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This sounds like a healthy discount versus paying the attorney's fees and the $1.86 billion in damages that it was last reported that they are seeking. Certainly, it is a reasonable point to start negotiations.

Trump was given $2 billion plus in free media coverage.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/0...
https://secure.marketwatch.com...
http://www.weeklystandard.com/...
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
https://fivethirtyeight.com/fe...

Duckduckgo returns lots more with my query, "worth of free media coverage 2016 election Trump"
If the media had ignored him or only ran paid advertisements, Trump would have been a lot less likely to have won

How about we start with a basic:

Step 1) Don't hire a music major with absolutely no technology training or education as your Chief Security Officer.

Equifax believed Mandiant had sent an undertrained team without the expertise it expected from a marquee security company.

So I guess they weren't as well-qualified as the music major you hired as your chief security officer?

"Dollars in, dollars out" doesn't tell you you which ads are more cost-effective

You have a specific landing page for each ad. Then you track that contact through to the purchase

it works if you do CPC only, which not only is costly, but is also a dying vehicle.

See:

Google’s CPC fell 23% in the quarter, compared with a drop of 7% in the same period a year ago, while TAC increased to 22% of advertising revenue from 21% a year ago, a combination that could be worrisome for Alphabet.

http://www.marketwatch.com/sto...

We're in year 3 or 4 of this constant shrinking of CPC, which is not surprising since it doesn't work. And now even Google is struggling to attract business.

Kind of like how we could just do away with the FDA, because drug fiascos like Vioxx are a thing of the past. We can all trust our corporate overlords not to put their own greed above the interests of their own workers and customers...

Yeah! Just like the $30 million plant that was going to hire 500 workers in central PA.

I mean, sure, that plant was never built and they didn't do anything more than open a small office, but this is 100 times larger. And yeah, Foxconn has announced other large projects in Vietnam, Indonesia and India that they never followed through on, but this time is different, right?

Or, alternatively, this is what happens when you destroy the job market like Obama did for the last 8 years with massive new regulation and Obamacare while simultaneously trying to buy votes by eliminating the work requirement for welfare recipients and massively expanding entitlement programs... The rich already pay 80% of all tax in the US http://www.newsmax.com/Finance... while the "poor" 45% Democrat voting block who thinks the rich don't pay enough pay ZERO taxes but enjoy all the general benefits as well as free healthcare, free housing, free food, free phones... the list goes on. http://www.marketwatch.com/sto...

That said, the federal government as well as most states mentioned don't have an income problem, they have a spending problem.

I thought Google was all about the diversity.

Don't you get it yet? Google is all about the hypocrisy. Example: Google wants everybody to use its cloud to support modern, efficient remote working. Yet remote working is largely banned at Google. Example: google tells you that privacy is dead, get over it but if you dox Eric Schmidt you will be sued to the ends of the earth. Example: Google says "don't be evil" then does the opposite.

The way to get net neutrality is to convince Republicans that it is important,

Now that Trump TV has gotten off the ground, and we have our first official state-run media outlet, there is no longer a need for net neutrality, which is so 2015.

http://www.marketwatch.com/sto...

You have a monopoly controlling all media in the US which despises everything except the extreme leftist view, and worry about TrumpTV which has never aired a show? 98% of CNN's coverage is negative, and refusal to air non-leftist positions for nearly a decade, MSNBC at 97% and the same. NYT and WAPO both openly stated last summer that they would no longer have a neutral position and would try to destroy Trump, promoting fabricated news just like CNN to further their leftist ideology. And to be sure we don't limit censorship and bias to print and TV, Google, Facebook, and Twitter have all been censoring opinions from the right and promoting far Leftism as well.

Hell, even Fox which gets accused of supporting Trump has 52% negative coverage and a whole slew of far left wing progressive shows where no right wing opinions are allowed and even centrist opinions are discouraged.

You are worried about some Station that is new and never aired a show while nearly everything you get is propaganda? Good grief!

The way to get net neutrality is to convince Republicans that it is important,

Now that Trump TV has gotten off the ground, and we have our first official state-run media outlet, there is no longer a need for net neutrality, which is so 2015.

http://www.marketwatch.com/sto...

I live in Sunnyvale, so yes, I do. As for the most expensive place, here's my citation.

Also, searching for the "hottest housing markets", Seattle isn't close to the top in any of the searches I looked at...

http://www.marketwatch.com/sto...

http://webcache.googleusercont...

You made I to #15 here...
https://www.nationalmortgagene...

Joel is this case is a major telecom company and ISPs are no longer small mom&pop shops.

when in reality, MAJORTELECOM has let his peer links saturate and/or severely imbalance

"Let his peer links saturate" As in, people are using their internet connection and MAJORTELECOM isn't upgrading their network. Their old business model depended on customers only checking email once a week. The world changes and now people found out they can use the service they bought. The bastards should invest in US's infrastructure to make their customers happy rather than throwing money at lobbyists and trying to squeeze more money out of people.

and won't upgrade the peer link and/or tolerate the imbalance without compensation.

Comcast bought back $5 Billion of their own stock this year. They made $20 billion in revenue and $12 billion in profit. Cry me a fucking river. They have a virtual monopoly and could charge whatever they want, except for town where they're actually facing competition from fiber, but they drop prices there to make sure Google and such don't make any money.

And bitching about peering imbalance? The peers they have to pay for traffic going out of their network is going to other ISPs. They have to pay the ISP above them just like I do. If they're bitching about their users using netflix, then charge them more. Trying to make a backroom extortion rather than letting the end-customer decide if it's worth the price is fucking bullshit. Power to the people.

And why is everyone in favor of the ISPs killing network neutrality an anonymous coward? Fucking shills.

We've got the hottest housing market in the nation

According to who? From what I can tell, Seattle isn't even in the top 20 hottest housing markets.

Source 1
Source 2

Target is suffering from this as we speak but will likely not change course having painted themselves into a corner.

People who are boycotting Target over a fucking bathroom issue are the ones who are the real oversensitive snowflakes. It's also entirely possible that things have just been sucking lately for retail stores in general, and Target is feeling the squeeze. Hhgregg just went under, and I doubt bathrooms had anything to do with it.

It's kinda like how the anti-Seaworld activists claimed Blackfish was causing a huge drop in attendance - coincidentally, right about the same time Universal Resort and Disney World opened some major new attractions. Nope, that probably had nothing to do with it - it had to be the protesters. Uh-huh.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/retail-sales-post-worst-two-month-stretch-in-two-year-2017-04-14

This article from January 2017 says: "Comcast Corp. reported better-than-expected financial results and added cable TV customers in the fourth quarter, culminating a strong year in which it added net video customers for the first time in a decade...In the fourth quarter, net income rose to $2.3 billion, or 95 cents a share, up from about $2 billion, or 79 cents a share, a year ago. Revenue grew 9.2% to $21 billion."

Let me give you some advice the next time you want to criticize Wikipedia. Go click on that link above to the Wiki article. Now, look at the text, notice how it has various numbers in brackets in superscript. You can hover over them and some text will pop up. That's called a "reference". Those "references" are where the claims in the article come from. If you click on one of those, or scroll allllll the way down to the bottom, you'll see the list of references for the article, all 283 of them. Those are what you need to attack the credibility of, because the Wikipedia article itself is really just a collection of claims given in those references. Just go ahead and start at #1 and work your way down, debunking each of those references. Make sure not to skip #4, which quotes a report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and National Intelligence Council:

We assess with high confidence that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election, the consistent goals of which were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.

Make sure not to skip this one, either. You wouldn't want it to seem like you're cherry-picking.

The chances have increased, according to British bookies, that President Donald Trump will leave the White House before his four-year term is over.

The bookmakers have seen a stream of bets that Trump will depart early after a report Tuesday that he asked the since-fired FBI director James Comey to shut down a probe into links between his inner circle and Russia.

“Overnight we’ve seen more than [£5,000] bet on Trump to leave before the end of his first term, and we expect to see a lot more bet today, with his odds now shortening from evens into 5/6,” Katie Baylis, spokeswoman at Betfair PPB, +0.95% , said in a note Wednesday morning. That implies a 55% probability that the president will exit before his term ends.

“And many punters think it won’t be too long before he departs, with the odds of him leaving this year now into 12/5 from 11/2 — a 27% chance [up] from 16% before the latest allegations,” Baylis added.

Later on Wednesday, Betfair said punters had bet another £13,000 that Trump will leave before the end of his first term.

Trump, by being such a disaster, has succeeded in rehabilitating George W Bush - and odds are he'll do the same with Nixon.

The goal of the project is to be able to restore fertility and endocrine health to young cancer patients

A woman in her 20s gets ovarian cancer and is unable to reproduce ever again, that's bad enough, but there's also the added awfulness of menopause. Osteoporosis, heart disease, a bunch of other shit that cancer survivors really shouldn't have to deal with.

Fourth, tissue engineering like this is really in it's infancy. Successfully duplicating an organ should be exciting to you even if you don't happen to have that organ and you aren't convinced the organ's function is really so important. You like your testicles functional? How about having a non-diabetic pancreas? Odds aren't bad you'll have problems with some organ some day and could benefit from a new one. Lessons learned here won't be strictly confined to ovaries, it makes it more likely an organ you'll want to replace will be possible. Plus, what the fuck? Slashdot is news for nerds who are supposed to like technology. Just because it's wet, squishy, and feminine, we've decided we don't like THIS technology?

Fifth, how much time and money were "wasted" on this? From NIH reporter, it looks like $300,000 was spent specifically on this project. About a third of a single tomahawk missile, like the 60 we used to do fuck all in Syria in a vain attempt to boost Trump's ratings. Or less than three times as much as has been raised to make onesies for fully grown manchildren.

In conclusion, leave questions about science and priorities to the adults.

Comey has found NOTHING after over a year of trying to prove a link between Trump and the Russians.

It hasn't been a year yet (July or August of 2016 is when the investigation started) so it hasn't been over a year.

There are plenty of links between Trump and Russia when you look at the folks on his campaign and their own connections. Roger Stone bragged on several occasions he was in communication with Guccifer 2.0 and knew when the next batch of emails was going to be released. Guccifer 2.0 is part of the Russian intelligence services.

Flynn, well, we know about his numerous ties to Russia and that he lied about not having any.

Carter Page, who at first said he never helped the Russians with classified or other such materials, then changed his tune to "no comment" when asked about the investigation into his dealings with Russia, and now is saying, "No I'm not going to hand over evidence of my dealings with the Russians so you can hang me with it."

As we saw a day or so ago, Eric Trump bragged that it was Russians who were financing his father's golf courses during the Bush recession. This on top of other financial dealings Trump has with Russia.

Then today, the Senate committee investigating collusion between Trump and Russia during the campaign has asked the Treasury Department's criminal division to hand over any and all documents related to Trump, his campaign and campaign aides.

That doesn't sound like "nothing important".

Oracle wants you to use cloudy thinking?

Oracle Effectively Doubles Licence Fees To Run Its Stuff in AWS.

Oracle profit, software license growth decline

Oracle Begins Aggressively Pursuing Java Licensing Fees

Judge Blasts Oracle's Attempt To Overturn Pro-Google Jury Verdict

Oregon settles bitter legal fight with Oracle for $100 million

Oregon Reaches $100 Million Settlement With Oracle

How well is that working out?
http://www.marketwatch.com/sto...

thanks captain obvious.

To make it even more obvious... most Americans only have $1,000 in retirement savings.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/most-americans-have-less-than-1000-in-savings-2015-10-06

http://www.marketwatch.com/sto... "I suppose that as the case of the programmer, Rajendrasinh B. Makwana, is brought out into the open we'll discover whether he's just a disgruntled programmer irked at being let go by Fannie Mae in October, or someone with more sinister intentions. It was only a fluke, according to all the reports Friday, that a malicious piece of code was found on the Fannie Mae FNM, -6.82% servers. It was designed to go off Saturday and erase all the data and screw up the company. It was placed there by Makwana, an Indian national and former Fannie Mae contractor, according to a federal indictment. If it was part of some greater scheme, then we can assume that on Jan. 31, the date his program was supposed to kick in, a slew of computer networks will go down. Generally speaking, this sort of thing is more of an inconvenience than a catastrophe."

The US income tax system is highly progressive. Currently the bottom 45% of US households pay no federal income tax. So when you look at the tax burden of the average American family (ie at the 50th percentile) that family is only paying a little federal income tax. To get to the number in the article it is other taxes like property tax, social security, state tax, etc.

It was NOT a United Airlines flight.

But the cost to United is HUGE: United's stock is falling 3.7% and wiping $830 million off the airline's market cap.

As the first link shows, United handled the situation badly.

I don't think President Trump has golfed that much, yet...

I found a different article (see below) that described the situation more precisely. Obama golfed every nine days in eight years. Trump golfed every five days for the first two months. Trump's golfing is twice the rate of Obama's golfing.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/for-trump-playing-golf-is-just-another-day-at-the-office-2017-03-31

Give a detailed accound of how the jackass movie themed ice bucket challenge helped anyone.

Hook, line and sinker.

The ALS ‘Ice Bucket Challenge’ actually worked

They don't help the victims of ALS or breast cancer or autism feel better, they help people who can't be bothered to do anything else feel better about themselves.

Lemme guess, you like to complain about virtue signaling too?
Have you considered that you are on the spectrum?
And that's why you don't "get" the principles of social organizing?

He's also appointed former top level Goldman Sachs employees.

The difference is that some of Trump's people USED to be paid by Goldman Sachs.

Hillary (and Obama) were ACTIVLEY BEING PAID by Goldman Sachs.

Just do a quick search at how much GS has contributed to Hillary (~$1 million) vs. Trump ($0).

I see the value bitcoin skyrocketing right now....

Yes, skyrocketing down is an apt description. It's lost roughly 20% of its "value" this month (see chart in article).

Never gained widespread adoption? They outsell both Mac and Windows laptops in terms of unit sales. They are ubiquitous at schools. You can buy them at Walmart and Target. If you have more recent information showing a downward trend, by all means share it.

In order:

Where do you categorize manicurist in there?

Already replaced by robots in some places

Or barber?

Robots are already doing washing and shaving. It's just a matter of time.

What about locksmith or carpet installer or piano mover? Construction?

I'm missing your point here. In time, all of these things will be automated. There's no reason a lock can't be swapped out by a robot. It just hasn't been done yet (that I know of). And there's no reason that a robot can't zip around a floor surface, take measurements, and cut a rug to fit, then lay it down with a level of precision that far exceeds what humans are capable of; it probably isn't cost-effective yet, but it is only a matter of time. And some aspects of construction are already being automated.

I feel like there's a lot you're missing.

Nope. I'm really not. Anything that doesn't require creativity can be automated, and the only thing preventing it from happening is that it currently costs more to automate some jobs than to have a person do them. As the cost of automation drops, more and more things will become automated. Anybody who thinks that any kind of physical labor will remain a viable career in the long term is kidding him/herself. The only interesting question is when any given industry will reach that tipping point. Most of the jobs you list are likely to still exist for a while, mainly because barbers tend to own their hair salons and manicurists tend to own their nail salons, and most people don't want to put themselves out of a job. But that only slows the conversion to automation; it does not stop it.

This article from MarketWatch talks about a 30-something who was going big or going broke betting on Apple's earnings. In his case he had been listening and posting to the Reddit forum dealing with stock trading. At one point in time he had amassed a small fortune but was reduced to a mere $240,000 which he was placing on his final bet that Apple would substantially miss its earnings and as a result, Apple's stock price would take a nosedive. He had bought options for such an event which would net him millions if the trade played out.

Fast forward to today's announcement and he's pretty much wiped out. Not totally since he was doing some other options trading to try and cover some of his bet, but on the whole, he lost it all.

It will be interesting to see what happens next.

Oracle profit, software license growth decline (Sept 16, 2015)

The average new car may be $33k, but that's in a world where a new Tesla is $100k. . You can get a Hyundai Elantra for $17k

Why are you comparing a high end luxury car to an econobox? If you want to compare with a Nissan Leaf or Chevy Bolt, fine but don't insult our intelligence with stupid and irrelevant comparisons.

Call me when I can buy an electric car for less than $15 grand.

Nice job moving the goal posts. If it isn't cheap enough for everyone then nobody should bother? What a stupid argument.

Oh and to address your challenge to get an electric car for under $15K, here you go.

Nintendo has already seen huge success with Super Mario Run on iOS.

Yeah, I don't think so.

Investors disappointed by early reviews and sales of the smartphone game "Super Mario Run" sold off more Nintendo Co. shares on Monday, with some analysts expressing concern over the game's payment model. Nintendo shares closed 7.1% lower in Tokyo Stock Exchange trading on Monday, extending a losing streak to five days, during which the stock has fallen more than 16%.

Nintendo shares drop on 'Super Mario Run' sales

First thing you do is fire all the hedge fund managers. Their fees make them consistently the worst way to invest in stocks.

Then you get rid of market index funds. The market index funds (DJIA, S&P500, etc) are weighted based on market capitalization. "Popular" stocks have a higher market cap, so tend to be over-represented in these funds. But a stock being popular means it has already experienced a value gain. It's less likely to appreciate more than the "unpopular" stocks.

So now you've got an algorithm which randomly picks stocks with an equal chance to pick any given stock (i.e. the proverbial monkey throwing darts at the financial page of a newspaper). That is your baseline. Until you come up with an AI which can beat that, this is just more marketers spending large quantities of money on ways to generate a slick prospectus which fools naive investors into investing in their fund so they can leech fees (which admittedly may be what they're trying to do).

The longer you allow a market economy to continue, the more optimized it becomes. The low-hanging fruit of economic efficiency has already long been picked. The remaining efficiency improvements are mostly so small that variances due to random chance usually swamp out their effect. That makes the market extremely difficult to predict because the better it has optimized the economy, the more it acts like gambling as its critics like to claim. (The key difference being this is one gambling game which is fixed in your favor, rather than in the house's favor. You just have to pick a strategy which minimizes your risk, which usually means some sort of broad unweighted index fund.)

I think the best solution to the H1B issue is to legislate a minimum wage of $100k/yr, as Ted Cruz had proposed when he was still running.

I agree that Congress should make it expensive to hire H-1Bs. But instead of giving higher pay to non-US citizens, let's have a federal tax of $50,000 per year per H-1B.

The money might go into a special fund that gives job training to US citizens, in skills that are in short supply. For example, Tim Cook said Apple makes its products in China because

The U.S., over time, began to stop having as many vocational kind of skills. I mean, you can take every tool and die maker in the United States and probably put them in a room that we’re currently sitting in. In China, you would have to have multiple football fields.

So let's use a $50,000 per year per H-1B tax to train more American tool and die makers, making the US a more attractive country in which to manufacture.

"Secretary" used to be the most common job according to some interpretations of BLS reports. The Word Processor made that role largely obsolete and now self-service:
http://www.npr.org/sections/mo...

So nowadays it's "Truck Driver"... wait a bit longer until autonomous vehicles make those delivery jobs go away. Wouldn't call those middle-class jobs, though.

Counterpoint: Sales and Services are the most common job in the US today, along with maybe some form of Educator:
http://www.marketwatch.com/sto...

It'll still be a while before those social jobs are automated away.

So, put this scumbag in jail so he can continue to surround himself with like minded people.

Such as this guy? Or maybe you meant this guy. Perhaps this guy.

Please tell us oh enlightened one how it's only the left which surrounds itself with like minded people and considers anyone who doesn't think like they do the enemy when day in and day out it is Republicans who use the word enemy to describe people within their own party who didn't back him?

Vent all you want but your words ring hollow when for the last eight years all we've heard is how bad things are, how horrible this president has been, how he should be impeached (for doing his job), and all the other vitriol cast upon him almost solely because of his race, yet none of that falls within your myopic view only the "left" being out of touch. If things are so bad then why suddenly, when not a single thing has changed in the last week, are Republicans suddenly saying the economy is doing well and there are no problems?

Because in a Republican's world if you don't bow down to your leader, if you don't blindly follow the leader, if you don't think like the leader, you're an enemy. Wouldn't want to open a Republican's hypocritical and bigoted mind by listening to others who don't agree, now would we?

A major expenditure for political campaigns is media buys—buying TV ads, for instance—but Trump was given billions of dollars in gratis TV coverage (1, 2). That's not "technology".

Trump was up against a horrible Democratic Party candidate who built on a long line of screwing the poor and ignored the lessons of Brexit. As corporate media lined up to bolster her, enough of the Trump voters' interests were left out. While she got busy calling them names (like being a "basket of deplorables") poor voters tried to make rent and feed their families. Every Trump jibe echoed around (such as the rubbish from news parody shows) without acknowledging what had been happening to the disenfranchised for 30 years under Democratic and Republican rule that Trump had nothing to do with setting up. Reacting to a bad economy with no end in sight had a lot more to do with Trump's victory than "technology".

while giving 90% of the benefit of tax cuts to people with the very highest income.

The top 20% of income earners pay 86% of all collected income taxes at the federal level, so why shouldn't they get 90% of the tax cuts?

I'll let you in on a little secret, it is the folks with "the very highest incomes" that pay the bulk of the taxes. The top 1% earns 20% of the income in America, yet pays 40% of the income taxes collected (at the federal level). Cutting taxes for folks that don't pay any taxes (and the bottom 50% of taxpayers pay less than 3% of all federal income taxes collected) isn't a tax cut, it's a handout.

> Not anymore they aren't.

Yea, they still are. I like how your cutoff for analysis is 2012 (a loss year for them), ignoring the billion dollar profit 2011 year, but I'll go into that later.

Their R+D is pretty big, and varies. When you spend 53 billion yen on just R+D and have a relatively small 7 billion yen profit, and the next year you spend 72 billion yen on R+D and have a 23 billion yen loss, what you are seeing is a company investing in the next few years, not a company that lacks sales or has huge internal expenses.
http://www.marketwatch.com/inv...

Meanwhile, they always keep bankrolls:
http://www.gurufocus.com/term/...

So if they do start screwing up, they have plenty of time to change course. Their conservative financials lets them take risks in the market, which they do pretty much constantly.

My point is this: they don't need to turn a huge profit to be happy. They don't require a Wii fad, they aren't counting on it.

Here's some companies that got into the video game hardware business, and then got out of it (or went out of business), all after Nintendo got into making video games:

3DO
Sega
Hudsonsoft / NEC
SNK ...basically stuff you was in the 80s and 90s that you don't see today. This list excludes guys who got in just a couple years before Nintendo and got blown out, of whom there were some (Mattel, Coleco, etc).

And here's some companies that have risen and fallen ENTIRELY within Nintendo's lifespan:

Pan Am
Atari
RCA
Compaq
Honeywell
Arthur Anderson (lasted a mere 89 years)

Hell, technically HP.

> Nintendo can't afford to keep losing money forever

They aren't losing money, though. Your link shows this:
2016: 136.99M
2015: +380.78M
2014: -232.22M
2013: +85.89M
2012: -548.7M
2011: +931.48M

Any analysis that tries to paint them in a shitty light needs to start at 2012. Start at 2013 and they are doing JUST fine. Start at 2011 and they are doing JUST fine. Even if you start at 2012, you are looking at a very small shortfall compared to their overall everything. They could screw up two more launches, if they really wanted to, and still be happy staying in business without hardware.

Yes, because a country that is crumbling because of low oil prices can affect the financial holdings of a real estate mogul. There's so much interplay between oil in Russia and property in New York City!

There was a concerted effort to prevent municipal WiFi.

Citations, please...

Based on using both state government to preempt municipal WiFI (its illegal in most states)

WiFi is not illegal explicitly. Provision of non-government-specific services by the government is prohibited in some places. Which makes perfect sense — because the prospect of competing with the town hall is the kiss of death for an honest business-plan. But even where it was not prohibited — such as Chicago — it still fell apart. San Francisco — the nation's most "progressive" town — cancelled theirs in 2007. You were saying?

And, had it somehow succeeded, the entirely new sort of worms would've started coming out of the can.

It seems immensely popular once done.

Only among porn-surfers, it would seem. But do list your own citations, please.

Governments shouldn't run sneaker factories.

Why not? How else can the workers be protected from exploitation by KKKorporations interested only in profit$?!?! What, other than collective ownership of means of production, can prevent such abuses as well as shipping the manufacturing to other countries?

I challenge you to come up with an argument for government-owned WiFi or schools, that would not apply to a government-owned sneaker factory. Unlike with wired Internet — or water- and gas-pipes — there is not even the usual "last mile" argument with WiFi.

But there are plenty of things (e.g. roads) that work well when run by government.

Citations really are weak point of yours, let me help you. Ooops, government-owned roads obviously do not "work well" either. Would privately-owned ones be better? We never tried... But we can look around... If Tokyo can have privately-owned and competing subway/commuter-rail lines — which actually works well — why can't New York?

For about 100 years now, the Statists have been repeating the myth of "natural monopoly" — convincing the rest of us and themselves that some things are better done by "a public utility". Looked at carefully, the myth falls apart. We've fallen for it, when we gave AT&T their telephone monopoly — and paid dearly for that mistake. Why would anyone seek to repeat it in other markets?

Clinton, who has done much much worse.

For those curious to specifics, here is a handy list of all of Hillary's publicized transgressions:

http://www.marketwatch.com/sto...

Says more about you than Softbank.

ChemChina to buy Syngenta in $43 billion deal, from February 2016.

Haven't heard of ChemChina?

Says more about you than ChemChina.

Haven't heard of Syngenta?

Says more about you than Syngenta.

Bet you have heard of Monsanto, which tried to buy Syngenta twice in 2015.

Says more about your paranoid, eco-aunt than it says about you.

Ah not really. That number is thrown around by "fancial advisors" to get people to invest with them. It depends on the asset classes one chooses and the years you look at. (The linked article also assumes one bought right after the Crash of '29) And that doesn't mean it will continue. And much of those returns were from the end of WWII to about 2000. Things are slowing down and with the Baby Boomers retiring and selling their holdings to buy their Harley Davidson motorcycles and Land Yachts, expect returns to be in the mid-single digits. The rate the financial planners I know are using 5% for retirement planning.

Ah, no. The stock market consists of a single asset class: stocks.

Because recovering your entire investment in 5-10 years is considered a very good outcome?

Ah, no. Depending on the discount rate you use, most buyouts like this want to have the business pay for itself in about 5 years, no more than 7 - depending on ones metrics.

You do realize that the stock market returns as a whole over the long term are in the ballpark of 10% per annum, right?

Ah not really. That number is thrown around by "fancial advisors" to get people to invest with them. It depends on the asset classes one chooses and the years you look at. (The linked article also assumes one bought right after the Crash of '29) And that doesn't mean it will continue. And much of those returns were from the end of WWII to about 2000. Things are slowing down and with the Baby Boomers retiring and selling their holdings to buy their Harley Davidson motorcycles and Land Yachts, expect returns to be in the mid-single digits. The rate the financial planners I know are using 5% for retirement planning.