>sovereignty

>noun

>Supremacy of authority or rule as exercised by a sovereign or sovereign state.

>Royal rank, authority, or power.

>Complete independence and self-government.

What this means is that Russia (and any other sovereign nation) has full power in relation to itself. The ICC has no more power or rights over it than some random farmer in Rwanda who never even heard of Russia.

The ICC (and any other court) has no jurisdiction over Russia (or any other country) other than whichever jurisdiction those countries allow it, to the extent they are allowing, and for as long as they are allowing.

It doesn't matter if Ukraine (or every single other person in the world that has ever existed or ever will exist) agrees that the ICC has jurisdiction because Russia does not, and when it comes to sovereign nations that is all it matters.

my point is "A court saying they have jurisdiction over something doesn't give them jurisdiction over something", and "A sovereign nation is sovereign".

It seems you're conveniently ignoring the concept of state sovereignty.

You're forgetting the taxes paid on every cent returned to shareholders (ie: the only profit actually generated to the owners of the business), as well as the taxes paid by its owners, employees, clients as a result of the business operating.

Also it's 19%, not 5%.

I agree though, corporate taxes shouldn't be 5%. They should be 0%.

> Can someone explain this puzzling aspect as to why having a mountain of cash ($200B in cash and short term investments) is so bad, but having massive liabilities is considered to be a good idea?

There's an opportunity cost in having that cash on the balance sheet, since it's cash that isn't working for a return. If the expected return on keeping that cash is less than the cost of capital, you're effectively burning that cash by keeping it in the company bank account.

This means that unless the company has a good reason to keep it (ie: they want to use it soon for a big investment) they should be returning that cash to its owners, so they can reinvest it elsewhere.

Whether you should be funding your business with debt or equity, depends on your cost of debt and your cost of equity, which in turn depends on your business model.

For a company like Apple, with huge revenue and profit generating capacity without needing substantial capital assets, a good credit rating in a zero interest rate environment, the cost of debt is going to be fairly low and as such funding the business with debt is more attractive than equity.

Seems like a perfectly reasonable take.. If you want to give jobs to people, you should be the one to pay them.

>The main thing I take away is that company-wide layoffs don't seem to be motivated by necessity.

You're welcome to hire them on yourself if you believe that to be the case. I'm sure Google would be happy to allow them to keep working if you're the one paying for them.