Slashdot Mirror
Tech Stocks Tumble
For the first time I'm posting a story that I consider completely offtopic for Slashdot: I'm sick of the insulting e-mails, the derogatory namecalling, and the all-in-all childish behavior accusing me of some sort of shadow conspiracy. I consider stories about the stock market to be CNNfn or CNBCs thing. We only bring up the market when it deals with specific companies that we're interested in, not when the story is "The Market." But here it is. Over the last week, the US Stock Market dropped like a stone through kleenex. I don't really know what to say about it: what I know, and in fact my interest in the Stock Market can fill a shotglass, but I'm sure there are many readers with opinions on the subject (including an especially huge black conspiracy perpetrated by Slashdot to hide the "Truth" about something that I simply consider offtopic and uninteresting).
That is an impressive show of being pissed off
by CmdrTaco. I guess it got to him.
Stock Market is a non-story to me as well.
I don't think it should be commented on by slashdot either!
I would suggest that, given that Linux's credibility in the business world is a direct function of RHAT and LNUX prices (which I don't agree with, but there you go), we need to be discussing this. This is more on-topic than any of Jon Katz's ramblings.
I'm sorry if you lost money. A lot of us lost money. That doesn't make Linux any less viable, it doesn't affect the GPL, but it is worthy of discussion.
Carefree highway, let me slip away on you.
The vast (90+%) majority of slashdotters don't post or email their opinions, and I'd bet they're generally happy with Mr. Taco's choices of what fits into "News for Nerds"...
I'd hate to see the site altered to fit the 3% loudest readers.
I was wondering how long the tech. stock lunacy would go on. As somebody who holds a little bit of stock in a profitable brick-and-morter retailer, this is kind of gratifying. It was getting really annoying to see these outrageous valuations for money-losing companies.
I'm even kind of glad that the Linux stocks have returned to sanity. It's pretty clear that Linux will continue to grow exponentially over the next few years. It's not at all clear where and how much money will be made in the market.
RedHat, for example, will never be the cash cow that Microsoft was in the '90s. Even if they get 90% of the OS market, they'll never have the outrageous margins that MS had/has. The Open-Source model just won't support it. I'm positive they'll turn into a strong, profitable company, but that it's anybody's guess whether they will be a profitable $20M company or a profitable $20B company.
It's entirely possible that the big bucks in the Linux market will be made by companies like IBM, SGI, and SCO. It's just too early to tell how it will turn out.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
This will determine if the commercial interests in Linux are really just a flash in the pan, or here to stay.. What worries me is that it looks more and more to be a flash in the pan..
A perfect example would be, sorry to say it, LNUX, Aka, VA Linux. Their stock will now end up having whole chapters devoted to it. It was the most spectacular rise AND fall of a stock ever.. From over 320$ opening day, to a little over 20. Don't get me wrong, I don't think it's undervalued. I think, at the moment, it *IS* a 20$ stock.
This is where the pain is going to start to set in, and we shall all see if these companies will thrive, or start stabbing eachother in the back.. They have shareholders to answer to now. One could argue that releasing things publically instead of holding them as proprietary isn't in the best interest of the shareholders..
Stocks are about greed. No one ever bought a stock becouse of morals, or to better the community. They buy it becouse they believe that it will make them money..
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
> I'm sick of the insulting emails, the deregotory namecalling, and the all in all childish behavior accusing me of some sort of shadow conspiracy.
OK.. so if i've deciphered your rant correctly, the problem is that you failed to post a story saying "the stock market is falling".. and so people got angry, assumed you had some nefarious reasons for not posting said story, and flamed you. So you, just to make these people shut up, are posting a story saying "the stock market is falling".
I find that kind of funny.
because while i obviously haven't seen your personal email and don't know what's in it, i _have_ been reading slashdot postings.. and for the last couple weeks i've actually seen a bunch of flame postings saying there is TOO MUCH coverage of stock/financial/business-related-money issues on slashdot! As in, people who see periodic announcements about commercial businesses going public or having things happen to them, and thus assume that Andover has turned slashdot into some kind of CNNfn workalike.
These people are probably going to be tearing their hair out over the story you just posted.
Taco: no matter what you do, people are going to get pissed off. There is nothing you can DO about this. People in general suck. For some reason slashdot readers in particular if they see something they don't care to read about, they seem to be unable to just not read it and move on with their lives. No, they have to post flame crap saying "this shouldn't have been written". And of course that works in reverse too, as you well know.
You can't please these people NO MATTER WHAT YOU DO. So why try?
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
When you don't investigate EVERY company you want to buy stock in, it's a gamble. These gambling day traders, trying to hop on the next big IPO inflated the market so much, that a huge correction was going to happen.
I don't feel sorry for the people that lost thier shirt one bit. People that invested in "dotcom" stocks that never had any good business plan, never any proftis, never any THOUGHT of profits, just some spiffy URL, deserved what they got when the bottom fell out. And for the people that lost big on Microsoft. If you couldn't see this drop coming months ago, you also deserved to lose what you did. A fool and their money are soon parted.
What happened was, these day traders started to realize that when the ruling came out, and these companies that depended on Microsoft started to drop with Microsoft, they realized that the market isn't some sort of game anymore, where their account balance was bragged about like a high score on Galaga. Those numbers they saw on e-trade, etc. was their retirement going down the shitter, and it scared the hell out of them. So the same jabronis that inflated the market with idiot buying, took it back down with idiot selling.
So I say good for them, maybe now they will realize that trading is just not hopping on the next big thing, and gambling your money away. It's something left to people that know every little company like the back of their hand, the brokers. If brokerage fees are something you have to worry about, you shoulnd't be in the market to begin with.
Ok. So you're not interested in the stock market, don't know anything about it, and don't feel like reading about it. Personally, I could care less about Quake and really don't feel like reading whatever Carmack has to say this week. Someone else out there is maybe sick of some other topic or topics that run on Slashdot from time to time.
But the fact of the matter is that Slashdot has become a large and diverse community site -- bigger than I think the creators of the site intended, and certainly beyond what they can really control now. (Hello first posters, gritty pants people, and other trolls).
The fact of the matter is that the stock collapse is an important story, even if you don't feel like reading about it. The stock market of the 90s has been very bizarre, growing in value far beyond the ability of corporations to repay the investment, and it had to be obvious that something had to give eventually. If the market falls by half over the coming days and weeks, that will restore sanity and long term stability, but at the same time it will hurt a whole lot of people. The parallels between the 20s leading up to 1929's crash and the 90s leading up to this (or else, if we recover from this now, a bigger and more permanent crash that I for one think is inevitable and not too far off on the horizon) are striking and certainly at least as newsworthy as a frickin' video game console and it's possible hard drive.
I have a hard time sympathizing with you on this one, CmdrTaco. You don't think this is interesting, yeah, well, fine. But a lot of other people surely do, and if this "community site" is to remain relevant to "the community", you must be willing to run stories that interest them as well as yourself.
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
1 Cisco Eclipses Microsoft As 'Most Valuable Company' by timothy on 02:07 PM -- Sunday March 26 2000 CST 249
2 3Com Spinning Off US Robotics by Hemos on 08:15 AM -- Tuesday March 21 2000 CST 80
3 Net Firms Running Out Of Cash? by Hemos on 10:57 PM -- Monday March 20 2000 CST 197
4 The Implications Of Knowledge Work by timothy on 02:43 AM -- Monday March 20 2000 CST 139
5 Secrets of Software Success: Management Insights from 100 Software Firms by Hemos on 09:40 AM -- Thursday February 24 2000 CST 71
6 What are Share Options Worth? by Cliff on 06:37 AM -- Saturday January 15 2000 CST 126
7 What's the Best Online Financial Solution? by Cliff on 01:25 PM -- Wednesday January 05 2000 CST 151
___
This is not a news site. This is CmdrTaco's sandbox. The reason slashdot is interesting is that most of the time, most of what he considers interesting, *I* consider interesting. That doesn't mean that he has to publish everything that I might consider interesting, or even publish everything that he has an interest in.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
A lot of people here are talking about how Linux was overvalued or how Techs were overvalued. I hate to break it to you, but that's a very nearsighted point-of-view. The reality is that the Market was overvalued and the Market corrected.
The good news is that technology stocks weren't strong because it was a fad. Technology stocks were strong because there was a ton of money coming into the market trying to take advantage of what is obviously a major shift in the way humans interact with eachother and in the infrastructure required to do it. That sort of upheval is what leads to frontier markets like the international trade situation after WWII or the gold-rush (which was not so much about gold as it was about settling half of a continent, in terms of investment and return).
This period of history will have its winners and its loosers, but I don't think that this correction will signal the last run-up or the last drop. We're in for a wild and bumpy ride for at least the next five years.
Note to Taco: you should be interested. The stock market is perhaps the single capitolist endevor that most resembles open-source, and as such it tends to demonstrate a lot of the pit-falls that we have to look forward to. How so? Well, can you think of another example where total disclosure is made, value is assessed simply on results, and each new endevor is free to use the same tactics demonstrated by earlier projects? The businesses themselves are nothing like Open Source, but if you think of each stock as a project on its own....
The justice department has set off a panic. I mean, Sun stock collapses the same day they announce increased earnings?
My theory: investors are willing to gamble on the unpredictability of tech companies, because these average out to be good gambles. But the unpredicatability of tech companies, and the unpredicatabiltiy of the justice department is too much, because all high tech companies are in violation of dozens of anti-trust laws.
Giving away software for free to gain market share? Preditory pricing. Only licensing your patents to people who don't directly compete against you? Sounds very monopolistic. Making proprietary modifications to standards to make sure that people using your products can't switch? ditto.
While all the CEOs are testifying before congress that Microsoft is the only one doing this sort of stuff, the market knows better. No one wants to invest in a regulated industry. Anything you do that makes a lot of money will bring a plague of justice department lawyers trying to prove you're a monopoly. Every time your competitors get mad, they'll complain to the government. Are we supposed to believe that government bureaucrats understand the dynamics of a market that companies can't even predict more than 6 months down the line?
On the bright side, maybe when the economy collapses, and we go back to high inflation, high unemployment, no stock options, and a higher budget deficit, they'll remember what caused it, and the politicians will finally notice that regulation does more harm than good.
--Kevin
Here's an excerpt from an email conversation between Rob and I which took place in April of 1999. It echoes the same sort of sentiments that this (today's) post does. He isn't kidding.
( Me: )
> (or yours) for granted. We were just looking for a creative way to drum up a
> little support, and have some fun in the process.
> poll turned out to be one of the most popular user polls we've ever had.
( Rob: )
*laugh*. No problems. I just get annoyed occasionally. You should see the
submissions box. Not posting a story usually == Conspiracy on my part
according to some people. Its annoying
And here's an excerpt out of a different email, two weeks later in early May of '99..
( Me: )
> Yeah, sometimes. The fun isn`t so much in painting the stuff, as it is in
> actually delivering it, and seeing people use and enjoy it. Much of it is
> just plain hard work..Prop for E alone took me well over a month to
> produce. Making it was an ordeal--but delivering it, and seeing people's
> chins drop was a joy.
( Rob: )
*laugh*
Its a little different for me. So much of my feedback is typically
negative that I just ignore most of it. I do what I like- I always
have, but that 'jaw dropping' doesn't work to well here-- I've posted
3500+ stories, and 3400 were fine, but once a week I post one that
someone disagrees with and WHAM
Maybe that gives you a little window on what it might be like to be on Rob's side of the table. The rest of you can give the guy a fucking break and sit on your hands if you have nothing better to do than bitch. If you think about the combined effect of thousands of people whining a similar whine, you wouldn't want to be on the recieving end either. If you appreciate Slashdot, great, show your appreciation by not adding to the noise. Consider using your brain and doing something useful with it.
Bowie J. Poag
Project Founder, PROPAGANDA For Linux (http://metalab.unc.edu/propaganda)
Bowie J. Poag