Slashdot Mirror

The facts will come out after the "crisis" is over. In light of precedence, why would you doubt the scam?

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

Now maybe you're talking about publicly owned debt, but there was definitely a lot (too much) of debt relief.

even though Greece imposed austerity on the level that has not been seen in a peacetime in Europe

That's hilarious. I guess it depends on your definition of austerity. Hint: things like "you have to eliminate that 13th and 14th month paycheck thing" are not austerity.

I know what article you read and then felt deeply about, without thinking about.
http://www.marketwatch.com/sto...

The thing is that he says the "well regulated militia" is the national guard and is controlled by the government.
It is not called an army because the "army" that the founding fathers were familiar with, was controlled by the tyrannical government....yeah. He said that.

The idea is to have enough arms in the hands of the people that if the government starts working against the people, the people can replace it with a new government that hopefully works better, not to spindoctor the governments army that serves the aristocracy.

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants - Thomas Jefferson (gun nuts like to forget about the patriots part).

Please explain how this happens, if the .gov has all the guns and sells out to corporations like it has? ("An army made of the citizens will not oppress their own people!" has never worked in the past, so we have 0 reason to think it will suddenly work.)

First of all, no they don't have 203 billions.

The problem with Apple’s “cash pile” is that most of it is not actually “cash” nor “on hand,” and it doesn’t take into account Apple’s debt. Apple has about $16.7 billion in cash and equivalents on its balance sheet.

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

And those alleged 180 billions are offshore and couldn't be used in the USA without paying a huge chunk in taxes. (And just for comparison, at the time of the buyout, Dell had 2x more money on US soil than Apple currently has - that's what happens when you don't throw money out the window to feed your ego).

Furhermore, even if we're talking about just those 16 billions Apple has, it's not *their* money, that's the shareholders money. Even if Apple had decided to go big and build a ONE billion dollars building (still 3x the price of Google's) they could have paid a $4 dividend per share with the difference. But no, fuck the shareholders, even though it's almost impossible at this point that the stock price will go up, Apple decided to keep the party going.

A) what method they are using is understood and made clear

Considering more and more companies are using non-GAAP accounting measures to deceive investors, it appears they've already determined what method to use while not making it clear what they're doing.

Trump is far from perfect, and he may in fact be a losing bet. But he's the only one on the ticket that has a real chance of winning that goes against all of that shit, at least apparently,

Apparently Not: Trump turns to Goldman Sachs veteran as finance chairman

Dude hired a former goldman sachs big-wig to raise a billion dollars for his superpacs.

EVERYTHING Trump says is empty pandering. The people cheering him on for "telling the truth" just aren't interested in catching him lying. So he tells yuuuuuge lies and nobody changes their mind.

Foxconn cuts 60000 jobs, replaces them with robots

That means that robots can be cheaper than a $320/month wage. It's not a minimum wage issue.

It should be zero. Accumulation of wealth, earning of income, should never be taxed. Tax consumption, not earning. Right now we penalize wealth, we penalize savings and earnings. We encourage spending (via deductions for a variety of expenses). Reverse it, and you'll have a stronger financial foundation. Instead, we have about 2/3rds of households one paycheck away from being destitute. Consumerism, folks - it's a great thing! Spend spend spend, and don't save!

>Interesting the timings of those - does no harm - reports coming out - Glyphosate is due for renewal in the EU in July (or so).

This is completely missing the point. In March 2015 the IARC (Internation Agency for Research on Cancer) reclassified Glyphosate as "probably causes cancer in humans". Ever since then there has been a constant bombardment of pro-GMO and anti-anti-GMO articles popping up.

You are not up-to-date on this, that's not just "an article" of "many" going for and against :

https://translate.google.com/t...

The 18-member working group called Joint Meeting on Pesticide Residues, short JMPR had met from 9 to 13 on May WHO headquarters in Geneva. The experts took this no own experiments, but evaluated from available data.

The results are in a six-page summary to find the meeting. They confirm the core an earlier assessment of the European Food Safety Authority food safety (EFSA). Here one came last November also concluded: A carcinogenic effect is unlikely if the agent is applied as intended. The decisive factor was an assessment of the Federal Institute for Risk Assessment, because Germany is the rapporteur responsible for Community inspection and evaluation of the plant protection product.

States: No risk for consumers based not on their own research but by evaluating existing data. And that's pretty close to the cut-off date on end of June this year.

Nightingale, ick hear you trapsen ...

http://www.marketwatch.com/inv...

Some numbers

Over all, Wendy's posted a preliminary profit of $85.9 million, or 31 cents a share, compared with a year-earlier profit of $23.3 million, or 6 cents a share. Excluding certain items, earnings from continuing operations were 12 cents a share, up from 8 cents a year ago.

Analysts, on average, had expected 11 cents a share, according to Thomson Reuters.

Revenue slipped 4.7% to $464.4 million, largely due to the ownership of 363 fewer company-operated restaurants in the period. Analysts had forecast $456 million in revenue.

"That diversion of resources could have fed and employed a lot of people."

Apple has $17 billion dollars in cash and short term liquid assets. When does the hiring spree start? Is hunger solved yet? Strange, it seems like your $10 billion dollars hasn't achieved a whole hell of a lot. That's why it's a non sequitur.

So we change the law to save corporations $10 billion dollars, and of course when they don't hire more people, that's because we're whiny entitled brats who don't deserve to get jobs for those $10 billion dollars. If you can't show any connection at all between the $10 billion dollars and jobs or starvation, it's still a non sequitur.

"When's your turn at being prey, pretty boy?"

I'm already prey, since I'm outbid by companies with more money than I have, who are willing to pay to increase my chances of death. How about when I get into a car that may or may not have an airbag made by this company that may or may not be defective?

Meanwhile, tell me: What's the difference between maybe shooting a man in the face with a shotgun and making a machine that maybe shoots a man in the face with a shotgun? Pucker up, ugly pug, and drive real careful.

more people obviously can afford to HAVE a household

To misquote Babbage: I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a statement.

Home ownership is 3rd lowest ever.

Marriage is at an all time low.

Family size is decreasing - YOUR OWN STATS. Meanwhile, Cohabitation is increasing. So are non-sexual roommates.

So please explain what the hell went on in your head that produced the output "more people obviously can afford to HAVE a household", because all signs are pointing the other way.

How does Amazon dictate the prices at suppliers can sell again, or function as the sole potential purchaser? Or do you just not know what the term monosony means?

Also, massive losses are incompatible with a substantial 5 year net income.

You're wrong on both counts.

• Income Tax - Current Domestic - $6.3 B
• Income Tax - Current Foreign - $7 M (not B)
• Income Tax - Deferred Domestic - $3.5 B
• Income Tax - Deferred Foreign - $9 M (not B)

The above looks like a total of just under $10B paid on paid on a $63B gross income, with a reported net income of $18B. That's approximately a 15 percent tax rate. Not 35 percent. Still better than Apple though, I'll grant you that.

Do you think Microsoft wants to support Windows 7, Windows 8.1, Windows 10, Windows 2008r2 server, Windows 2012, and Windows 2015 for the next 15 years?

No, but I do think they've maintained their position as the dominant desktop OS provider because they gave serious consideration to long-term support and backward compatibility.

No business or other large organisation wants to upgrade platform software every few months or even every couple of years. It's dead time that brings huge disruption, significant costs, and relatively little benefit.

No software developer wants to rewrite their entire product every few months or even every couple of years, for the same reasons.

Even regular, non-geek users seem to be getting tired of the upgrade treadmill as their phones and apps and web sites and social networks keep moving things round all the time.

For decades, Microsoft has been a clear leader in not forcing everyone to do that, and they made a lot of money anyway since it meant they were in the position that "no-one ever got fired for buying Microsoft".

If Microsoft are now going to force this kind of rapid update cycle on everyone, not to mention the questionable privacy and security implications of Windows 10, then they've dropped Windows to the same level as the likes of Linux and OS X. It seems reasonable to expect that the momentum that has kept Windows the dominant OS for so long -- primarily, the software base that runs on it -- will naturally become less of an advantage for them over time in that case, and perhaps little advantage at all after a few years.

The stock price chart for MSFT over the past few years is quite interesting. They had a pattern of sustained growth through 2013-2014, but then since the reality of Windows 10 took hold in 2015 it's quite a different story, with less growth overall and much more volatility. I suspect if they don't take the hint and back off on some of the aggressive posturing within the next few months, people are going to start making more money shorting Microsoft stock than investing in it as a good long-term prospect.

If all these companies' pretended good intentions about "pushing mankind to its outer limits by inspiring the world to imagine bigger solutions than our hands can hold." were true then could prove it shelling out a mere 10b to build a Moon base. Pocket change for them but they will kept it tight.

There is no possible other way! The utopian future cannot happen unless we, the have-not and have-few, disappear!

This is even more stupid, than the "no-one left but the One Percenters" part.

The sort of thing the serfs toiling in the fields a thousand years ago would say against combines and other agricultural machinery. Yes, nothing but graves awaited them — while we, the "one percenters" (by the standards of those times), live in the post-scarcity society with food so abundant, we throw out billions of dollars worth of it into trash.

We got enough railroads. What don't have is new boxcars to replace old boxcars at the end of their 50-year lifecycle.

The number of boxcars in service in North America fell by 41% in the past decade to just under 125,000 last year as 101,600 cars were scrapped and only about 13,800 replacement were added. That downsizing accelerated a decades long shift by railroads to more specialized railcars and intermodal carriers that allow shipping containers to hop from trucks to trains.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/shortage-of-railroad-boxcars-has-shippers-fuming-2015-06-21

I'm a bit baffled why this is a problem. Who uses boxcars nowadays? Everybody has shifted to 20ft and 40ft shipping containers. There's plenty of rail cars to handle these. They can even be double stacked in many parts of the country. A shipping container has the added advantage of being able to be loaded before the train comes, then simply lifted onto the car. If you load by forklift or pallet jack, it is a lot easier to fill up the container since the door on all standard containers is at the end, not the middle. You don't have to make a hard 90 degree turn after entering the container and deal with the loading difficulties that imposes. Containers also eliminate a lot of the problems of intermodal transport. You can lift the container right off the train and put it on a truck, or a ship. No need to unload the boxcar manually and repack it.

The only advantage that a boxcar seems to have is that a single car has a higher weight capacity than a single 40ft container. 1 boxcar has a weight capacity of roughly 2 40ft containers, if you're packing it full of paper at an average density of 0.9g/cm^3 (as the complainers in the linked article are). The many advantages of containers mitigate this disadvantage, in my opinion.

We got enough railroads. What don't have is new boxcars to replace old boxcars at the end of their 50-year lifecycle.

The number of boxcars in service in North America fell by 41% in the past decade to just under 125,000 last year as 101,600 cars were scrapped and only about 13,800 replacement were added. That downsizing accelerated a decades long shift by railroads to more specialized railcars and intermodal carriers that allow shipping containers to hop from trucks to trains.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/shortage-of-railroad-boxcars-has-shippers-fuming-2015-06-21

[...] but what the US needs is high speed freight trains

There's a box car shortage as many are near the end of their 50-year lifecycle and newer boxcars are so expensive that they're not economical for the railroads to put into service.

The number of boxcars in service in North America fell by 41% in the past decade to just under 125,000 last year as 101,600 cars were scrapped and only about 13,800 replacement were added. That downsizing accelerated a decadeslong shift by railroads to more specialized railcars and intermodal carriers that allow shipping containers to hop from trucks to trains.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/shortage-of-railroad-boxcars-has-shippers-fuming-2015-06-21

Actually baseball bats are more commonly used in assaults than rifles.

Most firearms homicides are with pistols of some sort, not rifles or shotguns.

http://www.breitbart.com/big-g...
http://blogs.marketwatch.com/c...

Further, most firearms deaths are suicides.:
http://www.pewresearch.org/fac...

Further, homicides are a poor indicator of how many crimes are committed with different weapons:
http://blogs.theadvocate.com/b...

when they're probably all owned by the same 50 or 60 people? I mean, you're stuck buying the tool anyway, and a cheap tool breaks and has to be replaced.

So, it's an argument over the price. You are being robbed... I so wish people would wake up. Whatever happened to the motto, *Anything Anywhere Anytime*? Don't believe the bullshit. Take the bank bail out money back (that's 4.5 trillion) and put it to work. But please, don't try to tell me it's not worth it, that it's more beneficial to just let the place dry up, while these people fly off to Paris on a political junket on our dime. How so very fortunate for them that people believe everything they are told.

if i default in my student loans, what do you get out of me??? nothing

Your Social Security benefits.

In 2013, the government garnished about $150 million in Social Security benefits from Americans to pay back their student loans, according to a September analysis from the Government Accountability Office. Between 2002 and 2013, the number of senior citizens losing out on a portion of their Social Security to pay back education debt soared 500% from 6,000 to 36,000.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/when-your-social-security-check-disappears-because-of-an-old-student-loan-2015-06-25

Except that short-term profitability has DOUBLED since wages increases commenced (source).

Am I the only person who questions where these numbers come from? The article simply references another article which itself has no information on where the numbers came from. Gravity Payments isn't publicly traded, so these numbers aren't coming from official filings. That means they're probably coming from the CEO himself who seems to be a bit of a self-promoter. The Bloomberg article linked in this submission questions some of the assertions of the CEO about industry retention rates, and if the CEO is trying to paint a rosy picture of retention rates, I would not be surprised if he's doing the same for revenue/profit.

Except that short-term profitability has DOUBLED since wages increases commenced (source).

Am I the only person who questions where these numbers come from? The article simply references another article which itself has no information on where the numbers came from. Gravity Payments isn't publicly traded, so these numbers aren't coming from official filings. That means they're probably coming from the CEO himself who seems to be a bit of a self-promoter. The Bloomberg article linked in this submission questions some of the assertions of the CEO about industry retention rates, and if the CEO is trying to paint a rosy picture of retention rates, I would not be surprised if he's doing the same for revenue/profit.

"Since the lawsuit is trying to force the CEO to buy out his co-founder based on the CEO's prior greed, lowering the short term profitability of the company while boosting his positive PR seems to be a likely motive for the pay hike."

Except that short-term profitability has DOUBLED since wages increases commenced (source). Did his plan then backfire?

Actually I'd expect the primary benefits to be short-term rather than long-term. One of the big effects of the pay hike was an ad campaign, the more time goes on the smaller the effectiveness of the ads but they're still paying the 70k salaries.

There's other effects that might kick in long term (ie employee satisfaction & retention), but the biggest positive effects would come at the start.

"Since the lawsuit is trying to force the CEO to buy out his co-founder based on the CEO's prior greed, lowering the short term profitability of the company while boosting his positive PR seems to be a likely motive for the pay hike."

Except that short-term profitability has DOUBLED since wages increases commenced (source). Did his plan then backfire?

Either way he wins

Looking at the trend lines, though, the rate of growth is _2x_ whatever it was prior to the announcement AND profits doubled. That's impressive no matter how you look at it.

"Revenue is growing at twice the rate it was before Chief Executive Dan Price made his announcement this spring, according to a report on Inc.com. Profits have doubled." (source, second graph)

The article clearly states in second paragraph:

"Revenue is growing at twice the rate it was before Chief Executive Dan Price made his announcement this spring, according to a report on Inc.com. Profits have doubled."

From TFA, second paragraph: "Revenue is growing at twice the rate it was before Chief Executive Dan Price made his announcement this spring, according to a report on Inc.com. Profits have doubled."

"Since the lawsuit is trying to force the CEO to buy out his co-founder based on the CEO's prior greed, lowering the short term profitability of the company while boosting his positive PR seems to be a likely motive for the pay hike."

Except that short-term profitability has DOUBLED since wages increases commenced (source). Did his plan then backfire?

The summary states "The average time people spend at one job has been trending downward for a long time.
but the site that is linked to this statement http://www.marketwatch.com/sto... shows the opposite: it says the average time people spend at one job has been slowly trending upward, rising from 3.5 years in 1983 to 4.6 years in 2012, the last year for which figures are available.

The article linked seems to think that the upward trend is significant, but I think it's easily explained. Younger workers change jobs more frequently, and hence the length of time spent at a job increases as a worker gets older (according to the same site, "Over half of workers age 55 to 64 and those age 65 and over had 10 years or more of tenure in 2012, compared with fewer than 10% of workers in their 20s and 30s."). So that upward trend is just the demographic bulge (the "baby boomers") getting older. I expect that number to drop when more of the baby boomers retire, and the people who started working in the 2000s start making up more of the workers surveyed.

I have stock in STI. They just got upgraded by Fitch. They're Coca Cola's bank (with interlocking directorates), so they're pretty stable so long as Coke is. They were conservative about lending during the subprime crisis, so that's not the issue -- the problem is that they gobbled up some banks that weren't so conservative and now own those banks' problems.

Different sites will give you different Texas Ratios. This one gives STI a ratio of 7, not 17. This one gives a ratio of 5. Read the company's prospectus, not Bob's Internet House of Maybe Numbers.

That said, you're right about the outsourcing: they've been offshoring to the infamous Infosys in India for a while now. If they keep that up, I might not own their stock much longer.

Whoops. Too late.

At least it appears they've seen the errors of their ways... now that their own missions are in danger of being hit by it, of course.

http://www.alternet.org/story/...

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

of course germans have problems. you just don't understand america's problems are different and worse in aggregate

All that a large company has to do is set up layers of shell companies in jurisdictions that don't cooperate with each other and they can do what they want.

Put the bottom most layer in some poor third world country that has zero chance of putting their own claim on space resources and it's a done deal.

With regard to citizenship for companies (etc)...companies are not and should not be 'people'.

The current laws that allow them to behave like people allow them to do what they want, having no fear of prison, just paying enormous fines that are part of the business and risk/return models to basically get away with murder (bad medicine, money laundering for drug cartels and terrorist groups, setting market rates, etc, etc, etc.).

Look at these and tell me what would have happened had it been people found guilty and not companies?
http://www.marketwatch.com/sto...

If he was refering to the fact that girls now have substantial advantage over boys (over 20% advantage throughout elementary, middle, and high school) and at college entrance

Women have this "advantage" because on average, women need more education to achieve the same level of success as in the workplace than men. The disparity of numbers in education is caused by inequity in the workforce.

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

Average job tenure is as high today as it ever was.

That seems like a pretty enormous claim and doesn't match my experience, have any data to back it up?

Here is a chart that shows a rise of average job tenure from 3.5 years 35 years ago, to 4.6 years today. The numbers come from the BLS.

A shortage of boxcars is jamming up the industries that don't rely on specialized rail cars.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/shortage-of-railroad-boxcars-has-shippers-fuming-2015-06-21

When I said what's different between the banks and Apple, it was about the process itself.

My bank keeps gets information on my credit card usage even though all the information is stored with VISA, Mastercard, AMEX, etc...

What is fundamentaly different from a patent perspective between what Apple pantented and what the banks do when it comes to targeted adds based on credit availability? I would say that the only differences would be that Apple would have external ads that are targeted based on a certain credit availability. Even then, I've see ads from afiliated 3rd parties from my bank for insurance companies whereas my son, who doesn't have a job and doesn't have a lot of money going into his account, does not see any of those ads. I would think that the targeted add has looked at our credit worthiness before showing specific ads.

But if you wanted to look at it from your perpective, Apple might become a bank in the future...

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/...
http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/10/...
http://thehill.com/policy/fina...
http://www.marketwatch.com/sto...

I am not sure if it could happen in the US, but in other jurisdictions, I could see it happening. It's already hapening with phone companies becoming banks in Africa:

http://qz.com/424535/in-south-...
http://www.bbc.com/news/busine...

Is the agent her employer?

I think once the agent begins automatically charging extra $$$ for every facilitated job in order to ensure that the actor does not attack the employee while working, such agent might become the employer. (Save Rides Fee)
Also, doesn't Uber provide insurance to drivers now? This violates the "Actor pays her own expenses" part of the analogy.

Those who are lose the work can and will find something else

This has been true in the past, but now automation is improving faster than people can retrain and the economy can expand.

The most common job in the USA at present? Truck driver. (well, maybe not, but still, 2.8M truck drivers - 1.5% of the entire working age population in the USA, earning an average of $51,000 apiece)

Imagine how that one's going to go down when automated trucks are viable. Haulage firms will push HARD to get them approved to run on the road - they're already running them on private land (like in the Alberta tar sands, where the robot trucks are safer and require less maintenance and burn 25% less fuel, aside from working all day and all night and saving the company millions in wages).

Almost overnight, unemployment will bump another 1.5% in the USA, and all that money that was going into the economy via truck driver's wages will initially go into the pockets of very rich people before prices adjust.

What are the truck drivers going to do instead? Their life of sitting in a cab knowing the best route and which diners have the best cheese-steak sandwiches isn't going to prepare them for a life in many other professions, definitely not any that are paid as well as $51,000 ; they're certainly not going to get jobs building robot trucks (by definition - if the number of people you're employing to make a more complex and expensive machine is anywhere close to the number of people the machine replaces, then it's not economically viable - so even if someone invents an edumacatatron to fill their heads with robotics engineering, ain't gonna happen).

They won't even get jobs as greeters in WalMart because those jobs are so hotly contested by old folks.

AirBNB has more rooms on offer than Hilton. Hilton employs 152,000 people, AirBNB employs 800.

The trucking industry will likely in the next decade go from having 2.8M drivers in the USA, to zero, and maybe 100,000 or so skilled robot repair mechanics.

Amazon will go from using people as robots in it's warehouses, to just using robots.

Even if people eventually benefit from all this, there are going to be some dark times.

but saving up for a down payment on house is already impossible in my neck of the woods. Most Americans live paycheck to paycheck.

The first thing to realize is that the summary and the linked article are muddying terms. The GM press release (I think that's the text of the official press release) doesn't actually mention "artificial ingredients" but rather the clunkier phrasing "artificial flavors and colors from artificial sources". So it's not all "artificial ingredients", just the artificial colors and flavors. (So things like synthetically produced vitamins, emulsifiers and preservatives aren't necessarily covered by this announcement.) Artificial colors and flavors are rather easier to remove than some of the other artificial ingredients.

The tricky part with replacing artificial colors and flavors isn't removing them - you could just remove them without any other changes, but you typically end up with cereal the color and flavor of the box it's packaged in. Instead, the problem is working out a processing scheme where you can replace the colors and flavors with "natural" alternatives without substantially altering the palatability to the consumer. You take out FD&C Red 40 and replace it with beetroot extract - which while still red is not the same shade and brightness of red. This means you have to tweak the recipe (e.g. find a mix of natural pigments) and hope that consumers don't mind the more muted colors.

Depending on how much you want the new product to look and taste like the old (rather than like cardboard), you may need a substantial reformulation of the ingredients and processing. Natural colors and flavors tend to be more sensitive than the artificial versions, so they can fade on heating or storage, requiring a retooling of the production line to compensate.

You're completely uninformed. Firstly, Italy IS restoring the Colosseum, the arena in particular, recently they polished the external walls too, and I'm quite astonished that the /. article doesn't mention it:

http://roma.repubblica.it/cron...

Obviously you cannot rebuild it exactly as it was, not because of lack of money, which is not a problem for the Italians (see next paragraph), but because they should use the very same marble which was used by their Ancestors, and get it from the same mountains. It would cause an environmental disaster.

Secondly, Italy hasn't received any money from the EU or the IMF, actually its 10-year sovereign bonds yield LESS than the US treasuries with the same maturity, which means that markets technically consider the Italian debt less risky than the american, for how unbelievable it might seem to you:

http://www.marketwatch.com/

(click on "rates").

So they really don't need any "help", let alone from some random american internet billionaires whose main concern would be the wifi coverage rather than rebuilding the Colosseum as it was.

It's not illegal to steal bits.

Tell that to the RIAA and MPAA, and those asshats in Germany. Oh, and the City of London Police...

I'm not sure now stealing crypto-currencies can be a crime. They're not money. They're hardly property. They don't have any real value.

Wrong, wrong, and wrong.
http://www.marketwatch.com/sto...
http://www.irs.gov/uac/Newsroo...

And the fact that the poor Q1 numbers were again accompanied by outrageous executive compensation didn't help either. It must be really nice to be in mr. Noto's shoes, getting about $72.8 million dollars for half a year's work - well, presumably less now due to the stock grants part taking a plunge.

There is one sure, fair, and solid way to put a stop to "outrageous executive compensation"... stop buying stock in companies that grant such pay/bonus levels.

While it seems like a stupid move to lavish cash on a CxO who is running a company that is bleeding cash left right, and sideways, it's the perfect right of stock investors to make their own judgements as to how stupid/not-stupid they believe such a thing to be.

And the fact that the poor Q1 numbers were again accompanied by outrageous executive compensation didn't help either. It must be really nice to be in mr. Noto's shoes, getting about $72.8 million dollars for half a year's work - well, presumably less now due to the stock grants part taking a plunge.

Seeing as during the last quarters executive compensation in the form of stock grants kept climbing at Twitter in spite of the company's financial performance, it hardly seems a good value investment, even with the raising tide lifting all boats nowadays.

This is a very simple situation. Comcast is a huge company leveraging its position as Internet gateway for approximately 20 million subscribers to get cash from others trying to provide services to those customers. In particular, they targeted Netflix because it competes with Comcast's cable TV and video on demand services.

Capacity was never the problem. The interfaces required to upgrade Comcast's interface with Cogent cost a few thousand dollars. Cogent offered to give Comcast those interfaces for free. Netfilx also offered Comcast free caching servers and a royalty free direct peering agreement that would have slashed congestion on the Comcast-Cogent interconnects and reduced both of their costs dramatically. Comcast wasn't interested.

What Comcast wanted was payola to allow Netflix access to Comcast's subscriber base. Comcast didn't care if that came in the form of Netflix using a CDN (Content Delivery Network), who pay Comcast for interconnects, or for direct payments from Netflix. They just wanted their pound of flesh.

Incidentally, in 2014 Netflix made about 267 million dollars in profit. Comcast made over 8 billion. I don't know what Netfilx is paying Comcast, but it can't be more than a drop in the bucket that is Comcast's approximately 69 billion dollar annual revenue. I suspect this was more about hurting Netflix than it is about protecting their bottom line.

Here are some sources backing up the facts and figures.
http://www.marketwatch.com/inv...
http://www.marketwatch.com/inv...
https://gigaom.com/2013/11/11/...
http://www.multichannel.com/ne...
http://www.practicalecommerce....