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Why the Occupy Movement Skipped Silicon Valley
An anonymous reader writes "Eric Schmidt says what we all suspected: Silicon Valley has largely been immune to the Great Recession. He said, 'Occupy Wall Street isn’t really something that comes up in daily discussion, because their issues are not our daily reality. We live in a bubble, and I don’t mean a tech bubble or a valuation bubble. I mean a bubble as in our own little world.... Companies can’t hire people fast enough. Young people can work hard and make a fortune. Homes hold their value.'"
Silicon Valley and other islands of technology define their economic model by success in the marketplace, not by the manipulations of ivy league finance wizards.
Homes over a million hold their value
Companies can't offshore fast enough
Young people can work hard and be fooled into thinking that they will make a fortune.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
That's what i have been telling my colleagues (all of them are in i.t., or i.t. companies) whenever the issues occupy wall street is raising came up. Almost all of them have been saying 'i have worked "hard" and made myself. everyone can' - because they are living in a bubble. Their skill set and aptitude, matches the time period they are living in. We are living in an era where skills/inclinations that i.t. requires are in high demand, and therefore we are in luck. Had we lived in an earlier era, we would be hard pressed to make a living.
And no - dont ever fall into the pit of thinking that 'because i am smart, i could make it' -> it does not work that way. Talent/inclination works differently than 'smart'. Cognitive powers does not have direct relevance to the inclinations you have - there are a lot of smart people, scientists too, who find i.t. work quite stressing, irritating and unbearable. and vice versa.
So we are lucky. if we had been born back in 15th century, we would be shining a feudal lord's shoes maybe. with all our smarts, but without anything on that time and age to support our particular talents.
Same the situation with majority of people - things that were in huge demand 50 years ago, are not in demand today. Things were inconceivable 50 years ago, are in demand today. But, dont err in thinking that 'adaptation is necessary' -> it is always this way - in a society with ills of capitalism, there is always huge demand for a very little percentage of talents, and the demand for the rest is never enough to feed the population.
And in this environment, those who 'made it' because they were lucky tend to think that they made it because of their 'talents'. Nay. you were lucky to hit your mother's womb in the perfect time.
It is utterly stupid to live in bubbles, devoid of perception of reality, and then to apply one's own bubble to reality, and be content with it. middle class today (which is a pathetic 10% in usa as of this moment btw) does that. and they are no different in position than the clerks, guards who did the feudal lord's bidding back in middle ages, for slightly elevated comforts.
Read radical news here
These people don't understand that their cushy lives and jobs depend on a strong US economy. Even if you aren't seeing the effects of it yet, it will still impact you eventually through soaring costs. We're all in it together.
In short, what Schmidt saw is the continued success of Apple, Facebook, Google, Twitter, Zynga, and biotech companies. As a result, these companies literally held up the economy of the Bay Area, and probably prevented a major cratering of the housing market that continues to plague much of the rest of California. Small wonder why the Occupy movement in the Bay Area (in my opinion!) didn't take long become a MAJOR annoyance, and in the end the Occupy encampments in San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley were swept away.
In a slightly lesser fashion, the same is happening to the Seattle, WA metroplex, too. The continued success of Amazon.com, Boeing, Microsoft, and Starbucks has literally held up the economy of that area.
I'm one of the unemployed (older and seasoned, yet not able to find interviews or jobs in my field). to folks like me, we are *very* much in tune with the occupy movement. we're not at work being flooded with 'work harder, harder; longer, longer!' messages. we're not caught up IN the bubble, we're outside the bubble. we see what its like on both sides.
you don't.
that's what makes all the difference. I've been employed for about 3 decades (in the software field) and I've paid more dues than eric, in my time. he's attained a more powerful position but he knows far less about life than me - of that, I'm very sure. I can tell. anyone my age and with just my simple travels, can.
I'm currently 'over there' in the not-working group (or should I say, not-employed; I'm actually working quite a lot, in fact). I don't think it will stay that way for a long time, but I've been here longer than I thought. its a bit scary and I can see the corporate greed that is caustic to employees. everyone is there 'at the pleasure of the king', pretty much. I see that. the occupy guys see that.
maybe he really does get it but he also realizes that people at his level have to sing the same song. its possible. hard to tell if he believes his own bullshit or not. some do, some don't.
at any rate, many of the folks I know (techies who are also out of work and mostly of middle age or higher) are *strongly* aware and in support of the occupy movement. I'm right smack in the middle of silicon valley, not even very far from the google campus. I remember when it was the SGI campus, too (and I worked at SGI back in those days; before there was a google). I feel I have a good handle on the bay area and silicon valley. and I can say, he's full of shit.
"occupy" *should* really hit home with bay area workers. especially the knowledge-based workers; ones that can so easily be replaced and outsourced. the fact that we are not unionized and that we are a 'commodity' puts us at extreme risk of being fired for any reason and at any time. you've seen the downsizing in front of your own eyes. you can't deny that, can you? are *all* those guys really poor performers? do you believe that?
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Immigrants from other company often come here with the same attitude.
This is why you see neither at an "Occupy" rally. Actually, though I live 30 minutes from Boston, and just got layed-off, I have not attended any rallies, and instead, put my time and efforts into finding a new job. And guess what - my efforts have paid-off and been rewarded - well. (And yes, I work in high-tech).
So I believe my sentiment is similar to those in Silicon Valley. Sure, Washington is broken, and sure, Wall St. is broken. But people at these rallies are really giving off the affect of just looking for a hand-out. If the actual reality or "demands" are any different - they've completely failed to make this clear - even to me - who listens to the most liberal of the liberal media.
Homes hold their value.
I was told by a low-level IT manager that San Francisco and Palo Alto are one of the most expensive cities to have a house. He said she paid over a million for a modest house in Palo Alto.
So, what exactly I'm missing? Either they hold their value really high (saying they have an unaffordable price is weird), this manager's statement is overrated, Palo Alto/San Francisco aren't part of SV, Eric Schmidt is not entirely correct or all of the above.
I rarely respond to comments. Also, don't ask for clarifications: a brain and Google are faster, believe me!
Do they need chemists? I'd love to go back to work for a reasonable wage. I'd even move to California. Oh yea, I can code a bit.
There is no occupy Oakland or anything like that and certainly no valuation in any IPOs for web 2.0 companies. Absolutely none! Not even yachts off international waters with cheap Indians to lower wages
http://saveie6.com/
Whatever their issues were. Engineers are good at defining and solving problems. "Occupy" failed to define a problem.
These people don't understand that their cushy lives and jobs depend on a strong US economy. Even if you aren't seeing the effects of it yet, it will still impact you eventually through soaring costs. We're all in it together.
I think you meant to include the word "should" in there because that's how it should work. However, I might point out that if the government determines you're "too big to fail" then you have a safety net and you can screw up your company as badly as you want. Now, if you're lobbying congress and providing them with tons of soft money, you might just be "too big to fail." Congress might artificially keep their bubble protected by turning briefly to Communism where they buy out and then own parts of the failing companies. And, like Communism, you'll have the citizens in the more sparsely populated parts of the nation suffering to keep the overly populated cities looking like pristine islands (see Moscow through the Cold War).
Google (and the rest of the tech giants) have been dodging taxes and I hope that when those Oakland OWS demonstrations spill over into Mountain View that the police don't have enough tax money to keep drenching the protesters.
My work here is dung.
Do you have any idea how much an Oracle or MS SQL Sever/ .net unlimited cal costs? Try 100,000 per server. Ruby on rails doesnt sound so bad after all. I expect Java to require an Oracle database license soon just like Solaris.
http://saveie6.com/
Silicon Valley has done well through the recession for three obvious reasons:
1) They actually produce something that the rest of the world wants. We seem to have forgotten, as a culture, that someone has to actually make things; a service economy only works if you have someone to serve... Which leads into:
2) The bankers, the realtors, the assorted "middle men" of Silicon Valley provide actual services to those bringing in the money. They haven't (yet) replaced the doers as Silicon Valley's raison d'etre. The world needs bankers - The bankers just need to remember that real people need them to provide real money so they can buy real things, rather than bundling together unicorn farts and leprechaun gold and hoping to get-rich-quick selling it as an "investment" to morons who only see dollar signs.
3) No slackers allowed - The usual parasites in any community get about as much sympathy from geeks as they would from Hitler. 'Nuff said.
...more likely to attract the ire of young people and Occupy movement.
and furthermore, 'getting rich' by 'hard work' is the biggest piece of fraud that is perpetrated by current system. can you think that someone who is owning majority or even noticeable share on a megacorporation, got rich through 'hard work' ?
now, if you redefine hard work to be 'making others work and taking the fruits of labor to 90% percentage', then it becomes possible. but then again, in the last 50 years that has also been circumvented - those who are owning the means are making a tiny minority (mostly from middle class) work for them to make others work for them, and reaping the profits. in short, we send our sons, daughters to business colleges to get high degrees and be high level managers, even executives to make all the people work for the sake of a minority owner percentage. no different than the peasants sending their sons to be lord's soldiers, or tax collectors.
Read radical news here
Oh chicken little, your blinders are quite strong.
There aren't as many people using MySpace and Digg as there were (insert # of days/months/years here) ago because it's a fad. A passing whim. It's not cool anymore. Evidence? Rogers' Diffusion of Innovations. They're essentially the same experience now as they were when they started.
There will be no drop in hardware/software demand because people ostensibly stop using social media overnight. The "cloud" and the rise in mobile computing devices will keep the industry humming. E-mail and the desire for 24/7 connectivity aren't going away either. As well as the general lifecycle of hardware itself will keep hardware manufacturers going.
People _not_ using social media won't kill the economy. It was humming along fine, (not perfectly, but servicable) in the 80's without Facebook, Google, iPhones, Blackberrys et al.
I get the feeling you're a "glass is half empty" kind of person.
Companies canâ(TM)t hire people fast enough.
Look at the IT Market in NYC. Why haven't the recruiters combed through the Occupy camps for manpower? I guess hobos don't make great programming/administration talent.
Have gnu, will travel.
hide your hobbitses
Hey, Rush! I thought you were off today!
..which is the bubble schmidt is talking about. in his social bubble there doesn't exist any unemployment - probably because if you're in that bubble and you're unemployed you already have loads of cash - if you don't, you disappear from that bubble. his comment is hilariously disconnected from general populace - which is even more hilarious because he works in a company which is supposed to be on top of information from(and to) general populace.
I mean, if he doesn't discuss what's happening 45 minutes from his backyard, the occupy movement should actually have started their movement from googles lawn - not from wall street.
sure, at wall street they speculate with googles stock. but at googles offices they speculate on how to dodge taxes and what things to sponsor to turn the attention away form that - and that's a global thing, they dodge taxes from everywhere.
the article itself mentions that on usa's average, the general area isn't doing that well even. it stops just short of saying that schmidt's circle is just full of shit.
tech companies and silicon valley itself would be much more better off if there weren't a recession anyhow, it's just that google is still in an upturn.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Everyone in Silicon Valley who wants to take part in the Occupy movement just goes to San Francisco and Oakland. They're not part of Silicon Valley proper, but they're still part of the Bay Area. I think the difference is that entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley are part of the 99%
No, I will not work for your startup
What I find interesting is that one place that Linux has made big inroads is in "big iron" computing hardware, mostly because of the extremely low licensing costs. IBM spent a fortune porting Linux to run on their "big iron" machines and it has paid off big time, especially you don't have to deal with sometimes-frightening software license costs! (You're right: the license for Oracle per server can be quite daunting.)
Then again, IBM iron is not as much sold as rented. As such, IBM is to big iron what Apple is to computers. The OS is just there to sell the hardware. I wonder if IBM would pay MS to port Windows if that was what their market wanted.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
I'm over 60 and still working in software. My trick is to never leave home, never let them meet me face to face - the opposite of what you did. I work as a contractor by telecommute, etc. Never bring up the issue of your age. Find an excellent sales person with an existing customer base to come up with ideas and projects, that's been a very good way to go. This is a very interesting time to be in software.
"Let them eat cake, 2.0."
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
Yeah, less than the cost of a single employee. And you only have to pay that once every few years, when a new version comes out, if you feel like the upgrade provides enough new features. Sure it's expensive for the start-ups. Most of them use PostgreSQL, MySQL or other free products because when you are 2 people creating a project in your free time you don't have $100,000 to drop on software. Also, your numbers are way off for SQL server. It's only $6000 per socket for standard edition, which is probably enough for most people, especially if you are just starting out.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Goldman Sachs have already made their money selling Facebook funds. Then comes the IPO with shooting star valuations for the upper management & VCs. Then the plunge to earth for the bag holders.
More typically known as pump & dump. This is what Silicon Valley is all about.
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they will
Young people (most of Google's employees) think they are indestructible.
I daresay that I am in better financial shape than 80% of Mr Schmidt's employees including those my age and I fully expect to keep innovating and being paid well for it until I am in my 60s and due to retire.
I cannot be certain that I will be OK financially at that point.
* Medicare may be a shadow if what it was
* The social security I paid into on the majority of my income for the last several decades (while the "investor class" paid on little of their income) may be gone
* The major corporations that committed to a pension may have shoveled the liability onto a disposable successor
* Medical insurance may become unattainable
* I could get disabled by the negligent act of a corporation with little or no compensation (Tort "reform") and get wiped out financially
It is time to realize that us 99%-ers are really in this together even if most of us are too busy working to join the protests.
There is no unionization of technical talent. IMHO, they figured out early on that they could make a boatload of money without some middlemen A) telling them that they're being treated like crap and B) if they only paid them money they would have a better standard of living.
That being said, I'm sure there are plenty of programmers out there who would dearly love a residual payment every time a piece of software they wrote was used just like Hollywood and music industry talent gets. Of course, that goes against the early hacker ethic which was to take fascist/totalitarian control of computing hardware away from the high priests in lab coats and give it to the masses.
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html
its not 'pessimism'. its statistics. and yes, everything is the fault of someone else. namely, the 5% top of the population who has 72% in total of income and assets - including wealth generation tools. the rest ? 85% bottom of society (almost everyone, you see) get only 15% from income and wealth in total.
yes indeed. its really the fault of someone else in this situation. in a dog eat dog world, you end up with one big fat dog. we are just 2-3 steps away from that. now we are at the 'a few big fat dogs' stage.
i would like to remind you that, if i had had been a college student who has chosen philosophy or women's studies and therefore i was unemployed, that would not justify your arguments.
because, anyone who is dare able to say 'philosophy is not needed', deserves a sound kick in the face. the current capitalist mechanic of corporate exploitation not needing something to make immediate profits in short term, does not mean that that something is not needed.
Read radical news here
That prices includes unlimited sql server, windows server, 32 cores, biz talk, and msdn. Add a thousand servers and the cost is a billion. Imagine how much youtube would cost? It wouldnt even be profotable
http://saveie6.com/
That's not true; there are a lot of poor people living in Silicon Valley.
Take off every 'sig' !!
the tenure of the article is much different from the title. The Author is actually refuting what Eric Schmidt is saying. The recession DID hit Silicon valley. Maybe not Google or Apple, but I know people that saw their salary cut by a good margin and houses devaluate in San Jose by around 20-30% in 2007/2008. Sure, it's not the all-out crash, but on a 1 million $ house, that's still 200-300k. And that's for those who were lucky to still be employed. It's not because of a recession that some people and companies can't thrive (plunging stock markets are a candy store for short sellers). My company (senior software developer speaking) had a record-breaking year in 2011 for example. But I'm sure that's not the norm.
I hardly think that youtube has a thousand database servers. Not unless they are keeping the videos in a transactional database, which would be completely insane.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Your fantasy world amuses me, please continue.
The saying goes that "If you work hard you will get ahead in the world". That statement was mostly untrue foe a long time. Yes, there were notable exceptions to that (Ben Franklin, Andrew Carnegie etc.) but for most people, this just was not true. Actually, luck played a big part in those successes.
Recently, the ruling class (the 1%) has forgot the last part of that saying, they want it to be "Work hard and maybe you will be lucky to hold on to your job". They got to their exulted positions just like the nobility of history did, they were lucky to be born to a rich and powerful family. Hard work seldom is the key to their success, they inherited it. All I am calling for is to put the full saying back into effect. If those at the top don't work hard and try to rest on the accomplishments of their elders, they should slip into poverty If a poor person does work hard, he should be able to take their place at the top of the heap..
This is a liberal district. Just look at who it elects. We all gravitated to the OWS in the East Bay because we were too busy to set one up here, releasing products for people to use when documenting abuse at the hands of riot police. Nyaah.
is that you might actually be naive enough to believe that load of crap. The regulations are there because morally bankrupt people and the companies who are run by them have no qualms about poisoning and even killing you if it helps their bottom line. your impotent little small businesses don't even enter into the equation. Assuming tat they aren't also interested in lining their own pockets at your expense in order to some day be one of the big guys.
See Dell Computers
A decade ago, I had a Chinese coworker whose parents lived in Shanghai. They were on the upside of their housing bubble back then, and the general belief was that land and houses were the only things you could invest in that really held their value. They didn't have much of a stock market of their own, there was a lot of new money around, and the population's still growing and moving to the big cities, and as they guy said about land, "They ain't making any more of that stuff". By now, they're starting to slump, but the prices are so high it's cheaper to buy in the US.
Same sort of thing happened with Japanese investors in Hawaii in the 80s-90s, as they were going through their bubble years back home.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Your point is irrelevant. When people left Myspace and Digg in droves, where did they go? Facebook and Reddit. They didn't just drop it entirely. They found something they liked better and went for it. People aren't going to leave social media because most people are too busy playing goddamned Farmville to give a crap about those privacy issues.
the raping of great companies through the blindness of their absentee owners is just one of those disasters that takes a while to play out
Curiously, when thinking about companies that don't value their brand, I started thinking of one that does and is also rewarded handsomely for it: Apple.
With them being the exception to that rule (a quality one could arguably describe to Jobs' iron fist and intense RDF), do you think that something like that can be maintained by any CEO, such as Cook, or does it really take a truly unique personality to do that for a company and its brand(s)?
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
RTFA please.
It starts with the quote then takes a very critical eye to it and brings up reasonable counter-examples that imply, in a nice journalistic manner, that he is full of shite.
as in take a display and stick it onto a motherboard... are they doing well too? because, after all, by your logic, people who 'make things' do well?
Yes, actually, though not by American standards.
Despite what we consider appalling working conditions, despite what we consider pitiful wages, despite what we consider meaningless piecework - People beg for jobs at those factories because it still counts as the best deal around!
Now, you might well argue that they would do better sticking to subsistence farming... And I wouldn't even disagree. But if you want more than mere subsistence, you need to play at least one of the money-making games.
You didn't really need to be an insider to realize how bogus all of those IPOs were. It's pretty obvious really: sell off your options as soon as you can before reality intrudes.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Just young people??? Can't us hard working old people make a fortune too?
The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny - Aesop
Will Apple collapse now that Steve Jobs died?
Apple collapsed before, during the Sculley period.
Reminds me that NT 3.51 and 4.0 was actually ported to IBM's PowerPC.
The biggest joke is that these 'occupy' people all use Facebook to protest Goldman Sachs, a company with a major investment in.....Facebook.
That the Occupiers are largely hipster douche bags who love their iSwag...
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
directly involved with the financial disaster of 2007 - 2008. Its that easy. OWS is a reaction to those sectors and players directly involved with the real estate bubble and the sub-prime mortgage mis-deeds of big banks - and Wall St. Technology served to make all that possible but it was greed - corruption - and politics that made the disaster. Those are the areas that OWS has (or will) focus on along with the business as usual (no CEOs or senior management go to jail -- but rather get bonuses) environment in DC and Wall St.
People are fed up - and I am one of them.
Its not the years, its the mileage
Both me and my wife are working in senior tech positions full time, yet we are struggling to pay for preschool of two kids. (Town)house/insurance/other basic expanses just add up. Yet we count ourselves lucky compared to people who came to this country legally 10 years ago, married, had kids, bought a house and are still not able to get permanent residence and are effectively indentured servants of their current employers.
What we are really lacking is skills to organize across company/nationality/religion lines. People in technology are generally smart, affluent, experienced in selling their ideas and in direct control of information presented to an average citizen. If we ever had organized willpower... woah!
But his house has gold and platinum and diamonds and ground unicorn horn mixed in with the mortar so it is only increasing in value. So there. What?
http://www.acetonestudio.com
Housing prices holding their value? Here? What's he smoking?
For the local folks who grew up there housing prices have done OK... especially when they bought early to be under Prop 13 protections on taxes.
One of my high school classmates owns a home downtown... and has probably lost a couple hundred thousand in property value over the last decade or so... on paper...
OTOH, she bought it for 30 or 40K and it peaked at more half a million before settling down to merely 8 or 9 times her purchase price...
occupy?
please.
will someone just nuke k-street already and clean this mess up for good.
camping out downtown won't change anything while special interests are in your representatives' back pockets.
here's something every american should agree on:
- put a cap on campaign spending
- make lobbying a capital offence (treason)
then we can start having a meaningful discussion about what we want our representatives to do for us. until then it's all just noise.
Techies are not completely out of the Occupy Movement. Robonaut 1 is occupying the International Space Station in a effort to obtain personhood for his kind. He is currently camped out in a storage area on the ISS but without power or communication links Robonaut has been completely ignored by the media.
It has been suggested that we techies start a movement to incorporate Robonaut 1 and thereby make it a person in the same sense that all corporations are persons. The present situation where corporations are persons but robots and AI are not is clearly unfair.
The Personhood for Robnaut movement farther wished to nominate Watson as Robanaut's CEO.
Tom Riley TomRiley@woodwaredesigns.com http://woodwaredesigns.com/woodware.html
Not that PowerPC is the same as the Power cpu used in them big beasts.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
OWS didn't skip Silicon Valley. They had a wonderful time congregating in Oakland and in San Francisco. I remember seeing something on the news about people being upset about the use of force...? As for those here that say that Silicon Valley is immune to the meddling of Wall Street and financial types, I suggest you look at the source of your income and the source of the money your company uses to pay your salary. There are lots of Wall Street types in your little valley. There's lots of money coming into and controlling your lives in the form of IPOs and venture funding. No business is isolated from the capital markets and the affect of the market place. Tech is just one of several industries on the fun part of the curve right now. Extract your head from the brown orifice and look around at the world and (as the Joker said before putting a bullet in Eckhart), "think about the future". Merry Christmas
I got the figure from www.zdnet.com a few weeks ago. It was a billion to run it because they use thousands of servers all clustered together.
Still, that cost is significant as most companies prefer Indian workers overseas as your one worker wont equal 100,000 in both salary and benefits over there. If I want to start a business I can't justify the expense. Php and Ruby on Rails is fine as that cost is certainly significantly these days as the big banks no longer hand out lines of credit like candy to corporations or businesses.
Most employees today make $45,000 o $55,000 a year due to the economy. Many who used to make $90,000 no longer due and have to take that paycut in todays economy.
http://saveie6.com/
I watched armchair economists predict the housing bubble and burst in great detail, while the 'real' economists denied it even existed.
You go right ahead and follow your experts off their cliff.
they predicted every possible scenario, some are bound to be right. The difficulty is in selecting the correct views. Which you imply is simply a matter of hindsight. Useless!
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I had no trouble seeing it all coming in 2005, and was universally told I was out of my mind.
How soon people forget.
It's hard to accept predictions without supporting evidence. While you might have predicted successfully there were many other voices out there other than yours. If nobody believes you they can't benefit from your insight. That's the point I'm trying to make, unless you have a way to sort the crap predictions from the gems your reflection on your past predictions that came true are worthless. (as in they did not provide anyone with value)
There is nothing more to discuss if your primary objective is to lurk about playing "I told you so".
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Google's P/E is about 20. i.e. A bit on the high side, but they do actually have an income. Cut Googles price in half to be worth investing in. Facebook's P/E is estimated to be about 125; It'd take 125 years to earn the value of the shares from their earnings. Think 8 billion on the high side for Facebook as it stands. i.e. a drop of about 80%.
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