Thoughts

Sperm Donor Wins Child Support Battle: Mother can’t renege on payment deal, Pa. Supreme Court rules.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22488113/

In an age where the reproductive rights of a mother are hotbed political issues, and the rights of a father are ignored, it’s refreshing to see something like this.  In short, if you make a deal with somebody you know (at least, in Pennsylvania) for them to donate sperm to you in order to have kids, and you agree that they’ll effectively not be the father (they don’t pay child support, and they have no right to visitation), then that’s it.  They’re not the father.  You can’t then go and renege and demand money.

Unfortunately, even this was decided in terms of the rights of a woman.  The decision hinges on the fact that to decide any other way would be to destroy sperm donation system, which in turn would limit a woman’s “reproductive prerogatives.”

The state of the system today is simply unacceptable.  Why is it that all we care about are the rights of the woman?  To be clear, the result in this case was right and proper.  But why was even this decided based on the rights of the woman, with the man ignored?  This is ridiculous.

Just some food for thought.

So, as of July 25/26, 2007, Nintendo is now worth more than Sony, and Apple Computer is now worth more than Hewlett-Packard (and already passed Dell, a while ago).

Nintendo

Nintendo passed Sony in market valuation yesterday (approx?). I don’t know how the hell this happened? Nintendo’s Wii and DS systems have been doing great - better than great - but it’s still just a couple products, compared to Sony’s massive presence in many markets. Nintendo is now one of the top 10 Japanese companies, and Sony’s not. Nintendo, in market cap, is bigger than Honda or NTT!

Apple Computer, Inc.

The company formerly known as Apple Computer announced revenues for their June quarter yesterday, July 26 at 5 PM. Net rose 73% to $818M from a year earlier, on the strength of, of all things, Macintosh sales. But the stock price primarily reflected sales of 270,000 iPhones in the first 30 hours of availability, methinks. iPod sales were fairly flat at +2% to 9.82M. Mac sales were +33% year over year to 1.76M. Apple now has $13.8 BILLION dollars in cash on hand. I could use a handout… how bout you?

On the strength of these figures, Apple stock skyrocketed to a new all time high, passing HP in market capitalization during after hours trading on July 25. Apple retained that lead with stock +$10 to ~$146 on July 26, leaving it with a market capitalization of approx. $127B.

As of this writing, market cap:

IBM: $174B
Intel: $139B
Apple: $127B
HP: $123B
Dell: $64B (Oh, Dell, where have you gone? Do you still think Jobs should shut down Apple and hand the money back to the shareholders? The king of all stupid comments?)