trapezoid

What's this written in?

This looks very straightforward. What API's do you support?

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.)

I think he intends to =)

sincere question - what do you value your time at?

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.

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.

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.