Consume Mass Quantities: Fill & Download for Free

Jabba the Hutt,.. with the utmost certainty. This vile gangster was like a king at his Palace, and had his own personal chef. He was not only known for consuming mass quantities of Hutt delights, but had a sinister reputation for eating those that had displeased him.Jabba, being a Hutt, didn't get massively huge by eating salads and water crackers. Hutts regularly held feasts at their palaces, and could consume breathtaking quantities of food. Amongst themselves it was customary to out do the other Hutts at a banquet.When he wasn't eating frogs from the bong water he was dining on all manner of munchies, specifically prepared to his own tastes. He even ate the huge spiders in a prison cell he was detained in once, deterring the others from biting him.Enter him into an eating contest and he'd put every other Star Wars character to shame. Hot dogs, pizza, philly cheesesteaks or pickled eggs; he'd blow the rest of the competition out of the water, and even once he'd claimed the title of ‘eating contest grand champion’ he'd still be demanding more brought before him!

“Do you believe more than half of Americans have less than $1,000 in their savings accounts and if so, how is it significant?”According to a survey last year, the actual number is nearly 70%: 34% of Americans have no savings at all and 35% have less than $1,000.This isn’t surprising. We’ve been squeezing the middle class for decades, holding wages stagnant while increasing prices and increasing social expectations. It’s no surprise that the majority of America now lives hand to mouth.Largely, this is because the US is a consumer-driven economy. The more people consume, the more money consumer-oriented businesses make, and so it’s in the interests of these businesses to get people to consume as much as possible. While there are people who advocate for frugality, their dry and boring voices are so often drowned in a mass paean of calls to consume mass quantities until you cannot consume any more. Frugality may be virtuous, but it’s not profitable.

Apple actually uses its cash hoard in a very interesting way to maintain a decisive advantage over its rivals:When new component technologies (touchscreens, chips, LED displays) first come out, they are very expensive to produce, and building a factory that can produce them in mass quantities is even more expensive. Oftentimes, the upfront capital expenditure can be so huge and the margins are small enough (and shrink over time as the component is rapidly commoditized) that the companies who would build these factories cannot raise sufficient investment capital to cover the costs.What Apple does is use its cash hoard to pay for the construction cost (or a significant fraction of it) of the factory in exchange for exclusive rights to the output production of the factory for a set period of time (maybe 6 - 36 months), and then for a discounted rate afterwards. This yields two advantages:Apple has access to new component technology months or years before its rivals. This allows it to release groundbreaking products that are actually impossible to duplicate. Remember how for up to a year or so after the introduction of the iPhone, none of the would-be iPhone clones could even get a capacitive touchscreen to work as well as the iPhone's? It wasn't just the software - Apple simply has access to new components earlier, before anyone else in the world can gain access to it in mass quantities to make a consumer device. One extraordinary example of this is the aluminum machining technology used to make Apple's laptops - this remains a trade secret that Apple continues to have exclusive access to and allows them to make laptops with (for now) unsurpassed strength and lightness.Eventually its competitors catch up in component production technology, but by then Apple has their arrangement in place whereby it can source those parts at a lower cost due to the discounted rate they have negotiated with the (now) most-experienced and skilled provider of those parts - who has probably also brought his production costs down too. This discount is also potentially subsidized by its competitors buying those same parts from that provider - the part is now commoditized so the factory is allowed to produce them for all buyers, but Apple gets special pricing.Apple is not just crushing its rivals through superiority in design, Steve Jobs's deep experience in hardware mass production (early Apple, NeXT) has been brought to bear in creating an unrivaled exclusive supply chain of advanced technology literally years ahead of anyone else on the planet. If it feels like new Apple products appear futuristic, it is because Apple really is sending back technology from the future.Once those technologies (or more accurately, their mass production techniques) become sufficiently commoditized, Apple is then able to compete effectively on cost and undercut rivals. It's a myth that Apple only makes premium products - it makes them all right, but that is because they are literally more advanced than anything else (i.e. the price premium is not just for design), and once the product line is no longer premium, they are produced more cheaply than competitor equivalents, yielding higher margins, more cash, which results in more ability to continue the cycle.