I Can’t Buy Apple Products Anymore

Guest Post by James the Deplorable Wanderer

Background article: https://thefederalist.com/2020/02/12/in-apple-case-feds-green-light-corporate-discrimination-against-conservatives/

This is making me somewhat sad, and not a little depressed.

I like Apple computers. They are simpler, easier and work better than nearly any IBM / Lenovo computers on the market. Not always, not in every department (Apple mainframes are woefully under-represented in quantum computing, engineering workstations outside the creative arts, weather forecasting). But what they do, they do really, really well.

And this is not an empty complaint: I still have (in storage at the moment) my original Apple IIe. Which I bought NEW, in 1981. Along with my Performa, Imac G4 (in designer violet case) and now a recent-vintage all-in-one (a gift from my father-in-law, who used it for genealogy research mostly. It wandered from my son (the original giftee) to my daughter (who gamed on it) to me.

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THIS DAY IN HISTORY – Apple founder Steve Jobs dies – 2011

Via History.com

On October 5, 2011, Steve Jobs, the visionary co-founder of Apple Inc., which revolutionized the computer, music and mobile communications industries with such devices as the Macintosh, iPod, iPhone and iPad, dies at age 56 of complications from pancreatic cancer.

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Technological Trends are Arrows Pointing Toward Inevitability

By Doug “Uncola” Lynn via TheBurningPlatform.com

In the movie “I, Robot” the actor Will Smith played a detective who distrusted robots. But all of the other characters in the film believed he was paranoid because, after all, what could possibly go wrong?  And therein lies the irony of technology today: The human mind can conceive of the most imaginative ways to apply science while simultaneously ignoring the warnings from history and the pernicious potentialities of Pandora’s Box.

The fifth article I posted on my blog was dated three years ago today. It was titled “How to Transplant a Human Head” and remains, even now, as one of my favorites; perhaps because it so directly addressed the Pandora’s Box of my own fear.  In that article, it was described as follows:

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Apple’s Rotten Core

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

Entering commoditized, fiercely competitive low-margin services cannot substitute for the high-margin profits that will be lost as global recession and saturation erode iPhone sales.

Apple has always been equally an enterprise and a secular religion. The Apple Faithful do not tolerate heretics or critics, and non-believers “just don’t get it.”

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Happy Birthday America: 144 Revelations from June, 2018

By Doug “Uncola” Lynn via TheBurningPlatform.com

Just as destination is determined by direction, so too are transitions roads to revelations.  In other words, today’s trends are tomorrow’s historical markers.  With that in mind, and for the purposes of cataloguing news articles in outright defiance against increasing internet censorship and memory-holed search engine results, the following disclosures occurred between the dates of June 1-30, 2018.

Although the list may be overly comprehensive for some, this blogger desired encyclopedic documentation for posterity, as well as to compare tracking from previous months.

For the reader’s convenience, the revelations are again sorted into the same category headings that were utilized for May, 2018; and, for those in a hurry who wish to bypass the entire “trifling minutia”, there are some concluding comments and questions at the end:

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How Our Country Was Stolen

Guest Post by Paul Craig Roberts

Today is Easter, an important Christian holiday. But it is not marked on the calendar that is part of the Apple software that came with my Apple computer lap top. Today is also April Fools day, and that is marked on the Apple-supplied calendar. For Apple’s programmers, April Fools Day trumps Easter.

How can it be that an American company, Apple, can remember to mark on the calendar Cinco de Mayo (May 5), Mexico’s commemoration of a Mexican army victory of the French in the Battle of Puebla in 1862, but not Easter?

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A Digital Noose ‘Round Every Corner

By Doug “Uncola” Lynn via TheBurningPlatform.com

Graduation season.  Parties, commencements, speeches and lots and lots of photos.  Recently, I loaded all of the pictures onto a PC and saved them into a folder, digitally labeled and timestamped, for posterity.  The next day, I noticed a message from Microsoft.  It said:  “Click here to see the photo album we created for you!”  I clicked and saw the very same photos I had loaded just hours before.  However, I never requested for my personal memories to be shared, let alone arranged into an album organized by the company whose operating system runs my computer.  Evidently, somewhere a while back, a box must have been checked, or unchecked, thus surrendering my right to privacy.

Every day I receive e-mail requests from Linkedin.com, Facebook and other networking websites to follow, like, or join, with people I am actually acquainted with in the real world.  The messages ask me if I “know” them as I see their photos and information along with the opportunity to electronically consummate with them, should I so choose.


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STUPID IS AS STUPID DOES

If you prefer fake news, fake data, and a fake narrative about an improving economy and stock market headed to 30,000, don’t read this fact based, reality check article. The level of stupidity engulfing the country has reached epic proportions, as the mainstream fake news networks flog bullshit Russian conspiracy stories, knowing at least 50% of the non-thinking iGadget distracted public believes anything they hear on the boob tube.

This stupendous degree of utter stupidity goes to a new level of idiocy when it comes to the stock market. The rigged fleecing machine known as Wall Street has gone into hyper-drive since futures dropped by 700 points on the night of Trump’s election. An already extremely overvalued market, as measured by every historically accurate valuation metric, soared by 4,000 points from that futures low – over 20% – to an all-time high. Despite dozens of warning signs and the experience of two 40% to 50% crashes in the last fifteen years, lemming like investors are confident the future is so bright they gotta wear shades.

The current bull market is the 2nd longest in history at 8 years. In March of 2009, the S&P 500 bottomed at a fitting level for Wall Street of 666. In a shocking coincidence, it bottomed on the same day Bernanke & Geithner forced the FASB to rollover like mangy dogs and stop enforcing mark to market accounting. Amazingly, when Wall Street banks, along with Fannie and Freddie, could value their toxic assets at whatever they chose, profits surged. The market is now 240% higher.

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BLACK iPHONES MATTER

The San Francisco Police Department has released video footage showing two daring robberies at a local Apple store. In both, a group of men walk in and grab whatever they can from display counters at a lightning fast speed, leaving shop assistants and customers stunned.


HOW ABOUT THEM APPLES – $14.5 BILLION OF THEM

Concluding a two-year long investigation, the European Commission has ordered Apple to pay up to €13 billion ($14.5 billion) in back taxes for its subsidiaries in Ireland. The Commission argues that Apple received “undue tax benefits” between 2003 and 2014, violating EU state aid rules.

As our chart illustrates, Apple’s provisions for income taxes outside of the United States amounted to just $4.89 billion during said period. According to the European Commission’s statement, the company paid an effective tax rate ranging from 1 percent in 2003 to 0.005 percent in 2014 on its European profits during the time. To put that in perspective, Apple paid an effective tax rate of 26.1 percent in the United States in 2014, with income taxes adding up to almost $60 billion between 2003 and 2014.

Both Apple and Ireland have already denied the Commission’s allegations and announced that they are going to appeal against today’s ruling. It will be interesting to see how this plays out in the end, as it may be the first case of a company being ordered to pay back taxes to a government that doesn’t even want the money.

Infographic: Apple's Foreign Tax Payments Since 2003 | Statista
You will find more statistics at Statista

APPLE HAS DONE IT AGAIN

Hat tip Francis Marion

Apple computer announced today that it has developed a computer chip that can store and play Hi Fi music in women’s Breast implants. They will cost between $499 and $699.00 depending on speaker size. This is considered to be a major breakthrough because women have always complained about men staring at their tits and not listening to them.


First They Came For the iPhones…

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The FBI tells us that its demand for a back door into the iPhone is all about fighting terrorism, and that it is essential to break in just this one time to find out more about the San Bernardino attack last December. But the truth is they had long sought a way to break Apple’s iPhone encryption and, like 9/11 and the PATRIOT Act, a mass murder provided just the pretext needed. After all, they say, if we are going to be protected from terrorism we have to give up a little of our privacy and liberty. Never mind that government spying on us has not prevented one terrorist attack.

Apple has so far stood up to a federal government’s demand that it force its employees to write a computer program to break into its own product. No doubt Apple CEO Tim Cook understands the damage it would do to his company for the world to know that the US government has a key to supposedly secure iPhones. But the principles at stake are even higher. We have a fundamental right to privacy. We have a fundamental right to go about our daily life without the threat of government surveillance of our activities. We are not East Germany.

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US Government ‘Asks’ Tech Companies To Tweak Algos, Promote Certain Content

Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

You probably had no idea, but representatives from Silicon Valley, Hollywood and the U.S. government came together earlier this week to privately discuss how they could jointly fight ISIS propaganda online. Never mind the fact that ISIS is the child of reckless and inhumane preemptive wars of aggression perpetrated by the U.S. government. Such introspection naturally never crosses the mind of government bureaucrats ostensibly attempting to understand the epic disasters they created in the first place.

So who attended the meeting? We don’t know for sure because the plebes aren’t entitled to know such things. Fortunately, we have become privy to some information thanks to Buzzfeed News. Here’s what we learned: