Chinese and Japanese grammar have very little relation to each other - about as much as Chinese and English. (The alphabets are, of course, very similar, as the Japanese adopted Chinese characters.)
The Japanese use Chinese characters. The Japanese also have alphabets. (At least two.) But Chinese characters aren't exactly an alphabet and the Japanese don't use Chinese characters directly as an alphabet, though many characters are based on Chinese ones.
Since we're being technical, Japanese does not have any alphabet as such; an alphabet has, by definition, a 1 to 1 correspondence between a single character and a sound. Japanese uses syllabaries ('kana' in Japanese), where almost all characters represent more than 1 sound. Hiragana is typically used to write Japanese words and grammatical particles, while katakana is typically used to write foreign words and for special emphasis, roughly analogous to how boldface type is used in English. Both of these kana are derived from Chinese characters, greatly simplified, though the relationship is somewhat distant.
Japanese also uses a third writing system called kanji, also not an alphabet, whose name literally means "Han [Chinese] characters" in Japanese. Kanji are logographs, where one character represents one entire word or concept rather than sounds.
Most kanji are identical or very similar to modern Chinese characters and are readily intelligible to a Chinese reader, at least in a general sense, though some have diverged a bit.
Grammar is another matter entirely. Japanese is a language isolate, a language that is not related to any other known language. (Someone will reply that it's distantly related to Korean, but this is a fringe theory in linguistics that is not widely accepted.) Chinese and Japanese are not grammatically related at all, and any similarity between their syntaxes is coincidental.
>a 1 to 1 correspondence between a single character and a sound.
While you're correct that the Japanese writing system is not an alphabet, I feel like your definition here is so vague it almost contradicts your point. After all, each kana character has a much closer correspondence with a particular "sound" than many actual alphabets.
So to clarify, the characters of an alphabet (notionally) correspond to particular phonemes.
At the least, Korean has voiced-versus-non-voiced-depending-on-word-position changes, and IIRC there are other similar rules (about changing pronunciation in certain contexts) as well.
> Japanese is a language isolate, a language that is not related to any other known language. Someone will reply that it's distantly related to Korean, but this is a fringe theory in linguistics that is not widely accepted
When using some strict definition of "related" (e.g. "neither language is a strict descendent of the other"), that may be true, but anybody that's studied both languages has probably noticed that there's an eery similarity between the two, even if it's merely the result of many centuries of cross-pollenization....
My own experience is not so great, I've only studied Korean a bit, but I did study it in Japanese (which I know fairly well), and the similarity made it a lot easier, because so many things corresponded 1-to-1... However Korean friends that are fluent in Japanese constantly rave about how easy it was for them to learn, not just because of the huge amount of shared Chinese-derivative vocabulary (many words are completely identical, with formulaic changes in pronunciation), but because the whole structure of grammar, sentence/conversation-planning, idioms, etc, is so similar that a huge proportion of their Korean instincts pretty much just work as-is in Japanese.
Spoken Japanese and Chinese have little to no relation, except for Chinese words imported into Japanese.
Hiragana, however, is derived from Chinese characters thousands of years ago. The Chinese characters were used in Japanese writing to write words phonetically.
I think the point is to get the data into Excel. You can use the API wherever you like, but how are you going to get it into a live spreadsheet? (Writing to a CSV and importing the result isn't the same thing.)
Excel is a great tool, but it has its shortcomings. The article is highlighting the main one: it's easy to build huge, brittle systems with Excel.
This immediately brings up questions: What tools exist for building robust spreadsheets? How can we encourage people to use them? Should we make better ones?
Like the article says, SQLite is a good choice when you're starting out. It's included in Python and is great for the basics.
Once you have a lot of data, it really depends on your specific situation. If you don't have any preferences, you can try something new - MongoDB is interesting.
MongoDB/NoSQL is not for the type of analysis mentioned in the article and is NOT a replacement for a spreadsheet.
Out of all the nosql options, why pick the one with the most broken default configuration? People complain that MongoDB is has a bad rep when used for things its not meant to, and then its constantly offered as solution.
This article, and others like it, imply that what Apple is doing is unethical. However, the opposite is true: it would be negligent for Apple not to do this.
Apple's responsibility is to its shareholders, and that responsibity is to maximize profits. Because it stands to lose billions of dollars in taxes if its income is reported naievely, it makes perfect sense for Apple to spend millions, tens of millions, or even hundreds of millions to optimize its tax flow.
As long as nothing illegal is happening, this is just an exams of a company fulfilling its fiduciary duty to its owners.
If people think this behavior is egregious and needs to change, the solution is to pass new laws to that extent. No one is going to voluntarily overpay on their taxes.
>This article, and others like it, imply that what Apple is doing is unethical. However, the opposite is true: it would be negligent for Apple not to do this. Apple's responsibility is to its shareholders, and that responsibity is to maximize profits.
Ethical, to have a meaning in the common sense, has to refer to "the society as a whole" -- not to whom you have a "responsibility to".
A gang member also has a responsibility to his gang members (e.g to maximize profit and get rid of people causing trouble there too). That doesn't make his crimes "ethical".
So, no, it can be legal and not ethical. Finding corner cases to side-step the spirit of the law is not regarded "ethical" in any place I know of.
Your gang metaphor makes no sense because Apple is not committing any crimes.
A better metaphor would be a U.S. citizen who takes the IRS standard deduction even though they know that their itemized deductions would be less. Is that unethical?
What about people who use TurboTax software, which helps them find deductions that they would not have otherwise known about? Is that unethical?
In addition, consider the society of nations as a whole. The U.S. alone among developed nations expects its companies to pay U.S. taxes on profits earned globally. If Apple were a French, Dutch, English, German, etc. company then this conversation would not even be happening. They would just pay the local tax rate and then repatriate the remaining earnings.
The problem is that it is not always clear cut what is legal and what is illegal when it comes to taxation on an international scale.
Tax laws are often written in language that lays out principles - such as profit should be booked in the country that the sale takes place in - but it is very easy to manipulate "profits" to make them appear in other countries. If a company goes too far to manipulate profits out of a country with relatively high taxes it can become illegal - but it would take a full investigation to determine this.
More certainly can and should be done to close loopholes and improve coordination between countries, but it is not a simple matter of a country writing "a new law" to fix the problem.
There is this running joke here in France with our local Superman, Super Dupont. The guy's so patriotic and so proud of his country that he regularly pays his taxes late to pay the tax penalties and support his country.
On topic, it's funny that the Congress seems so eager to treat Apple as a one of a kind bad boy whereas most of this industry is doing the same, and would be stupid not to. They bring more to their country than if they were blindingly paying the taxes the Congress think they should pay: more money means more products and more jobs. Simplistic view of the whole thing, I admit, but if France has shown one thing, is that we don't gain competitivity by suffocating companies with taxes.
But that's exactly it: at what point does tax "avoidance" become unethical or "civically irresponsible". After all, Apple is operating in the USA: doesn't it have a responsibility to the country (and state), along with it's shareholders and customers?
The point is that Apple is not just operating in the USA; it is operating around the world and makes profits around the world. No one disputes that Apple pays U.S. taxes on their U.S. operations, and no one has accused them of moving U.S. profits overseas to avoid taxes. The big to-do is entirely about their earnings overseas.
The question of the ethics of international taxation is complicated by the fact that most countries in the world do not expect their companies to pay both local taxes and domestic taxes; the U.S. does. So it is not like Apple is violating some broad standard of behavior. If anything the U.S. tax system is the aberration.
No. Its singular obligation is to the shareholders - not even to the customers, except insofar as that builds longterm shareholder value.
Of course, in practice there's a lot of leeway in deciding how much attention one should pay to customers; loyal customers are key to a company's success.
Whether or not to pay extra taxes, however, is cut and dry. There's virtually no benefit to Apple in voluntarily paying a higher tax, so it doesn't do so. Any obligation it has to the state must be explicitly stated in law. There's no concept of civic irresponsibility for companies; that's exactly what laws are for. there's only legal and illegal.
I couldn't agree more. I think most of the public would agree that corporations aren't paying their fair share of tax but it's wrong to accuse them of doing something unethical. They are doing their job and maximising profits. It's up to the government to fix the many loopholes in tax regulations. The current tactic of trying to embarrass companies in to paying more tax is just a waste of everybody's time. If the government can't do it's job right and close the loopholes they have no right to complain to companies that they aren't paying enough tax.
You're confused about the meaning of "unethical". What Apple is doing is lawful, apparently. But it is certainly unethical at the same time; everyone has a moral duty to contribute to society and make it function, and Apple is shirking that duty.
It can't be unethical. They have a legal obligation to their shareholders to maximise profits so they don't have a choice. They can't pay more in taxes.
