Letters to the Editor
sunspot
Published Letters: 355 Editor's Choice: 43
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Not Surprised
[Read the article: Please stop whining, iPhone early adopters]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Even the most Apple loyal observer must agree that this was unexpected.
I'm hardly a loyal Apple observer, but I'm not particularly surprised to see the iPhone price plunge after just a couple of months. Cell phone prices tend to drop rapidly to begin with - the Motorola RAZR went from expensive to cheap within about a year's time - and the iPhone was being extensively beta tested by Apple for several months before it was finally released to the public. I'm sure the original price was set sometime early this year and it probably made perfect sense at the time, but my guess is that once they finally ramped up manufacturing and looked at the numbers the iPhone turned out to be a lot cheaper to manufacture in August than it had looked like it was going to be in February or March. Apple also gets a monthly cut from AT&T, and if iPhone sales exceeded projections then those monthly revenues could help to offset some of the price cut, too.
Apple's also clearly sharing some iPhone components in the new iPod Touch, including the operating system and interface design. That's going to result in substantial cost savings for them as well. It's nice to see them pass that along to their customers for a change instead of clinging to fat margins, which has traditionally been Apple's modus operandi.
As Apple slowly transitions from being a computer maker to being a consumer electronics company a la Sony, Panasonic or Philips they'll probably continue this drift toward a low margin, high volume model. Given their successes so far in this field, they could easily become a dominant consumer electronics player over the next decade.
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Deja Vu All Over Again
[Read the article: Countrywide hits an iceberg]
[Read more letters about this article: Here][Mozilo] assured his audience that Countrywide's "proprietary technology" would help it meet its goal "to avoid any foreclosure."
Sounds just like the crap that credit card outfit Providian was spewing, just before it imploded a few years ago.
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I thought 9/11 changed everything?
[Read the article: Thompson proposes a new gay marriage amendment]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Looks like the Wide Stance Party is still obsessed with the gays. How'd that work out for you in the last election, boyz?
Maybe Thompson and his ilk should worry less about which constituents want to get married to which constituents, and more about what their own Party's Senators and Representatives are doing in the bathroom with Congressional Pages. Gay marriage is the least of the problems faced by our Brokeback Toilet Republicans.
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The value of a dollar
[Read the article: The oil price paradox]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]As another letter pointed out, oil isn't going up in price - at least not at the moment - the dollar is declining in value. It costs more dollars to buy a barrel of oil as a result.
Oil probably will be going up in price on a global basis soon enough though, as China's wild growth continues and as demand continues to rise across the globe. Supply clearly isn't going to keep up. No massive new fields have been discovered, and you can only pump oil so fast out of our existing fields - especially since many of them appear to be in decline.
Mexico is fast running out of oil. If you think illegal immigration is an issue now in the US, wait until their economy completely collapses after the oil crutch is yanked out from under it.
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And this is bad HOW exactly?
[Read the article: John Edwards ponies up the subprime cash]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Regarding Barney Franks’defense of the regulated lenders: many of the people who are losing their homes would never have been able to buy them in the first place because they couldn’t qualify for loans under traditional underwriting including FHAs.
And the problem with this is what, exactly?
These people didn't "buy" a home. They bought a huge pile of debt they couldn't hope to pay off, and by entering the market they helped to inflate the cost of all homes, pricing a lot of legitimate buyers right out of the market. So now we end up with lots of empty homes and lots of "buyers" whose credit has been trashed and who almost certainly ended up losing more money on the homes they obviously couldn't afford than they'd have spent renting. Then there are the people stuck renting all this time when they could have bought if home prices hadn't been bid up as a result of fraudulent lending practices. And of course there are the banks and lending institutions who perpetrated this fraud and are now all teetering on the edge of insolvency. So naturally these free marketeers are now looking to the taxpayers for a hundred-billion dollar plus handout, because that's what free market libertarian clowns do when they hopelessly trash the companies they run and send the economy crashing into the mud.
It's a classic example of how unregulated markets lead to nothing but fraud and a vast misallocation of resources. They're ultimately far less efficient at generating wealth as a result, except for a small handful of well-connected criminals.
What kind of an idiot could possibly defend such obvious kleptocratic behavior?