of the employee's wages. Mandating them just means employees will make less in cash income, without ever giving them the choice.

Personally at my startup I have to strongly consider paying my early employees under the table. I had one employee a couple years ago, paid him legally and it ended up creating a ton of work filing various tax forms and withholdings every quarter, and getting called by the state because they didn't get my statement even though I sent them my statement it was the wrong statement, etc. All time I couldn't spend finding customers to keep the business going.

Well, it's not being spent on private jet rides and ferraris. It's in banks being loaned out to companies, so that's beneficial too.

And lots of cases where companies have huge sums tucked away are because they are off-shore profits, if they bring those home they'd lose around 40% to taxes (depending upon their home state). If we eliminated corporate income tax you'd never see that, trillions of overseas dollars would be repatriated instantly, some reinvested, and most dividended to shareholders. If we made dividends just ordinary income taxed at taxed at regular income rates in exchange for eliminating corporate income taxes the government probably wouldn't lose that much in income taxes, and the system would much more favor investing in the US.

I agree with you there is a business strategy reason for pre-announcing, but it doesn't make your product better, it's just an attempt to freeze sales of competitors, and I don't think it works except in very special circumstances. For the market to care, you have to announce something that is going to be better/cheaper, and you have to have a track record in that space of delivering quality products.

Microsoft has no VR/AR track record, there isn't a VR/AR market to speak of, it has a track history of announcing then canceling products (every tablet ever until the Surface), of shipping disappointing first release products (every product ever including the Surface and Xbox), etc. Pre-announcing Hololens is giving away every innovative idea to competitors well ahead of launch, even ahead of fixing the problems with the product.

Microsoft has massive resources, it can silently develop hololens for years until it's truly ready, and when it launches it will make a big splash. No one needed to be teased about the iPod.

You said it better than I did.

I'm building my own startup and I think about Jobs' demanding attention to detail every day, especially when I think about half-assing how a feature works. I always realize that the customer isn't going to know or care about my need to get to market ASAP, if I half-ass it they are just going to say "this doesn't work right" or worse "this doesn't work at all", so I go the extra mile to polish and make it work intuitively and well.

It's the same process that produced the iPod, iPhone and iPad. And ironically Apple is know for how frugal and efficient it's R&D spending is. Or how underfunded it's R&D is, from the perspective of analysts focused on comparing that line item in their income statements to other public companies.

The truth is Apple has proven it knows how to build quality consumer products at the right price points. Even post jobs, the Apple Watch, priced at surprisingly high price points, had higher revenues than probably any watch in history it's first year, and more revenues than the iPhone did it's first year. It had lots of competition from cheaper, less capable smartwaches, but sales results say Apple hit the sweet spot of what customers wanted.

And Apple hasn't had a significant product flop since the Newton, which pre-dated Job's return and entire restructuring of product development and R&D. It's product development process is the best in the hardware side of the business (it's web services on the other hand...).

I'm fine with NASA's manned flights taking more risk to accomplish more and sooner, but it seems like the Dragon capsule is the "safer risk" given it's inherent safety mechanisms.

Look at my other comment about the nearly 10 year development time line Jobs had for the iPad, and how he canceled it at least once and had the team start over. You can do lots of highly experimental products without releasing them, and keep going back to redo them and make them better.

Jobs was also paranoid about any innovations they came up with not being leaked to competitors, which I think is a reasonable fear. The iPhone was the first touchscreen phone to actually work well because of a lot of little innovations like proximity sensing that made it possible to confidently make phone calls without accidentally launching other apps with your cheek. Once someone sees that it's "duh obvious" to rip that off and get it their products. Why announce/show/launch 2 years early when the product isn't as good, and everyone gets to see all your best ideas before you are able to polish them and make the product as good as it needs to be?

Yea, but no product release thats the point. Both companies have pressure from the outside to show they are doing something in VR/AR, but Apple has always (since Jobs return) had the discipline to not ship products until they were ready. A couple articles with minor leaks doesn't change that, Apple has done no public demos. So either those leaks were corporate blessed to calm down analysis's, or just random employee leaks.

The best example is the iPad. It was actually ready for production but canceled by Jobs last minute because he didn't think it was a good enough product. Instead he sent the team back to see if they could take their ideas and make a phone out of it, and we got the iPhone instead. When the iPhone became a success, the team was allowed to go back and redo the iPad, and only then did Jobs deem it ready for the market.

An example that that mentality is still strong in product marketing at Apple would be the Apple Watch. Whether you think it was a finished product or not (it definitely had rough edges), it was a successful one ($6B+ first year sales, probably 10x the rest of the smartwatch market combined, biggest watch launch ever). Very little was leaked before it's launch other than the idea Apple was working on a watch.

The Senate Launch System is an adequate replacement for the Shuttle, it will waste almost as much taxpayer money, but at least be able to lift crews out of LEO.

Isn't it a bit strange that they won't approve a Dragon capsule for human use without a full unmanned test, yet now they are going to risk lives without a test on the SLS? At least the Dragon has a reasonable escape system.

A far better place for a base launching deep space missions would be the lagrange points on earth orbits. There are near earth asteroids that can be hollowed out, and mined for fuel without the immense costs of DeltaV to land massive amounts of mining/production/power plant equipment on the moon, and launch ships from it. An extra 2.5 Km/sec gets you lots of places in the solar system quite a bit faster.

Are we talking about the $200B Space Shuttle that killed two crews? The one that had the same payload capacity as a $60M Falcon 9?

Can't wait for the Senate Launch System to start putting crews in space for more than 10x the cost of a Falcon Heavy.

Until it was ready for release. It's just bad product management to tease products that aren't ready for release yet, solve the main problems behind locked doors first.

I don't want a job or your benefits. You are advocating a tax on me, a contractor, that's going to lower my wages and make it harder for me to find work.